Hispanics, the New Jews

[UTUSN]

*******QUOTE*******

from "A History of the Jews" p. 358 (paperback) by Paul JOHNSON::

".... ...the Russians always treated Jews as unacceptable aliens. .... ...the regime began to refer to it as 'the Jewish problem', to be 'solved', either by assimilation or by expulsion."

***********UNQUOTE***********



However, after -----------ASSIMILATION-----comes, --------ESPULSION--------then, EXTERMINATION

[MadMaddie]

1. History.....a blueprint for the future....

[The Jacobin]

2. Stop it.

This isn't even worth a response.

Damn near every day around here we get "Are Gays the new Jews" or some such crap.

[UTUSN]

3. However, thanks for the response in a thread you don't like n/t

[Captain Hilts]

4. And Johnson's a right wing historian. His 'history' of the US stinks. nt

[UTUSN]

5. I did not *know* that ----was going to read his History/Christian

ity next.

[UTUSN]

20. Google didn't help me to learn much about JOHNSON so

I'll take your word for it until I learn more------AND I WILL.

[Captain Hilts]

39. His history of the US just brushes off the New Deal in about two ...

paragraphs. The govt. changes in the 30s gave us the govt. we know today and he really gives it the short shrift.

I remember conservatives really recommending this book.

[Ms. Clio]

40. I googled him and he is definitely a darling of the right

If this is the same guy? I googled Paul Johnson historian and came up with interesting tidbits such as:

"Paul Johnson: George Bush is the Next Thatcher"

"An Empire for Liberty? A Conversation with Paul Johnson"

[UTUSN]

6. Hmmm, I'm here every day and don't see that shit n/t

[texasleo]

7. Yes, Jeb Bush will shove his wife and kids into the oven

czarcasm

:P

[UTUSN]

but what does the czar-czam MEAN? n/t

[Cleita]

8. Your point is a valid one.

Jews may not like comparing it to the Holocaust or to the Russian pogroms, but the similarities are certainly there. It looks like we are going to make an underclass of stateless people into felons so we can arrest them and send them to our new ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) camps under construction now. These trends seem ominous to me.

[rockymountaindem]

9. How many Mexican immigrants have been killed by the army?

Or beaten/hung by angry mobs? So far I don't see any Pogroms, nor Holocausts. Can you elaborate on those similarities for me?

[UTUSN]

12. Just low/scab wages n/t

[rockymountaindem]

14. Well, that's not exactly the same thing

The tension between Jews and other Russians was of a religious/ethnic, not class origin. Jews often lived in their own enclaves with mostly self-sufficient local economies, and had a similar level of economic development/success as their non-Jewish neighbors. The problem the Jews faced was attacks organized by the local Gendarme or Army units, or anti-Semitic riots by mobs with no police interferance or often with tacit approval from the authorities. So far, not even the "minutemen" have done anything like that, let alone the National Guard or the populace at large. When the white mobs start rampaging through Hispanic neighborhoods in L.A., let me know. 'Till then it's not the same thing.

[Cleita]

17. Perhaps the Minutemen haven't done anything wrong but

would you know if they did? It's not like the news is out there getting the story anymore.

As a longtime resident of L. A. there have been problems over the years between the inner city communities of blacks and hispanics and the police. The whole country saw the Rodney King beating, but this was pretty routine with the police agencies up until then.

The white communities knew very little about this, but there was a whole culture of beating up blacks and hispanics by police agencies up until then. Police are a militia as much as army is.

[rockymountaindem]

22. I'm not saying that isn't a problem

nor am I trying to justify it. However, you're making a false comparison. How many times have you seen this?



A pile of dead Jewish kids from a 1905 pogrom in modern-day Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine.

[Cleita]

26. I've seen pictures not only of those children but of many

around the world who have suffered for being born to the wrong clan. It hasn't happened here yet, but it could. The warning signs are there. We would be fools not to see them and to try to stop them.

Remember Abu Ghraib and we thought it would never happen with our soldiers doing the torture and killing. Also, children were tortured in Abu Ghraib. Don't forget.

[UTUSN]

24. JOHNSON taught me that there were/are class differences in Jews

Like the U.S./N.American Jews were/are extremely unfettered/prosperous and then came the influx of Russian/Jews. However, the Jewish culture/philosophy is to accept/help DA-PEEPS!

