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During WWII, U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security

149 points by pif 10y ago

minikites 10y ago
It's a shame so many people can't function without being afraid/angry at a dehumanized "other". Sometimes it's outright malice (Syrian refugees today), sometimes it's softer but just as harmful ("the Japanese are going to take over the world!!" in the 1980s) and sometimes it's from within (Japanese and Italians in WWII, the entire history of black citizens in the USA). And when a new "enemy" arrives that's more appealing than the old "enemy" we reclassify the old "enemy" to be on "our side" (i.e. Greeks, Italians, etc used to be considered non-white).
- humanrebar 10y ago
  Sometimes it's other Americans who choose other political candidates.
- falsestprophet 10y ago
  It is important to understand the United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq. Killing people on a vast scale from countries and also accepting immigrants (including military age males) from the same country at the same time is more complicated than #WereACountryOfImmigrants.
  - finid 10y ago
    But think about this for a second; if not for us destabilizing those countries, there will be no refugee crisis to deal with. We basically took the most and arguably the most prosperous country in Africa (Libya) and ruined it. Now we're refusing to take in those fleeing from our mess. We did the same thing in Iraq and Syria. But it seems we're not done yet. Iran is next. Bit is anybody protesting war against countries that can do us no harm? Nah! It makes for good war video games and Hollywood war movies.
  - whatshisface 10y ago
    While that may be true, the odds that something that hasn't happened in eight years could happen in 90 days are pretty small. Most of what agitated people was the order's execution, which involved some fallout that may have been avoidable.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    Yeah, why should we help clean up any of the mess that we've been causing? /sarcasm
  - knz 10y ago
    > United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? The bombing campaign is not occurring in a vacuum, is targeted at people engaged in warfare against us or our allies, and those conflicts have killed far more people than just the bombing campaign - including via the use of chemical weapons. I'm not trying to justify civilian casualties, the ongoing drone attacks on multiple continents, or even answer whether we should be involved in these conflicts - I just think the situation is more nuanced than "the US has bombed/killed 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq".
    - finid 10y ago
      Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? But what you seem to ignore is that the active warfare in both countries was caused by us. And in Libya too. Think about that. Those countries are now a mess because of "regime change".
      - knz 10y ago
        I'm aware that the US/NATO was involved in the Arab Spring. But again, I think the reality was far more complex - Mohamed Bouazizi didn't immolate himself because the CIA/MI6 told him to. There were videos from the time of people marching and being shot by their governments - those governments could have chosen to bring meaningful reform but instead chose violence. Likewise with Assad in Syria - the CIA/MI6 aren't making him drop barrel bombs or use chemical weapons. Even outside of internal pressures, geopolitics are at play as well - Iran and Russia are playing "the great game" as much as the US/NATO are in the fight against terrorism.
        finid 10y ago
        Since the so-called Arab Spring started in Tunisia, you have to ask yourself why we didn't push for "regime change" in that country. The demonstrations in Syria were not spontaneous. They were engineered. If you have time, read the email exchanges between the US ambassador to Syria and H. Clinton. Regarding Iran and Russia playing "the great game", they're supporting the legitimate govt of that country. Without their support, Assad would have been dead years ago, and Syria would have been in worse shape than it is now. You might start by reading https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328 https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328 Edit: Added WikiLeaks links
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- osullivj 10y ago
  Göring [1]: "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring
- uxp100 10y ago
  Just a shitty event some may not be aware of RE: 80s attitudes towards Japanese success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin (Since the first paragraph doesn't spell this out, Vincent's murderers thought he was Japanese.)
saycheese 10y ago
Executive Order 9066: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066
daemonk 10y ago
Seems like a lot of these historical incidents are being brought up recently. They are certainly interesting and perhaps show that humanity as a whole tend to repeat the same actions. But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history? Conway brought up the Obama's tightening of the Iraqi immigration during his term. Does that somehow justify Trump's immigration ban? I guess you can say she is just pointing out the media hypocrisy in being less judgmental with Obama than with Trump and that may be fair. But ultimately it is just a distraction in some sense. I fear Trump's camp is sticking to the "the media is hypocritical" campaign as a distraction. I guess it's a clever way to use the free bad press.
- mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
  People in Trump's camp have used the Japanese internment as "precedent" for a Muslim ban. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-internment-muslim-registry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inte...
  - melling 10y ago
