Today's New York Times carries this correction (third item):

An article on Feb. 9 about the military's recruitment of Hispanics referred incompletely to the belief of some critics that Hispanics in the Iraq war and blacks in the Vietnam War accounted for a disproportionate number of casualties. Statistics do not support the belief. Hispanics, who are about 14 percent of the population, accounted for about 11 percent of the military deaths in Iraq through Dec. 3, 2005. About 12.5 percent of the military dead in Vietnam were African-Americans, who made up about 13. 5 percent of the general population during the war years. The error was pointed out in an e-mail in February; the correction was delayed for research after a lapse at The Times.

That "belief of some critics" is a false and widely held one--at best a myth, at worst a lie. You'd think refuting it would be worth a full-fledged story in the Times, not just a hundred words in the corrections column.

Iran, of course, is still an underdeveloped country. It seems to profess that it is willing to lose even its poverty in order to take out one wealthy Western city in the exchange. But emotion works both ways, and the Iranians must now be careful. Mr. Bush is capable of anger and impatience as well. Of all recent American presidents, he seems the least likely to make decisions about risky foreign initiatives on the basis of unfavorable polls.

Israel is not free from its passions either — for there will be no second Holocaust. It is time for the Iranian leaders to snap out of their pseudo-trances and hocus-pocus, and accept that some Western countries are not merely far more powerful than Iran, but in certain situations and under particular circumstances, can be just as driven by memory, history, and, yes, a certain craziness as well.

Ever since September 11, the subtext of this war could be summed up as something like, “Suburban Jason, with his iPod, godlessness, and earring, loves to live too much to die, while Ali, raised as the 11th son of an impoverished but devout street-sweeper in Damascus, loves death too much to live.” The Iranians, like bin Laden, promulgate this mythical antithesis, which, like all caricatures, has elements of truth in it. But what the Iranians, like the al Qaedists, do not fully fathom, is that Jason, upon concluding that he would lose not only his iPod and earring, but his entire family and suburb as well, is capable of conjuring up things far more frightening than anything in the 8th-century brain of Mr. Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the barbarity of the nightmares at Antietam, Verdun, Dresden, and Hiroshima prove that well enough.

So far the Iranian president has posed as someone 90-percent crazy and 10-percent sane, hoping we would fear his overt madness and delicately appeal to his small reservoirs of reason. But he should understand that if his Western enemies appear 90-percent children of the Enlightenment, they are still effused with vestigial traces of the emotional and unpredictable. And military history shows that the irrational 10 percent of the Western mind is a lot scarier than anything Islamic fanaticism has to offer.

So, please, Mr. Ahmadinejad, cool the rhetoric fast — before you needlessly push once reasonable people against the wall, and thus talk your way into a sky full of very angry and righteous jets.

Going home

I am a wee bit drunk as I type this. 365 days ago I was also drunk. How do I remember that fact? That was the last time I had a few pints before I went to Afghanistan was also St. Patrick’s Day. Now I was back at the same pub drinking a few pints, but I did stop this time after five pints, because soon I will be flying on the big iron bird home to my wife and kids, versus going down range.

For the past ten days I have been out processing or de-mobilizing in army speak. Go to CIF to turn in my body armor and all my other bits of field gear. Have the doctor ask me about my health, metal and physical. Did I see any dead bodies? I asked him US, coalition, or civilian? He put down yes in all three columns. Finance calculated my terminal or now referred to as transition leave. The dentist advised me to get my teeth cleaned when I got home. I now have three big folders, stuffed with papers, saying I am now a combat veteran. It feels like I just I blinked my eyes and I was leaving, but when I think about it was a long 365 days in Kandahar. I am trying to remember how many ramp ceremonies I went to. Way too many. But we (The US military) did lots of good there. I have no regrets. I helped open schools, train the Afghan National Army and Police, secure roads and arrange Hajj pilgrims go to Mecca. This fact will never make the newspapers or the cable new trash channels: there are no protesters chanting: “Americans go home, come back Taliban.” The Afghans like us and want us to stay. And stay we will. I expect tours in Afghanistan will be like tours for US personnel in Korea during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. A long hardship tour.

The interpreters I worked with wished me good luck and a safe journey home. I told them that I would visit them in a few years with my family and show them where the TICs and IEDs were at. I gave them a hug and wished them a safe, peaceful and prosperous future.

What is interesting is how many soldiers are going to the Active Army from the reserve. A lot. A few requested Iraq. That was a surprise. A couple of soldiers are ETS’ing or leaving the army, but many more re-upped to stay in the reserves. This is a post in it self.

I will be writing and posting a few more images when I get home. I have many themes and ideas for more posts written down in my notebook. I have a few ideas for a novel that I am bouncing around. Maybe if I have enough or as my platoon Sergeant would say “make some time” I start will writing.

While I was at the bar we were making toast: “to electricity, to in-door plumbing, or beer.” Then people mentioned names of fallen comrades. Last somebody said “To Tehran in ’07.”

So Long LP
Posted by Stephen Green

The Libertarian Party has driven away yet another member:

I'm a party-free kind of guy right now. I was a Libertarian, but have officially changed my party affiliation from that tribe of loser-savants to (I) for Independent. The Losertarian Party lost me when they suggested in the most recent issue of the Losertarian Paper that the United States Government engineered 9/11, that the buildings were control-detonated, and that unwieldy, bloated bueracracy somehow managed to gain enough competence to fake out the entire population of the world, who watched every second of it on TV.

Never mind that I saw the airliners crash into those buildings with my own eyes. Nevermind that Osama Bin Laden later accepted credit for this noble and humane deed. Nevermind that the actions of every one of the terrorists were documented by many non-government bodies, it's the Republican's fault!

Thumbs-up
Much has already been made of the thumbs-up gesture that British and American soldiers have received from "welcoming" Iraqis. Unlike in many western cultures, in the Middle East the thumbs-up can be an insult, roughly translating as "up yours". But the US Army's Defense Language Institute says that after the first Gulf War, the gesture was adopted by some Iraqis, along with the ok sign, as a "symbol of co-operation and freedom".

Swedish Welfare State Collapses as Immigrants Wage War

Last year I wrote an article about how Swedish society is disintegrating and is in danger of collapsing, at least in certain areas and regions. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe. The “Swedish model” would no longer refer to a stable and peaceful state with an advanced economy, but to a Eurabian horror story of utopian multiculturalism, socialist mismanagement and runaway immigration. Some thought I was exaggerating, and that talk of the possibility of a future civil war in Sweden was pure paranoia. Was it?

In a new sociological survey (pdf in Swedish, with brief English introduction) entitled “Vi krigar mot svenskarna” (“We’re waging a war against the Swedes”), young immigrants in the troubled city of Malmö have been interviewed about why they are involved in crime. Although it is not stated, most of the immigrant perpetrators are Muslims. In one of the rare instances where the Swedish media actually revealed the truth, the newspaper Aftonbladet reported several years ago that 9 out of 10 of the most criminal ethnic groups in Sweden came from Muslim countries. This must be borne in mind whilst reading the following newspaper article:

Immigrants are “waging war” against Swedes through robbery

The wave of robberies the city of Malmö has witnessed during this past year is part of a “war against the Swedes.” This is the explanation given by young robbers from immigrant backgrounds when questioned about why they only rob native Swedes, in interviews with Petra Åkesson for her thesis in sociology. “I read a report about young robbers in Stockholm and Malmö and wanted to know why they rob other youths. It usually does not involve a lot of money,” she says. She interviewed boys between 15 and 17 years old, both individually and in groups.