[Cleita]

15. If you look at your history, the turning of a group of people

into scapegoats is a gradual one. If they send the NG to the border this will up the chances of immigrants being killed by soldiers. If they put them into camps, it invites the slave labor. The Holocaust was a gradual escalation of injustices toward the Jews, Homosexuals and Gypsies as well as other groups not as well publicized. Hitler hated Slavs as much as he hated Jews and many of them were exterminated as well.

First it started by turning them into non-persons denying them jobs followed by taking their property. Then they made it illegal for them to shop, work or in other words survive. Once they became "illegitimate people" they were arrested and put into camps. At first there was only a movement to arrest the men to work in labor camps but when women and children were left behind without a wage earner, they solved the problem by taking whole families.

Prisoner work camps were always a part of Germany. But Hitler built bigger and better ones in his newly conquered territories of Austria and Poland to incarcerate the millions of new prisoners his laws brought about.

So think about it. If twelve million unauthorized immigrants are incarcerated as it seems many Americans want this to happen we are already on our way to having more victims than Hitler's six million.

[rockymountaindem]

19. Firstly, the OP referred just to Pogroms in Russia

Those were outbreaks of mass violence which were usually rather disorganized and served mostly to bust up Jewish communities and kill a few people (some of my own ancestors included). After WWI, the number of casualities soared and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed.

The Holocaust is an entirely seperate matter from Pogroms. The Holocaust was a centrally organized, systematic and industrialized form of killing. There are a lot of differences between what happened during the Holocaust and what is going on the US now. I'll leave the whole mass murder issue aside :sarcasm: and stick with the fact that the Jews of Germany were German citizens whose rights were systematically stripped from them. Illegals from Mexico and elsewhere who come here don't have citizenship, and as such their situation isn't comparable. They know before they come here that they aren't part of our society. The Jews of Germany were wholly integrated into German society and had full rights.

Furthermore, why on earth would the US government round up all the illegals and pay to put them in camps when we could just deport them to Mexico? That would be a whole lot cheaper and, you know, not an atrocity that would play out in front of the whole world.

[Cleita]

25. Okay and how did you get your citizenship?

If you were born here, didn't your parents or grandparents come over here as refugees from those pogroms? Aren't the Hispanics refugees from an oligarchy who keeps them in perpetual poverty and subservience? Try to have some compassion. After all somebody had compassion on your people.

If it's so easy to round them up and deport them, why are these camps being built? My opinion is that they want to scare them into either joining the army, working off a sentence or going back to their country of origin. But the camps are intended to soften them up a bit so that they will go into the military for fodder for the endless wars the neo-cons are planning.

[adriennui]

29. i see a difference between economic deprivation

and the universal discrimination of jews. remember the expulsion in 1492? spain, portugal.....even great britain. jews had to move east where many settled in poland and russia. we know how that went.

there is absolutely no correlation.

[Cleita]

31. Your own words.

"... jews had to move east where many settled in poland and russia. we know how that went."

Along with the discrimination I am sure that there was deprivation, which caused them to move. The same is happening with the Mexican campesinos. They are moving where they won't be as deprived. We know that this might not go very well either. I see no difference.

Also, the campensinos are discriminated against in Mexico and most of Latin America because they are mostly of Indian descent, and considered of lowest class.

[Ms. Clio]

27. Hundreds of Mexicans and Mexican Americans were lynched in this country

During the 19th and early twentieth centuries.

[Cleita]

32. Yes, but no one wants to look at that.

When my husband and I were traveling we visited Downeyville in the California Sierras. In the Downeyville museum was a picture of a Mexican woman who looked strikingly like my mother. It turns out she was Margarita, the first woman hung on the gallows in that town during the gold rush.

It was strange that the only woman they hung was a Mexican.

[Ms. Clio]

34. I know that story very well

In most of the stories she is called Juanita, but her real name was probably Josefa. And there were actually a couple other women of Mexican origin or descent lynched in CA, too.

Yes, very strange, that.

[Cleita]

36. You are right. She was named Juanita. Memory jog here.

Honestly she really looked like my mother.

