Forgetting Our Place
Put forth on December 14, 2006 by XicanoPwr
Posted in George Bush, Human Rights, Immigration, Immigration Debate, La Migra, Racism, Raza, Round-ups
Hey what is going on here, it seems the day after Ciro Rodriguez was elected; Homeland Security�s Gestapo went on another raid. (hat tip to Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican). I guess we have forgotten “our place” and how we should thank our master’s for allowing us to lick their boots. Not really, this is just one more example of the Republican party under the Bushies’ facade of their “optimistic,” “color blind” society crap on how they work it behind the scenes and, even more importantly, how they work it in the two pounds of damp GOP meat between their ears. Maybe, in the immortal words of Senate Minority (soon to be Majority) Leader Trent Lott, if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency on the Dixiecrat ticket, we would have avoided all these problems.
Dudya must have been slapped with a dose of reality - brown folk really do not to vote Republican, now that his only Mexican American Republican was shown the door. Guess he found out that we have been saying disparaging things about Republicans, for their shallow, indefensible, America-hating reason that Republicans do jack shit for us. As they do for anyone failing both the liquid asset and darker-than-a-grocery bag test.
Remember, as far as this administration is concerned, you are either with them, or against them, even if being with them would be against your own best interests to the point of pathological self-loathing.
The citizenship of people who happen to be brown, therefore, to protect their civil, Constitutional and human rights apparently carries very little weight with the Bush White House and his mindless followers with that little parenthetical “R” after their names.
“The illegal immigrants are using intimidation saying, and the media are as guilty as they are of saying this, that their civil rights are being violated,” McGill said. “If you are breaking the law and you are not a citizen of the United States, you are not eligible for any rights. They committed a crime when they walked across that border.”
You know how it is: Republicans are real Americans and then there are those whose ancestors either were brought here in chains or colonized. These are the ones who broke their backs for the ancestors of the real Americans who populate the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Any person who really thinks they are free while their neighbor is not should, at best, consider their freedom temporary because in a whim it can be easily revoked; and, at worst, their freedom is just a mere illusion. Think of it this way: Blacks and Latinos are targets by xenophobic racists, along with homosexuals and women, for no other reason than those doing the oppressing are still figuring out a way to cull the working class whites from the herd. Unfortunately, the sort of people who are better off don�t have Jim Crow laws, lynching, voting disenfranchisement, miscegenation laws and other forms of institutional racism that were common in America for most of the 20th Century as part of their living memory.
The sort of people who lived through this openly racist period in American history aren�t found in history books, they are the older ones still among us. And, it seems, if the Republicans have it their way, there will be a new generation of Americans who can say the same thing. Oh wait, I can hear them shrill how the undocumented are not Americans. The awful truth they are so happy to deny is that these are Americans because no matter what country of origin they are from, it is part of the Americas.
It also seems whenever Latinos get pissed off hearing about these Gestapo type raids, the automatic response from people who still buy into the idea of a functional democracy rather than a thin cardboard veneer of democratic-sounding bullshit pasted over feudal business and class dealings is, well, that�s just too fucking bad.
Unfortunately, the real information about these raids is what keeps slipping through the cracks of the great American “free” press whose net for this sort of thing couldn’t be used to strain bowling balls. Its not that the American press is incompetent, it’s just that after making a pact with the GOP devil in exchange for tax cuts and federal deregulation of media ownership, they are as corrupt as all hell. This is exactly the way they want to be if you are merely a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.
You’ll notice that the press is basing the purpose of these raid as a crackdown on identity theft and not the constant terrorizing of thousands of people and their families based on race. If journalism is the first draft of history, then the story told about the illegal wire tapings, corrupt theft of elections by disenfranchising minorities, and terrorizing families, gives one an idea what the the final draft of history will look like.
Today’s Know Nothings are not just driven by ignorance but also by fear, religious bigotry and xenophobia. Their sheer ignorance is a wonderful tonic for them because it allows them to carry out a crusade against people of color with pleas for domestic internments, because they don�t know, or don�t care what happens to them once they are shipped of in buses to nowhere.
The paper confirms that the federal agents took an undisclosed number of people away in buses away to an undisclosed location.