    Why is called a Muslim ban? The Muslin world is around 1.7 billion people, and dozens of countries (almost 1/3 of world population): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Muslim_Percent_Population_v2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Muslim_Percen... And we have over 3 million Muslims in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States People seem to label everything in politics with a positive or negative name, depending on their beliefs. The left and right are so noisy with their claims, I'm having a hard time filtering through all the noise. If we could use a little math in our labeling, we wouldn't get an equality on the ban being for "Muslims". Perhaps we could have our Deep Learning machines come up with Classification names.
    - krapp 10y ago
      Why do people keep assuming the intent behind this cannot be to ban Muslims because it doesn't ban all Muslims?
yread 10y ago
There was heavy discrimination of Germans as well during both World Wars https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5of8na/if_the_midwest_was_mostly_settled_by_germans_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5of8na/if_th...
iambateman 10y ago
I love this article, because we have to remind people that Americans have been afraid of Italians and Germans and Swedes and Jews and the Japanese and Muslims and the Chinese and DEFINITELY the Irish at one time or another. Established groups feared new groups. But in the end, these people generally brought new innovations and economic growth and interesting new foods. They mashed new cultures with old - not without pain - and eventually gave us General Tso's Chicken. In other words, it's gonna be alright. ^^ this is what I tell people who support Muslim bans. I'm not sure if it helps them, but it helps me.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  I don't know how well it works on Trump supporters, but there's something that bugs me about this argument. It seems to take a moral issue (do you treat other people well?), and replace it with an economic issue (do you know of inventions, food, or some economic benefit from those people?). I feel like it's a racing certainty that many Italian-Americans lived ordinary lives, and didn't do anything out of the ordinary—it's a quality shared by the vast majority of all people regardless of their origins. Shouldn't that be okay too? Otherwise, how important would someone have to be? Can we use binary search to find out?
  - ericd 10y ago
    If one can't successfully appeal to someone's sense of morality (perhaps because they have different morals), one can try to appeal to their sense of self interest.
    - conistonwater 10y ago
      This one, uh, I point-blank refuse to believe. The moral principles about how you can treat other people are so widespread and uniform (made it into the bloody bible, even; the only bit that everybody knows from that MLK speech is about this), that you're gonna have some serious convincing to do, before I believe that people "have different morals". It seems more believable that people have just the same morals they always did, but are applying them very selectively without proper justification (as it always is with prejudice).
joshuaheard 10y ago
I researched this some after Trump's executive order, and it is interesting because most people know about the Japanese internment because it was the largest, but we also interned Italians and Germans. These three groups were also prohibited from buying certain items that could potentially be used in sabotage.
- cafard 10y ago
  Nations have commonly interned enemy aliens, e.g. P.G. Wodehouse. However, one hell of a lot of the "Japanese" interned were in fact native-born citizens. My German-born great-grandparents were not molested by the government during WW I, though there was harassment of Germans and German-speakers. And in WW II the US had admirals and generals with names like Nimitz, Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Gerow.
  - blincoln 10y ago
    Counterpoint: my German great-grandparents and their relatives were interred by the US during WWII. They lost most of their possessions, just like the Japanese prisoners.
JackFr 10y ago
> By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans. These scientists were 'pseudo' only in retrospect. It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream. As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.
- reese_john 10y ago
  Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  To their credit, race was thought of differently before the discovery of the double helix. It was only until the 70s that people commonly believed that Neanderthals became white people because their bones were discovered in Europe, and that Homo Erectus created the Asian "race" because their bones were discovered in Asia. Nowadays race more often means skin color and a deterministic culture, with the occasional addition of crude metrics such as IQ to justify preexisting biases.
- vixen99 10y ago
  Just to be clear, this was not a small group of pseudo intellectuals. Eugenics was applauded almost universally by Progessives and Conservatives among others. Included we can count J. Maynard Keynes, Irving Fischer ('prevention of breeding of the worst'), Gunnar Myrdal (economics Nobel Prize) Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and dozens of other famous names. You can say that eugenics was 'received opinion' in that era.
  - nemild 10y ago
    And even later it was someone like William Shockley, inventor of the transistor and Nobel prize winner.
  - 10y ago
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
My great-uncle was one of them. A second-generation immigrant, his father forbade any utterance of Italian in his household. But my great-uncle - born American - nontheless dealt with discrimination, and so he went a step further and changed his Italian name to Bill Morgan. Bill loved his country so much that when he failed the physical for the OSS - already an army captain - by being legally blind in one eye, he lied and cheated his way into a formal position helping the British train resistance fighters in Europe. He was just as conniving when he convinced his superiors to give him a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and lead a unit of French resistance fighters. He made a career with the CIA. Even in the letter he gave me when I was born (he died before I met him), he described in great detail need to be fit in mind and body to serve your country. He's buried in Arlington. So much for a threat to homeland security. If anyone is interested, he documented his experiences of WWII in an exciting book, "The OSS and I." It's hard not to enjoy a book with a chapter titled: "How to blow up a bridge." https://www.amazon.com/S-S-I-WILLIAM-J-MORGAN/dp/B0086N639A https://www.amazon.com/S-S-I-WILLIAM-J-MORGAN/dp/B0086N639A
