Surprise! Fresno was once a hotbed of communism. The Fresno Bee was once known as a "communist rag". One of the artifacts of that concentration of hard leftists is the Pacifica Radio station which broadcasts from Fresno, with most of its programming coming from Berkeley and San Francisco. Most people think of Fresno as a pretty conservative place. But there is still that leftist San Francisco connection, and some local leftist activists. We get the radio signal from Fresno out here in the country, and we have some lefty activists, too.
The Sixties live on in San Francisco
Last week, before Arizona rocked the country with its immigration enforcement law, I heard part of a program on Pacifica Radio by representatives of the "Women's Wisdom Circle" or something to that effect, out of the Bay Area - San Francisco, Berkeley or a nearby city. The host of the program was celebrating the memory of the discovery of LSD. She remarked that this discovery was certainly an auspicious development for people seeking insight, as "Neptune was rising over San Francisco" at the moment that LSD was discovered in Switzerland. She and her guests enthused about other "mind-expanding" drugs for a while. She was filled with wonder at the fact that the common name for cannabis in Spanish, "marijuana", is feminine. This seemed like a big deal to her.
They talked about receiving wisdom from the plants around us, which could teach and heal us if we only listened to them. For example, the bane of the Southeast, kudzu vine, spread at the same time as Lyme disease, which they said kudzu vine can treat. Plants just show up around us to heal us when we get sick. One noted healer diagnoses illness by finding out which plants grow in the patient's yard. These plant would then be used to heal the patient. Western medicine relies far too much on "reason".
If only they knew this in Africa. There would be no need for Western medicines for AIDS and malaria. They should just listen to the plants which start growing near them. Why wouldn't this group scrape a little money together to send the healer described above to Africa to teach people how to end the suffering? Are they too absorbed in their own little world, surrounded by nurturing affluence, seeking new enlightenment?
The program closed with an enthusiastic notice that Neptune is rising again, leading the enlightenment-seeking women and men of San Francisco to expect another era of fabulous insight right away. I hope that this time, enlightenment doesn't come with phenomena like teenagers sitting on the freeway during an LSD "trip" to see the lights coming toward them.
This little snippet of radio programming was sort of a nostalgic return to the heyday of the hippies. Who needs Western medicine when plants talk to you and your parents send you money so you won't starve while becoming enlightened? Who needs Obamacare? Of course, there is also programming on this station which suggests that the United States should go much faster than Obamacare in socializing medicine. Somehow, these ideas fit together in the minds of the folks at Pacifica.
May Day in the Greater San Francisco Area (AKA Aztlan)
Today, the programming was different. Angry. I heard about 20 minutes of May Day protests. May Day commemorations had, of course, already been planned in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere, without much regard for the cruelty this represents toward the millions of victims of communism.
With the passage of the Arizona law, the focus of the May Day commemorations changed to immigration. Of course, Pacifica Radio is solidly on the left side of the left, so the themes ran from the rights of "indigenous peoples" directly to vile, vicious demonization of anyone who was in favor of enforcing current federal immigration law. Demonization in the name of love, of course. It is critical that anyone who does not support open borders be labeled as "draconian", "Nazi", "Fascist", "Racist", etc. They need an enemy.
One can certainly empathize with the predicament of people who have crossed the border illegally, wanting only to work. They have come while our government looked away and their government actively encouraged them to take the risks to come. They have been living in an uncertain status that keeps them in the shadows, and their situation is complicated by children born in the U.S. They are desperate for a better life than the one they had in Mexico and have been exploited because of their illegal status, then dumped into social service programs. The non-enforcement of our current immigration laws and the maddening difficulty of legal immigration has led to a giant problem which politicians have tried very hard to ignore.
One can also empathize with the people of Arizona, who have become desperate as violence and disorder have mounted due to gang members and drug runners who enter the country along with the workers. And due to social disorder started by having laws on the books which are not enforced. This leads to selective enforcement of other laws, etc. But the folks at Pacifica Radio ignore the plight of Arizona residents and look far beyond the day-to-day concerns of illegal immigrants and their families. Their programming had a bit of a fantasy-like quality to it. The Pacifica broadcast studio was repeatedly referred to as the "mother ship" during the protest broadcast.