But these actions just go to show that no matter how we Americans exalt that we believe in high-minded principles, when you get right down to it, most people in the US don’t have a huge problem with this these actions taken by their own government. This is especially true consider the torture and humiliation that is practiced in Abu Graib, at least not enough of a problem to hold George W Bush accountable for it, or raise hell about it when the architect of those abuses is elevated to the position of Attorney General.
Most Americans, unless they have the intelligence and force of character to think otherwise, are constrained to think of morality in more or less religious terms, and never expanding that moral judgment to question practices. At the same time, they so willingly give the red, white and blue stamp of approval for good intentions and noble aims of American policy regardless of who has to suffer and die for it.
Because of that, we have finally reached a point where everyone�s enemy is less than human. As a consequence Latinos and especially the undocumented have been easily relegated to a subspecies like “spics,” “beaners” and “wetbacks” or simply as faceless and statistical as the Iraqi civilian casualties that barely register on the conscience of most Americans, befitting a needless war justified with lies and carried out with self-serving political motives and mindless nationalism by the emerging American one-party state of corporate interests, inadequate white males and corrupted Christianity.
And those responsible for the present atrocities won�t even be phased by its weight. It�s not in their make-up to do so; although when the situation demands it, they, like so many sociopaths, can simulate actual human emotion. No, the ones terrorizing minorities and the working class and killing thousands of Iraqis will get promotions and presidential libraries, write books and go on the lucrative book circuit. And those Americans who are taking pleasure in the suffering of others will just continue going to their churches as fat and smug and irredeemably stupid as they ever were. One thing is for certain, they certainly won�t be ones who are up at night wondering they if will be eating the next day or worrying about that knock at the door.
That’s a curse left for those with a conscience who can still feel.
UPDATE: In this raid, ICE detained 1,282 and of those detained “5% resulted in identity-theft charges. Let’s do a little math, jejeje those cabrones forget math is in our blood. Out of all those people they arrested 64 resulted in id-theft charges. So what does that mean, Michael Chertoff had to release 1,218 because they were legal. Remember this is based on intelligence they gathered; so not only was the CIA’s information faulty, so, the same thing can be said about Homeland (In)Security. Why doesn’t Chertoff and the goon squad Homeland (In)Security go after the real ID thieves, like the hacker who hacked into a UCLA database and stole personal records which included social security numbers, of 800,000 students, faculty and administrators.
UPDATE: EBW at Wampum reported that the workers who were detained from the Iowa and Nebraska plant were taken to Camp Dodge.
These went up on the gates of Camp Dodge. The Des Moines Register reported that workers arrested at Swift & Co. packing plants in Iowa and Nebraska were being held at Camp Dodge. 90 workers from the Swift plant in Marshalltown, and most of the 261 workers from the Swift plant in Grand Island, Nebraska.(Source: Mike Marty with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union)
Here is a prefect example of the new bill that was passed not to long ago, Military Commission’s Act, about losing habeas corpus and our due process.
Technorati Tags: Latinos, voting disenfranchisement, GOP, identity theft, xenophobia, ICE, Camp Dodge, Military Commission’s Act
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This is the blog of Edmundo "XicanoPwr" Rocha, a social worker, an activist, freelance writer and founder and editor of The Sanctuary. My interests include: immigration reform, critical race theory and it's interaction with equality/inequality and freedom/oppression as they relate to the experiences of people of color in the Americas.
Para Justicia y Libertad is a Latino-centered political blog focusing on the humanistic perspective of politics, history, and society as they relate to the Latina/o community throughout Texas and the United States.
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HELL yeah. great post, XP.
Thanks, I just get tired reading about this crap and seeing responses of assholes who know nothing of what they talk about. At this time I am sitting on four moderated comments from on of those cheeto-eating-basement-dwelling-101st keyboardist and trying to think of a way to have a little fun.
Hasta la Victoria siempre!
jeje. “cheeto-eating.”
“You know how it is: Republicans are real Americans and then there are those whose ancestors either were brought here in chains or colonized. These are the ones who broke their backs for the ancestors of the real Americans who populate the Daughters of the American Revolution.”
Yeah, that’s precisely it.
Ha exprimido exactamente lo que he pensado sobre la estupidez de los tipos que nos ataquen hoy dia!
The loud, noisy Latino-hating racists who make their hatred obvious are bad enough, but at least they’re open and honest about their bigotry while simultaneously being dumb enough to give us a good laugh.