[Ms. Clio]

37. that must have been very unnerving

:-(

[rockymountaindem]

33. That was then, and that was wrong

The OP was talking about the here and now.

[UTUSN]

11. Honey, you are one of the TOP 1, 2, 3 coolest people in DU

But don't tell CatWoman and blm I said this.

[Cleita]

18. LOL!

We won't tell them. :-)

[yojon]

10. Repubfucks need scapegoats

Same story every time. Just a different goat.

[Swamp Rat]

13. I treat Bushler&Co "as unacceptable aliens"

:hide:

[sweetheart]

16. muslims nt

[Cleita]

21. Muslims are scorned but not as much as hispanics these days.

Maybe it's because most muslims have money and the hispanics are dirt poor and less able to fight back.

[lumberjack_jeff]

23. Would you really like a discussion on why the analogy is bad?

For starters, I don't think that Jews snuck into Russia surrepititiously (except perhaps as refugees from Germany) and no US citizens are being deported (I'm aware of the dust bowl history).

And just so I'm clear... "assimilation" is... uh... bad.

I've always thought of us as a melting pot, but I guess not.

Leaving aside for the moment, the reality that the true horrors that Jews, gays, gypsies, and the handicapped faced at the hands of the nazis (and later Stalin) are trivialized by these comparisons.

[Cleita]

28. Okay one more time.

If a repeat happens of those times because no one wants to look at the warning signs, that would really trivialize those people who suffered and died back then. Remember when they said "never again", I don't believe it meant, "never again" for a specific group of people and not others.

[UTUSN]

30. Umm, let's go over each point

1- "Jews snuck into Russia" ------ uh,no, not for the most part: They were SCURRIED over there.

2- "no US C are being deported" --------Uh, U.S.citizens canNOT be deported anywhere.

3- "assimiliation is bad" ------ No, but tell Mexican American children that they should IDENTIFY with Davy CROCKETT (as opposed to with Mexicans).

4- "trivialized by these comparisons" ---------- How do you think Hispanics hear/feel when O'REILLY/HANNITY/MALKIN are spewing their SHIT MOUTHS??????????????

[lonestarnot]

35. The new Chinese. Remember the bad cocaine habit? White women

got addicted in the Chinese laundry, so the chinese who built the railroads all of a sudden became scapegoats for white women's cocaine habits. LLLLLLLLLonnng time since studied that, so may not have included enough details.

[Ms. Clio]

38. I think it was opium and opium dens n/t

[lonestarnot]

41. Yes right, opium.

[genie_weenie]

42. Hispanics! Dun dun dunnnnnnn Are they the new...

Kurds or Roma or Ainu or Laplanders or Cathars or Bulgars or Zoroastrians or blah blah blah.

This is a ridiculous assertion. First please describe a Hispanic person to me. Second, who exactly is treating the Hispanic persons in the manner the Jewsih people were treated.

[jackstraw45]

43. Except Jews were LEGAL residents and expelled...

For centuries in Europe...

So let me know when hispanics who are american citizens are rounded up and expelled to another country.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

44. Your a little late

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-04-1930s-deportees-cover_x.htm

[UTUSN]

45. O.K. Johnson is a Tory wingnut.(per HITCHENS, link). & to Posts #2 & 42

Since somehow this thread got kicked up again, I'll clarify.

1) I knew nothing about JOHNSON, had never heard of him before I went to look for a history of the Jews, and found only 2 or 3 and had to select down to pick one. I forget what criteria I used to pick the "winner".

2) So somebody enlightened me as to his wingnuttiness, and sure enough Google today (as opposed to last night) produced several items confirming it, including the deliciously spiteful item by HITCHENS, who is himself now a questionable-whatever in the political spectrum.

3) However, my interest was THE JEWS, and regardless of JOHNSON's RAYGUN worship and deriding of JEFFERSON/JFK/FDR, he should be able to fill in my blanks regarding THE JEWS. Besides, I'm stuck halfway through this humongous tome, so I've got much invested in it. I am also halfway stuck in ZINN's History of the American People, and THAT is where I return when I finish THIS book---NOT to JOHNSON's U.S. history.

