Tuerto

Israel-sponsored fire truck in Santiago, Chile. Jews are blamed for arson, by Chileans who won't even pay for their own firefighters. Image taken without permission, click to go to original story.

Chile Hoy, a rather bland news aggregator of good news about, yes, Chile, had a headline that I figured would be some environmental story. “La Patagonia argentina y chilena en peligro,” or to put it another way, “Argentina’s and Chile’s Patagonia in danger.” Coal? Fires? Industrial fisheries?

Nope: it’s the Jews. So, you thought that the New Years forest fire in Torres del Paine National Park was an accident, caused (perhaps) by a hapless Israeli tourist who improperly burned his toilet paper? No no no: it was just another volley in an ongoing race war, run by my own Hebrew tribesmen. Who knew? I had a bar mitzvah, but somehow I never get invited to these things. The first paragraph gives a taste:

While we watch the disaster that’s been made of our world, that “future” it could be that such a “future” is right around the corner. Led by the International Zionist Movement, this silent takeover of Patagonia has progressed dramatically in recent years; not through war and invasion, but through territorial acquisitions, economic infiltration, Israeli fifth columns, global media support and geopolitical positioning.

The author, notable non-Mapuche Adrian Salbuchi, doesn’t seem to get the humor in a white Argentine warning Chileans about the “takeover” of land that was for centuries claimed by Argentina, continuously occupied by independent indigenous groups, and at one point even under the supposed dominion of a Frenchman. The territorial legitimacy of this land remains in question. In the mountains, one finds an active border conflict between Chile and Argentina; my map from the Chilean military displays the area as “pending demarcation.” But that’s nothing. Within Chile, just this week the national police have been duking it out with indigenous Mapuches. Here’s a video of an armored cop using a shotgun to club a mother in front of her children for having the temerity to tell the police they couldn’t cross her land. (While her kids had to witness the violence, YouTube considers the video unsafe for viewing by those under 18.)

Here in the real world, the conflict over land in southern Chile and Argentina (including both Patagonia and its northern neighbors, the Lagos, Rios, Bio Bio and Maule regions) has nothing to do with Jews, Zionists, or “Israeli fifth columns.” Instead, the issue is that European-Americans took the land from unwilling people who had been there for millennia. The Chilean state, through much of the 20th century, invited European migrants to come take over “unused” (read: indigenous) land in the region, providing thousands of families, largely Germans, with attractive sites for homesteading in return for territorial fealty to Chile. In the dictatorship of the 1970s, and continuing in the Concertación period until about 1995, hundreds of thousands of hectares were handed out to well-connected individuals and companies for the planting of tree farms and the destruction of lush native forests. Today such farms are the dominant feature of the landscape from the foothills of the Andes to the inland reach of the coastal fog; from the northern reach of Patagonia half way to Chile’s capital city. Today — literally today — forest fires are roaring across that region. The state is accusing Mapuche activists of arson. When seven firefighters died last week, it was a Mapuche activist whose house was torched in retaliation.

This fight is between largely German-descended Chileans (some of them unreformed Nazis) and indigenous Chileans. In case you doubt that the racism at play has been reproduced through culture, I note this comment from the Chile Hoy post:

I even got to know an old Nazi, grandmother of an ex-girlfriend of mine, and between chats and chats, what I’m telling you came out, even to the point that she showed me a knife from Nazi Youth that she has kept with much honor.

As so often in the history of bigotry, the characteristics being assigned to the “other,” in this case the Jews, are theatrically perfect examples of psychological projection. If non-Jewish Chileans and Argentines want to worry about the unjust takeover of Patagonia, great. But rather than seeking out the region’s miniscule number of Jewish residents and visitors and accusing them of unjust territorial pretensions, they should start with a look in the mirror.