The people I really can’t stand are the ignorant, subtle “soft” racists who try to soften up their bigotry behind code words, and talk up those trite shibboleths that we’ve all heard: “I don’t hate brown people from south of the border, I just hate illegal lawbreakers, and I want them to assimilate like other immigrants.”
Ah yes, everybody’s favorite thinly-veiled racist code-word, assimilation– aka “turn your back on your people, your family, your culture and your heritage and come work for and empower the same ‘Anglo-Protestant’ power base that’s been brutalizing your people for centuries.”
I’ve long found it curious how, even in the states where Latinos initiated the societies that the Anglos coveted and militarily attacked us for– Florida and Aztlan states como Arizona, Tejas y California– “assimilation” is taken as a one-way street– “y’all brown people gotta become military-lovin’, nuke-worshipin’, environment-neglectin’, English-speakin’, Ay-rab hatin’, SUV-drivin’ good ol’ boys and girls like us Anglos here, you hear.”
Latinos and others, of course, are hounded to give up our identity and solidarity, and then to uncritically support the established, oppressive power base of the Anglo-Protestant elites “who populate the Daughters of the American Revolution” as you eloquently put it– even to the point of helping to attack and stealing from still more oppressed people who stand atop resources that the elites covet (Iraq for example).
Even the US’s own treaties and legal precedents acknowledge the inalienable right of Latinos to settle in the Aztlan corridor and in Florida, protect our people and heritage here, use Spanish con el espiritu de nuestra gente for public purposes in government, schools and offices– and to unabashedly celebrate our holidays and our history. Yet these of course are routinely broken, with those “true Americans” like the Minutemen conveniently forgetting the details they don’t like.
It’s why I detest those Anglo imbeciles who chide us to be “just like other immigrants.” As I always explain to these fools, they even call us by a misnomer– we’re not mere immigrants, we’re a colonized people who were brutalized, humiliated and expelled from our own lands.
As I learned years ago in college, in the wake of the Florida wars and especially following the Mexican War, Latinos suffered no less than 11 wholesale incidents of ethnic cleansing and outright treaty violations and property seizures at the hands of the arrogant Anglos.
These expulsions and ethnic cleansings were a constant tragedy in the 1850’s through 1870’s but they were also repeated affairs even in later decades. The very overrated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that supposedly “liberal” president, was in fact one of the country’s worst racists even by the standards of his own time– not only did he preside over the internment and concentration camps for Japanese-Americans and countenance the worst period of lynchings of American Blacks that the country has ever seen. FDR also facilitated the brutal forced removal (with thousands upon thousands killed) of Chicanos and other Latinos from the Southwest and Florida who had been here for countless centuries.
This of course, on top of dozens of arrogant invasions and resource wars against Latin American countries since the Monroe Doctrine. FDR’s cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, was infamous for this, but even he was outdone by that jerk Woodrow Wilson, who just about never met a Latino country that he couldn’t find some half-baked pretext to invade and murder thousands of troublesome brown people who happened to be in the way of his robber baron buddies.
Not only did the border cross us in 1848, the US Anglo imperialists have constantly made sure to violate our people and to brutalize our societies anew after that. And now these fools have the arrogance to tell us that we should “assimilate” to the same violent culture and brutal power structure, the one that’s never failed to find an excuse to attack our own and other vulnerable peoples? They can forget it!
El poder queda en las manos de la gente, de nosotros y nuestros hijos y el pueblo cuyos manos han construido– y siguen de construir– esta sociedad de Aztlan. Yo nunca voy a aguantar las voces de los Anglos ignorantes que dicen que deberiamos rendirnos a su cultura, lengua, herencia y poder sobra nuestra propia tierra y hogar!
Ellos han tomado tanto de nosotros y nos humillado tanto, y todavia siguen de hacer el mismo, es la hora para hacer valer nuestros derechos, los mismos derechos que aun hoy nos estan intentando de negar.
Viva la solidaridad entre la gente! A mis hermanos y hermanas quien ahorita estan sufriendo la opresión y los ataques odiosos del autoridad Anglo tan falso: Les apoyamos a todos ustedes en su momento de gran necesidad! Estamos juntos y luchamos para nuestra comunidad!
What ever happened to “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”?
Our Constitution does not say that the right to due process is just for citizens. It is a basic human right.
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