AZTLAN – Go to Oz, turn left past Camelot and head south
Posted: Wednesday, June 1, 2011 4:00 am
AZTLAN – Go to Oz, turn left past Camelot and head south By Emil Franzi, Special to The Explorer Explorer News | 0 comments
The recent outbursts – the proponents’ behavior was too thuggish to call it a legitimate debate – over Ethnic Studies at TUSD concerned making the program elective. The program as taught should be completely scrapped for the fraud it is.
Society gets no benefit from teaching blatant falsehoods. Claims that lands ceded by Mexico to the United States after the War of 1846 were the home of an advanced Aztec culture called Aztlan that was eliminated by invading Europeans are simply absurd.
Native tribes living here had little contact with the Aztecs, a culture engaged in the same group psychosis and internal genocide as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The Aztecs were conquered by a handful of Spaniards because many other tribes Aztecs oppressed and murdered joined the invaders. Life for the average Native American of this continent before Columbus was best illustrated in “Apocalypto.” Try Netflix for a real elective.
Until Mexican Independence in 1821, the area may have been colored Spanish on European maps but they were barely ruling anything. Scattered settlements and missions existed at the sufferance of the mostly nomadic warrior tribes who were really in charge and constantly fought with each other.
Mexican successors to the Spaniards also fought each other and neglected their northern provinces, often not even arming what few troops they posted. By the 1840s, the real rulers of “Aztlan” were folks like the Comanche, who sent giant raiding parties within 200 miles of Mexico City and brought parrots back to Texas. Apaches and other warrior tribes controlled the rest. Forget that peaceful farmers bilge. It insults great warrior cultures that were the real rulers of that mythical realm.
By the time President Polk led the American Empire against the one Santa Ana was establishing., there were few Mexicans remaining in northern Mexico. Those surviving lived in the accumulations of hovels that were Tucson and other small settlements, finally under the protection of a country that at least bothered to send an army.
While there was discrimination by some Europeans against Mexicans, the overwhelming majority of both hadn’t arrived yet. The hostility between native tribes and Mexicans was even greater than that between gringos and either of them. To teach otherwise is to blatantly distort the truth.
So is teaching that Euro-Americans oppress Mexican-Americans. Media covered one female student claiming she never knew she was oppressed until she was taught it in her Ethnic Studies class. Really?
The Alabama slave working the fields all day knew he was oppressed. So did the Jewish family hiding in an attic from the Nazis in occupied Holland, the Chinese woman raped by occupying Japanese troops, and the Cambodian school teacher hunted down to be part of a mass execution by Pol Pot’s lunatic regime. Closer to home, so did the young Aztec man having his heart cut out by a batch of insane priests from a vicious society of which so many are genuinely ignorant and wish to honor. Nobody had to tell any of them they were being oppressed.
If you don’t know you are being oppressed, you are probably aren’t. Here are some more hints.
If you can run off at the mouth about it and nobody busts you, you probably aren’t oppressed. If you can freely and publicly meet with others who share your perspectives and particularly if those who tell you of oppression are on the payroll of the very society they claim is doing the oppressing and are funded by taxes raised from the supposed oppressors, there’s a real good chance you aren’t oppressed.
If you abuse others and keep them from speaking, threaten folks and disturb public meetings that give you your own say, you just moved into being the oppressor yourself. That’s what you and the rest of those at TUSD really need to learn about.
Hear Emil Franzi and Tom Danehy Saturday from 1 to 4 p.m. on KVOI 1030 AM.
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