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Last week began yet another month set aside for celebrating the history of victims of “systemic racism,” “white supremacy,” slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, to name a few of the historic crimes perpetrated by “whites.” What started as a correction of historical writing vitiated by partiality and prejudice, today has degenerated into rank politicization that provides leverage to some political factions––mostly progressive Democrat clients–– at the cost of historical truth.
The first problem with “Hispanic Heritage Month” is the name. The only meaningful definition of that imprecise word “Hispanic” is something like “Hispanophone,” those who speak Spanish. Such a category includes nearly half a billion people comprising a vast diversity of ethnicities, nations, religions, customs, cultures, mores, cuisines, folkways, and histories. So which of those thousands and thousands of “heritages” will we be celebrating all month?
We can be sure that the lion’s share of these “heritages” will be Mexican. There’s a good reason for that: until recently, most of the legal or illegal immigrants have come from Mexico. The American Southwest, after all, was conquered and settled by Spaniards, and became part of Mexico after the 1821 revolution. This history, including the Mexican War of 1846-48 which ended with Mexico ceding the Southwest to the U.S., is part of American history, and should be taught as such, warts and all.
But in fact, what is generally taught from grade school to university is a politicized history that serves the leftist, Howard Zinn melodrama of racist “white” Euro-American invaders and colonizers who destroyed the indigenous peoples and their idyllic cultures in order to monetize their stolen lands with oppressive capitalists and their Christian flunkeys.
Every Columbus Day, for example, we are regaled with such simplistic, often cartoonish narratives that leave out all the complexities and nuances of real history. Typical of this ahistorical mentality is the “Wanted Poster” promulgated in 1992 by a South American indigenous organization, which lists Columbus’s crimes as “grand theft, genocide, racism, initiating the destruction of a culture, rape, torture, and instigating the big lie.”
Nor was this a fringe opinion. Kirkpatrick Sale’s bestseller of the same year, The Conquest of Paradise, legitimized these question-begging epithets with slanted interpretations of selected evidence. Yet many of these tendentious revisions of history have made it into textbooks and curricula, especially in various “studies” programs in universities.
The politically correct or “woke” history of Mexico and its encounters with the U.S. exhibits the same dubious historical claims, cherry-picked evidence, and lack of complexity, let alone actual facts. Starting in the Sixties, one controversial myth-history was popularized by the student activist group MEChA. Their claim is that the whole Southwest was once “Aztlán,” the homeland of “La Raza,” the “bronze” race, who are “the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers,” as the “Plan of Aztlán” puts it.
This “homeland” was lost to the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion,” and the goal of the “Plan” is the “reconquest” of that lost homeland. Like most ethnic myth-histories such as “systemic racism” and its corollary “white fragility,” the racist drift of all this is obvious in the motto of MEChA: “For the Race everything, outside the Race, nothing,” a creepy reprise of Mussolini’s “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Today the fascist motto has been dropped, along with some of the more militant beliefs, as has the moniker “Chicano,” which like “Latinx” never caught on with ordinary Mexican-Americans. The organization also has backed off some of the more blatantly illiberal identity politics, seeking a wider influence that can attract more than just ethnic Mexican students, since migrants from Latin and Central America have increased substantially. But the “stolen land” trope continues, even if the more lurid fantasies are down-played.
The “history,” however, remains a political myth and a curricular staple. The notion that Mexican immigrants are merely returning to their ancestral homeland is useful for gaming the politics of immigration and policies like virtual open borders and lax vetting protocols. Hence the popular slogan, “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”
Yet this narrative of a homeland ravished by gringo invaders conceals other historical falsehoods in addition to the fantasy of Aztlán. The fact is, the vast majority of Mexicans who immigrated to the Southwest, especially California, did so after it became part of the United States. Before then, the only Mexicans who ended up in the province of Alta California were retired soldiers, criminals, orphans, and the political cronies of the ruling elite, who acquired 26,000,000 acres of land on which most of them raised cattle on haciendas worked by indigenous peons.
Indeed, many of the roughly 15,000 inhabitants before the Gold Rush weren’t Mexican at all, but American and British merchants who married into grandee Californio families and traded the hides and tallow produced by vast herds of cattle. So many came from New England that these immigrants were call bostoños. With the grandees they formed a quasi-aristocracy who chafed under the Mexican central government’s high-handed neglect. Many before the Mexican War with the U.S. were scheming to become part of the States or some other great power like Britain or Russia.
