VS.
In posting this today, I have found that Cesar Chavez was not a radical’s radical. But much like history, the left warps people and event to fit their ideology. Obviously, however, he is not a match for the Holiday today. For instance, he agreed that the La Raza movement was racist and spoke out against it:
… while reading a memoir/history of the immigration-reform movement by retired historian Otis Graham… I find out that even Cesar Chavez rejected the “la raza” idea as inherently racist. Graham quoted a 1969 New Yorker profile by Peter Matthiessen:
“I hear more and more Mexicans talking about la raza—to build up their pride, you know,” Chavez told me. “Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say ’la raza,’ you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned Mexican. … La raza is a very dangerous concept. I speak very strongly against it among the chicanos.”
And in Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, his 1970 biography, Matthiessen talked to Chavez deputy Leroy Chatfield:
“That’s one of the reasons he is so upset about la raza. The same Mexicans that ten years ago were talking about themselves as Spaniards are coming on real strong these days as Mexicans. Everyone should be proud of what they are, of course, but race is only skin-deep. It’s phony and it comes out of frustration; the la raza people are not secure. They look upon Cesar as their ‘dumb Mexican’ leader; he’s become their saint. But he doesn’t want any part of it. He said to me just the other day, ‘Can’t they understand that that’s just the way Hitler started?’ A few months ago the Ford Foundation funded a la raza group and Cesar really told them off. The foundation liked the outfit’s sense of pride or something, and Cesar tried to explain to them what the origin of the word was, that it’s related to Hitler’s concept.”
In other words, Cesar Chavez would have agreed that the Democrats keynote speaker (2012 DNC), Julian Castros, was a racist and would — I assume — speak out against this! FrontPage Magazine as well talks about Chavez’s faith and his views that were opposite of modern liberalism/the Democrat Party:
…. But Chavez’s faith, more than his ethnicity or his labor affiliations, informed his activism. Inspired by Christ’s example, Chavez became famous through fasting (and through boycotts of grapes). He held religious masses at the California state capitol in Sacramento. He even once used his union connections to keep a plane grounded so that he could make his flight to see the pope. Chavez told his biographer in the mid 1970s that “my need for religion has deepened. Today I don’t think that I could base my will to struggle on cold economics or on some political doctrine. I don’t think there would be enough to sustain me. For me the base must be faith.”
Fittingly, UFW’s headquarters bears a religious name. The president referred to Chavez’s Central Valley sanctuary as “La Paz.” Its full name is Nuestra Señora Reina de La Paz—Our Lady Queen of Peace. In making a national monument of a religious retreat named in honor of Jesus’s mother, the president risks irritating one constituency as he courts another. Surely the American Civil Liberties Union can’t be thrilled with a mystical Catholic, and his outpost named for Mary, receiving official recognition from the U.S. government.
Alas, there is an election to win. Disrupting the president’s fragile coalition over principles normally fiercely fought for on matters as unobtrusive as nondenominational graduation prayers and Christmastime nativity scenes just won’t do when it comes to nationalizing a religious leader’s religious retreat named for a religious saint. Here, activists, normally incapable of looking the other way, mute their objections.
“Cesar feels that liberals are liberal right up to the steps of the Catholic church,” explained Dorothy Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, during Chavez’s ’70s heyday. “Guys can be liberal about homosexuality, about dope, about capital punishment, about everything but the Catholic church. There the liberalism ends.”
However, I doubt Google knows this about Chavez, and buys into the Huffington Post or modern liberal interpretation of Chavez, like they do the Vietnam War (the Cold War), Reagan’s time in office, and the like.
In order to understand the differing views between Google and Bing, one has to realize that because religion is less practiced on the left, something has to take its place:
You cannot understand the left until you understand “leftism is a religion.”
You cannot understand the Left if you do not understand that leftism is a religion. It is not God-based (some left-wing Christians’ and Jews’ claims notwithstanding), but otherwise it has every characteristic of a religion. The most blatant of those characteristics is dogma. People who believe in leftism have as many dogmas as the most fundamentalist Christian.
One of them is material equality as the preeminent moral goal. Another is the villainy of corporations. The bigger the corporation, the greater the villainy. Thus, instead of the devil, the Left has Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the “military-industrial complex,” and the like. Meanwhile, Big Labor, Big Trial Lawyers, and — of course — Big Government are left-wing angels.
And why is that? Why, to be specific, does the Left fear big corporations but not big government?
The answer is dogma — a belief system that transcends reason. No rational person can deny that big governments have caused almost all the great evils of the last century, arguably the bloodiest in history. Who killed the 20 to 30 million Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago — big government or big business? Hint: There were no private businesses in the Soviet Union. Who deliberately caused 75 million Chinese to starve to death — big government or big business? Hint: See previous hint. Did Coca-Cola kill 5 million Ukrainians? Did Big Oil slaughter a quarter of the Cambodian population? Would there have been a Holocaust without the huge Nazi state?
Whatever bad things big corporations have done is dwarfed by the monstrous crimes — the mass enslavement of people, the deprivation of the most basic human rights, not to mention the mass murder and torture and genocide — committed by big governments.
How can anyone who thinks rationally believe that big corporations rather than big governments pose the greatest threat to humanity? The answer is that it takes a mind distorted by leftist dogma. If there is another explanation, I do not know what it is.
~Dennis Prager
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