Gold Standard

OK, I’m coming at this from a right-leaning perspective, and I see the usual personal-morality stuff that I have problems with among those in my party. But are you really equating this document with one demands the wholesale ethnic cleansing of the American Southwest? Pretty weak defense.

No. I don’t like “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan” at all, although I think that your reading of it is highly debatable. (See Dave Neiwert for much more.)

I don’t have a strong opinion that one document is better or worse than the other. I could go either way. But I strongly feel that the Texas Republicans have much stronger ties to the current Texas GOP platform than Bustamante has to El Plan.

We would probably both agree that George W. Bush has no obligation to answer for this contents of the platform.

Therefore, why the hell should Cruz Bustamante answer for El Plan?

I agreed with Ted’s original MEChA post, but I think Joey is right here. When I followed the “More” link I was expecting something a bit more shocking.

I don’t use the term “fellow travelers.” “Transmitters” refers specifically to individuals and organizations who pick up ideas and agendas from the extremist elements of the body politic and repeat them and amplify them in the mainstream. I provide specific examples of this, of which the MEChA meme is only the latest. And I pretty clearly detail the mechanism by which this occurs.

Of course, I am also interested in the extent to which left-wing extremism is carried into the mainstream. However, on this score, Howard Dean’s advocacy of a progressive tax structure is no more Maoist than Teddy Roosevelt’s. A more germane example would be the extent to which animal-rights activists’ or eco-terrorists’ beliefs were repeated by mainstream liberals and amplified by them. But the real extent to which this is happening is minimal at best.

It must be emphasized that Aztlan is not a racial concept — it is inherently multiracial, in fact; if it is anything, it is ethnic. Its entire purpose is to refute the perception that Hispanics who come to America are “outsiders” — rather, it asserts a simple historical truth: Hispanics are native peoples in this land, regardless of the boundaries erected by white settlers. It is at heart an insistence that their place be given its due. It is neither exclusionist nor racist or even ethnicist; it is, by nature, primarily anti-white supremacist, and ultimately multiculturalist.

I suspect that it is the latter to which joey and others object.

David, thanks for not so subtly calling me a racist.

And thanks for showing us that the deadly and wrong-headed “blood and soil” argument advanced by white supremacists and Nazis — and so comprehensively proven to be evil by much of 20th century history — is OK, so long as it’s put forward by brown people.

I’m sure you’ll tell me again how I’m misreading Atzlan.

Joey:

Read carefully. I not-too-subtly implied you were an anti-multiculturalist. Which I don’t think I’ve ever suggested equated to “racist.” Else I’d be calling Kaus and Reynolds “racists.”

Of course, such accusations would be as well-grounded as claims that MEChA is racist.

“Blood and soil” and other Nazi doctrines were specifically and unmistakably eliminationist and exclusionist. They were relentlessly derogatory of other races. For that matter, so are American Patrol doctrines. Of course, the latter seem not to bother you much.

There is nothing overtly eliminationist or exclusionist about Aztlan rhetoric. At worst it seems to claim that “this is my country first” — but it never calls for the oppression or removal of other races. It is devoid of any calls to “drive the gringos out,” as its critics would have you think. Only a tendentious and distorted reading of their self-assertion efforts can even suggest so.

Joey, you’re subscribing to the common fallacy that ‘Aztlan’ refers to the American Southwest, or indeed, to any physical land at all.

It is clear from some background understanding of the mythology involved, as well as a careful (as opposed to hypercritical) reading of El Plan, that the ‘nation of Aztlan’ is a metaphysical ‘nation’ to which all Chicanos everywhere belong. The document is about retaining Chicano cultural heritage, not about reclaiming stolen land. The reference to Aztlan not belonging to the “foreign Europeans” is a call to Chicanos to cherish and value their own culture and heritage, rather than allowing it to be replaced by European culture and heritage.

There is no implication of violence, even metaphorical cultural violence, in the document, except to those who are trying very hard to find it. Most of the confusion stems from American misunderstanding of Chicano mythology (for instance, the repeated references to ‘bronze’ are probably assumed to be racial, when they actually refer to the metal, because it’s made by mixing copper and tin, and symbolizes unity) and also from the rather militant tone of the document.

