The Wall

Hadrian's Wall

President Trump wants to build a wall along the US border with Mexico. Other people have built walls with varying degrees of success. The Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall (above), and the Berlin Wall all spring to mind. I have been meaning to say something about this and today Windypundit puts up a post and that pushes me off the dime. I start with a comment on that post:

Are we going to let the government decide who can cross the border and who can't? I'm pretty sure that has been one of the functions of government since the beginning of governments.
Building the wall is a bad idea. It would only work if you had an army of people to patrol it, and that would end up costing many times more than the wall would cost in the first place. Eventually, funding for that army would fade away and the wall would become just another barrier to be crossed, like a river, mountain or desert.

I've said it before (I'm sure), but I'll say it again. If Mexico wasn't such a mess, we wouldn't have so many people desperate to leave their home and travel north to that alien land of the gringo. Of course, it's not just Mexico that's a mess, pretty much all of Latin America, from the Rio Grande River to the tip of Tierra del Fuego is a rotten, stinking mess. Some of it is our fault, things like the War On Drugs and our incessant meddling in the governments and our ruthless commercial exploitation of anything we could find to exploit haven't helped matters.

But a bigger problem, one that goes back to the colonial era, is the system of property rights, or the lack of such a system. Near as I can tell, all property belongs to the head honcho, who is backed by the Catholic Church. Everybody is dependent on the governor granting them some property.

Previous related posts.

Fish In Water

Fish

Roberta mentions Mao's "fish in water". It means nothing to me, so I go a-Googling and find this:

They enabled Mao's army to make use of its excellent fish-in-water relationship to the farmers around it. - The Life of Mao by Ross Terrill

And this on problemattic.net:

An Indian policeman describes the problem with attempts to assimilate and conquer the tribal groups:

“See Ma’am, frankly speaking this problem can’t be solved by us police or military. The problem with these tribals is they don’t understand greed. Unless they become greedy, there’s no hope for us. I have told my boss, remove the force and instead put a TV in every home. Everything will be automatically sorted out.”

And Roy describes this beautiful scene at an annual Maoist festival, deep in the jungle:

At first, the PLGA comrades watch the dancers, standing aside with their guns. But then, one by one, like ducks who cannot bear to stand on the shore and watch other ducks swim, they move in and begin to dance too. Soon there are lines of olive-green dancers, swirling with all the other colours. And then, as sisters and brothers and parents and children and friends who haven’t met for months, years sometimes, encounter each other, the lines break up and re-form and the olive green is distributed among the swirling saris and flowers and drums and turbans. It surely is a People’s Army. For now, at least. And what Chairman Mao said about the guerrillas being the fish and people being the water they swim in, is, at this moment, literally true.

The communists (FARC) are fighting in Latin America. I suspect that property rights are at the root of their complaints, much as they were in early 20th century China.

The Liberal Media

Some crimes move or frighten us in ways we hadn’t anticipated. The Colonia Narvarte massacre is one of those, as was evident at the rally for the victims on Sunday, August 2nd, when hundreds gathered around the statue of El Ángel on Avenida Reforma.CREDITPHOTOGRAPH BY YURI CORTEZ / AFP / GETTY

I was reading a story yesterday in The New Yorker about murder and corruption in Mexico. Five people were murdered in Mexico City, two of them were journalists from Vera Cruz, and I got to wondering why should a journalist risk getting killed to publicize corruption? I mean, nobody cares. If people cared about this kind of thing, they wouldn't keep electing these scumbags into powerful positions.
     But that's not really how it works, it is? People, taken as a whole, are stupid herd animals who are easily panicked with the smallest of advertising budgets. Bring enough money to bear on a particular issue and people will believe whatever you tell them. Tell them that Humpty Dumpty is their friend and they'll vote for him, even if he is a little cracked.

    "The Liberal Media" is a phrase I often encounter on my prowls around the net. It's always from someone who disagrees with something, big surprise there. I typically use it as a marker for a right-wing gun-nut. But there is some truth to this myth. There have been times when I have looked for information on a topic and ALL the reports seem to have the same slant. I had been thinking this validates the R.W.G.N. view that everyone in mass media is engaged in delusional group-think and they are all marching in lockstep, i.e. they are a bunch of dummies and you shouldn't listen to them.

    But now we've got this story out of Mexico and I'm wondering, if you aren't going to publish articles about corruption, how are you going to fight it? Well, there is the drug war, though I'm not sure it has risen to the level of 'low-intensity conflict', much less a civil war, and a civil-war is what it would take to kick these guys out of power, and it probably wouldn't work anyway.
    So maybe publishing articles in mass-media is the only effective way to fight this corruption. Not a very happy prospect.
    If you are going to war, the first thing you need is allies and the more the merrier. Okay, merry may not be the word we want here. If you want to remove an entrenched oligarchy from power, you are going to need all the help you can get. And in a war, which is what we have here, you are either on one side or the other. The people with the power don't need any help, they can hire people to do their bidding. But if you are part of the opposition, you need to toe the party line.