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  This is heavily stereotypical, but you can judge the loyalty of an Italian-American with just two questions: Where does your mother live? What's your favorite [sports] team? If mom lives in the US, and the team plays baseball, NFL or NCAA football, or NBA or NCAA basketball, you could probably hand over the nuclear launch codes. If mom lives in Naples, and the team plays Euro-soccer, you'd better keep an eye on that guy. If mom lives in Windsor, Ontario, and the team is the Blue Jays, the test is inconclusive.
  - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    I've heard this one before. One would be wise to remember that stereotypes typically have a small foundation of truth if you dig deep enough.
xHopen 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4 When are we gonna , once for all, understand it
paulddraper 10y ago
Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc. Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens. I understand the tiny minority is the problem; just don't think your analogy to these other groups is an apt one.
- ctrl-j 10y ago
  > Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens. Neither do Muslims? I mean, show me the statistics that show that they have a higher terrorism rate than other groups. The IRA, the extremist christian groups, and the mentally ill all do a lot of damage as well, but they're not being banned from the USA. I think Muslims get targeted by the media because they're different looking, and so they get reported on more thoroughly. I could very well be wrong, but I honestly don't believe they are statistically more prone to terrorism.
  - zimpenfish 10y ago
    > The IRA Indeed, Pete King, one of the group assembled to work on the "Muslim Ban" has been a long-standing supporter of the IRA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_...
  - paulddraper 10y ago
    Overall numbers are hard to come by, especially for smallish incidents, but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... > they're not being banned from the USA Were there countries with huge numbers of extremely violent mentally ill people, I have no doubt the US would limit or halt immigration from those places. There are huge numbers of radical or radical-sympathetic Muslims. If you have an open mind, I suggest getting a Muslim's take on the actual numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk (warning, has numbers, may not be PC) It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.
sandworm101 10y ago
Irish, italians, russians, jews, chinese, japanese... is there a group that america hasnt at some time feared? Did canadians get thier turn? Having a guilty and irrational fear of some group, whatever the group, seems almost part of american identity. I cannot think of any period of american history that wasnt steeped in such fears.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  The 1990s?
  - sandworm101 10y ago
    Gays+aids? Urban black "super predators? Werent the 90s the height of white-flight and the bussing debates? Perhaps thats a different type, an internal fear. Perhaps the post-apollo 70s? Americans then feared nuclear war generally, but not russians as a people. Racism was a thing internally, but i cannot think of an especially hated outside group.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  At least one of these immigrant-panics was on to something: the hillbillies were coming to ruin our political culture, back in the 1700s. (http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...)
RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
Some people would look at this and say "We unambiguously won WWII. Back then the 'greatest generation' knew what was needed to win a war, and wasn't squeemish about doing what needed to be done. WWII was the last major war we actually won. Since then we have become too politically correct to actually win wars. Trump will change that. We will win again."
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
KirinDave 10y ago
I like this article because it reminds us that "whiteness" is not actually a strictly racial identity. There are numerous factors that make someone "white" in America, which makes them acceptable to white nationalists. These purity rules can change over time to represent what's politically expedient. Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on. This is one of the primary reasons that fascism is such an uncomfortable situation for its citizens. Fascism thrives in the face of an "enemy" that can be defeated by force and a "strong leader." These enemies will be selected by convenience, not rationality.
- krapp 10y ago
  >Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on. This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.
  - conistonwater 10y ago
    This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw "All right, we'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks... But we don't want the Irish!" It's a nice film, its director made quite a few good films (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#Film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#Film).
    - sammydavis 10y ago
      Mel Brooks is probably our greatest American comedy director and writer, at least in the second half of the 20th century he's in the top handful. Who comes to mind, Blake Edwards?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
davidw 10y ago
The largest mass lynching in the United States was of 11 Italians in New Orleans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_lynchings
- WillyOnWheels 10y ago
  This page claims 18 to 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_massacre_of_1871 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_massacre_of_1871
  - mikeyouse 10y ago