Joey:
Sorry to sound harsh about this, but are you deliberately misreading David N’s post, or do you simply not understand what he wrote? I just read it through twice, and he’s not calling you a racist; he’s doing exactly what he said he’s doing in his response to you: suggesting that you oppose multi-culturalism.

Maybe you can answer what he actually does say, and then tell us how you think that equates to calling you a racist. As for me, I suspect that when you have to resort to accusing your opponents of things they didn’t say, that’s because you have no real grounds for opposing what they actually did say.

I certainly don’t know whether the “nation of Aztlan” is supposed to refer to a people (e.g. the Irish, the Chinese, the Jews, or any people who have been dispersed through a diaspora) or a state. Do you? Maybe it’s clearer in Spanish than in English. If you have a good reason to suspect that Aztlan is supposed to be a state, even though El Plan “do(es) not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continent” please tell me why. (And no, I don’t think “reclaiming the land of our birth” means establishing a separate political entity.)

As for your snide response to Aztlan as a myth or an idea: “well, ideas do have consequences,” please illuminate us as to the consequences you believe derive from these ideas.

Then there’s this: “And I don’t give a good god damn if the most violence MEChA has done is punch one person in the nose.”
Well, maybe you should. Or do you believe that ideas have consequences, but actions do not?! Don’t you believe that actions speak louder than words? If the organization has been around for decades and hasn’t caused or sanctioned any violence, then regardless of your reading of El Plan, your suspicion that they’re planning “ethnic cleansing” (your words) is not based on any real acts, is it? Can you point to any groups that you think are nasty racist supremacists that have done no violence? If not, then MEChA isn’t really like them, and the comparisons are silly, right?

Finally, to reconnect with Ted Barlow’s point, perhaps you could tell us whether Cruz Bustamante is more personally responsible for El Plan, or whether DeLay, Perry, et al, are more personally responsible for the Texas Republican platform.

They continually amaze me, the people who deny the distinction between racism by the oppressor and racism by the oppressed. It’s psychologically revealing, I think. Of course racism is, in general, bad. But that doesn’t mean that all forms are equally bad; and it certainly doesn’t mean that all forms require an identical response. The Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats are instructive examples. Minority and majority, oppressed and oppressor, have traded places over time. If we agree that oppressor racism is bad, we can agree that oppressed racism is also bad, if for no other reason than it historically has been shown to very often lead to oppressor racism. Having said that, it’s quite natural and correct for us to react to and judge differently the man prone on the ground cowering under the baton who is filled with hatred and bigotry than we do the hate-filled and bigoted man towering above him.

When one goes out of one’s way to concentrate on identifiying and denouncing the sin’s of one’s enemies, *particularly* when one is quite vulnerable to criticism on the same grounds, it’s almost always a diversionary and perhaps self-deluding tactic. (Matthew 7:3, etc.) Whites who are obsessed with “reverse racism” are clearly doing this, and it’s morally infantile.

Nice work, Ted.

Somewhat off topic, but, when they say that sodomy “tears at the fabric of society…” what the hell does that actually MEAN?

I agree with Tacitus above.

Finally! Someone!

OK, Joey got a little reasonable on us at the end, but leopards and spots….

He equates (“marginally less [reprehensible]”) rabid, violent revolution with “the establishment of a ethnic-nationalist “chicano” mind-set that defines itself as being in opposition to the mainstream of American life.” And he shows, again, that he has missed the entire point of the document (which, of course, has effectively no relationship to Bustamante, who is the only reason it comes up). The phrase “mainstream of American life” is very clearly homologous with “white.” And that’s _exactly_ what El Plan has a problem with! The idea that American life is what white folks say it is, and that la Raza, who have been in the Southwest longer than the white folks, had better just put up and shut up.

It’s not that Joey, et al are racist. It’s that they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge a worldview in which whites are not the definers of culture. Multiculturalism is about saying. “Hey, we’ve got something to offer, and something to say, as well.” And anyone who dares say that in this country will be equated with Nazis and the KKK. Why would the response be so virulent? Why doth the lady protest so much?

And why does Joey keep putting paraphrases in quotes mere words away from the originals. Does he not know the meaning of the word “tendentious?” Joey, if your reading were not tendentious, you wouldn’t have to change the words to make them say what you want them to. “Bronze land” is not “bronze people,” and as has been pointed out, bronze isn’t a reference to skin color anyway.

