oped: Oh My it has sure grown up...I worked the Mexican Border Yuma,Sector from 1975-1979 with USCS /Customs Patrol Officer...it was a quaint lil town mostly sagebrush,rattlesnakes and scorpions...look at it now :)
by: Kim Zigfeld
Imagine that when you woke up this morning CNN was blasting the news that Mexico had announced it planned to annex Yuma County, Arizona and neighboring Imperial County, California. Mexican troops were massing on the U.S. border, about to invade. Mexico’s reason? Both counties have over 40% of their populations comprised of persons of Mexican ancestry, by far the dominant ethnic group, and both used to be part of Mexico. If you’d have a problem with a Mexican invasion, you should have an equally big problem with Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and its open threats to seize portions of Eastern Ukraine.
Russia is offering exactly the same reason for its aggression, namely that these parts of Ukraine have large populations of “ethnic Russians” and used to be part of Russia. The Economist magazine reported just a few weeks ago on the extensive portions of the American Southwest where this was the case in regard to Mexicans.
In fact, the Mexican case for aggression would be even stronger than
the Russian, because Yuma and Imperial were taken from Mexico by force
whereas Crimea was given to Ukraine in a formal act of the Soviet state
which was then ratified by Russia in writing when the USSR dissolved in a
document known as the Budapest Accord.
It wouldn’t be hard for Mexico to show that its ethnic population is
being oppressed in the USA. Their wages are much lower than their white
counterparts, and they face all manner of racial hostility. Similarly,
Russia says that Ukraine can’t be trusted to govern people of “Russian”
ethnicity, that only Russia can be trusted to protect their rights.
What’s more, it would be far, far easier for Mexico to prove that the Yuma and Imperial populations ethnically “belong” to Mexico. You’d need a doctoral thesis, or two, in order to explain the “ethnic” differences between Ukrainians and Russians given that the two languages are highly similar as are the two religious practices, and the racial difference is many times more subtle. Trying to distinguish the cuisines and cultures is equally tricky compared to a similar effort involving Mexico and white America.
Now, you may say, if Ukraine and Russia are so similar, why shouldn’t they be part of the same country. There’s a one-word answer: Holodomor. Russia has a strange way of insisting that various people need to live under Russian rule and then seeking to liquidate them, as Stalin sought to do with a state-induced famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Similarly, although Russians are virulently racist against people from the Caucasus, they refuse to permit those people their freedom. It’s simply impossible, as a matter of historical fact, for Ukrainians to ever trust Russians to govern them. It would be like asking African-Americans to be ruled by Jefferson Davis.
After crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas, you’d need to travel for hundreds of miles before you’d enter territory Mexico couldn’t claim for itself under the rubric being used by Vladimir Putin to justify seizing chunks of Ukraine. And if instead of limiting yourself to Mexican ethnicity you began discussing instead simply all those Americans whose native tongue is Spanish, something else Putin repeatedly does in regard to Russian where Ukraine is concerned, you’d find vast swaths of the American landscape subject to Mexican aggression.
Fortunately for Americans, they have the wherewithal to defend themselves against ethnically motivated Mexican land grabs. Ukraine doesn’t, and that’s not Ukraine’s fault. The entire world ganged up on Ukraine when the USSR collapsed and told the country it had to surrender its nuclear strike force. In return, the Budapest Accord guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Now, it seems, Ukrainians have been victimized by the old “bait and switch.” What sane country would ever again agree to an international treaty like the Budapest Accord if the world doesn’t keep its word to Ukraine?
One has to wonder, of course, whether Putin has lost his mind. With every day that passes, Russia’s population becomes more and more Islamic in the West and more and more Chinese in the East. Does Putin really want to set a precedent by which Russia’s Islamic and Chinese regions can simply hold straw polls, as Crimea did last weekend, and then break away from the Russian federation to join countries which are more culturally and ethnically akin to them?
And indeed, if you look at the reporting on Putin both in the media and from world leaders, you’ll find many occasions when words like “paranoid” are used to describe him. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Putin did not seem to be in touch with reality when she recently spoke to him by phone about Ukraine. It’s very hard to distinguish Putin’s impulsive, self-destructive military aggression against Ukraine from the USSR’s thrust into Afghanistan, an act which now must be seen as the beginning of the end for the USSR as a nation state.
The response that the USA would make to a Mexican attempt to grab Imperial and Yuma is the response that the USA can and must support on the part of Ukraine in Russia. The USA would raze the entire country of Mexico to the ground before it would allow one blade of grass in Yuma or Imperial to fall under Mexican control, and it can and must arm Ukraine so that Ukrainians can do the same to Russia if they need to. In addition, it must support tough economic sanctions on Russia, whose economy is already on the verge of depression meaning that sanctions will have a particularly effective bite.
