Just so the gringos remaining in California know who's boss, Hispanic radicals at the University of California at Berkeley a couple of weeks ago trashed a student conservative newspaper and hurled a few death threats against members of the group that publishes it. Berkeley, of course, is no stranger to Stalinism, but this time the comrades—actually, compañeros—were not poor little dissenters and peace activists, but the rising tide that threatens to swallow the whole state—and the country along with it.

The group that got clobbered is called the Berkeley Conservative Foundation, and from the noises it makes, it sounds much like the rather bloodless version of conservatism that seems to prevail these days. Its newspaper ran an article complaining that a radical Mexican-American student group on campus impedes "advances in civil rights toward a colorblind American society," which is how student conservatives talk. But you can bet your sombrero that's not how their enemies talk.

Their enemies in this case consist of an obnoxious (and actually fairly dangerous) radical group called MECha—the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or, for those Americans who have not yet been prudent enough to learn their new national language, the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, Aztlan being the happyland of the future when Mexican-Americans break up the United States and return to the good old days when their Aztec ancestors could rip human hearts out of living bodies without having to worry about pesky little details like law and civilization.

When the conservatives released their paper with the story about MECha, the latter descended upon the group's offices on campus, broke in, and stole all 3,000 copies of the paper. Other members of the conservative group were, as the Washington Times reports, "harassed by the group's [MECHa's] members and a few of them received death threats." The leader of the conservative group pronounced that "This is terrorism, pure and simple." And so it is.

What MECHa did to merit the sinister charge of impeding "advances in civil rights toward a colorblind American society" is, according to the Times, to use "the word 'gringo' to describe white people" and "call for a revolt against them." That sounds about right. MECHa for years has boasted of its racial identity as "brown people" against whites, and in the flyer in question demands "liberation" of "the bronze continent by the bronze people" and denounces the "gringos" (white folks) for invading and conquering the aforementioned "bronze continent." As the Times also reports, "campus police are now investigating the incident," and campus administrators are shocked at the "unconscionable behavior…that diminishes our community," as one such administrator bleated. "Such actions are particularly egregious in an educational setting." Well, yes, they're just terrible, aren't they.

What no one seems to grasp is that what the "bronze liberators" did to the newspaper and those who publish it is pretty much the way political culture works south of the border, where the "bronze continent" really shines. All the commonplaces that both the conservative victims and none-too-conservative administrators mouth—about "democracy," "free speech," "color-blind societies," "the rule of law," etc.—are in fact derivatives of the Anglo-Saxon civilization that did indeed invade and conquer the "bronze continent" lo those many years ago. It is precisely because of that invasion and conquest that there is a university in Berkeley at all, let alone newspapers to read or people able to read them. The Aztec role models that the MECHa hombres admire so much enjoyed none of the above.

MECHa, of course, doesn't really care, but the ones who should care are the "gringos" they clobbered, as well as the "administrators" deploring the "unconscionable behavior." It is the delusion of such people that the values they invoke are not really Anglo-Saxon or even Western values but universal values, which all human beings everywhere and all the time either do recognize or should recognize or are obliged to respect and obey, even if they don't recognize them. The fact that most non-Western societies have never heard of such values and political and cultural institutions based on them and don't much like them when they do hear about them usually tells the Western universalists nothing.

The point, of course, is that because a Western nation has through massive immigration admitted millions of non-Westerners into what was once a European and even Anglo-Saxon culture, today even the conservatives are amazed to learn that the new Americans don't like the "universal" values of the West and in fact trample on them at every chance. Americans should have learned that lesson on September 11, but many didn't. At Berkeley, the conservatives still haven't absorbed it, but if they listen real hard, barbarians like MECha will give them further instruction.

COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

March 11, 2002