Finally, all of this is about El Plan – yet every poster from the right slips effortlessly from the Plan to MEChA. They’re not the same. Most of the lefty websites I go to include links to Instapundit. What kind of asshole would I be to insist that every one of those bloggers is responsible to denounce every distasteful word that drops from Glenn’s mouth?

MEChA is exactly as radical as Hillel or the NAACP – and I bet that some websites associated with those estimable organizations include links to groups that are more overt in their ethnic pride. And I don’t doubt for a moment that some on the right would happily tar every mainstream black and Jewish politician with the most tendentious reading of the fringe groups’ writing.

All the time insisting that, while they quote the American Patrol, they actually oppose it.

Oh, and last thing: as Schwarzenegger’s group American English shows, Speak English or Die types are, in fact, closely tied to, and sometimes the same as, Aryan Nation-style racists. I’m sorry if you don’t like that fact, but your dislike of it doesn’t change it.

I agree with Tacitus as well (that’s two!). Bustamante should have said, vocally and clearly, when this silliness started: “I did not take Mecha to be advocating racism or violence; I do not personally advocate these and think it is regrettable if indeed certain elements of Mecha advocate them.” Easy, right?

But, contra Joey, I think Bush et al’s responsibility for the Texas GOP platform is greater, and a more serious matter, than Bustamante’s for Mecha. Bustamante was a kid, and there’s every reason to believe that he never came into contact with the loonier elements in mecha, and there’s no reason to believe that he holds those views himself.

However, Bush is an adult (kind of), as are the members of the Texas GOP (kind of). They consciously and deliberately chose these views, and this language, and there’s every reason to believe that they held and continue to hold the same views. Unlike an obscure student group, the GOP platform for the second largest state in the U.S. matters, and really does have consequences.

Bustamante flirted with nutjobs, but nobody thinks he is one. Bush and Texas’ GOP representatives and senators flirted with nutjobs, and have given us no reason to believe they are not among the ranks. That’s the difference.

But those MEChA documents, those are of the utmost relevance. Cruz Bustamente, renounce MEChA now!!!

I have a question for everyone here. More like a challenge.

Government and society are two different things. Why do you speak of them as if they were one?

Now, this may perplex you, after all you believe there is this majestical being that calls itself ‘Government’ which heroically steers society where it needs to go (else all society would slide into the abyss!).

Consider this quote: “Some people have so confused government and society as to think the two are the same, but they are different and have different origins.”

Who said this quote? It is not a modern thought, it is from 1776. It is not from an obscure document, everyone read it. In fact, this quote was THE VERY FIRST LINE of a popular text and the thoughts of this quote provided the content for the entire document.

It is the first line from “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine.

Oh, to make things even worse, talk to a Constitutional Lawyer. The Constitution is not a social document. Did you know that the Bill of Rights do not apply to you? You have no ‘right’ to speech. The Bill of Rights applies to the government, not to people. The GOVERNMENT may not restrict your speech, but your mother/ employer/ property owner can.

In fact, the very theme of seperation of Church and State is to seperate State and Society. The State was not to mold Society like kings and dictators did.

In this thought, society steers itself. People become human and not a statistic or clay to be experimented on. The freedom of society is not defined by the law, rather the freedom of society is defined by society yearning to be itself. An increasing legalistic society is a decreasing society. A tyrannical society does not exist for a government is tyrannical when NO society can exist. Society is not a ‘form’ which can be constructed with architect attitudes from intellectuals. It is letting everyone be Human, to realize that Mankind has a natural societal form and to impede on it is a violation of Nature.

This is why the ‘platform’ listed above is NON-REFLECTIVE of conservative thought. This is a document of politicians (who, when in office, must ‘do something’). Conservatives are happiest when the government does nothing and gets out of the way of society. When you read a republican document that lists passing more laws and such, it is the coinage of politicians deattached from society.

But realizing this would take an intellectual rigid approach, which is rare because we are so lazy now days. Many people ‘don’t hear’ certain things and hear ‘other things’ because it fits their world view rather than challenging it.

The best system for Society is no system- which is called LIBERTY. And this is why I’m a Republican.