    Then there's always the Tulsa Race Riots in which upwards of 300 people were killed while a white mob burned one of the country's wealthiest black neighborhoods to the ground while arresting thousands of black people and displacing nearly 10,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot Technically not a lynching I suppose, but as far as mass killings of minorities go..
    - masklinn 10y ago
      Tusla is more of a massacre than a lynching, Greenwood was bombed from private planes.
  - davidw 10y ago
    Looks like someone needs to do some editing. In any case, it just goes to show that many groups have been 'the other' that people blame for problems.
- toyg 10y ago
  And there were Sacco and Vanzetti, of course.
  - zeveb 10y ago
    > And there were Sacco and Vanzetti, of course. They were, of course, guilty — as their lawyer later told Upton Sinclair.
badmadrad 10y ago
Using this as a criticism of Trump's travel ban is a false equivalency. There have literally been a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe perpetrated by radicalized Syrians, Somalians, and Iranians. Not to mention the knife attack from Somalian refugee (who was getting a free ride) at Ohio State. Read through these lists and tell me there is nothing to be worried about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... Yes, being a victim of a terrorist attack is as likely as getting hit by lightning but that doesn't mean you should wrap yourself in aluminum foil and go outside in a thunderstorm. You usually protect yourself and take shelter. Its ok to protect yourself when there is a conceivable threat. That being said, I do feel the travel ban was hastily rolled out without much coordination and caused some people to be detained that shouldn't have been but to completely disregard the principle of it as misguided or racist in some way is just disregarding the truth of the state of world. In fact, many pundits are saying this going to create more propaganda or create more terrorists. First, I disagree with notion that we should care about ISIS's propaganda. People don't become terrorists because a country bans them. They become terrorists when foreign power drops bombs and puts boots on the ground in a country they feel is theirs. Others become terrorists because they are forced to or naive minded people looking for some purpose in life. If all we care about is their propaganda we will be frozen to inaction because anything you do can be spun against you. Furthermore, the things ISIS hates the most is the cultural imperialism imposed on them. They don't like western values and don't want to adopt any western ideas since they are a threat to the foundations of their belief system. A threat they are willing to kill for. So really you are damned if you do and damned if you don't with ISIS. It's an ugly and complicated mess and comparing to Italians or Japanese is a gross oversimplification.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  The last time I looked, the perpetrators of mass casualty incidents in the US were at best only 40-50% immigrants. Even for most of the immigrants, I suspect they were radicalized subsequent to entry in the US. The number of terrorists that the travel ban would have stopped is at best in the low single digits. It is not at all clear that the number will exceed the number of people in the US who will become radicalized due to this policy (which I would also estimate at low single digits).
zeveb 10y ago
And during WWI there were similar issues for ethnically-German Americans. For whatever reason, I don't know much about what the ethnic-German experience in WWII was — maybe after the first war ethnic Germans just blended into mainstream American culture.
humanrebar 10y ago
I'm starting to think that Trump made this move partly to get his left-wing opponents to lose credibility with people in the center by doing something with (if you're generous or disinterested) plausible justification. That is, it's clear to me that people calling this "racist" might even be correct, but it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist. That looks a lot like being understanding towards Iraqis ("I know you're not all terrorists") while being bigoted towards Americans ("You're clearly all racist!"). Anyway, once that meme (doesn't really like Americans) is implanted, then Trump takes a hit today but get some "marketing" wins in the long run when it comes to other issues coming up (Supreme Court appointments, ACA changes, etc.)
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America. People who support the ban do so for a variety of reasons and are not neatly grouped in the political center as you suggest, just as people who oppose the ban do so for a variety of reasons and can not be neatly grouped on the left. it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist It's true that promoting such a perception would benefit the Trump administration, but as I always say to people seeking to capture some ideological territory, 'you don't speak for the American people.' At present the administration is rather overdrawn at the credibility bank.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America. You can refute all you want. I'm talking about real conversations I've had with real people. It looks like some Americans are hateful towards "hateful" Americans and it puts people on the defensive and pushes them away. EDIT: > you don't speak for the American people Right. That's not the message that people are getting. There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis. That sort of visceral feeling is hard to shake off when you want to later appeal to their sense of decency when health insurance rules are being reconsidered.
tptacek 10y ago
Also, a really great Popehat post on the same topic: https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/29/randazza-what-shall-we-do-with-the-dago/ https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/29/randazza-what-shall-we-do... When we observe that Italians were feared as enemy aliens in the early 20th century, we mean it literally: Sacco and Venzetti were "anarchists", but "anarchist" was the term used at the time for "terrorist".
gozur88 10y ago
How could this not be the case when we were at war with Italy? If the article had said Italian-Americans weren't seen as a threat that would be news.