Almost 90% of all robberies reported to the police were committed by gangs, not individuals. “When we are in the city and robbing we are waging a war, waging a war against the Swedes.” This argument was repeated several times. “Power for me means that the Swedes shall look at me, lie down on the ground and kiss my feet.” The boys explain, laughingly, that “there is a thrilling sensation in your body when you’re robbing, you feel satisfied and happy, it feels as if you’ve succeeded, it simply feels good.” “It’s so easy to rob Swedes, so easy.” “We rob every single day, as often as we want to, whenever we want to.” The immigrant youth regard the Swedes as stupid and cowardly: “The Swedes don’t do anything, they just give us the stuff. They’re so wimpy.” The young robbers do not plan their crimes: “No, we just see some Swedes that look rich or have nice mobile phones and then we rob them.”

Why do they hate the Swedes so much? “Well, they hate us,” Petra Åkesson reports them as answering. “When a Swede goes shopping, the lady behind the counter gives him the money back into his hand, looks into his eyes and laughs. When we go shopping, she puts the money on the counter and looks the other way.” Åkesson, who is adopted from Sri Lanka and hence does not look like a native Swede, says it was not difficult to get the boys to talk about their crimes. Rather they were bragging about who had committed the most robberies. Malin Åkerström,a professor in sociology, sees only one solution to the problem: “Jobs for everybody. If this entails a deregulation of the labor market to create more jobs, then we should do so.”

It is interesting to note that these Muslim immigrants state quite openly that they are involved in a “war,” and see participation in crime and harassment of the native population as such. This is completely in line with what I have posited before. The number of rape charges in Sweden has quadrupled in just above twenty years. Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago. Most other kinds of violent crime have rapidly increased, too. Instability is spreading to most urban and suburban areas. Resident aliens from Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia dominate the group of rape suspects. Lawyer Ann Christine Hjelm found that 85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or from foreign parents. The phenomenon is not restricted to Sweden. The number of rapes committed by Muslim immigrants in Western nations is so extremely high that it is difficult to view these rapes as merely random acts of individuals. It resembles warfare. This is happening in most Western European countries, as well as in other non muslim countries such as India. European jails are filling up with Muslims imprisoned for robberies and all kinds of violent crimes, and Muslims bomb European civilians. One can see the mainstream media are struggling to make sense of all of this. That is because they cannot, or do not want to, see the obvious: this is exactly how an invading army would behave: rape, pillage and bombing. If many of the Muslim immigrants see themselves as conquerors in a war, it all makes perfect sense.

Malmö in Sweden, set to become the first Scandinavian city with a Muslim majority within a decade or two, has nine times as many reported robberies per capita as Copenhagen, Denmark. Yet the number one priority for the political class in Sweden during this year’s national election campaign seems to be demonizing neighboring Denmark for “xenophobia” and a “brutal” debate about Muslim immigration. During last years Jihad riots in France, Sweden’s Social Democratic Prime Minister Göran Persson criticised the way the French government handled the unrest in the country. “It feels like a very hard and confrontational approach.” Persson also rejected the idea of more local police as a “first step” in Sweden. “I don’t believe that’s the way we would choose in Sweden. To start sending out signals about strengthening the police is to break with the political line we have chosen to follow,” he said. Meanwhile, as their authorities have largely abandoned their third largest city to creeping anarchy, there is open talk among the native Swedes still remaining in Malmö of forming vigilante groups armed with baseball bats out of concern for their children’s safety. As I argued in another essay: If Arnold Schwarzenegger fails to get re-elected as Governor of California he may like to do a sequel to “Conan the Barbarian.” He could shoot it in Malmö. He will get the extras for free.

What happened to the famous Swedish nanny state, you say? Don’t Swedes pay the highest tax rates in the world? Yes, they do. But tens of billions of kroner, some say several hundred billions, are being spent every year on propping up rapidly growing communities of Muslim immigrants. Sweden has become the entire world’s welfare office, because the political elites have decided that massive Muslim immigration is “good for the economy.” Soon Sweden’s “army” may comprise no more than 5,000 men, five thousand troops to defend a nation more than three times the area of England. Moreover, it may take up to a year to assemble all of them, provided they are not on peacekeeping missions abroad. That Sweden might soon need a little peacekeeping at home seems to escape the establishment. In 2006 the celebrated Swedish welfare state has become the world’s largest pyramid scheme, an Enron with a national flag.

Although Sweden is an extreme example, similar stories could be told about much of Western Europe. As Mark Steyn points out, the Jihad in the streets of France looked like the early skirmishes of an impending Eurabian civil war, brought on by massive Muslim immigration and Multicultural stupidity. Law and order is slowly breaking down in major and even minor cities across the European continent, and the streets are ruled by aggressive gangs of Muslim youngsters. At the same time, Europeans are paying some of the highest taxes in the world. We should remind our authorities that the most important task of the state – some would even claim it should be the only task of the state – is to uphold the rule of law in exchange for taxation. Since it is becoming pretty obvious that this is no longer the case in Eurabia, we should question whether these taxes are still legitimate, or whether they are simply disguised Jizya paid in the form of welfare to Muslims and our new Eurocrat aristocracy. Although not exactly the Boston Tea Party, perhaps the time has now come for a pan-European tax rebellion: We will no longer pay taxes until our authorities restore law and order and close the borders to Muslim immigration.

This is urgent. When enough people feel that the system is no longer working and that the social contract has been breached, the entire fabric of democratic society could unravel. What happens when the welfare state system breaks down, and there is no longer enough money to “grease” the increasing tensions between immigrants and native Europeans? And what happens when people discover that their own leaders, through the EU networks and the Euro-Arab Dialogue described by Bat Ye’or in her book “Eurabia,” have been encouraging all these Muslims to settle here in the first place? There will be massive unemployment, and tens of millions of people will feel angry, scared and humiliated, betrayed by the system, by society and by their own democratic leaders. This is a situation in some ways similar to the Great Depression that led to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. Is this where we are heading once again, with fear, rising Fascism and political assassinations? The difference is that the “Jewish threat” in the 1930s was entirely fictional, whereas the “Islamic threat” now is very real. However, it is precisely the trauma caused by the events of 70 years ago that is clouding our judgement this time, since any talk at all about the threat posed by Muslim immigration or about preserving our own culture is being dismissed as “the same rhetoric as the Nazis used against the Jews.” Europeans have been taught to be so scared of our own shadows that we are incapable of seeing that darkness can come from the outside, too. Maybe Europe will burn again, in part as a belated reaction to the horrors of Auschwitz.

A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.”

The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still, even a merely sartorial identification with psychopathic violence shocked me, for it implied an imaginative sympathy with such violence; and seeing those young men outside the theater was my first intimation that art, literature, and ideas might have profound—and not necessarily favorable—social consequences. A year later, a group of young men raped a 17-year-old girl in Britain as they sang “Singing in the Rain,” a real-life replay of one of the film’s most notorious scenes.

The author of the book, Anthony Burgess, a polymath who once wrote five novels in a year, came to dislike this particular work intensely, not because of any practical harm to society that the film version of it might have caused but because he did not want to go down in literary history as the author of a book made famous, or notorious, by a movie. Irrespective of the value of his other work, however, A Clockwork Orange remains a novel of immense power. Linguistically inventive, socially prophetic, and philosophically profound, it comes very close to being a work of genius.

The story, set in the England of the near future (the book was published in 1962), is simple. The narrator, Alex, a precocious 15-year-old psychopath who has no feeling for others, leads a small gang in many acts of gratuitous, and much enjoyed, violence. Eventually, caught after a murder, he goes to prison, where—after another murder—the authorities offer to release him if he submits to a form of aversive conditioning against violence called the Ludovico Method. On his release, however, he attempts suicide by jumping out of a window, receiving a head injury that undoes his conditioning against violence. Once more he becomes the leader of a gang.

