Monday, March 21, 2016

If hispanics don’t vote in large numbers for Donald Trump there will be a civil war

In the 1940’s, 1950’s, and 1960’s, immigration into the United States was held at very low levels.  This allowed wages for the average worker to rise substantially, but also greatly limited the profits of the rich and tended to reduce inequality.  How terrible.

So obviously the rich wanted to tear open the borders, and let the surplus labor of the overpopulated third world in.  Because 100 desperate people competing for every job makes wages go down not up: nobody beats the law of supply and demand.

To this end the rich have waged perhaps the most all-encompassing propaganda war in history.  They have re-written the history books, replacing the decent moderation of Malthus and Mills and Keynes with the ‘people must breed like rabbits to create prosperity’ lies of Milton Friedman and Julian Simon.  They have censored almost all references to the effects of massive population growth: if roads get crowded, if fresh water is in short supply, why, the increase in the number of people simply cannot be mentioned.

But of all the toxic lies the rich have promoted, probably the worst is that of the ‘hispanic’ ethnicity.  It was not that long ago that there were in the United States no such things as ‘hispanics’.  There were Americans, some of whom were of Latin American ancestry and were traditionally classified as white, and there were Mexican nationals, and Salvadoran nationals etc.

So the rich used their money and influence to hammer home that all these disparate people are ‘hispanic’, and worked to create a racial identity where none was present before.  Partly this is the old game of divide and conquer: split the working class apart into racial and ethic fault lines, have them fight amongst each other for crumbs rather than question why they are only getting crumbs in the first place.  But it was also useful to help open the US borders to a massive influx of cheap labor from Mexico.

The current corporate-approved script is that all people labeled ‘hispanic’ are a kind of xenophobic social insect that cares only about their own species and dreams only of conquering the universe.  So an American ‘hispanic’ is supposed to care only about poor Hispanics in Mexico and Guatemala, and nothing at all about their fellow U.S. citizens that are black or white or yellow etc.  An American ‘hispanic’ wants massive immigration of Mexicans etc., even if it hurts the interests of their fellow U.S. citizens, and even if it hurts the interests of American Hispanics themselves, because all that Hispanics care about is the aggregate power of their race.

“For the race everything, outside of the race nothing” is the slogan of one of the corporate-sponsored Hispanic racist lobbying organizations.   And when they say race (“Raza”) they don’t mean the people in general, I assure you that they mean people who are Hispanics.

This is an incredibly racist philosophy, but it serves the interests of the oligarchy so it’s OK.  White social solidarity, however, would tend to operate in closing the borders, and this would cost the rich money, which is why white solidarity is not OK (for now).

Suppose that someone who recently immigrated from Russia stated publicly that they only cared about their fellow slavs, that they wanted US tax dollars to help poor kids in Moscow and none to help poor blacks or Asians in US slums, and that they wanted only to increase the numbers of ethic Russians so that they could increase the power of their race and maybe eventually take over large sections of the United States in the name of mother Russia?  Toxic, right?

Remember, assimilation is not primarily about speaking English or wearing blue jeans.  Assimilation is first and foremost about loyalty.

Now for a long time this meme that Hispanics are all toxic racists may well have been an illusion, something the corporate press reported over and over again not because it was true, but because they could.  It made a good excuse for various elected officials to sell out their constituents for their donors: ‘oh if we don’t reach out to the racist Hispanics who care only about their fellows in other lands I will lose the growing racist Hispanic vote.’    I expect that many U.S. citizens with Latin American ancestry didn’t buy this – they probably looked at the idea of turning the United States into another Mexico with the same horror as any other U.S. citizen.  But with each election being a false choice, and the media repeating the same scripted memes over and over, how could we tell?

But is this long pretense now become a reality?  Is a large and growing fraction of the population of the United States now cutting itself off from the rest of the nation?  Do they feel themselves a nation apart, like the Russians in the Ukraine, or the Kurds in Turkey?  We may soon find out.

If Donald Trump – whose proposed immigration policies look like those of Mother Teresa compared to the brutal, racist and xenophobic policies of Mexico – can get 40 percent of the Hispanic vote in the upcoming general election (assuming of course that he gets the Republican nomination), despite massive propaganda to the contrary, this would be a sign of hope.  It would mean that the US Hispanic population is not yet gone completely over to the other side, and might help to break the toxic meme of inevitable Hispanic racism. 

The Mexican oligarchs would scream to the high heavens.  Having deliberately crushed their own nation into miserable poverty, they face the same dilemma as all such oligarchs: the poverty is making the oligarchs fabulously wealthy, but it is also threatening to turn Mexico into  a failed state.  The Mexican oligarchs need the safety valve of emigration into the United States if they are to continue to play their games.  And more: The Mexican oligarchs must be licking their chops at the idea of de-facto reconquering chunks of the United States.  A president Trump might – only might! – threaten these dreams.

On the other hand, if fewer than 20 percent of U.S. Hispanics vote for Trump, this would be epic.  It would mean that the lies have become true, and that the United States now has a large and growing sub-population that no longer identifies itself as American.  It will vote and act for it’s own racial interests and not in the general national interest.  Eventually whole sections of the nation will likely revert to Mexico.  And anyone not an ethnic Hispanic won’t like that – especially American blacks, who Mexicans despise even though for now they pretend to make common cause with them.  And most Hispanics won’t like that either – witness their desire to leave places like Mexico and Guatemala – but by then it will be too late.  Perhaps they can move on and conquer Canada.

The magic of the US melting pot is that it took all these disparate immigrants from all over - Poland, Ireland, Sweden, whatever - and turned them into Americans.  Their political heroes were no longer Carl Gustav or Charles DeGaul but George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  They worried about what was going on in the ghettoes of New York City and Appalachia, not Kharkov or Gunnebo.  But the rich have decided that a politically unified working class is too hard to manipulate, so they have decided to take the melting pot and break it into shards.  Have they succeeded?  I suspect we will find out before too long.