The Alamo -- Movie
The Alamo -- Movie
As military history, the War of Texas Independence was one of two U.S. and Mexican Wars which did, indeed, separate some of Northern Mexico from the rest. Most of the military detail depicted in the recent ?Alamo? movie -- including Anglo-American or Irish-American pirates, slavers, and other riff-raff, well turned-out Creole boys, and ill-trained Mestizo conscripts -- is typical of many battles between and among North Americans from the First Battle of San Antonio in 1812 to the last battle of the U.S.-Mexican War. Santa Anna was in nearly all of them with poor results for the cause of Mexican nationalism.
The Anglo-American nibbling away of Spanish claims in North America could well have continued. Had the CSA prevailed in the Civil War, I hold (with Harry TURTLEDOVE) that the CSA would have annexed Cuba and bought Sonora with loans from France and the UK. The Confederacy would have then reached the Pacific, too, and become something on the Caribbean like the late Hapsburg empire hoped to be on the Mediterranean.
I think that two ?Manifest Destinies? would have been worse than one, but we will never know.
Today, the political economic system, bourgeois culture and religious development that has prevailed in the U.S. part of Northern Mexico seems to have proven better for all but the former Spanish aristocracy, even a bit better for the black slaves and indigenous people of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California than the even more devastating competition between pure European, former slave, Creole, Mestizo, and Native American cultures further to the South.
That may not continue to be the case, but, so far, the "second chance" ethos of "Gone to Texas" accurately depicted in the recent movie has not degenerated into the severe technical and social stagnation that Mexico proper seems always on the brink of.
The question for Texians ? patriotic Texans of any culture no longer on the run ? today and going forward is how to build a republican democracy, a robust economy, and a cosmopolitan culture on the actual history, geography, and people we have.
I am pretty sure that misrepresenting history, from the racist Texas History Movies of the 1920's to the leftist celebration of indigenous proletarian mythology is a bad start. The geography here remains challenging but very valuable -- valuable enough that many imperial projects from around the world will continue to be directed against the people here.
The opportunity for us today is cultivating republican-democratic political institutions within a cosmopolitan culture that has varieties of language, religion, and ethnic heritage as well as building military-economic institutions still capable of defeating imperial projects without ruining everything else we may build here.
None of the imperial systems look that good today: Russo-Prussian, Anglo-Austrian, Austro-Iberian, and Belgian-French. We might want to look at the ?light cavalry? model of the Mongols, though. I am not altogether optimistic about our political or military institutions today.
However, the Texican military, political, and economic record is certainly better than the strictly Mexican one at this point.
All I can say looking forward that a U.S. military of long-term hires fighting for the imperial projects of a pseudo-nobility of concession-tending Anglo-Austrian NeoCons and ChickenHawks seems like a rather bad direction for us to be headed in.
::JRBehrman
As military history, the War of Texas Independence was one of two U.S. and Mexican Wars which did, indeed, separate some of Northern Mexico from the rest. Most of the military detail depicted in the recent ?Alamo? movie -- including Anglo-American or Irish-American pirates, slavers, and other riff-raff, well turned-out Creole boys, and ill-trained Mestizo conscripts -- is typical of many battles between and among North Americans from the First Battle of San Antonio in 1812 to the last battle of the U.S.-Mexican War. Santa Anna was in nearly all of them with poor results for the cause of Mexican nationalism.
The Anglo-American nibbling away of Spanish claims in North America could well have continued. Had the CSA prevailed in the Civil War, I hold (with Harry TURTLEDOVE) that the CSA would have annexed Cuba and bought Sonora with loans from France and the UK. The Confederacy would have then reached the Pacific, too, and become something on the Caribbean like the late Hapsburg empire hoped to be on the Mediterranean.
I think that two ?Manifest Destinies? would have been worse than one, but we will never know.
Today, the political economic system, bourgeois culture and religious development that has prevailed in the U.S. part of Northern Mexico seems to have proven better for all but the former Spanish aristocracy, even a bit better for the black slaves and indigenous people of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California than the even more devastating competition between pure European, former slave, Creole, Mestizo, and Native American cultures further to the South.
That may not continue to be the case, but, so far, the "second chance" ethos of "Gone to Texas" accurately depicted in the recent movie has not degenerated into the severe technical and social stagnation that Mexico proper seems always on the brink of.
The question for Texians ? patriotic Texans of any culture no longer on the run ? today and going forward is how to build a republican democracy, a robust economy, and a cosmopolitan culture on the actual history, geography, and people we have.
I am pretty sure that misrepresenting history, from the racist Texas History Movies of the 1920's to the leftist celebration of indigenous proletarian mythology is a bad start. The geography here remains challenging but very valuable -- valuable enough that many imperial projects from around the world will continue to be directed against the people here.
The opportunity for us today is cultivating republican-democratic political institutions within a cosmopolitan culture that has varieties of language, religion, and ethnic heritage as well as building military-economic institutions still capable of defeating imperial projects without ruining everything else we may build here.
None of the imperial systems look that good today: Russo-Prussian, Anglo-Austrian, Austro-Iberian, and Belgian-French. We might want to look at the ?light cavalry? model of the Mongols, though. I am not altogether optimistic about our political or military institutions today.
However, the Texican military, political, and economic record is certainly better than the strictly Mexican one at this point.
All I can say looking forward that a U.S. military of long-term hires fighting for the imperial projects of a pseudo-nobility of concession-tending Anglo-Austrian NeoCons and ChickenHawks seems like a rather bad direction for us to be headed in.
::JRBehrman
posted by John Robert BEHRMAN at 4/17/2004
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