It is a matter of national honor. America led the way in disarming Ukraine after the fall of the USSR, and America has not done enough to bring Ukraine within the European and NATO umbrellas. If that had been done, there would be no chance of Russia daring to threaten Ukraine now.
And it’s more than that. If Putin can get away with grabbing chunks of Georgia in 2008 and chunks of Ukraine in 2014, there will be no stopping him. Putin sees the collapse of the USSR as a catastrophe, not a godsend, and he wants to restore the USSR to its former glory. He still uses the melody of the USSR’s national anthem. Many American lives have been spent to stop dominoes from falling around the world, we cannot forget the lessons of the past or we will have to learn them all over again, the hard way.
What’s more, it would be far, far easier for Mexico to prove that the Yuma and Imperial populations ethnically “belong” to Mexico. You’d need a doctoral thesis, or two, in order to explain the “ethnic” differences between Ukrainians and Russians given that the two languages are highly similar as are the two religious practices, and the racial difference is many times more subtle. Trying to distinguish the cuisines and cultures is equally tricky compared to a similar effort involving Mexico and white America.
Now, you may say, if Ukraine and Russia are so similar, why shouldn’t they be part of the same country. There’s a one-word answer: Holodomor. Russia has a strange way of insisting that various people need to live under Russian rule and then seeking to liquidate them, as Stalin sought to do with a state-induced famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s. Similarly, although Russians are virulently racist against people from the Caucasus, they refuse to permit those people their freedom. It’s simply impossible, as a matter of historical fact, for Ukrainians to ever trust Russians to govern them. It would be like asking African-Americans to be ruled by Jefferson Davis.
After crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico into Texas, you’d need to travel for hundreds of miles before you’d enter territory Mexico couldn’t claim for itself under the rubric being used by Vladimir Putin to justify seizing chunks of Ukraine. And if instead of limiting yourself to Mexican ethnicity you began discussing instead simply all those Americans whose native tongue is Spanish, something else Putin repeatedly does in regard to Russian where Ukraine is concerned, you’d find vast swaths of the American landscape subject to Mexican aggression.
Fortunately for Americans, they have the wherewithal to defend themselves against ethnically motivated Mexican land grabs. Ukraine doesn’t, and that’s not Ukraine’s fault. The entire world ganged up on Ukraine when the USSR collapsed and told the country it had to surrender its nuclear strike force. In return, the Budapest Accord guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Now, it seems, Ukrainians have been victimized by the old “bait and switch.” What sane country would ever again agree to an international treaty like the Budapest Accord if the world doesn’t keep its word to Ukraine?
One has to wonder, of course, whether Putin has lost his mind. With every day that passes, Russia’s population becomes more and more Islamic in the West and more and more Chinese in the East. Does Putin really want to set a precedent by which Russia’s Islamic and Chinese regions can simply hold straw polls, as Crimea did last weekend, and then break away from the Russian federation to join countries which are more culturally and ethnically akin to them?
And indeed, if you look at the reporting on Putin both in the media and from world leaders, you’ll find many occasions when words like “paranoid” are used to describe him. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Putin did not seem to be in touch with reality when she recently spoke to him by phone about Ukraine. It’s very hard to distinguish Putin’s impulsive, self-destructive military aggression against Ukraine from the USSR’s thrust into Afghanistan, an act which now must be seen as the beginning of the end for the USSR as a nation state.
The response that the USA would make to a Mexican attempt to grab Imperial and Yuma is the response that the USA can and must support on the part of Ukraine in Russia. The USA would raze the entire country of Mexico to the ground before it would allow one blade of grass in Yuma or Imperial to fall under Mexican control, and it can and must arm Ukraine so that Ukrainians can do the same to Russia if they need to. In addition, it must support tough economic sanctions on Russia, whose economy is already on the verge of depression meaning that sanctions will have a particularly effective bite.
It is a matter of national honor. America led the way in disarming Ukraine after the fall of the USSR, and America has not done enough to bring Ukraine within the European and NATO umbrellas. If that had been done, there would be no chance of Russia daring to threaten Ukraine now.
And it’s more than that. If Putin can get away with grabbing chunks of Georgia in 2008 and chunks of Ukraine in 2014, there will be no stopping him. Putin sees the collapse of the USSR as a catastrophe, not a godsend, and he wants to restore the USSR to its former glory. He still uses the melody of the USSR’s national anthem. Many American lives have been spent to stop dominoes from falling around the world, we cannot forget the lessons of the past or we will have to learn them all over again, the hard way.
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