The Struggle Against Helotry

helot (n):

1:		capitalized: a member of a class of serfs in ancient Sparta
2:		serf, slave

In the comments to the video of LTC Allen West’s speech, Ex-Dissident said:

There are some very disturbing elements in this speech. When he mentions politicians kowtowing to corporations and businessmen, he sounds an awful lot like our own Marxist in the White House. I would be very skeptical of West’s motives.

And:

I don’t know. He doesn’t sound like a thinking conservative during that speech…

I composed a reply to Ex-Dissident, but it was too long for a Blogger comment, so I’m posting it separately here. I’m assuming that he is not an American, so I will attempt to put Col. West’s words into an American context.

The huge flood of illegal aliens into the United States continues unabated due to the tacit collusion of both major political parties. The handful of people who support secure borders are generally to be found among the Republicans, but most prominent members of the Republican Party shy away from taking any strong position on the issue, and some, like John McCain, are full-bore “amnesty” supporters.

The Democrats want the Mexicans in the country for the same reason that European Socialists want Muslims in the EU: they are a reliable vote for the socialist welfare state. They immediately become clients of a multitude of state services, from food stamps to Head Start, and can be used as poster-child victims to push through ever more liberal multicultural/socialist policies. Bring them in, make them citizens, hand them their Spanish-language ballots (or the ones with pictograms, for the illiterates), and you have another batch of permanent votes for unlimited socialism.

But why should Republicans collaborate in such a scheme, when it guarantees them perpetual minority status?

It’s an open secret that many large businesses depend on cheap Mexican labor — legal and illegal — to maintain their profitability. The process began decades ago with migrant labor in the Southwest, which entered the country to perform seasonal agricultural tasks — Cesar Chavez and his noble crusade made them into the first lionized “Chicano” victim group back in the 1970s. The agribusiness companies got stoop labor for half the minimum wage or less, and the owners were prominent donors to the Republican Party — no wonder the Republicans cashed the checks and kept their mouths shut.

This sort of corruption inhibited modernization and automation in the agriculture sector. If companies had had to hire Americans, the wage costs would have driven them to save money by investing capital in automation, and much of the stoop labor would have become obsolete. As it is, in Southern California much of the harvesting is done the same way that it always has been. Compare that with, say, Japan.

Over the next several decades the problem spread from the Southwest to the rest of the country. There is virtually no area of the United States which does not have its enclaves of Mexicans, legal and illegal, many of whom speak little or no English. Besides agricultural labor, they work for landscaping companies, construction firms, and other industries that require low-skill workers and are willing to pay in cash. The women work as nannies and maids.
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There are plenty of them around here, in the heart of rural Virginia. One time I saw a busload of them parked in the corner of a parking lot in a small rural shopping center. The overseer — a “person of American background” — had gone into the store to buy drinks and lunch for his crew. The Mexicans stayed over by the edge of the woods, hundreds of yards away from any other cars or people in the parking lot. The overseer brought their lunch back to them, and they sat in the shade to eat it. Then back on the bus, and presumably back into the hot sun in a tobacco field somewhere not far away.

On the Eastern Shore of Virginia, back off the main road, I have seen the dormitories where Mexicans are housed. They are stark cinderblock buildings, similar to the accommodations you might expect in refugee camps. The likeness is enhanced by the chain-link fences that surround the compounds, with gates for the buses to go in and out. Other camps consist of trailer parks out in the middle of the fields, tiny plastic and metal boxes with no shade and no amenities whatsoever.

This is what Col. West is talking about. And all of it goes on with the full knowledge and collusion of public officials at the local, state, and national level. Many of these politicians are Republicans, and many of those receive campaign contributions from the major corporations that profit from helot labor. Here in Virginia, based on my personal experience, the principal beneficiaries are agribusiness, construction, landscaping, road repair, poultry processing, and the textile industry.

If a business — say a chicken-processing plant — is powerful enough locally, it can make certain that it gets plenty of advance warning of an inspection visit by immigration officials, so that only the Mexicans with green cards are visible on the assembly line when the feds poke their heads through the door.

This kind of corruption is endemic throughout the country, and it grows worse every year as more illegals pour in. It has the effect of depressing wages at the lower end of the scale, and working-class citizens who pay taxes see their incomes drop because of the competition from workers who pay no taxes at all.

A more serious problem, one that is harder to quantify, is the degradation of the civic culture at all levels that occurs when corruption like this permeates society. Everyone knows what is going on — from the poor to the wealthy, we all know what the game is. Everybody also knows what the rules are: anyone who complains or tries to change the situation is immediately demonized as a “racist”.

So the blue-collar people keep their mouths shut, out of prudence, but they know the score, and many of them hate Mexicans. Middle class people get their lawns mowed and their houses cleaned at bargain prices, and they live far from the crime-ridden immigrant enclaves, so their fastidious gaze may be averted from any of the direct consequences of what benefits them. Wealthy people who own large businesses obviously benefit from the dirt-cheap labor.

The Republican party is apparently willing to endure permanent minority status as long as its members continue to enjoy all the perks and privileges of office and the side-benefits that come with the continued support of businesses that profit from helotry.

So when Allen West inveighs against “big corporations” in this regard, he is attacking a modern American version of Mussolini-style syndicalism, the collaboration of business and government to their mutual benefit. Syndicalism breeds corruption, and the helot industry is one of the most corrupt aspects of modern syndicalism.

In other words, Col. West is not opposing capitalism; he is battling fascism.

It’s a quixotic task, and a huge portion of the Republican establishment will close ranks against him. But he’s a dedicated man, and he’ll keep at it He’s smart, well-educated — all that knowledge about Islam he picked up himself, from reading the same books we do — and has great integrity.

May God go with him.