0 comment Saturday, October 4, 2014 | admin
Lee Benson writes an article in the Deseret Morning News on the subject of the Mexican belief that they own much of the Western U.S. Many of us who are aware of the border crisis know that many Mexicans express a belief that they are the 'real' owners of much of the Southwest, but in fact many believe that the Western states all belong to 'Greater Mexico.'
Benson quotes a retired U. S. Foreign Service officer who spent time in Mexico, and observed schoolchildren being taught that this swath of western America belonged to them and their people.
"They have an undeclared policy to retake by infiltration what they lost by infiltration," he says, comparing the large numbers of Mexicans currently streaming into U.S. territory to the large numbers of Americans who once poured into then Mexican-held strongholds in Texas, California and elsewhere; Americans who eventually turned their collective might into majority rule. In other words, they're doing to us what we did to them.' (Italics mine).
The warnings by this retired embassy worker, David Timmins, are well-taken. He correctly perceives the threat from this revanchist effort to re-take 'their' land. However, the last sentence quoted above, the italicized sentence, may be the writer's misconception: "... they're doing to us what we did to them."
Maybe the writer is not aware that the original American settlers in Texas were there with the permission of the Spanish and later the Mexican government. Maybe he is not aware that much of Texas was sparsely populated and that there were few Spanish or Mexicans there at the time the colonists arrived.
The American settlers were not there by stealth or in defiance of the governing authorities; they had to meet certain criteria, and they were granted a certain allotment of land. This is hardly analogous to the present Mexican invasion, with millions of unidentified people, subject to no screening process, character and skills unknown, entering our country each year.
To say that the Mexican illegals are just doing to us 'what we did to them' is to denigrate the honest American settlers of Texas, and to put them on a par with the lawbreakers who are currently invading our country and demanding rights. To compare the settlers of the Southwest with the illegals is also to imply that our current troubles are just payback, or 'karma', that we are reaping what we sowed back in the 1820s. Of course this is exactly the rhetoric of the liberals who always take the other side in any dispute, but no thoughtful American should wish to make this moral equivalence between the illegals and the American settlers of the Southwest.
Benson quotes a retired U. S. Foreign Service officer who spent time in Mexico, and observed schoolchildren being taught that this swath of western America belonged to them and their people.
"They have an undeclared policy to retake by infiltration what they lost by infiltration," he says, comparing the large numbers of Mexicans currently streaming into U.S. territory to the large numbers of Americans who once poured into then Mexican-held strongholds in Texas, California and elsewhere; Americans who eventually turned their collective might into majority rule. In other words, they're doing to us what we did to them.' (Italics mine).
The warnings by this retired embassy worker, David Timmins, are well-taken. He correctly perceives the threat from this revanchist effort to re-take 'their' land. However, the last sentence quoted above, the italicized sentence, may be the writer's misconception: "... they're doing to us what we did to them."
Maybe the writer is not aware that the original American settlers in Texas were there with the permission of the Spanish and later the Mexican government. Maybe he is not aware that much of Texas was sparsely populated and that there were few Spanish or Mexicans there at the time the colonists arrived.
The American settlers were not there by stealth or in defiance of the governing authorities; they had to meet certain criteria, and they were granted a certain allotment of land. This is hardly analogous to the present Mexican invasion, with millions of unidentified people, subject to no screening process, character and skills unknown, entering our country each year.
To say that the Mexican illegals are just doing to us 'what we did to them' is to denigrate the honest American settlers of Texas, and to put them on a par with the lawbreakers who are currently invading our country and demanding rights. To compare the settlers of the Southwest with the illegals is also to imply that our current troubles are just payback, or 'karma', that we are reaping what we sowed back in the 1820s. Of course this is exactly the rhetoric of the liberals who always take the other side in any dispute, but no thoughtful American should wish to make this moral equivalence between the illegals and the American settlers of the Southwest.
Labels: Their Land