4) Now, Post #2 really smarted, and #42 poured salt and vinegar there. And since I do NOT share JOHNSON's masochism, this was NOT a good thing. It NEVER OCCURRED to me to posit some kind of racial equivalence between Jews and Hispanics---and certainly not to make some facile equivalence of each group's suffering, since there is PLENTY of suffering to go around, and everybody feels their own uniquely.

The similarities I intended to point to were: That Hispanics are now being called "a problem" the way Jews have been, and "the SOLUTIONS" being posed to them are ASSIMILATION and EXPULSION, the same ones the Jews were given. And, since many of us here really DO see Nazi tendencies in the wingnut empire of today, it just might not be so far fetched that EXTERMINATION will, indeed, someday be added to the list of "solutions".

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.salon.com/media/1998/05/28media.html

T H E_.R I S E_.A N D_.F A L L_.O F
_______Paul "Spanker" Johnson

THE RIGHT-WING HISTORIAN'S LONGTIME MISTRESS DEALS HIM THE UNKINDEST WHACK OF ALL.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

.... ...he had been exposed by his mistress of 11 years, the writer Gloria Stewart, as a spankee:

"Paul loved to be spanked and it was a big part of our relationship. I had to tell him he was a very naughty boy."

A pretty easy task (the second bit, I mean). Johnson has made a career as an especially bilious and persecuting moralizer. His disgraceful book "Intellectuals," a foul-minded assault on the Enlightenment, laid a feverish stress on the private lives of secular and rationalist intellectuals. ....

Stewart unmasked Spanker Johnson to the tabloids because she could not bear to read another word of his "family values" tripe in the press. As recently as March, interviewed by Jacob Weisberg for the New York Times Magazine, he had claimed to be an advisor to the late Princess Diana. "Don't commit adultery," he said, was his "chief advice" to the divine one. When various Tory MPs were found in a trouser-free condition not long ago, Johnson predicted the ruin of the state and said that adultery, especially when committed by those who opposed it in public, should be severely punished.

But here's the bizarre thing. Johnson is not just a cult figure wherever two or three spankers are gathered together. He is an adored object of the American Right. Norman Podhoretz loved "Intellectuals." Nixon used to send out Johnson volumes for Christmas. Oliver North was once overcome with admiration at seeing William Casey read a whole Johnson on a plane flight. Dan Quayle kept a copy of Johnson's awful "Modern Times" by him, and employed it as a prop against those who accused him of being no great reader. (When pressed for an exegesis of its content, he announced contentedly that it was "a very good historical book about history.") To be fair to Quayle, "Modern Times" is almost technically unreadable. And so is Johnson's most recent extrusion, "A History of the American People." Of this pseudo-scholarly atrocity -- slavery a mere blip, the New Deal a monstrous tyranny, Watergate a liberal conspiracy, Reagan the summa of statesmanship -- Newt Gingrich has stepped forward in the Weekly Standard to announce it as "perhaps (sic) the most important history of the American people in our generation." And Steve Forbes, in the Wall Street Journal, terms it "a magnificent achievement." And neither of them, I feel confident, agrees with Johnson's grand, risk-taking, entrepreneurial claim that Thomas Edison invented the telephone. ... ....

It's both satisfying and unsatisfying that Spanker Johnson is now, conclusively and forever, a figure of ridicule and contempt. He ought also to be remembered for his bigotry and spite and bullying. (And maybe for an accidental tincture of literary prescience: One light smack and he "comes up foaming at the mouth.") But not all the perfumes of Araby can sweeten that spanking hand; nay, not all the genius of the Pfizer Corporation can make this Johnson rise again.
SALON | May 28, 1998

********UNQUOTE*******

[Donald Ian Rankin]

46. I think the big difference is numbers.

I'm not an expert on population dynamics, but my understanding is that until the foundation of Israel no one country ever had a terribly high percentage of the population as Jewish - I'm fairly sure no large country ever has, at any rate.

Hispanics currently make up 14.1% of the American population; around about 4.3 x 10^7 people, according to Wikipedia, and that number is rising. To put that in perspective, it's about three times as many Jews as there are in the whole world.

I haven't gone as far as to draw any conclusions from this yet, but I'd be surprised if there weren't sufficient implications to make the analogy a rather dubious one.