The United States has long defended the pursuit of liberty
against those driven by reckless hate, possessed by the worst of
tyranny. Government by the people, for the people, is a moral
imperative for any free society.
Yet across the campuses of the United State’s great
academic institutions, an enemy of freedom lurks in the shadows of
multiculturalism. The organization known as Movimiento Estudiantil
Chicano de Aztlán is one of the largest student groups in the
country. Under the guise of community service, MEChA has secured
legitimacy and power in academic governments across the country,
including UCLA.
Although commendable, MEChA’s philanthropy does not excuse
its extreme and racist agenda. For too long MEChA has gone
unanswered for the hateful proclamations of its founding document
known as El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán. Created in 1969, this
belligerent manifesto has been hailed as quintessential to MEChA
philosophy in official documents recent as 2000 by MEChA de
UCLA.
In short, El Plan de Aztlán calls for the seizure of the
southwestern United States. In subscribing to this document, MEChA
refuses to recognize American sovereignty, convinced the United
States illegally occupies the ancient birthplace of the Aztecs,
known as Aztlán: “Aztlán belongs to those who plant
the seeds, water the fields and gather the crops and not to the
foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the
bronze continent.”
According to the plan, MEChA intends to revolt against our
institutions and our way of life: “Lands rightfully ours will
be fought for and defended. Land and realty ownership will be
acquired by the community for the people’s welfare. Economic
ties of responsibility must be secured by nationalism and the
Chicano defense units.”
MEChA’s plan promotes hate for the “gringo,”
as the organization looks upon Americans as evil invaders of its
land: “Those institutions which are fattened by our brothers
to provide employment and political pork barrels for the gringo
will do so only as acts of liberation and for La Causa. For the
very young there will no longer be acts of juvenile delinquency,
but revolutionary acts.”
Amazingly, MEChA has grown to significant numbers in recent
years, infiltrating hundreds of colleges and high schools,
brainwashing students with its sick racial fanaticism. Based upon a
complete analysis of El Plan, it appears as if the
organization’s ultimate goal seems to be a national division
and violent race war.
Like the Nazis, MEChA advocates ethnic nationalism as a call to
arms, seeking political power outside the established institutions
of this country. “Political liberation can only come through
independent action on our part, since the two-party system is the
same animal with two heads that feed from the same trough. Where we
are a majority, we will control; where we are a minority, we will
represent a pressure group; nationally, we will represent one
party: La Familia de La Raza!”
This is nothing short of a declaration of war as El Plan de
Aztlán calls for the formation of a new apartheid regime in
place of the United States government. “We declare the
independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a
bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America,
before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation,
we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán. Por La Raza
todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.” (Translation: “For the
race everything, for those outside the race nothing.”)
Conceived in hate, fueled by racism and fixed on treacherous
revolution, MEChA is a danger to the intellectual and moral
standing of this university.
Ethnic segregation and racial nationalism are the ways of
fascists and have no place at UCLA. If MEChA does not publicly
renounce the hateful proclamations of El Plan de Aztlán, then
its funding must be frozen and official status revoked. Like the
Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan, MEChA’s manifesto
subscribes to a philosophy of racism, violence and treason.
The founding ideals of the United States, equality and justice,
and the guiding principles of UCLA, tolerance and diversity, are
simply incompatible with MEChA’s beliefs. In this historic
choice between tolerance and bigotry, we must hold MEChA
accountable for its rhetoric, sending a clear and simple message:
UCLA is a haven of learning, diversity and tolerance, not a front
for racism, treason and fascism.
Moritz is a member of Bruin Republicans.