In the final chapter of the book’s British version, Alex again rejects violence, this time because he discovers within himself, spontaneously, a source of human tenderness that makes him want to settle down and have a baby. In the American edition—which Stanley Kubrick used—this last chapter is missing: Alex is not redeemed a second time, but returns, apparently once and for all, to the enjoyment of arbitrary and antisocial violence. In this instance, it is the British who were the optimists and the Americans the pessimists: Burgess’s American publisher, wanting the book to end unhappily, omitted the last chapter.

Burgess had been a schoolteacher (like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies) and evidently sensed a stirring of revolt among the youth of his country and elsewhere in the West, a revolt with which—as a deeply unconventional man who felt himself to be an outsider however wealthy or famous he became, and who drank deep at the well of resentment as well as of spirituous liquors—he felt some sympathy and might even have helped in a small way to foment. And yet, as a man who was also deeply steeped in literary culture and tradition, he understood the importance of the shift of cultural authority from the old to the young and was very far from sanguine about its effects. He thought that the shift would lead to a hell on earth and the destruction of all that he valued.

He marks the separateness of his novel’s young protagonists from their elders by their adoption of a new argot, as well as a new form of dress. Vital for groups antagonistic toward the dominant society around them, such argots allow them to identify and communicate with insiders and exclude outsiders. Although I worked in a prison for 14 years, for example, I never came to understand the language that prisoners used as they shouted to one another across landings and between buildings. It was their means of resisting domination. In the French banlieues, les jeunes use an argot derived from words spelled and pronounced backward—and completely incomprehensible to educated speakers of French. People of Jamaican descent in Britain use a patois when they want not to be understood by anyone else. The connection between argot and criminal purposes has long been close, of course; and the importance that Burgess ascribes to the new argot in A Clockwork Orange suggests that he saw youthful revolt as an expression more of self-indulgence and criminality than of idealism—the latter, shallower view becoming orthodoxy among intellectuals not long after A Clockwork Orange appeared.

Burgess’s creation of a completely convincing new argot more or less ex nihilo is an extraordinary achievement. Nadsat (Russian for “teen”), as its speakers call it, is a mixture of anglicized Russian words—particularly provocative at the height of the cold war—and Cockney rhyming slang. As a linguistic invention, it is the equal of Orwell’s Newspeak. Alex, the narrator, though cold-blooded and self-centered, is intelligent and expresses himself with great force. A vocabulary that is entirely new and incomprehensible at the beginning of the book becomes so thoroughly familiar to the reader at the end that he forgets that he has ever had to learn its meaning: it seems completely natural after only a hundred pages. On the very first page, when Alex describes his gang’s intention to do a robbery, he says:

[T]here was no real need . . . of crasting [robbing] any more pretty polly [money] to tolchock [hit] some old veck [man] in an alley and viddy [see] him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry [old] grey-haired ptitsa [woman] in a shop and go smecking [laughing] off with the till’s guts.

Of course, the lack of real “need” does not prevent Alex and his gang from robbing in a cruel and violent way, for their cruelty and violence is an end in itself, joyfully engaged in. Not for Burgess was the orthodox liberal view that economic deprivation and lack of opportunity cause crime.

The gang’s solipsistic and dehumanizing argot reflects this cold-bloodedness. Sexual intercourse, for example, becomes “the old in-out-in-out,” a term without reference to the other participant, who is merely an object. The gang attacks a schoolteacher carrying books home from the library, for no reason other than a free-floating malevolence and joy in cruelty:

Pete held his rookers [hands] and Georgie sort of hooked his rot [mouth] wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies [teeth], upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like. . . . The old veck [man] began to make sort of chumbling shooms [sounds]—“wuf waf wof”—so Georgie let go of holding his goobers [jaws] apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.

I doubt that a lack of feeling for others has ever been expressed more powerfully.

Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as lèse-majesté, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. When I refused to prescribe medicine that young men wanted but that I thought they did not need, they would sometimes answer in aggrieved disbelief, “No? What do you mean, no?” It was not a familiar concept. And in a sense, my refusal was pointless, insofar as any such young man would soon enough find a doctor whom he could intimidate into prescribing what he wanted. Burgess would not have been surprised by this state of affairs: he saw it coming.

When Alex and his gang enter a pub—they are underage, but no one dares challenge them—they spread fear by their mere presence.

Now we were the very good malchicks [boys], smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters [people] started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds [drink] spill on the table. “Leave us be, lads,” said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, “we’re only poor old women.”

Intimidation of the aged and contempt for age itself are an essential part of the youth culture: no wonder aging rock stars are eternal adolescents, wrinkled and arthritic but trapped in the poses of youth. Age for them means nothing but indignity.

Alex’s parents (one of the things Burgess didn’t foresee is the rise of the single-parent family) are afraid of him. He comes home late and plays his music very loud, but “Pee and em [Father and Mother] . . . had learnt now not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now they would take sleep-pills.” When Alex’s father wants to know what he does at night—Alex is only 15—he is apologetic and deferential: “ ‘Not that I want to pry, son, but where exactly is it you go to work of evenings?’ . . . My dad was like humble mumble chumble. ‘Sorry, son,’ he said. ‘But I get worried sometimes.’ ”

When in a symbolic reversal of the direction of authority Alex offers his father some money (robbed, of course) so that he can buy himself a drink in the pub, his father says: “Thanks, son. . . . But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”

In 1962, the idea that the young would someday impose upon old people in Britain a de facto after-dark curfew was still unimaginable, but Burgess, seeing the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand on the horizon, imagined that outcome very vividly. With a prophet’s imagination, he saw what would happen when the cloud grew until it covered the sky.

With like prescience, Burgess foresaw many other aspects of the youth culture to come: the importance that mind-altering drugs and an industrialized pop music would play in it, for example. (Burgess did not, however, suggest that high culture was necessarily ennobling in itself. Alex, much superior in intelligence to his followers, is a devotee of classical music, listening to which, however, increases his urge to commit violence. No doubt Burgess had in mind those Nazis who could listen with emotion to Schubert lieder after a hard day’s genocide.)

Burgess foresaw the importance that the youth culture would attach to sexual precocity and a kind of disabused knowingness. In a remarkable rape scene, Alex meets two ten-year-old girls who, like him, are skipping school, in a record shop, where they are listening to pop music with suggestive titles such as “Night after Day after Night.”

They saw themselves, you could see, as real grown-up devotchkas [girls] already, what with the old hipswing when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded groodies [breasts] and red all ploshed on their goobers [lips]. . . . [T]hey viddied [saw] themselves as real sophistoes. . . . They had the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair—a like dyed strawy. Well, they would grow up real today. . . . No school this afterlunch, but education certain, Alex as teacher.

Their education that afternoon consists of repeated rape by an already experienced 15-year-old.

It would not have surprised Burgess that magazines for ten- or 11-year-old girls are now full of advice about how to make themselves sexually attractive, that girls of six or seven are dressed by their single mothers in costumes redolent of prostitution, or that there has been a compression of generations, so that friendships are possible between 14- and 26-year-olds. The precocity necessary to avoid humiliation by peers prevents young people from maturing further and leaves them in a state of petrified adolescence. Persuaded that they already know all that is necessary, they are disabused about everything, for fear of appearing naive. With no deeper interests, they are prey to gusts of hysterical and childish enthusiasm; only increasingly extreme sensation can arouse them from their mental torpor. Hence the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has followed in the wake of the youth culture.

