Sowing the seeds of separatism and strife

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Submitted By: Ronald F. Maxwell
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28 2007

Recently LoudounTimes.com ran an incendiary blog by Laura Valle of La Voz of Loudoun County, suggesting a comparison between those in the county who want to uphold the laws pertaining to illegal immigration with Adolf Hitler. Surely Mrs. Valle cannot be unaware of the similarity of her organization’s name with La Voz de Aztlan. After all, she could have named her organization, The Voice of Loudoun, but chose not to.

As a student of the U.S. Civil War, I have seen how the war became increasingly inevitable because of wrongheaded decisions and hardening attitudes in earlier generations. It is practically dogma now to believe that had the Founders dealt with the slavery issue at the time of independence, the Civil War may never have happened.

Nobody knows what will happen as a result of an estimated 20 million foreign nationals entering this country illegally since 1990, most of those from across our common border with Mexico. (This is in addition to the tens of millions of legal immigrants who have become U.S. citizens since the late 1960s). The U.S. has the world's most liberal immigration policies. No other country comes even close. Our generosity is not at issue. What is unique and what is unprecedented is the size, speed and special nature of this vast unlawful population movement, which includes 10 percent of the population of Mexico.

To pretend that somehow Mexicans or Americans are immune to attachment to land, to custom, to language and to culture -- that they do not possess patriotic instincts and ethnic attachments is fanciful wishful thinking. Mexican and American people are human -- and they will behave as all other peoples everywhere in all of human history, in predictable ways. Why on earth would we want to create the conditions in the American Southwest or for that matter all across America, for future civil strife, or in a worst case scenario, civil war? We have heard the "reconquista" diatribe all our adult lives. As the numbers swell to tens of millions, the "reconquista" doesn't sound as fanciful as it once did. Just check out the Web site for La Voz de Aztlan.

This isn't the old familiar immigration we grew up with, the relatively small populations from Eastern Europe, from the Mediterranean, from Japan, from Ireland -- those ancestors of ours who couldn't wait to learn English, who within a generation became more American than Americans, who grabbed hold of the Stars and Stripes and never let go. Sure, our ancestors taught us second languages and, indeed, we celebrate our heritage in the privacy of our homes and among our ethnic and cultural and religious sub-groups. It’s great that we do, but we don't march in angry protest with Irish, Italian or Israeli flags.

What we are witnessing today, what our elites are allowing to happen, indeed abetting, is a burgeoning separatist movement, largely though not exclusively confined to the Southwest. If you study the fertility rates among this population, it's simple to project the future demographics. The Southwest will become, by mid-century, the northern province of Mexico, de facto if not de jure.

How this plays out, in terms of language, sovereignty, separatist movements, civil strife or violent conflict is open to all sorts of speculation. There are many other contested borderlands -- Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Armenia, Kurdistan, Darfur, Chechnya -- we know the tragic list.

Will these tens of millions from south of the border learn English, diminish their strident ethno-centric demands and truly assimilate as previous immigrants have done? Even in this benign view, the population of the United States will have skyrocketed to almost 500,000,000 by mid-century. Open space, protection of wilderness and wildlife, uncrowded cities and suburbs and roads -- functioning schools and hospitals and social services – fuggit about it.

Why are we allowing this to happen? In whose interest, besides Mexico’s elites and the U.S. corporations who want ever cheaper labor, is this?

These are the questions we must consider soberly, unemotionally and rationally. We must have compassion not just for the illegal alien who is being driven out of his indigenous home in Mexico by the corrupt caudillos in Mexico City and lured by the greed merchants of American big business. We must have compassion for our own sons and daughters, for the children of all races and background who will inherit the wind in the coming decades. The curse on those of us who just ignored the problem and let it get worse will be to live into old age to witness the results of our neglect and wishful thinking.

It is our responsibility to seriously think this through, to question our assumptions and some of our cherished notions – to do better than even the Founders did in 1781.

The writer, a resident of Rappahannock County, wrote and directed the movies "Gettysburg" and "Gods & Generals." He can be reached at www.ronmaxwell.com

Mr. Maxwell meanders through history in the manner typical of xenophobes and conspiracy mongers. But we live in a land where freedom of speech is a right, and he is certainly entitled to his opinions. Let's just be clear that these opinions are not shared by most Americans, particularly those residing in Loudoun County.
In Loudoun, we see diversity not as a conspiracy, but as the lifeblood of our nation. La Voz of Loudoun is a community organization providing an important community service.
There is no conspiracy, Mr. Maxwell. America is not at risk. We are a nation of immigrants, growing and changing, always incorporating the democratic values of our Founders.
Stand down, sir, you are not under attack.

Posted by LoudounPatriot

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Sowing the seeds of separatism and strife