Sam makes it almost too easy to demonstrate my point. I barely had to search........
samfrancis.net
SAMUEL FRANCIS
Chavez holiday another attack on Euro-American culture
FOR RELEASE Tuesday, May 2, 2000
It's going to be a close fight to keep the Confederate flag flying above South Carolina's capitol, with the NAACP economic boycott of the state, Big Business pressure to abandon the flag as a symbol of the state's heritage, and the naked political hunger of many Republicans. But even if the flag in Columbia vanishes, never fear. Across the country in California another public icon is about to be born.
There the emerging Hispanic majority is crusading for an official state holiday to honor Hispanic union organizer Cesar Chavez. From all accounts, it looks like it will be successful, since organized labor, the political left in general and the vast Hispanic racial lobby are all in favor of it. Republicans, as usual, can't be counted on to oppose the measure, since they're terrified of losing the Hispanic vote.
Chavez, born in 1927, was the founder of the United Farm Workers and in the late 1960s was a regular feature at New Left demonstrations. While he was never quite as popular as Black Panthers or outright communists on the radical chic martini circuit, he and his well-equipped spin artist pals did make "boycotting grapes" almost as trendy as supporting the Viet Cong or raising defense funds for cop killers and terrorists.
The New Left and its airhead adherents soon moved on to other campaigns, but the Hispanic workers whom Chavez tried to organize have never forgotten little Cesar. Today, however, the demand for a state holiday in his honor has less to do with his contributions to union organizing than it does to his symbolism of racial unity against the gringos.
The racial meaning of the holiday movement is clear enough because it's not mainly farm workers who are leading the charge for it but Hispanics in general. Opposition to the holiday is seen, not as opposition to labor unions, but as hostility to Hispanics, and support for it among Hispanics is supposed to be a test of just how Hispanic you are. As the Washington Post noted in a recent story about the movement, "... as California's Hispanic population keeps growing -- and keeps getting more energized politically -- so too does the clamor to do even more in Chavez's memory."
Arizona and Texas already have Chavez holidays, but the one proposed for California lurches just a bit further to the left than they do. One California proposal would not only make Chavez' birthday a paid annual holiday for state workers but would also require public schools to spend part of the day teaching kids about Chavez' legacy and the rest of it leading them in community service in his name. Like much that comes out of the multiculturalist camp, the reminders of Red China under Mao Tse Tung are obvious.
The proposal passed the state Senate earlier this year. The Republicans abstained. In Arizona, some Republican lawmakers actually voted for it, because, as the Post explains, they were "worried that a vote against the bill could galvanize Hispanic voters against their party in the November elections." (It never occurs to Republicans to galvanize their own voters.) The only major disagreement over the holiday is about how much it might cost taxpayers.
What is going on with the Chavez holiday in California -- and you can bet your grape juice there will soon be similar movements in other states where "La Raza" is pushing toward a majority -- is the continuing saga of the displacement of European-American civilization and its heroes, holidays and symbols by another civilization (if that indeed is quite the right word for it).
The same displacement is going on with the attacks on the Confederate flag, though many involved in that fight don't see it that way. They still think the fight over the flag is really about either "racism" or the "Southern heritage." But it's much larger than that.
You cannot expect to switch populations and demographic majorities through massive immigration and differential birth rates as the Untied States has been doing now for some 30 years and not expect also to switch civilizations and the symbols that represent them. You cannot expect millions of aliens from one civilization to enter the country, abandon all the loyalties and values of their old civilization and sign up with all those of the new one they have entered.
The adoption of the Chavez holiday and the abandonment of the Confederate flag in a region where it once was the major public icon are merely the starters in the conflict of races and civilizations in which we are now engaged. Once the new non-European majority -- brown or black, red or yellow -- really cranks up, flexes its political muscle and forms its own identity, there will be no symbol, institution or value associated with the ones Europeans planted here that will remain safe.
Samuel Francis is a nationally syndicated columnist. |