Contribution of Academia to the Current Anger
We heard reports from the San Francisco Civic Center and from a protest in Santa Rosa, characterized as coming from the "streets of Aztlan". Aztlan is a mythical territory covering a huge part of the United States, which some Chicano Studies types consider to be theirs, because a few Mexicans reached there shortly before Americans. In addition, there is a legend that the tribes which lived in Mexico when the Spaniards came had originally migrated to Mexico from the Southwestern U.S. in about the 11th century.
The more radical Chicano Studies types planned to re-claim Aztlan from the United States through "La Reconquista", by subversion and force. They had a government system worked out which would put their racial group in total charge. Only non-Mexicans who agreed to subservience would be allowed to stay. It had strong neo-marxist elements, but paid tribute to a mythical Mexican culture as well. Even Mexicans who lived there would have to follow the strict dictates of the leaders of the movement.
Because of the obvious racialism inherent in their early goals and plans, many of the radical Chicano Studies types later adopted the "cover ideology" of activism in behalf of "all indigenous peoples" in order to avoid criticism from others on the Left. "La Reconquista" is now more commonly thought of as a demographic process (becoming the majority through immigration and high birth rates), along with promotion of Chicanos in political positions and other positions of power.
There are lots of fervent promoters of this idea in the State bureaucracy. Other ethnic groups respond in kind, sometimes making hiring a new employees a matter of bargaining between different ethnically-based coalitions. This bargaining is degraded into old-fashioned nepotism and cronyism, with a noble patina of seeking equality.
At the May Day protest, there were calls for universal amnesty or, even better, abolition of immigration laws in favor of free migration for "indigenous peoples" without regard to national borders. One fellow explained that it was all the fault of the United States that security and the economy in Mexico were so abysmal. It is all the fault of NAFTA. And "that's why we come here".
And that's one big reason that he hates the United States. There was a lot of talk about returning sovereignty to "the nations and pueblas of the earth and mother earth". I probably didn't get that last phrase exactly right, but it's close.
Why do they hate us?
What is really interesting is that the people who organize these protests are insistent that the federal government solve all their problems and give them a lot of money, but at the same time they want to overthrow our system of government: to replace the "Declaration of Independence" with a "Declaration of Interdependence" between the "nations and pueblas of the earth" (with due respect for the rights of Mother Earth). These are anti-globalists. They also want other nation-states to disappear. In other words, they want a return to multi-cultural tribalism. Spengler made this observation in Asia Times in July of 2008:
History seems awfully unfair: half or more of the world's 7,000 or so languages will be lost by 2100, linguists warn, and at present fertility rates Italian, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian and a dozen other major languages will die a century or so later. The agony of dying nations rises in reproach to America's unheeding prosperity.The Convoluted Path to Utopia presented from the San Francisco Area
An old joke divides the world into two kinds of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't. America is one of the things that sorts the world into polar opposites. To much of the world, America is the Great Satan, the source of the plague of globalization, the bane of the environment, the Grim Reaper of indigenous cultures, the carrier of soulless industrialism, and the perpetrator of imperial adventures. To hundreds of millions of others it is an object of special grace. Whether one subscribes to the concept or not, America's grace defines one of the world's great dividing lines, perhaps its most important.
Violent antipathy to America measures the triumph of the American principle, and the ascendance of America's influence in the world. . . .
In the fantasy world of Pacifica Radio, there are a few steps missing between the destruction of the United States and other nations of the world and the establishment of their utopian replacement for the current world systems of government. This reminds me of the way early communists left out or downplayed the totalitarian stages in their descriptions of the path to to a utopia peopled by perfectly unselfish, productive "Soviet Man".
Sometimes Pacifica Radio's positions with regard to Big Government seem to contradict each other. The far Left has many groups which have seemingly irrational policy positions. Like "Queers for Palestine". Why would self-identified "Queers" agitate in behalf of a government which would execute them in a horrible manner if they lived in Palestine?
Photo-blogger Zombie explained this oddity (elsewhere. the link is work-safe, unlike some of his other journalistic records): Queers for Palestine is an anarchist group which believes that by turning the West against the Muslim world, both will be weakened enough that THEY will be able to gain control and run the world with sweetness and light. People might take them more seriously if they could explain the steps between the collapse of the old governments and their benevolent takeover.
