by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo
The world’s best-dressed Mexican-hater is at it again. Lou Dobbs on his Monday, April 8, 2008 evening show attacked historical truth once again in his never-ending effort to build up his ratings.
His latest concern is about an advertisement for Absolut Vodka that uses a 1830s map of Texas and northwest Mexico before annexations by the United States. Of course, the map is factual. Those lands were part of Mexico. But truth threatens Mr. Dobbs’ small world. He believes this is an outrageous assault on the United States history because it suggests that the United States invaded, occupied and took land that did not belong to it.
The problem is that Dobbs sticks to the politically correct version of events that is taught to children in U.S. grammar schools. He appears either unwilling or unable to run a truth check for adults.
Anybody who is somebody knows that President James K. Polk “manufactured” an attack on U.S. troops to justify war against Mexico. In 1845, the president appealed to Manifest Destiny as justification for invasion, murder and robbery against Mexico and Mexicans.
While history has tried to whitewash the racism behind the rape of Texas and the lands leading to California and the Pacific, contemporaries of the time like Abraham Lincoln saw the unjustified war for what it was.
It is too late to undo the injustice by surrendering the Southwest to Mexico, but it is never too late to learn from the past. Polk’s purposefully faulty intelligence and Bush’s intended overstatements about WMD in Iraq have a lot in common.
As Santayana wrote: Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Clearly Mr. Dobbs is heading for the trash heap of history.
The most striking misstatement of Dobbs and his minions is that the United States “paid” Mexico for the land from New Mexico to California. Actually, the United States had tried bluster with the mission of a plenipotentiary minister, John Slidell, in order to bribe a weak Mexican government into selling those lands before the war by threatening to take it by force otherwise.
It was a tactic that had been used by James Monroe against Spain to acquire Florida in 1821. When the Mexicans refused to sell out, war was waged, Mexico City invaded and the rump Mexican Congress forced to sign a treaty that they had no legitimate power to accept. (The same thing happened later to snatch Panama from Colombia and then build a canal).
The U.S. war party in Washington took vengeful caprice against Mexico because the country of Moctezuma had shown the audacity to refuse to sell itself out when Slidell was on his mission. Therefore, the Congress refused to authorize the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo unless the commitment of $15 million to Mexico was expressly worded so as NOT to buy the territories. That section of the treaty says that the money was “for losses incurred.” This is an expression that Mexicans took to refer to the deaths of so many of its people, since Mexican culture has traditionally valued human life more than property. So the United States did not pay for the land. It took it by force. The offi cial treaty documents prove this fact. Of course, the truth about the United States or any facts that justify Mexican rights are alien to Mr. Dobbs. The truth does not fit into his pre-fabricated categories of U.S. superiority and Mexican inferiority.
There was a time, I suspect, that Latinos and Latinas would become disturbed by the repeated errors, misstatements and race-baiting emanating from the ever-sartorial Lou. Increasingly, we recognize that it is only entertainment for the increasingly irrelevant circle of uncritical Dobbsian ditto-heads.
Studies at Brooklyn College. Author and scholar, he serves as member of the Pennsylvania(Anthony M. StevensArroyo is Professor Emeritus of Puerto Rican & Latino State Advisory Committee to the US Commission of Civil Rights in Washington. Email: stevensa@pld.com).