Most important, the Mexican government’s neglect and failure to make any effort to develop the region, and the incessant political conflicts over who should rule Alta California helped to create a people whose identity was distinct from Mexicans’, and so instead they called themselves Californios. Visitors consistently remarked on their anachronistic dress, opulent lifestyle, and distinct appearance so different from Mexicans.
But today, no one is interested in real history, which is much more complex than the racialist melodrama of oppression and grievance. As with most of the “identities” celebrated on designated months, the mythic history of unjust oppression burdens the majority culture with the responsibility to adapt to and accommodate the cultures of those it has victimized.
Hence as we have seen over the last three decades, the dominant culture must expiate its historical crimes with various sorts of reparation and entitlements: amnesties for illegal aliens, nullification of federal immigration laws by “sanctuary cities,” and bestowing on non-citizens drivers licenses, voting rights, food stamps, and free room and board and health care.
Even the technical term from international law, “illegal alien,” must be discarded, since these folks from Mexico are not “aliens,” but rather some sort of refugee simply reclaiming what was once theirs by right, a land whose authentic culture was violently displaced and distorted by the gringo occupiers.
This virtual legalization of illegal aliens, moreover, is the realization of what the “Plan of Aztlán” called “Restitution for past economic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic and cultural psychological destruction and denial of civil and human rights.” Thus a “reconquest” impossible by force will be achieved through demography and the abandonment of the old model of assimilation, in an attempt to make the U.S. more like the cultures illegal aliens risk their lives to flee.
The point is not that the West has not committed violence and injustice against other peoples. But those crimes are universal to a flawed human nature and its destructive impulses, and the dynamic culture of the West made them more efficient at such depredations. But what’s unique is the Western self-consciousness and self-criticism that have led to recognizing that such inhumanity like slavery is a crime to be fought against and eliminated. This cultural habit is what created a country like the United States, to which millions of people from around the globe risk their lives to be part of.
Much of what goes on during these commemorative months is unexceptional. No one objects to the descendants of immigrants celebrating and acknowledging their ancestors’ customs, holidays, and cuisines. But identity-politics still determines which ethnicities get their yearly month of celebration. Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Armenians, and many others rarely get the same national attention. Only those identities that “woke” ideology defines by dubious “histories” of “oppression” by “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” are politically useful enough to make the cut.
This tribalism doesn’t bode well for our country, which depends on an “unum”––political freedom and equality, and unalienable rights possessed by individuals, not favored groups–– that can weld so many “pluribus” into a nation. Using bad history to divide and pit ethnicities against each other compromises that common ground, and dangerously undermines the oikophilia that makes us willing to fight and die in its defense.
I’m certain that the purpose of this holiday is to honor the Sephardim. What? You think it could be something else?
Not coming from the Democrats it isn’t.
Incas and Aztecs are unavailable for comment..
Yeah, because they were cannibals and ate everybody around them, including each other Fuck them. Good riddance.
My comment had nothing to do with their culture. Simply the fact that they were there before the Spaniards killed them off. That seems to be the theme with all of this “who deserves what country” B.S.
Have you read “The Conquest of New Spain? If not, you should. You’ll cheer the Spaniards on as they kill the scummy Aztecs.
You’re a one trick pony. Missed my point twice.
Every day of the year is ‘White History Year’. As a matter of fact today we celebrate Belgian waffles and manned flight.
Marxism and Nazism come from white people.
Wasn’t Nazism all about celebrating and glorifying the perfect white people, the Aryans?
I don’t think the Belgians did much of a job at saving their country from the destruction of the perfect white people Hitler called the Aryans.
The only cure for racism, tribalism, or any form of collectivism is individualism.
“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.” – Ayn Rand
Rand was certainly right about the morons. It was so nice not having your moronic ravings for the last two weeks.
The more you attack, the more I’m going to stay.
Oh c’mon. It wouldn’t matter if I or didn’t. You are insane and driven by a narcissistic overweening need for approval.
I thought I would include some responses from Sept 15. Goska article. You can check the article if you doubt me.
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johnhenry says
I’m happy to second your opinion of THX.