Some of the people I heard protesting today sounded like they had a rather naive belief that if the big, bad West could only be defeated, everything would just naturally revert to a peaceful, prosperous system where various tribal groups and "pueblas" traded with each other in total fairness and in harmony with Mother Earth. A sign of indoctrination by Ethnic Studies programs in college.
The Bumpy Path to Aztlan in the Fresno Area
When I was substitute teaching, one of the kids (a European-looking young man) in a local high school history class declared in a rather hostile manner that "all tyrants in history have been European". It was typical Ethnic Studies racist hate speech, taught to him by a respected adult. They have to lie to keep their narrative pure.
There were several activist teachers in our town (some did not have the required credentials) who had majored in Ethnic Studies at Berkeley and elsewhere. I totally understand the additional proposed law in Arizona to eliminate Ethnic Studies classes and education of children aimed at overthrowing the United States. I expect that their influence is as destructive in Arizona as in our little town. But on a larger scale, perhaps.
In our town, these public school teachers, with a group of other activists, almost destroyed our city government and school system a few years ago. They developed ties to the regional Democratic party. Soon, members of the community were afraid to attend community meetings.
One of the teachers disabled the sound system in order to ruin a patriotic program put on by elementary school kids. One second grade school class for ESL students where I taught had walls covered with stories about the mythical, noble Aztec ancestors of the kids, and suggestions concerning how to show their pride in being part of this noble ethnic group and how to return their "Aztec" ethnic group to its rightful, dominant place. He presumed to assign an ethnic identity to his students and to identify it as better than other ethnic identities. Pity the poor kids in the class from countries other than Mexico, especially those whose ancestors were dominated by the Aztecs. And kids of, say, Mayan ancestry from Mexico. Somehow, the teacher who put up these murals didn't consider himself to be a racist.
One result of this kind of activism was a dispute I witnessed between kids of Mexican descent and recent Arab immigrants in a fifth grade class. They fought over whether Arab or Mexican culture was superior. There was no mention of American culture. America was not considered by these students to have a culture, as far as I could tell. After I mentioned that I knew someone from the UAE, one Yemeni child described for me a movie (a fantasy in his mind, I think) in which Arabs killed Mexicans with machine guns. I asked why Arabs would be fighting with Mexicans. He wasn't sure. But he was sure that Arab culture was superior to Mexican culture. None of these kids even seemed aware of an "American Culture". I'm not sure that increasing tensions between Mexicans and Arabs was the original intent of Ethnic Studies. But Ethnic Studies classes have now been scientifically demonstrated to increase racial tenstions in universities. Most people are not surprised that the same is true at lower grade levels.
One wonders how area and ethnic studies professors would feel if they were ordered to undergo diversity sensitivity sessions themselves to try to straighten out their problems.Though most immigrant parents in our town wanted their kids in English immersion classes, these teachers pushed to keep recent immigrants speaking Spanish as much as possible. Whole classes of children who had good English fluency in kindergarten lost much of that fluency in first grade, because they were taught in Spanish, except for half an hour per day. The English-speaking Ethnic Studies elites can't maintain control if their "clients" are fluent in English, too. And it's so romantic to push for maintaining purity of cultural identity. The Arab and Punjabi kids learned English AND Spanish.
The disintegrating political situation in our town started to turn around when there was a serious assault by one prominent activist (in political office) and some of her relatives, and the local police made no arrests. It became a big scandal. The school system was also in serious trouble academically at that point.
Back to Reality
Back to my ill-informed high school student: I named a few non-European tyrants for the class and talked about some of their atrocities. But I should have mentioned that many of the worst tyrants in history, at least in the 20th century, spent time in Paris - home of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Tyrants of several different ethnicities. It's remarkable, really.
Somehow, the Ethnic Studies folks at Berkeley and the ernest radio programmers at Pacifica Radio can get socialism and tribalism mashed up into some really convoluted ideologies. I should have helped my students to get a glimpse into the origins of some of the irrationalities of the Left, so maybe they wouldn't end up in an Ethnic Studies program in Berkeley.
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