149 points by pif 10y ago

It's a shame so many people can't function without being afraid/angry at a dehumanized "other". Sometimes it's outright malice (Syrian refugees today), sometimes it's softer but just as harmful ("the Japanese are going to take over the world!!" in the 1980s) and sometimes it's from within (Japanese and Italians in WWII, the entire history of black citizens in the USA). And when a new "enemy" arrives that's more appealing than the old "enemy" we reclassify the old "enemy" to be on "our side" (i.e. Greeks, Italians, etc used to be considered non-white).

humanrebar 10y ago
Sometimes it's other Americans who choose other political candidates.
falsestprophet 10y ago
It is important to understand the United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq. Killing people on a vast scale from countries and also accepting immigrants (including military age males) from the same country at the same time is more complicated than #WereACountryOfImmigrants.
- finid 10y ago
  But think about this for a second; if not for us destabilizing those countries, there will be no refugee crisis to deal with. We basically took the most and arguably the most prosperous country in Africa (Libya) and ruined it. Now we're refusing to take in those fleeing from our mess. We did the same thing in Iraq and Syria. But it seems we're not done yet. Iran is next. Bit is anybody protesting war against countries that can do us no harm? Nah! It makes for good war video games and Hollywood war movies.
- whatshisface 10y ago
  While that may be true, the odds that something that hasn't happened in eight years could happen in 90 days are pretty small. Most of what agitated people was the order's execution, which involved some fallout that may have been avoidable.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Yeah, why should we help clean up any of the mess that we've been causing? /sarcasm
- knz 10y ago
  > United States is leading a bombing campaign that has recently killed over 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? The bombing campaign is not occurring in a vacuum, is targeted at people engaged in warfare against us or our allies, and those conflicts have killed far more people than just the bombing campaign - including via the use of chemical weapons. I'm not trying to justify civilian casualties, the ongoing drone attacks on multiple continents, or even answer whether we should be involved in these conflicts - I just think the situation is more nuanced than "the US has bombed/killed 50,000 people in Syria and Iraq".
  - finid 10y ago
    Isn't it a bit disingenuous to omit the fact that both Iraq and Syria have areas experiencing active warfare? But what you seem to ignore is that the active warfare in both countries was caused by us. And in Libya too. Think about that. Those countries are now a mess because of "regime change".
    - knz 10y ago
      I'm aware that the US/NATO was involved in the Arab Spring. But again, I think the reality was far more complex - Mohamed Bouazizi didn't immolate himself because the CIA/MI6 told him to. There were videos from the time of people marching and being shot by their governments - those governments could have chosen to bring meaningful reform but instead chose violence. Likewise with Assad in Syria - the CIA/MI6 aren't making him drop barrel bombs or use chemical weapons. Even outside of internal pressures, geopolitics are at play as well - Iran and Russia are playing "the great game" as much as the US/NATO are in the fight against terrorism.
      - finid 10y ago
        Since the so-called Arab Spring started in Tunisia, you have to ask yourself why we didn't push for "regime change" in that country. The demonstrations in Syria were not spontaneous. They were engineered. If you have time, read the email exchanges between the US ambassador to Syria and H. Clinton. Regarding Iran and Russia playing "the great game", they're supporting the legitimate govt of that country. Without their support, Assad would have been dead years ago, and Syria would have been in worse shape than it is now. You might start by reading https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328 https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328 Edit: Added WikiLeaks links
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
osullivj 10y ago
Göring [1]: "the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country." [1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring
uxp100 10y ago
Just a shitty event some may not be aware of RE: 80s attitudes towards Japanese success: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Vincent_Chin (Since the first paragraph doesn't spell this out, Vincent's murderers thought he was Japanese.)

saycheese 10y ago

Executive Order 9066: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066

daemonk 10y ago

Seems like a lot of these historical incidents are being brought up recently. They are certainly interesting and perhaps show that humanity as a whole tend to repeat the same actions. But is it also the goal to attempt to justify the current immigration ban by citing history? Conway brought up the Obama's tightening of the Iraqi immigration during his term. Does that somehow justify Trump's immigration ban? I guess you can say she is just pointing out the media hypocrisy in being less judgmental with Obama than with Trump and that may be fair. But ultimately it is just a distraction in some sense. I fear Trump's camp is sticking to the "the media is hypocritical" campaign as a distraction. I guess it's a clever way to use the free bad press.

mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
People in Trump's camp have used the Japanese internment as "precedent" for a Muslim ban. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-internment-muslim-registry.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/us/politics/japanese-inte...
- melling 10y ago
  Why is called a Muslim ban? The Muslin world is around 1.7 billion people, and dozens of countries (almost 1/3 of world population): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Muslim_Percent_Population_v2.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e4/Muslim_Percen... And we have over 3 million Muslims in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_States People seem to label everything in politics with a positive or negative name, depending on their beliefs. The left and right are so noisy with their claims, I'm having a hard time filtering through all the noise. If we could use a little math in our labeling, we wouldn't get an equality on the ban being for "Muslims". Perhaps we could have our Deep Learning machines come up with Classification names.
  - krapp 10y ago
    Why do people keep assuming the intent behind this cannot be to ban Muslims because it doesn't ban all Muslims?

yread 10y ago

There was heavy discrimination of Germans as well during both World Wars https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5of8na/if_the_midwest_was_mostly_settled_by_germans_how/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/5of8na/if_th...

iambateman 10y ago

I love this article, because we have to remind people that Americans have been afraid of Italians and Germans and Swedes and Jews and the Japanese and Muslims and the Chinese and DEFINITELY the Irish at one time or another. Established groups feared new groups. But in the end, these people generally brought new innovations and economic growth and interesting new foods. They mashed new cultures with old - not without pain - and eventually gave us General Tso's Chicken. In other words, it's gonna be alright. ^^ this is what I tell people who support Muslim bans. I'm not sure if it helps them, but it helps me.