He likes drinking his own bathwater.
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Steve B. says
If death is final, then life has no real meaning. Just like the hero in fountain head who raped his girlfriend and then committed a terrorist act because he didn’t like someone changing his drawing!
Reason and logic?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Otto K Gross says
Wow. This is a disturbing insight into your inner workings.
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Duncan Allen says
September 15, 2023 at 5:13 pm
Doesn’t THX 1138 have anything better to do with [his] life than to push his boorish, obnoxious, extremely intolerant and spiritually delusional viewpoint on people who aren’t even the slightest bit interested?
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Robert B Young MD says
September 15, 2023 at 11:03 pm
The irony of THX 1138’s comments is that in many ways he is actually describing Goska’s Christianity, which is loving & fearless, even though s/he “senses fear and dishonesty”. Sensing that says much more about THX 1138 than about Goska.
Yeah but waffles are good.
And cars, trains, airplanes, electrical power, light bulbs, air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, modern plumbing and EVERYTHING ELSE that makes life pleasant.
Fuck everybody else.
And, course, the Biden regime and its commissars, and the “Green” idiots who despise Western Civilization and are determined to destroy it, are now working frantically to outlaw every one of those, or at a minimum, “regulate” them into extinction by making them utterly unaffordable!
…all in the name of “Saving the Planet.” Or, more honestly, to impoverish and enslave us by forcing us back into a medieval standard of living, where none of them would be allowed.
Yeah, and gas powered stoves. I used to love those as a kid, although the one I have now is electric. I used to roast hot dogs in the flames like a campfire.
How about American Heritage Month so when will they declare a American Heritage Month?
I can’t help but wonder what would happen if “they” declared a White History Month?
Would all he** break loose, do you think?!?
Absolutely!
But in order to celebrate America one must celebrate Capitalism, in order to celebrate Capitalism one must celebrate individualism, in order to celebrate individualism one must celebrate individual rights and private property rights, in order to celebrate that once must celebrate self-reliance, and in order to celebrate all of those values one must discover, understand, fight for, and celebrate Ayn Rand’s moral code of RATIONAL SELFISHNESS.
“In its great era of capitalism, the United States was the freest country on earth—and the best refutation of racist theories. Men of all races came here, some from obscure, culturally undistinguished countries, and accomplished feats of productive ability which would have remained stillborn in their control-ridden native lands. Men of racial groups that had been slaughtering one another for centuries, learned to live together in harmony and peaceful cooperation. America had been called “the melting pot,” with good reason. But few people realized that America did not melt men into the gray conformity of a collective: she united them by means of protecting their right to individuality.
The major victims of such race prejudice as did exist in America were the Negroes. It was a problem originated and perpetuated by the non-capitalist South, though not confined to its boundaries. The persecution of Negroes in the South was and is truly disgraceful. But in the rest of the country, so long as men were free, even that problem was slowly giving way under the pressure of enlightenment and of the white men’s own economic interests.
Today, that problem is growing worse—and so is every other form of racism. America has become race-conscious in a manner reminiscent of the worst days in the most backward countries of nineteenth-century Europe. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.” – Ayn Rand
I see you took your “can’t fix stupid” pills today.
That’s a lot of things celebrate. Maybe we could simply celebrate the country. It’s certainly a lot easier than remembering to celebrate capitalism, individual rights and private property rights, self-reliance and moral codes of RATIONAL SELFISHNESS, whatever that is. I don’t think I need classroom lecture on how to be happy.
Thanks, but I’ll just have a hot dog, a burger and a coke. So much easier than having to sweat the small stuff, from a scold like you.
I suppose no day is really a good day for you.
How much money are your fellow Lutherans getting from Senile Joe for every illegal alien they help to invade America?
I bet you keep nice and quiet about that at your Lutheran church. Easy to attack me here with your keyboard while your Lutheran church is destroying the country.
There’s no way Intrepid supports illegal immigration.
Drop your shit. And bigotry against Christian denominations ani’t cool.
To Jeff Bargholz,
ALL of the major Christian denominations in America are being funded by the Biden administration to the tune of hundreds and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to feed, house, aid, illegal aliens. That’s a fact. And all these Christian churches are happy to receive the funds and help the illegal alien invasion and destruction of the USA.
That’s not bigotry, it’s a FACT.
