Dum Pendebat Filius

Just a couple of days ago, I wrote about the Herndon Town Hall switchboard being flooded with calls, at the request of a right-wing radio host, to protest a proposed gathering place for day-laborers. Today, via Orcinus, I see that there was a rally in Denver, where people came to protest the Denver Public Library’s acquisition of “copies of a Spanish-language novella with sexually explicit illustrations found on library shelves last week.”

It soon became apparent that the inappropriate content wasn’t the real problem:

But the issue of novella content was quickly pushed to the side, as the protesters focused primarily on illegal immigrants, especially those from Mexico.

“You always hear they want to come and work,” said Robert Copley of the Colorado Minuteman Project. “Well, they also want to come and kill, and destroy wages, and just demean our quality of life.”

The discussion seems to have touched on sociolinguistics as well:

“You need to speak English,” Weatherford told Casillas.

“I am speaking English, but I can speak Spanish too,” Casillas replied.

“You need to speak (English) all the time,” Weatherford said.

As usual, Orcinus sees through the smokescreen and points out the truth:

Illegal immigration is a serious problem, not least for its effects in spreading a Wal-Mart economy to the working classes, as well as the way it depresses wages. It requires serious and thoughtful solutions that change the framework of how we deal with both the nuances and the fundamentals of the problem. Blaming desperate Mexicans — millions of whom have been thrown out of work and off their lands because of NAFTA — for wanting to come here for jobs is not going to solve anything.

But that’s exactly what the Minutemen and their ilk are proposing to do: Harass illegal migrants as they cross the border. This has also created a predictable spate of freelance Minutemen conducting their own version of a border watch. (In two recent cases this escalated to someone shooting a couple of Latinos.)

It’s called scapegoating, and it is the hallmark of American right-wing extremism. The paranoid mindset always insists on a scapegoat: Jews. Blacks. Mexicans. Gays. In the 1920s, it was Catholics. They always insist that someone is conspiring to bring harm to them and to America. They describe them as vermin, and urge their elimination. It is a story that has repeated itself many times.