conistonwater 10y ago
I don't know how well it works on Trump supporters, but there's something that bugs me about this argument. It seems to take a moral issue (do you treat other people well?), and replace it with an economic issue (do you know of inventions, food, or some economic benefit from those people?). I feel like it's a racing certainty that many Italian-Americans lived ordinary lives, and didn't do anything out of the ordinary—it's a quality shared by the vast majority of all people regardless of their origins. Shouldn't that be okay too? Otherwise, how important would someone have to be? Can we use binary search to find out?
- ericd 10y ago
  If one can't successfully appeal to someone's sense of morality (perhaps because they have different morals), one can try to appeal to their sense of self interest.
  - conistonwater 10y ago
    This one, uh, I point-blank refuse to believe. The moral principles about how you can treat other people are so widespread and uniform (made it into the bloody bible, even; the only bit that everybody knows from that MLK speech is about this), that you're gonna have some serious convincing to do, before I believe that people "have different morals". It seems more believable that people have just the same morals they always did, but are applying them very selectively without proper justification (as it always is with prejudice).

joshuaheard 10y ago

I researched this some after Trump's executive order, and it is interesting because most people know about the Japanese internment because it was the largest, but we also interned Italians and Germans. These three groups were also prohibited from buying certain items that could potentially be used in sabotage.

cafard 10y ago
Nations have commonly interned enemy aliens, e.g. P.G. Wodehouse. However, one hell of a lot of the "Japanese" interned were in fact native-born citizens. My German-born great-grandparents were not molested by the government during WW I, though there was harassment of Germans and German-speakers. And in WW II the US had admirals and generals with names like Nimitz, Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Gerow.
- blincoln 10y ago
  Counterpoint: my German great-grandparents and their relatives were interred by the US during WWII. They lost most of their possessions, just like the Japanese prisoners.

JackFr 10y ago

> By the 1920s, pseudo-scientists and polemicists in the 1920s popularized the notion that Italians were a separate race from Anglo-Americans. These scientists were 'pseudo' only in retrospect. It literally took a world war to knock eugenicists out of the mainstream. As we pat ourselves on the back today for being so rational and enlightened, we would do well to remember episodes like that and restore some sense of humility. The progressives of that era considered themselves no less enlightened and rational than we do ourselves.

reese_john 10y ago
Related: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
To their credit, race was thought of differently before the discovery of the double helix. It was only until the 70s that people commonly believed that Neanderthals became white people because their bones were discovered in Europe, and that Homo Erectus created the Asian "race" because their bones were discovered in Asia. Nowadays race more often means skin color and a deterministic culture, with the occasional addition of crude metrics such as IQ to justify preexisting biases.
vixen99 10y ago
Just to be clear, this was not a small group of pseudo intellectuals. Eugenics was applauded almost universally by Progessives and Conservatives among others. Included we can count J. Maynard Keynes, Irving Fischer ('prevention of breeding of the worst'), Gunnar Myrdal (economics Nobel Prize) Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, Sidney Webb and Julian Huxley, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill and dozens of other famous names. You can say that eugenics was 'received opinion' in that era.
- nemild 10y ago
  And even later it was someone like William Shockley, inventor of the transistor and Nobel prize winner.
- 10y ago

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

My great-uncle was one of them. A second-generation immigrant, his father forbade any utterance of Italian in his household. But my great-uncle - born American - nontheless dealt with discrimination, and so he went a step further and changed his Italian name to Bill Morgan. Bill loved his country so much that when he failed the physical for the OSS - already an army captain - by being legally blind in one eye, he lied and cheated his way into a formal position helping the British train resistance fighters in Europe. He was just as conniving when he convinced his superiors to give him a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and lead a unit of French resistance fighters. He made a career with the CIA. Even in the letter he gave me when I was born (he died before I met him), he described in great detail need to be fit in mind and body to serve your country. He's buried in Arlington. So much for a threat to homeland security. If anyone is interested, he documented his experiences of WWII in an exciting book, "The OSS and I." It's hard not to enjoy a book with a chapter titled: "How to blow up a bridge." https://www.amazon.com/S-S-I-WILLIAM-J-MORGAN/dp/B0086N639A https://www.amazon.com/S-S-I-WILLIAM-J-MORGAN/dp/B0086N639A

logfromblammo 10y ago
This is heavily stereotypical, but you can judge the loyalty of an Italian-American with just two questions: Where does your mother live? What's your favorite [sports] team? If mom lives in the US, and the team plays baseball, NFL or NCAA football, or NBA or NCAA basketball, you could probably hand over the nuclear launch codes. If mom lives in Naples, and the team plays Euro-soccer, you'd better keep an eye on that guy. If mom lives in Windsor, Ontario, and the team is the Blue Jays, the test is inconclusive.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  I've heard this one before. One would be wise to remember that stereotypes typically have a small foundation of truth if you dig deep enough.