Even Daniel Greenfield has written about here at FPM.
Your usual pathetic response. Guilt tripping doesn’t work with me.
Easy for you to attack Christians and Jews here, although I doubt whether many people actually read your drivel. You don’t have, and never will have, the guts to attack us face to face.
You couldn’t lift a finger to help this country because you are basically a do-nothing coward. So easy to be a little keyboard warrior.
Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews do more to help people in need than you ever will, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. You will always be what you are….a pathetic, selfish, self-centered jerk, a pile of nothing, waging a war you have made up in your own mind. You are a failure in all things. Objectivism is your excuse for failure.
However, if I saw you lying in the street in NYC I would do nothing to help you. You simply aren’t worth the trouble. I would step over you and laugh. I have a feeling God would approve since he doesn’t suffer fools. He also knows a lost cause when he sees it.
Not while Beijing Biden is Resident.
The real reason for MECha and the narrative to give back lands, was to advance a communist ideology in young students by teaching the land was stolen and then proceeding to teach that “La Raza” and Mexico were lied to. The teaching finally ending in the belief that the Raza was used by Judeo-Christian’s, who were capitalist, to work mines, ranches and other jobs, only to benefit the white settlers and their capitalistic greed. This is continued to the ‘progressive’ movement beginning in the 1890’s. The ‘progressive’ movement which in reality was communist in its core even caused the delay of the United State giving statehood to Arizona due to the reviewing of the State Constitution to ensure it aligned with the Federal Constitution and not a progressive one that gave the state the ability to go against the Federal Constitution. This movement is a very divisive movement to essentially lay the ground work for stolen land ending with the utopia of communism if only the white colonizers would not have stolen the land and used the inhabitants to do slave labor under the lies of capitalism. This is completely a divisive tactic to create a group of people who will refuse to be loyal to America and will demand lands back with the belief that is was taken based on color, inferiority, and the evil greed of capitalism which over-took the ideology where everyone would be equal no matter their position of work whether it was in the mines or on the ranches. Now it is exploited by the democrat party the same way as slavery has been sold. In the end white people are evil and their form of government has been to pillage other races. This is being pushed to gain votes by creating a second class of citizens.
Is your self esteem so low that you have to belittle this?
Who Cares? Yesterday was National Pepperoni Pizza Day, Next week is probably National Recognize a Species of Bunny Week..
It
Is
All
Fluff
The problem with your argument is that so many zombies follow and heed the nonsense.
J.Jonah Jameson – Who cares?! Have you been in a coma lately?
Are you not aware of the millions of illegal Mexican migrants who
have and are pushing across the southern border into the U.S. –
with the belligerent anti-American mindset as described in this
article.
In itself, such a divisive and invasive force is a threat to the nation
but coupled with the millions of illegal foreign ingrates – this
invasion constitutes a national security risk to the very existence
of the United States. And you can actually ask Who cares?”
Great screen name.
How about instead of Constitution Day we have Constitution Month or Year? We could celebrate the founding fathers for their wisdom and bravery.
Some of us do celebrate this Nation and its Constitution quietly without wearing it on our sleeves and thankfully in the privacy of our homes. It is especially great to those born in other lesser countries known for their corrupted politicians. Our Founders performed a holy deed without parallel in modern history. I thank God for America each and every day.
then why not wear it on our sleeves and and hid it in the privacy of our homes???
stop being a pussy and make a stand for freedom and liberty
Try being in Seattle or SF or LA sometime. You would be in skirmishes all the time. You believe wearing something on your sleeve is a standard you honor. Roosevelt’s advice of speaking softly but carry a big stick works more effectively.
But in fact, sometimes i do. Those days when receiving sneers and middle fingers and yells and scratch marks on my car parked at the store make me not want to bother. Inside stores i get lots of compliments on my patriotic badges and caps, 95% from the older people.
Because leftists and the usual suspects will attack you. Shit. I get attacked regularly just for wearing a cowboy hat.
They always lose, though.
Xavier Becerra is identified with the La Raza & M.E.Ch.A. separatist movement.
Mecha’s (M.E.Ch.A.) own slogan reads, “For the race everything. For those outside the race, nothing.”