    So none of the issues being arguing about are really that important. What is important is that we fight against the oligarchy that is in power, because whenever they get to be too big and powerful, they tend to forget their responsibility to act as good citizens.

Immigration

I have heard several times recently about Politicians who say they are getting hammered about illegal immigration. I first time I heard this was last fall. Ron Wyden, one of our Senators, been going around the state holding town hall meetings, and he said he was surprised at how much flak he was getting on this subject. I mentioned this to my friend Jack and he was not surprised at all. He tells me that Fox news had been hammering on the subject for six months. Well, well, well, if it isn't old Rupert Murdoch throwing his weight around. He owns Fox and whole bunch of other media, in case you didn't know.

Another instance was an article by Ryan Lizza in the December 17, 2007 issue of "The New Yorker" about the Republican Presidential candidates. This time I was surprised. Of course, I don't watch Fox news, and I doubt whether anyone at "The New Yorker" does either, but maybe somebody should be. Thank goodness my friend Jack has been keeping tabs on Fox.

But maybe evil old Rupert has a point. There are a great number of illegal immigrants coming into this country from Mexico. I am pretty sure building a Berlin wall to keep them out is not the answer. I am not sure what is. Perhaps a more lenient immigration policy so we can know who and where the immigrants are. Perhaps more economic stimulus packages for Mexico so people are not so desperate that they sneak into the United States. I do not know.

How did Mexico get to be in such bad shape anyway? I like to think it was rampant corruption in the government. I worked for a guy once who thought it was because they did not have a good Protestant work ethic. They were Catholics after all. I don't buy that either. All the Mexicans I know of are working very hard so they can send money back to Mexico.

Immigration

Seems to me we would not be having such a big problem with illegal immigration from Mexico if Mexico was not in such bad shape economically.

I suspect the United States foreign policy has something to do with Mexico's economic condition. I suspect there are a few large American business interests (Republicans, no doubt) that guided our foreign policy (or lack thereof) regarding Mexico, and that these polices helped keep the PRI in power for so long and prevented any real progress there. So, hooray for Vincente Fox for breaking the PRI's stranglehold. Maybe Mexico can start making some progress.

Foreign Policy

I am in favor of the war we started with Iraq. From all accounts Saddam Hussein is an evil man. I think we will be doing the Iraqi people a great service by removing him from power. Removing him will not be enough. To prevent someone of similar nature from coming to power, it will be necessary to establish a new government, and to see that it is firmly established. Constitutional democracy seems to be the preferred form of government these days so that might be the form to pursue. So we can look at an extended stay in Iraq, probably five years or so.

Back in 1970 I turned nineteen years of age, and my lottery number was 30, which almost guaranteed that I would be drafted. I wasn't having any of it. I didn't have any particular objection to the war in Vietnam, but I didn't like people telling me what to do. Fortunately I lived in Ohio and Ohio State University had a policy of admitting anyone who graduated from a High School in Ohio. So I signed up for school. Didn't really want to go to school, I'd been bored out of my mind in High School, and I couldn't see that college would be any better. But given the choice of going to school or going to Vietnam, I chose school. Call me a draft dodger if you will. I was young and ornery, and probably wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway.

I stayed in school for a year and a half and then I heard a rumor that if you dropped out of school in December, you would be eligible for the draft till the end of the year. If you made it to the end of the year without getting drafted, your period of eligibility was over and you were no longer subject to the draft. The kicker was that nobody ever got drafted in December. So I dropped out, waited out the month, and I was deferred.

John F. Kennedy was supposed to be one of greatest presidents. I'm not so sure. He got us into Vietnam, and he backed out of supporting the Cuban exiles in their attack at the Bay Of Pigs. Richard Nixon is supposed to one our worst presidents, but I'm not so sure. He got us out of Vietnam. I really didn't like his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. I can't really say why, except perhaps that there was too much news about him.

Until this war on Iraq, I was very much opposed to US foreign policy. Our single minded support of any regime that declared itself to be anti-communist seemed to be causing more trouble and grief in the world than the communists were. El Salvador, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines and Mexico are my favorite examples.

Some people will wonder why I include Mexico. Mexico is pretty much poverty stricken, a third world disaster like any other. It is right next door to the United States. The most powerful nation on Earth. Although I cannot say exactly how or why, I suspect Mexico's current situation can be directly traced to US policy.