The world in which youth culture predominates and precocity is the highest achievement is one in which all tenderness is absent. When Alex and his gang attack the teacher, they find a letter in his pocket, which one of them reads out derisively: “My darling one . . . I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.”

Such simple and heartfelt affection and concern for another person are extinct in the world of Alex and his droogs. Alex is incapable of putting himself in the place of anyone else, of “changing places in fancy with the sufferer,” as Adam Smith puts it. Self-absorbed, he is self-pitying but has no pity for others. When he is arrested after the brutal murder of an old woman, he calls the policemen who have arrested him “bullies” and accuses them when they laugh at him of “the heighth of . . . callousness.” Alex is quite incapable of connecting his own savage behavior with the words that he applies to the police. I was reminded of a case of murder in which I gave testimony recently: the young murderer kicked his girlfriend’s head so hard that he broke her jaw in many places and forced her tongue through the back of her throat, and her stomach filled with blood—and a neighbor heard him laugh as he kicked. A policeman, after listening to his lies and evasions for two days, accused him of having no remorse for his deed. “You ’ave no feelings,” the murderer rejoined. “I pity your poor wife”—just like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, but without the intelligence and the taste for classical music.

In the world of Alex and his droogs, all relations with other human beings are instrumental means to a selfish, brutal, hedonistic end. And this is the world that so many of my patients now inhabit, a world in which perhaps a third of the British population lives. It is also the world in which having a baby is the fulfillment of a personal human right, and nothing else.

But Burgess was not merely a social and cultural prophet. A Clockwork Orange grapples as well with the question of the origin and nature of good and evil. The Ludovico Method that Alex undergoes in prison as a means of turning him into a model citizen in exchange for his release is in essence a form of conditioning. Injected with a drug that induces nausea, Alex must then watch films of the kind of violence that he himself committed, his head and eyelids held so that he cannot escape the images by looking away from them—all this to the piped-in accompaniment of the classical music that he loves. Before long, such violence, either in imagery or in reality, as well as the sound of classical music, causes him nausea and vomiting even without the injection, as a conditioned response. Alex learns to turn the other cheek, as a Christian should: when he is insulted, threatened, or even struck, he does not retaliate. After the treatment—at least, until he suffers his head injury—he can do no other.

Two scientists, Drs. Branom and Brodsky, are in charge of the “treatment.” The minister of the interior, responsible for cutting crime in a society now besieged by the youth culture, says: “The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories . . . . Common criminals . . . can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.” In other words, a criminal or violent act is, in essence, no different from the act of a rat in a cage, who presses a lever in order to obtain a pellet of food. If you shock the rat with electricity when it presses the lever instead of rewarding it with food, it will soon cease to press the lever. Criminality can be dealt with, or “cured,” in the same way.

At the time that Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, doctors were trying to “cure” homosexuals by injecting them with apomorphine, a nausea-inducing drug, while showing them pictures of male nudes. And overwhelmingly, the dominant school of psychology worldwide at the time was the behaviorism of Harvard prof B. F. Skinner. His was what one might call a “black box” psychology: scientists measured the stimulus and the response but exhibited no interest whatsoever in what happened between the two, as being intrinsically immeasurable and therefore unknowable. While Skinner might have quibbled about the details of the Ludovico Method (for example, that Alex got the injection at the wrong time in relation to the violent films that he had to watch), he would not have rejected its scientific—or rather scientistic—philosophy.

In 1971, the very year in which the Kubrick film of A Clockwork Orange was released, Skinner published a book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He sneered at the possibility that reflection upon our own personal experience and on history might be a valuable source of guidance to us in our attempts to govern our lives. “What we need,” he wrote, “is a technology of behavior.” Fortunately, one was at hand. “A technology of operant behavior is . . . already well advanced, and it may prove commensurate with our problems.” As he put it, “[a] scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame [for a man’s behavior] to the environment.” What goes on in a man’s mind is quite irrelevant; indeed, “mind,” says Skinner, is “an explanatory fiction.”

For Skinner, being good is behaving well; and whether a man behaves well or badly depends solely upon the schedule of reinforcement that he has experienced in the past, not upon anything that goes on in his mind. It follows that there is no new situation in a man’s life that requires conscious reflection if he is to resolve the dilemma or make the choices that the new situation poses: for everything is merely a replay of the past, generalized to meet the new situation.

The Ludovico Method, then, was not a far-fetched invention of Burgess’s but a simplified version—perhaps a reductio ad absurdum, or ad nauseam—of the technique for solving all human problems that the dominant school of psychology at the time suggested. Burgess was a lapsed Catholic, but he remained deeply influenced by Catholic thought throughout his life. The Skinnerian view of man appalled him. He thought that a human being whose behavior was simply the expression of conditioned responses was not fully human but an automaton. If he did the right thing merely in the way that Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell, he could not be a good man: indeed, if all his behavior was determined in the same way, he was hardly a man at all. A good man, in Burgess’s view, had to have the ability to do evil as well as good, an ability that he would voluntarily restrain, at whatever disadvantage to himself.

Being a novelist rather than an essayist, however, and a man of many equivocations, Burgess put these thoughts in A Clockwork Orange into the mouth of a ridiculous figure, the prison chaplain, who objects to the Ludovico Method—but not enough to resign his position, for he is eager to advance in what Alex calls “Prison religion.” Burgess puts the defense of the traditional view of morality as requiring the exercise of free will—the view that there is no good act without the possibility of a bad one—into the mouth of a careerist.

The two endings of A Clockwork Orange—the one that Burgess himself wrote and the truncated one that his American publisher wanted and that Kubrick used for his film—have very different meanings.

According to the American-Kubrick version, Alex resumes his life as violent gang leader after his head injury undoes the influence of the Ludovico Method. He returns to what he was before, once more able to listen to classical music (Beethoven’s Ninth) and fantasize violence without any conditioned nausea:

Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas [feet], carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor]. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.

Kubrick even suggests that this is a happy outcome: better an authentic psychopath than a conditioned, and therefore inauthentic, goody-goody. Authenticity and self-direction are thus made to be the highest goods, regardless of how they are expressed. And this, at least in Britain, has become a prevailing orthodoxy among the young. If, as I have done, you ask the aggressive young drunks who congregate by the thousand in every British town or city on a Saturday night why they do so, or British soccer fans why they conduct themselves so menacingly, they will reply that they are expressing themselves, as if there were nothing further to be said on the matter.

The full, British version of A Clockwork Orange ends very differently. Alex begins to lose his taste for violence spontaneously, when he sees a happy, normal couple in a café, one of whom is a former associate of his. Thereafter, Alex begins to imagine a different life for himself and to fantasize a life that includes tenderness:

There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa [girl] all welcoming and greeting like loving. . . . I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted. . . . For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son. . . . I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.

Burgess obviously prefers a reformation that comes spontaneously from within, as it does in the last chapter, to one that comes from without, by application of the Ludovico Method. Here he would agree with Kubrick—an internal reformation is more authentic, and thus better in itself because a true expression of the individual. Perhaps Burgess also believes that such an internal reformation is likely to go deeper and be less susceptible to sudden reversal than reformation brought from outside.

Burgess also suggests the somewhat comforting message, at odds with all that has gone before, that Alex’s violence is nothing new in the world and that the transformation of immature, violent, and solipsistic young men into mature, peaceful, and considerate older men will continue forever, as it has done in the past, because deep inside there is a well of goodness, man having been born with original virtue rather than original sin (this is the Pelagian heresy, to which Burgess admitted that he was attracted). There is a never-ending cycle:

[Y]outh is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky [small] toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks [men] made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties [goes], like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.

My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry [old] enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done . . . and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.