xHopen 10y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQVmkDUkZT4 When are we gonna , once for all, understand it

paulddraper 10y ago

Nice thoughts, but none of the groups you mentioned in your analogy have the worldwide penchant for terrorism that Muslim groups do. Berlin, Brussels, New York, Israel, Orlando, etc. Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens. I understand the tiny minority is the problem; just don't think your analogy to these other groups is an apt one.

ctrl-j 10y ago
> Italians, Germans, Swedes, Jews, and Japanese didn't immigrate to other countries and slaughter its citizens. Neither do Muslims? I mean, show me the statistics that show that they have a higher terrorism rate than other groups. The IRA, the extremist christian groups, and the mentally ill all do a lot of damage as well, but they're not being banned from the USA. I think Muslims get targeted by the media because they're different looking, and so they get reported on more thoroughly. I could very well be wrong, but I honestly don't believe they are statistically more prone to terrorism.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  > The IRA Indeed, Pete King, one of the group assembled to work on the "Muslim Ban" has been a long-standing supporter of the IRA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_IRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T._King#Support_for_the_...
- paulddraper 10y ago
  Overall numbers are hard to come by, especially for smallish incidents, but of the 23 acts of terrorism in 2016 killing a hundred or more people, 100% of them were done by Muslims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... > they're not being banned from the USA Were there countries with huge numbers of extremely violent mentally ill people, I have no doubt the US would limit or halt immigration from those places. There are huge numbers of radical or radical-sympathetic Muslims. If you have an open mind, I suggest getting a Muslim's take on the actual numbers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSPvnFDDQHk (warning, has numbers, may not be PC) It's fine to support open immigration, but denying that there is an unusual problem with violence in the Muslim community is indefensible.

sandworm101 10y ago

Irish, italians, russians, jews, chinese, japanese... is there a group that america hasnt at some time feared? Did canadians get thier turn? Having a guilty and irrational fear of some group, whatever the group, seems almost part of american identity. I cannot think of any period of american history that wasnt steeped in such fears.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago
The 1990s?
- sandworm101 10y ago
  Gays+aids? Urban black "super predators? Werent the 90s the height of white-flight and the bussing debates? Perhaps thats a different type, an internal fear. Perhaps the post-apollo 70s? Americans then feared nuclear war generally, but not russians as a people. Racism was a thing internally, but i cannot think of an especially hated outside group.
clock_tower 10y ago
At least one of these immigrant-panics was on to something: the hillbillies were coming to ruin our political culture, back in the 1700s. (http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-see...)

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

Some people would look at this and say "We unambiguously won WWII. Back then the 'greatest generation' knew what was needed to win a war, and wasn't squeemish about doing what needed to be done. WWII was the last major war we actually won. Since then we have become too politically correct to actually win wars. Trump will change that. We will win again."

deleted 10y ago

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KirinDave 10y ago

I like this article because it reminds us that "whiteness" is not actually a strictly racial identity. There are numerous factors that make someone "white" in America, which makes them acceptable to white nationalists. These purity rules can change over time to represent what's politically expedient. Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on. This is one of the primary reasons that fascism is such an uncomfortable situation for its citizens. Fascism thrives in the face of an "enemy" that can be defeated by force and a "strong leader." These enemies will be selected by convenience, not rationality.

krapp 10y ago
>Many young Americans are shocked to learn that Italian and Irish (who are often a baseline of appearance in modern America)were once not only considered not "white", but were demonized even as much as other races that Europe has traditionally looked down on. This was parodied in the movie Blazing Saddles, set in the American wild west, with a quote that I'd be [edit: apparently not] banned for repeating verbatim.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  This? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boO4RowROiw "All right, we'll give some land to the niggers and the chinks... But we don't want the Irish!" It's a nice film, its director made quite a few good films (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#Film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Brooks#Film).
  - sammydavis 10y ago
    Mel Brooks is probably our greatest American comedy director and writer, at least in the second half of the 20th century he's in the top handful. Who comes to mind, Blake Edwards?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

davidw 10y ago

The largest mass lynching in the United States was of 11 Italians in New Orleans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_lynchings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_lynchings