The comparison to the Nazi Party is well deserved. La Raza openly supports pushing all but Latino Americans out of a portion of the United States (ethnic cleansing), they call for ‘Reconquista’ or the re-conquest of the American Southwest by Mexico (the re-occupation of the Sudetanland), and the establishment of ‘Atzlan’ which is the utopian all-Latino version of the American Southwestern states (Adolf Hitler planned to called his utopia Germania).
“Despite the fact that the majority of documented hispanics oppose illegal immigration, as do the majority of Americans, Aztlan and La Raza race hate groups have become the self-appointed voice for a separatist movement that threatens a violent overthrow of the Constitutional system and a barbaric program of ethnic cleansing. This is held up by the media as ‘diversity’ and to vociferously oppose it is scorned as racism.”
Jose Pescador Osuna, Mexican Consul General We are practicing “La Reconquista” in California.”
“We’ve got an even more ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan”
or the reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of Mexico.”
“Remember 187 — the Proposition to deny taxpayer funds for services to non-citizens — was the last gasp of white America in California.” — Art Torres, Chairman of the California Democratic Party
“The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot.” — Excelsior, the national newspaper of Mexico
La Raza, or El Centro de la Raza, is a corrupt, communist org, as if others did not know this. Previously in Seattle’s Beacon Hill we lived near the school they took over and that the leftist City Council then gifted to them. Imagine, giving a communist group real property owned by the public. La Raza was made up of felons and lots of hippies and other low lives. Once i went there to check out their English as a Second Language Classes. The hippy woman speaking for La Raza was unkept and a fool.
Their Spanish was street tr ash level. They were terrible, scammers, and fools. It’s original leader, Roberto Maestas, and his kid liked to visit Fidel Castro and often appeared on Channel 5’s weekend programs. They live off the public trough and contribute to the decline of Seattle.
I used to live in Seattle for years. I remember Beacon Hill.
La Raza needs to fuck off the planet of Earth.
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration’s close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times
“Make no mistake about it: the Latino community holds this election in your hands. Some of the closest contests this November will be in states like Florida, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico — states with large Latino populations.” PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA
“I know how powerful this community is. Just think how powerful you could be on November 4th if you translate your numbers into votes.” PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA
Under Holder’s watch at the DOJ Civil Rights Division, more
than half of all the lawyers hired were chosen from four
radical, anti-American organizations: the ACLU, National
Council of La Raza, NAACP, Mexican American Legal Defense
and Education Fund, and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil
Rights, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky outlined in their
2014 book, “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
Yeah. they lost and deserved to lose.
I read “Utopia” years ago. It’s an interesting book although the fictional Utopians had slavery. I pointed that out to my girlfriend who was a student at the University of Seattle at the time. and she had to correct her dip-shit professor because he’d given her a lower grade than she deserved because of that factual observation in her essay, which I’d written for her.
The asshole professor did correct her grade, however.
Brazil is actually a former Portuguese colony, not Spanish, if I remember correctly. That’s definitely the language they speak.
I’ve been to every old Spanish Mission in CA, even the ones that were just ruins. The San Juan Capistrano one is still very nice.
A swallow took a shit on my brother’s head the first time I was there. You should’ve seen how mad he got, and the swallow stayed perched above him like it was mocking him. Boy, was that funny.
i wish you would all consider not triggering THX .
Are you his buddy?
Mexicans (mestizo) half Spanish half Indian, were never able to settle Texas beyond a few military outposts because of the Comanche and Apache tribes. It took the white Americans to wipe those savages out and bring civilization to Texas, going from riding horses to flying to the moon in just 100 years. Texas was only part of Mexico for 15 years. There were only 5,000 Mexicans in Texas in 1836 when they slaughtered the Americans in the Alamo. There are now 14,000,000 Mexicans living Texas and white people became a minority in 2022. There is a concerted effort to eliminate the Caucasian race in every white country on earth through massive illegal and legal immigration. The Caucasians left who don’t have a suicide wish are going to have to segregate themselves somewhere like Idaho because Texas is already a lost cause. It’s either mass immediate deportation of the criminal invaders, which is the opposite of what is happening, or the United States becomes a Hispanic country permanently.
Yeah, the beaners were terrified of the Comanches and Apaches. Whitey had to take them out.
Nonsense. The Spanish wanted the indians to be incorporated into their culture, and that included language