And this, surely, is partly right. Four centuries ago, Shakespeare wrote:

I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

And certainly it is true that criminality, statistically speaking, is an activity of the young and that there are few prisoners in the prison in which I worked who had been incarcerated for a crime committed after age 35. There seems to be a biological dimension to common-or-garden wrongdoing.

But a quietistic message—cheerful insofar as it implies that violence among young men is but a passing phase of their life and that the current era is no worse in this respect than any past age, and pessimistic in the sense that a reduction of the overall level of violence is impossible—is greatly at odds with the socially prophetic aspect of the book, which repeatedly warns that the coming new youth culture, shallow and worthless, will be unprecedentedly violent and antisocial. And of Britain, at least, Burgess was certainly right. He extrapolated from what he saw in the prime manifestation of the emerging youth culture, pop music, to a future in which self-control had shrunk to vanishing, and he realized that the result could only be a Hobbesian world, in which personal and childish whim was the only authority to guide action. Like all prophets, he extrapolated to the nth degree; but a brief residence in a British slum should persuade anyone that he was not altogether wide of the mark.

A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them. To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius.

It’s a strain being a Mexican diplomat in the United States these days, as the plaintive expression on Mario Velázquez-Suárez’s dignified features suggests. Diplomacy may be the art of lying for one’s country, but Mexican diplomacy requires taking that art to virtuosic heights. Sitting in his expansive office in Mexico’s Los Angeles consulate, Deputy Consul General Velázquez-Suárez gamely insists that he and his peers observe the diplomatic duty not to interfere in America’s internal affairs, including immigration matters. “Immigration is an internal discussion,” he says. “We have to respect that regardless of whether it pleases us.”

Well, at least one part of the deputy consul general’s statement is true: immigration is an “internal discussion.” The decision about who can enter and permanently reside in a country is central to its identity. The rest of his statement, though, is utterly false. Mexican officials here and abroad are involved in a massive and almost daily interference in American sovereignty. The dozens of illegals milling in the consulate’s courtyard as Velázquez-Suárez speaks, and the millions more radiating outward from Los Angeles across the country, are not a naturally occurring phenomenon, like the tides. They are there thanks in part to Mexico’s efforts to get them into the U.S. in violation of American law, and to normalize their status once here in violation of the popular will. Mexican consulates are engineering a backdoor amnesty for their illegal migrants and trying to discredit American immigration enforcement—activities clearly beyond diplomatic bounds.

Mexico’s governing class is not content simply to unload the victims of its failed policies on the U.S., however. It also tries to ensure that migrants retain allegiance to La Patria, so as to preserve the $16 billion in remittances that they send to Mexico each year. Mexican leaders have thus tasked their nation’s U.S. consulates with spreading Mexican culture into American schools and communities. Given the American public’s swelling anger about illegal immigration, it’s past time for Washington to tell Mexico to cease interfering and for the Bush administration to start enforcing the law.

Just how shameless is Mexico in promoting illegal entry into the U.S.? For starters, it publishes a comic book–style guide on breaching the border safely and evading detection once across. Mexico’s foreign ministry distributes the Guía del Migrante Mexicano (Guide for the Mexican Migrant) in Mexico; Mexican consulates along the border hand it out in the U.S. The pamphlet is also available on the website of the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior, or IME (Institute for Mexicans Abroad), the cabinet-level agency that promotes Mexicanismo in the U.S.

Nodding to U.S. law, the guide does briefly remind readers that “mechanisms for legal entry” into the U.S. exist and are the surest way to get in. But the book primarily consists of “practical advice” for entering illegally: do drink salt water and cross when the heat is lowest; don’t wear heavy clothing when fording a river. Do keep your coyote in sight; don’t send your children across the border with strangers—a Mexican variation on the usual parental advice. And don’t “throw rocks or objects at officials or at patrols since this is considered a provocation by those officials.” (This last piece of advice clearly hasn’t taken hold: attacks on the border patrol have steadily increased in number and viciousness.)

The guide’s recommendations on how to avoid detection once in the U.S. are equally no-nonsense: do keep your daily routines stable, to avoid calling attention to yourself; don’t engage in domestic violence—the Marvel comic–type illustration shows a macho man, biceps bulging, socking a woman a big one in the jaw. Don’t drink and drive because it could result in deportation if you’re arrested.

Mexico backs up the publication with serious resources for the collective assault on the border. An elite law enforcement team called Grupo Beta protects illegal migrants as they sneak into the U.S. from corrupt Mexican officials and criminals—essentially pitting two types of Mexican lawlessness against each other. Grupo Beta currently maintains aid stations for Mexicans crossing the desert. In April, it worked with Mexican federal and Sonoran state police to help steer illegal aliens away from Arizona border spots patrolled by Minutemen border enforcement volunteers—demagogically denounced by President Vicente Fox as “migrant-hunting groups.”

Disseminating information about how to evade a host country’s laws is not typical consular activity. Consulates exist to promote the commercial interests of their nations abroad and to help nationals if they have lost passports, gotten robbed, or fallen ill. If a national gets arrested, consular officials may visit him in jail, to ensure that his treatment meets minimum human rights standards. Consuls aren’t supposed to connive in breaking a host country’s laws or intervene in its internal affairs.

The border-breaking guide is just the tip of the iceberg of Mexican meddling, however. After 9/11, Vicente Fox’s government realized that the immigration amnesty that it had expected from President Bush was on hold. So it came up with the second best thing: a de facto amnesty, at the heart of which is something called the matricula consular card.

Mexican consulates, like those of other countries, have traditionally offered consular cards to their nationals abroad for registration purposes, in case they disappear. In practice, few Mexicans bothered to obtain them. After 9/11, though, officials at Los Pinos (the Mexican White House) ordered their consulates to promote the card as a way for illegals to obtain privileges that the U.S. usually reserves for legal residents. The consulates started aggressively lobbying American governmental officials and banks to accept matriculas as valid IDs for driver’s licenses, checking accounts, mortgage lending, and other benefits.

The only type of Mexican who would need such identification is an illegal one; legal aliens already have sufficient documentation to get driver’s licenses or bank accounts. Predictably, the IDs flew off the shelf—more than 4.7 million since 2000. Every day, illegals seeking matriculas swamp the consulates. Every seat and place to stand in the modest, white stucco Santa Ana, California, consulate was filled one morning this July, most of the people there seeking the 200 or so matriculas that the consulate issues per day.

The Mexican government knows just how subversive its matricula effort is. A consulate’s right to issue such a card to its nationals is indisputable; where the Mexican diplomats push the envelope is in lobbying governments to adopt it as an American ID. In announcing the normalization-through-the-matricula push, then-foreign minister Jorge Castañeda was characteristically blunt: “We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant activities—if you will—in their communities.”

And yet, Mexico’s consuls comically pretend that they know nothing of their countrymen’s immigration violations and wouldn’t possibly interfere with America’s response even if they did. “Our formal policy is not to ask the immigration status, because we don’t have anything to do with that,” explains the outspoken consul for Santa Ana, Luis Miguel Ortiz Haro Amieva, speaking in his narrow office above the consular reception area. “Our services don’t have anything to do with immigration status,” he says implausibly.

This pose gets more challenging all the time, because legal immigration from Mexico has basically stopped. Eighty percent of all Mexicans who arrived in the U.S. over the last decade crossed the border furtively, a rate that has only increased of late. These illegal arrivals now outnumber legal Mexicans in the U.S. And the more the disabilities of illegal status diminish, the greater the future flow of illegals will be.

