The dark side of May Day 2006

Article: News - Rock throwing reported in Santa Ana:
"SANTA ANA — Police asked other law enforcement agencies for help this afternoon after a group of 1,500 protesters jammed traffic on Bristol Street near 1st Street and Edinger Avenue and some started to hurls rocks, plastic bottles and marbles at officers."

This is small beer compared to the May Day rioting in Berlin, but it does show that not everything was roses everywhere in the anti-America demonstrations Monday.

I chose the term "anti-America" carefully. At best, the organizers are asking American public officials to do what is in the best interests of a segment of the Mexican population, not what is best for America. At worst, a sizable element of the demonstrators appear to deny that there even is an America entitled to defend its interests against them.

To illustrate a part of this, I want to take a close look at one minor "leader" of the movement.

A woman (whose name I didn't catch) was interviewed by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News last night and he tried to get her to give a forthright answer to what was meant by the slogan "We did not cross the border, the border crossed us." She gave a long and more than a little misleading talk about land trade routes linking native peoples from Canada to southern South America as evidence that borders were somehow an innovation of British (and then American) colonial expropriation and exploitation of North America. Asked whether she meant by this that there should be no borders at all from Argentina to Canada, she refused a direct answer and launched into a disquisition on free speech and civil rights, but also saying that as money and goods can move across borders, workers should be able to also.

O'Reilly, somehow missed the opportunity to pin down whether, in fact, pre-Columbian peoples - whatever their interests in trade - marked and defended territories for their various nations/tribes. He might also have asked if they did not also make war on one another, take slaves, offer human sacrifices, etc. In short, he missed a real opportunity to define the question in terms of realpolitik and not some Rousseauian idea of the noble savage so superior to the corruption of Christendom.

O'Reilly also failed to ask her what it might mean to her argument that the earliest known inhabitants of South America were Negroes and the the earliest known inhabitants of North America were Caucasians.

Turning to the end of the interview, one is struck by how her argument mirrors the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposal which would extend geographically and expand in scope the North American Free Trade Area into a copy of the European Union. This is a project near and dear to President George W. Bush.

When you consider that President Bush is also the most prominent proponent of amnesty for those aliens who have broken our laws to come here and work (or even just to live off the fat of the land on various forms of public assistance including free health care which is threatening the financial solvency of many US hospitals) you might think that the demonstrators would be chanting "We support President Bush" instead of hanging him in effigy.

O'Reilly got one thing right. He did make the point that the key to this problem is the government of Mexico. The European-descended cabal that rules that country has used emigration to the US and remittances from Mexicans working in the US as a safety valve to deflect attention from the rampant corruption of the regime which contributes greatly to the poverty there.