WillyOnWheels 10y ago
This page claims 18 to 21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_massacre_of_1871 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_massacre_of_1871
- mikeyouse 10y ago
  Then there's always the Tulsa Race Riots in which upwards of 300 people were killed while a white mob burned one of the country's wealthiest black neighborhoods to the ground while arresting thousands of black people and displacing nearly 10,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot Technically not a lynching I suppose, but as far as mass killings of minorities go..
  - masklinn 10y ago
    Tusla is more of a massacre than a lynching, Greenwood was bombed from private planes.
- davidw 10y ago
  Looks like someone needs to do some editing. In any case, it just goes to show that many groups have been 'the other' that people blame for problems.
toyg 10y ago
And there were Sacco and Vanzetti, of course.
- zeveb 10y ago
  > And there were Sacco and Vanzetti, of course. They were, of course, guilty — as their lawyer later told Upton Sinclair.

badmadrad 10y ago

Using this as a criticism of Trump's travel ban is a false equivalency. There have literally been a rash of terrorist attacks in Europe perpetrated by radicalized Syrians, Somalians, and Iranians. Not to mention the knife attack from Somalian refugee (who was getting a free ride) at Ohio State. Read through these lists and tell me there is nothing to be worried about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... Yes, being a victim of a terrorist attack is as likely as getting hit by lightning but that doesn't mean you should wrap yourself in aluminum foil and go outside in a thunderstorm. You usually protect yourself and take shelter. Its ok to protect yourself when there is a conceivable threat. That being said, I do feel the travel ban was hastily rolled out without much coordination and caused some people to be detained that shouldn't have been but to completely disregard the principle of it as misguided or racist in some way is just disregarding the truth of the state of world. In fact, many pundits are saying this going to create more propaganda or create more terrorists. First, I disagree with notion that we should care about ISIS's propaganda. People don't become terrorists because a country bans them. They become terrorists when foreign power drops bombs and puts boots on the ground in a country they feel is theirs. Others become terrorists because they are forced to or naive minded people looking for some purpose in life. If all we care about is their propaganda we will be frozen to inaction because anything you do can be spun against you. Furthermore, the things ISIS hates the most is the cultural imperialism imposed on them. They don't like western values and don't want to adopt any western ideas since they are a threat to the foundations of their belief system. A threat they are willing to kill for. So really you are damned if you do and damned if you don't with ISIS. It's an ugly and complicated mess and comparing to Italians or Japanese is a gross oversimplification.

jcranmer 10y ago
The last time I looked, the perpetrators of mass casualty incidents in the US were at best only 40-50% immigrants. Even for most of the immigrants, I suspect they were radicalized subsequent to entry in the US. The number of terrorists that the travel ban would have stopped is at best in the low single digits. It is not at all clear that the number will exceed the number of people in the US who will become radicalized due to this policy (which I would also estimate at low single digits).

zeveb 10y ago

And during WWI there were similar issues for ethnically-German Americans. For whatever reason, I don't know much about what the ethnic-German experience in WWII was — maybe after the first war ethnic Germans just blended into mainstream American culture.

humanrebar 10y ago

I'm starting to think that Trump made this move partly to get his left-wing opponents to lose credibility with people in the center by doing something with (if you're generous or disinterested) plausible justification. That is, it's clear to me that people calling this "racist" might even be correct, but it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist. That looks a lot like being understanding towards Iraqis ("I know you're not all terrorists") while being bigoted towards Americans ("You're clearly all racist!"). Anyway, once that meme (doesn't really like Americans) is implanted, then Trump takes a hit today but get some "marketing" wins in the long run when it comes to other issues coming up (Supreme Court appointments, ACA changes, etc.)

anigbrowl 10y ago
I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America. People who support the ban do so for a variety of reasons and are not neatly grouped in the political center as you suggest, just as people who oppose the ban do so for a variety of reasons and can not be neatly grouped on the left. it may not matter if it seems like they're calling middle America racist It's true that promoting such a perception would benefit the Trump administration, but as I always say to people seeking to capture some ideological territory, 'you don't speak for the American people.' At present the administration is rather overdrawn at the credibility bank.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > I dispute your attempt to conflate protests against Trump's ban on entry with an indictment of middle America. You can refute all you want. I'm talking about real conversations I've had with real people. It looks like some Americans are hateful towards "hateful" Americans and it puts people on the defensive and pushes them away. EDIT: > you don't speak for the American people Right. That's not the message that people are getting. There are lines being drawn and many decent people feel like they're being hated along with neo-nazis. That sort of visceral feeling is hard to shake off when you want to later appeal to their sense of decency when health insurance rules are being reconsidered.

tptacek 10y ago

Also, a really great Popehat post on the same topic: https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/29/randazza-what-shall-we-do-with-the-dago/ https://www.popehat.com/2017/01/29/randazza-what-shall-we-do... When we observe that Italians were feared as enemy aliens in the early 20th century, we mean it literally: Sacco and Venzetti were "anarchists", but "anarchist" was the term used at the time for "terrorist".

gozur88 10y ago

How could this not be the case when we were at war with Italy? If the article had said Italian-Americans weren't seen as a threat that would be news.