You would think that an ID obtainable simply by showing Mexican nationality would not elicit fraud from Mexican nationals themselves. But Santa Ana consul Ortiz Haro whips out a stack of counterfeit Mexican voting cards and birth certificates that the consulate has confiscated from matricula applicants, bought at document bazaars like Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park. Some applicants can’t be bothered to get their real Mexican documents; others want to avoid extortion by relatives who demand payment to send those documents, says Ortiz Haro. He is confident, however, that the consulate can spot all fakes and verify, say, a birth certificate from the remotest Mexican peasant village. The FBI demurs: it opposes the use of the matriculas as American IDs because the consulates lack adequate safeguards against counterfeiting.

The consuls’ protestations of ignorance about their nationals’ immigration statuses are particularly far-fetched when it comes to tracking down missing border breakers. “If someone crosses but hasn’t been heard from,” says Santa Ana protective-services director Mildret Avila, speaking in Spanish and carefully avoiding details of that crossing, “the family will come to us and say: ‘Our brother was supposed to arrive but hasn’t come.’ We’ll contact the consulates all along the border—in San Diego, Calexico, Denver, and Phoenix, who will ask the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and check the hospitals and prisons to try to find him.”

What about inquiring with the coyotes? “We never hear from them,” Avila says. “We don’t know who the family pays; the coyotes just disappear.” Note that at this point in the interview, Avila is implicitly acknowledging that the Mexican nationals in question are illegal. Not for long, though. Why don’t you tell someone who is in the country illegally that he should return to Mexico and get permission to enter? I ask. “We don’t know if someone has papers or not.” You could ask, couldn’t you? “Yes.”

Now, arguably, individual consuls aren’t obligated to police compliance with American law—that responsibility lies with American authorities. But Mexico’s disrespect for the law regarding its illegal migrants actually begins on its side of the border. Mexico’s own regulations require that all exits from the country go through established crossing points. Decades ago, Mexico enforced that rule. Now, any Mexican can cross wherever he wants. A few years ago, the governor of Baja California proposed reviving the law as a means of preventing desert-crossing deaths. He swiftly found himself denounced for kowtowing to the Americans, writes former U.S. ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow in his book, The Bear and The Porcupine. The proposal died.

Mexicans view migration to the U.S. as a fundamental human right, says Davidow; no laws should stop it, they believe. In addition, nearly 60 percent of Mexican respondents polled by Zogby in 2001 said that the southwestern U.S. really belongs to Mexico. Only 28 percent disagreed.

Mexican consuls denounce any U.S. law enforcement effort against illegal immigration as biased and inhumane. For the moment, they still tolerate deportations if officials pick up the illegal Mexican right at the border and promptly set him down on the other side—whence he can try again the next day. Once in the U.S., however, an illegal gains untouchable status, in the consuls’ view.

In 2002, the Denver consulate planted sympathetic stories in the Denver Post about an illegal Mexican high school student, Jesus Apodaca, who could not afford out-of-state tuition to Colorado colleges. Consulate spokesman Mario Hernandez lobbied Colorado legislators to award in-state tuition to Apodaca. When the stories ran, Republican congressman Tom Tancredo, a vocal opponent of illegal immigration, suggested that Apodaca might more properly be deported. Such impertinence was more than Hernandez could bear. “This is an arrogant use of power,” he declared. “I don’t think Mr. Tancredo realizes what he is doing to this family, which is already vulnerable.” The family’s “vulnerability,” of course, was wholly of its own making.

Colorado governor Bill Owens disagreed with the consulate’s contention that the state should treat Apodaca as a legal resident for the purpose of state-subsidized tuition. He didn’t dare suggest that Apodaca actually be—gasp!—deported. Nevertheless, in retaliation for Owens’s opposition to a tuition grant, consul Leticia Calzada undiplomatically urged Mexican tourists to boycott Colorado and visit Wyoming instead.

No less righteously angry was San Diego’s consul, following the border patrol’s arrest of a family of illegal aliens near the consulate. The family was on its way to pick up matriculas. Objected Consul General Rudolfo Figueroa: “We feel outraged over the way [the arrest] was handled. This was an act of bad faith.” The consul filed a formal complaint with the border patrol; the Mexican embassy in Washington demanded—and got—a formal investigation into the matter. Mexico’s foreign ministry said that the arrests violated a “gentleman’s agreement” that its consulates could carry out their duties without the presence of law enforcement. The ministry might ponder why there should be any conflict between Mexican consular duties and the rule of law.

Boston’s consul general sharply protested the arrest of several illegal Mexicans this April. Ipswich, New Hampshire, police chief W. Garrett Chamberlain had grown frustrated with the federal government’s refusal to take custody of illegal aliens that his deputies reported to immigration agents. So he charged a Mexican illegal for criminal trespass—for being in a place without legal authority. A chief in a nearby town followed suit. Mexican officials went berserk: if this legal move succeeded—and police chiefs across the country immediately declared interest in using it—it would breach the nationwide sanctuary for Mexico’s illegals.

Pulling out all the stops, the Mexican government paid for the defendants’ legal representation—another departure from traditional diplomatic practice, which forbids interference in a host country’s judicial process unless it is patently unfair. Boston consul general Porfirio Thierry Muñoz Ledo declared the Ipswich trial “legally invalid, discriminatory and a violation of human rights.” Yet the New Hampshire chiefs weren’t using the law against the defendants because they were Mexican but because they were illegal. No legal Mexican need worry about arrest for trespass or for violations of the immigration law. Mexico’s campaign against immigration enforcement, however, equates being Mexican with being illegal—a presumption that the country would undoubtedly label racist if an American articulated it.

For the moment, Mexican illegals inside the border are safely insulated from enforcement. A New Hampshire judge rejected the Ipswich indictment this August, ruling that local police departments may not use trespass law against immigration violators. Since the federal authorities virtually refuse to arrest immigration violators, and since most big cities forbid their police to inquire into immigration status, the nation remains one big sanctuary for illegals.

Mexico’s consuls go even further in undermining U.S. border law. They’re evolving a “disparate impact” theory that holds that any police action is invalid if it falls upon illegal Mexicans, even if that action has nothing to do with immigration. In July, the Mexican consul general in New York City, Arturo Sarukhan, lambasted Suffolk County, Long Island, officials for evicting over a hundred illegal aliens whose dangerously overcrowded housing violated fire and safety codes. The code enforcement constituted a “vilif[ication]” of the Mexicans, Sarukhan said, and inflamed community “tensions.” Policing fire and safety codes is a core function of local government—unless it interferes with an illegal Mexican, in the New York consul general’s view. He might note that the “tensions” in Long Island aren’t due to the Suffolk County government but to the continuing influx of Latin Americans flouting American law.

Quick to defend individual illegals, the consuls just as energetically fight legislative measures to reclaim the border. Voters nationwide have lost patience with the federal government’s indifference to illegal immigration, which imposes crippling costs on local schools, hospitals, and jails that must serve or incarcerate thousands of illegal students, patients, and gangbangers. Californians in 1994 launched the first protest against this unjustifiable tax burden by passing Proposition 187, banning illegals from collecting welfare. Mexico’s Los Angeles consulate swiftly joined forces with southern-California open-borders groups to invalidate the law, even giving the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles a computer and database to help build a case against the proposition. Mexican action against 187 apparently extended to Mexico as well. After a federal judge struck the initiative down in 1998, then–Los Angeles councilman, now mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa credited Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo with helping to undermine it.

In November 2004, Arizona voters passed Proposition 200 over the strenuous protests of the Phoenix consul general, who sent out press releases urging Hispanics to vote against it. The proposition merely reaffirmed existing law that requires proof of citizenship to vote and to receive certain welfare benefits. After the law passed, Mexico’s foreign minister threatened to bring suit in international tribunals for this egregious human rights violation, and the Phoenix consulate supported the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund’s federal lawsuit against the proposition.

Back in Mexico, politicians blast any hint that American legislators might obstruct illegals’ free pass. In May, Congress passed the Real ID Act, which rendered driver’s licenses issued to illegal aliens inadmissible for aircraft boarding and at other federal security checkpoints. Mexico’s interior minister, Santiago Creel, lashed out: the law is “absurd, it is not understandable in light of any criteria,” he said. In fact, the law was quite understandable: after 9/11, Congress wanted to make sure that federal authorities had properly vetted aliens given access to sensitive areas, such as airplanes. Creel, however, dismissed U.S. security concerns; the fact that the illegals “send their remittances and also benefit the Mexican economy,” he declared, was far more important.

Former foreign minister Jorge Castañeda showed similar contempt for America’s terrorism worries this July. He haughtily told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Mexico would only cooperate with the U.S. on future security matters if the U.S. granted amnesty to its illegal aliens. Military-to-military cooperation is “very, very sensitive” to Mexicans, explained Castañeda. Americans’ sensitivity to widespread contempt for its sovereignty—well, that’s not even worth paying attention to.

The gall of Mexican officials does not end with the push for illegal entry. After demanding that we educate their surplus citizens, give those citizens food stamps, deliver their babies, provide them with doctors and hospital beds, and police their neighborhoods, the Mexican government also expects us to help preserve their loyalty to Mexico.

Since 1990, Mexico has embarked on a series of initiatives to import Mexican culture into the U.S. Mexico’s five-year development plan in 1995 announced that the “Mexican nation extends beyond . . . its border”—into the United States. Accordingly, the government would “strengthen solidarity programs with the Mexican communities abroad by emphasizing their Mexican roots, and supporting literacy programs in Spanish and the teaching of the history, values, and traditions of our country.”

The current launching pad for these educational sallies is the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior. The IME directs several programs aimed at American schools. Each of Mexico’s 47 consulates in the U.S. (a number that expands nearly every year) has a mandate to introduce Mexican textbooks into schools with significant Hispanic populations. The Mexican consulate in Los Angeles showered nearly 100,000 textbooks on 1,500 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District this year alone. Hundreds of thousands more have gone to school districts across the country, which pay only shipping charges. Showing admirable follow-up skills, the consulates try to ensure that students actually read the books. L.A. consulate reps, for instance, return to schools that have the books and ask questions. “We test the students,” explains Mireya Magaña Gálvez, a consul press attaché. “We ask the students: what are you reading about now? We try to repeat and repeat.”

Like most explanations given for Mexican involvement in American cultural matters, the justification for the textbook initiative is tortured. “If people are living in the U.S., of course they need to become excellent citizens of this place,” says Magaña Gálvez. “If we can help in their education, they will understand better.” But if the goal is American assimilation, why take a detour through Mexican history? “We must talk about Mexican history,” she explains. “Our history is very rich, very intensive. It’s important to know that history. The students will feel proud to become Americans if they feel proud of their country.”

Immigrants have often tried to hold on to their native traditions, but not until recently did anyone expect American schools to help them do so. And it is hard to see how studying Mexican history from a Mexican perspective helps forge an American identity. The Mexican sixth-grade history book, for example, celebrates the “heroism and sacrifice” of the Mexican troops who fought the Americans during the Mexican-American war. But “all the sacrifices and heroism of the Mexican people were useless,” recounts the chronicle. The “Mexican people saw the enemy flag wave at the National Palace.” The war’s consequences were “disastrous,” notes the primer: “To end the occupation, Mexico was obligated to sign the treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo,” by which the country lost half its territory.

This narrative is accurate and rather tame by Mexico’s usual anti-American standards. But a student in the U.S. could easily find himself confused about his allegiances. Is his country Mexico or the U.S.? Study exercises that include discovering “what happened to your territory when the U.S. invaded” don’t clarify things. The textbook concludes by celebrating Mexican patriotic symbols: the flag, the currency, and the national anthem. “We love our country because it is ours,” the primer says.

Mexican consulates also push for bilingual education in American schools, with the same odd logic with which they defend teaching Mexican history: teaching in Spanish, they say, will make students better English speakers. In this nonsensical claim, the Mexican officials are of course at one with the American bilingual-ed establishment. No surprise, then, that the National Association of Bilingual Educators has conferred awards on Mexico’s education ministry for its support of Spanish-language instruction or that the association is represented on the IME’s advisory council.

The IME also supplies adult-education materials in Spanish language and culture to community colleges and public libraries, and expects them to provide the space, teachers, and technology for distance-learning courses. “The Glendale library [in the Los Angeles suburbs] is beautiful,” enthuses the L.A. consulate’s Magaña Gálvez. It has converted half of its space to a Spanish language center using Mexico’s course materials, she says.

Yet does this Spanish-language project actually result in the acquisition of English? I put this question to Socorro Torres Sarmiento, the community affairs coordinator in the Santa Ana consulate. She dodged the question: “It’s difficult to do English at the same time,” she said. In other words, probably not.

The consulates appear to regard local opposition to their bilingual agenda with bemused contempt. Santa Ana’s consul, Ortiz Haro, says conspiratorially of his host city: “Here, we are living ‘just English’ in the schools. We have problems with some school districts [in Orange County], especially in Santa Ana. This high school district is involved in a lot of political issues, I think they have a very conservative point of view about education.” Of course, what Ortiz Haro calls “political issues” is simply the school board’s effort to follow the mandate of Proposition 227, the 1998 California voter initiative that sought to curtail bilingual ed in California schools.

But the consuls don’t easily give up in fighting to preserve and increase the use of Spanish in the U.S. Socorro Sarmiento, Santa Ana’s community affairs coordinator, visits Orange County schools to promote a Mexican government–sponsored drawing contest, Éste Es Mi Mexico (This Is My Mexico). When Sarmiento speaks to the students in Spanish, she—predictably—receives resistance: “The teacher says, ‘You need to speak English, because we’re not allowed to speak Spanish.’ ” Undaunted, Sarmiento reminds the children not to forget their Spanish—valid advice, but irrelevant to the school context, where teaching Mexican students English should be the paramount concern.

The contest that Sarmiento is promoting is another device to reinforce a sense of Mexicanness in students. It asks them to draw pictures expressing the “history, culture, natural resources, people, or traditional holidays [of] our beloved and beautiful country.” Winners get a trip to Mexico City at the Mexican government’s expense. Here again—in conservative Orange County, California, at least—some schools are skittish about sponsoring a Mexican government–designed program. Sarmiento responds that embracing Mexican culture is vital for students’ self-esteem. In her school visits for the contest, she asks students if they know who the Aztecs were.

“Unfortunately,” she says, “they often don’t.” But if the students are to succeed in the U.S., a more relevant question might be: do you know who the Pilgrims were?

The U.S. Department of Education, no foe of multiculturalism, collaborates with some of Mexico’s education initiatives. It helps bring hundreds of Mexican teachers to U.S. schools for part of the school year or during the summer—and not just to Mexican population centers like Los Angeles but also to recent outposts in the Mexican diaspora, such as Green Forest, Arkansas. The visitors suggest methods by which American teachers can incorporate Mexican dance, songs, and history, especially the indigenous cultures of the Toltec, Mayas, and Mistecas, into their lessons, notes Edda Caraballo, director of Migrant Education for the California Department of Education.

Such devotion to other countries’ folkways would be unimpeachable if students overflowed with knowledge of America’s history. As survey after survey has found, however, American students know next to nothing about their country’s past. Only one-third of seniors at elite colleges could pick out the general at the battle of Yorktown from among William Sherman, Ulysses Grant, Douglas MacArthur, and George Washington, according to a 2000 American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey.

A huge proportion of the Mexican students receiving school-based training in Mexicanismo are illegal, making American help in preserving an alien culture all the more remarkable. The burden of illegal immigration has fallen heaviest on California, where one-quarter of the nation’s illegals live and where one-quarter of the students don’t speak English. The Anaheim school district in Orange County recently floated a $132 million bond measure to meet the costs of educating illegal aliens and their children. Santa Ana consul Ortiz Haro laughs as he recounts that Anaheim school administrators had wanted to bill Mexico for the cost of educating its illegal exports—a perfectly sensible idea that strikes him as ludicrous. Concern with border breaking is, to a Mexican consulate, well, just a little uncouth.

The audacity of Mexico’s interference in U.S. immigration policy stands in sharp contrast to Mexico’s own jealous sense of sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine a country touchier about interference in its domestic affairs or less tolerant of immigrants. In 2002, for example, Mexico deported a dozen American college students (all in the country legally) who had joined a protest in Mexico City against a planned airport. Such participation, said Mexico, constituted illegal domestic interference. (It would be interesting to know how many Mexican students—legal and illegal—have participated with impunity in demonstrations in the U.S. against American immigration and educational policies.) During his confirmation hearings, U.S. ambassador Jeffrey Davidow said innocuously that the U.S. would encourage high participation in Mexico’s 2000 presidential election. A magazine editor rebuked him for “intromission in Mexico’s internal affairs.” Davidow didn’t even dare visit the troubled state of Chiapas early in his tenure, knowing that the press would condemn it as illegal meddling.

Imagine if U.S. diplomats yowled constantly about Mexico’s unfair policies toward illegal Americans. Mexico would expel them instantly. This summer, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza closed the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo after a particularly bloody period of drug violence that included the assassination of the town’s police chief. Garza admitted to a reporter that he shut the consulate “in part” to punish Mexico for its failure to control the mayhem. Such measured language, in response to a public threat, provoked a sharp correction from Mexico’s deputy foreign secretary, Geronimo Gutierrez. Garza’s words, fumed Gutierrez, do “not correspond to the role of an ambassador.”

But Mexican diplomats in the U.S. often express far harsher, and ad hominem, political judgments, with little regard for protocol. Santa Ana consul Ortiz Haro does not conceal his disdain in observing that California Propositions 187 and 209 [banning racial preferences], as well as the Minuteman Project, originated in Orange County. “We have six Congressmen here; five are Republicans. That would not be so bad,” he adds magnanimously, “except for the kind of Republican: [Dana] Rohrabacher, [Ed] Royce; these are friends of Tancredo, who says we need the military on the border.”

Mexican politicians are even starting to allege that American responses to illegal immigration in the U.S. are a violation of Mexico’s sovereignty. This August, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency in four counties bordering Mexico, because of violence and devastation wrought by trafficking in aliens and drugs. City council members from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez branded Richardson’s declaration an interference in Mexico’s domestic affairs.

Mexico’s own immigration policies are the exact opposite of what it relentlessly advocates in the United States. Its entry permits favor scientists, technicians, teachers of underrepresented disciplines, and others likely to contribute to “national progress.” Immigrants may only enter through established ports and at designated times. Anyone not presenting the proper documentation and health certificates won’t get in; the transportation company that brought him must pay his return costs. Foreigners who do not “strictly comply” with the entry conditions will face deportation. Steve Royster, who worked in the American consulate in Mexico from 1999 to 2001, presided over several deportations of Americans who had overstayed their visas. “They were given a choice: accept deportation or go to jail,” he says.

Providing full college tuition or all-expenses-paid secondary and primary education for illegal American students in Mexico? Unthinkable. Until recently, U.S.-born children of Mexican parents weren’t even allowed to enroll in Mexican public schools, reserved for Mexican citizens only. The parents would have to bribe officials for Mexican birth certificates for their kids. (The 1998 change in the Mexican constitution to allow dual nationality now makes enrollment by U.S.-born Mexicans possible.) “We’re not friendly with immigrants; that’s a big difference with the speech we have here with American schools,” admits a Mexican diplomat.

What about textbooks to propagate American culture in Mexico? They would provoke an uprising against Yanqui imperialism. When President Ernesto Zedillo tried in the 1990s merely to revise Mexican textbooks to acknowledge contemporary cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, he found himself denounced as a traitor. The revisions went nowhere.

Mexico’s border police have reportedly engaged in rapes, robberies, and beatings of illegal aliens from Central and South America on their way to the U.S. Yet compared with the extensive immigrant-advocacy network in the U.S., few pressure groups exist in Mexico to protest such treatment. If Americans run afoul of Mexico’s border police, watch out. In 1996, the Mexican police beat and shot in the back a teenage American girl who had led them on a high-speed chase in Tijuana. No one in the U.S. or Mexico raised a fuss, at least publicly.

Contrast that incident with another that occurred in the U.S. a few months earlier. A vanload of Mexican illegals in California had fled from the border patrol and the Riverside County deputies, throwing metal bars and beer cans at their pursuers and sideswiping cars to divert attention. When the van stopped, the deputies caught two of the fleeing occupants and beat them. Mexico’s foreign ministry turned the beating into an international human rights incident, attributing it to “discriminatory attitudes that lead to institutional violence.” Mexican diplomats formally protested to state and federal officials, and helped the two beaten Mexicans file multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the deputies and Riverside County. The State Department abjectly apologized and promised to set the FBI and Justice Department on the case. Had American authorities responded to the Tijuana beating with comparable anger and PR savvy, the Mexican backlash would have been fierce.

And if American politicians, presiding over a grotesquely mismanaged economy and the exodus of millions of citizens, adopted the grandiose rhetoric of Mexican politicians, they would be a laughingstock from one end of Mexico to the other. Heralding the creation of the IME and its parent agency, the National Council for Mexican Communities Abroad, President Vicente Fox argued that these bodies were necessary to “defend the human, civil, and labor rights [of Mexican migrants] more effectively, as well as to protect them against adversity or arbitrariness.” The idea that the American government represents a heightened threat of “arbitrariness,” compared with the corrupt Mexican bureaucracy, or that Mexico needs to protect its refugees from “adversity” abroad when it can’t provide them with a reasonable living at home, is simply delusional.

Mexico’s struggle to hold the hearts of its fleeing countrymen has worked. Mexican migrants have maintained a strong nationalism, exhibited through the “unfailing celebration of Mexican national, religious, and regional holidays, the conspicuous displays of patriotic symbols in Mexican neighborhoods and businesses, and in the low naturalization rate,” writes University of California professor Luis Eduardo Guarnizo. In the last decade, the rate of naturalization among legal Mexican immigrants did improve, in response to the 1996 welfare-reform law, which reduced welfare eligibility for non-citizen immigrants, and to Mexico’s authorization of dual nationality in 1998 (not exactly ideal motives for becoming citizens). The rate is still well below the immigrant norm, however. In 2001, just 34 percent of eligible Mexicans became citizens, compared with 58 percent of other Latin Americans, 67 percent of Asians, and 65 percent of Canadians and Europeans.

The Mexican government will push to control as much U.S. immigration policy as it can get away with. It’s up to American officials to stop such interference, but the Bush administration simply winks at foreign attacks on immigration laws that it itself refuses to enforce. President Bush should worry less about upsetting his friends at Los Pinos and more about listening to the American people: illegal immigration, they believe, is an affront to the rule of law and a threat to American security. It can and must be stopped.