Hitler's Health & How it Shaped World War Two

[Gaylord Focker]

*edited for leaving out the quote of ther poster i was replying to --see below.*

[ September 18, 2003, 11:42 PM: Message edited by: Gaylord Focker ]

[Gaylord Focker]

Originally posted by Comrade Trapp:

]Our goal was not nor did we wipe out the Native Americans, the goal was to relocate them, not kill them. Yes, we did go about it wrong, but it wasn't genocide.

Comrade Trapp

Would you call the Trail of Tears simply relocation?

[Panzer39]

Good point we did not; however had we not been able to "relocate them" to land we had no use for we most certainly would have committed genocide against them. We used Germ warfare, killed their women and children, hunted them down and put them all together on reservations so we could "protect" them from the settlers that would due them harm. On the occasion that we discovered use for the land we "relocated" them too, we would move them again under penalty of death for hanging around.

Germany "relocated" a large portion of the Jewish population by "persuading" them to flee to other countries. Thankfully some of the scientists who developed the A-bomb decided to leave. They than rounded up those who stayed and put them in concentration camps for their own protection. Sound familiar? I will grant that the Germans took it one step further with the holocaust. However, I do not find it a hard stretch to say that the we almost did the same to the Indians. Unlike the Germans we showed an once of compasssion and allowed them to live out hollow lives on reservations. We did a very wrong act, but not an utterly evil one. It would be like the Germans just leaving the Jews in consentration camps but not starting the mass murders. Eventually those there dwindle to the point of non-existance.

[ September 18, 2003, 11:52 PM: Message edited by: Panzer39 ]

[JerseyJohn]

General Rambo

"The future of the United States will be interesting. History proves nations come & go. We will make mistakes & have sin."

Yes, you've summed up one of my greatest fears, the future of this country and who gets to control it. The present election system is little more than a successful public relations campaign, little more than a prolonged media event. If the wrong people did get control of this country, there would be more than enough emergency powers for them to create an incident (the Reichstag fire!) and cement themselves in place by suspending the whole electoral process. It could be done. Easily.

In my opinion one of your best and most thoughtful posts. As one who's avidly read all 2615 of them to date, I consider myself qualified to say that.

[ September 18, 2003, 11:56 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Gaylord Focker]

Originally posted by Panzer39:

Good point we did not; however had we not been able to "relocate them" to land we had no use for we most certainly would have committed genocide against them. We used Germ warfare, killed their women and children, hunted them down and put them all together on reservations so we could "protect" them from the settlers that would due them harm. On the occasion that we discovered use for the land we "relocated" them too, we would move them again under penalty of death for hanging around.

Germany "relocated" a large portion of the Jewish population by "persuading" them to flee to other countries. Thankfully some of the scientists who developed the A-bomb decided to leave. They than rounded up those who stayed and put them in concentration camps for their own protection. Sound familiar? I will grant that the Germans took it one step further with the holocaust. However, I do not find it a hard stretch to say that the we almost did the same to the Indians.

I completely agree with you here. I refrained from posting before that if the United States were the size of Germany back then, a holocaust followed through to the end here would have occurred unfortunately.

United States history during the 1800's really is ugly, well to me anyway. Especially from starting out with the high ideals of the Founding Fathers, fighting for and gaining Independence, the Bill of Rights, even down to the clothing and styles of the 1700's appear nice in paintings anyway. Going from that into the theft and murder of the Native Americans, The Mexican War, the Civil War, the bank robbers, the assassination of President Lincoln, the robber barons, the theft of Hawaii, to the instigated war with Spain, the weird mustaches, to a move toward out right Imperialism culminating in the victory in the instigated war with Spain.

[jon_j_rambo]

The English, French, & Spanish did their share of destruction to the Natives Americans, Native Africans, South America, Asia, etc. The United States didn't even exist yet, so we weren't the first to mistreat Natives. USA had a couple of wars with England too. Europe's history as a whole has issues.

"I'm a stranger in a strange land, this world is not my home"

Rambo, Born in the USA & BornAgain.

[JerseyJohn]

Panzer, Gaylord,

Part of the problem with the White Man's treatment of the native Americans is there really wasn't any consistant Government policy that made much sense.

The earliest travesty was Andrew Jackson's "relocation" of that Indian tribe from the south; my apologies for not remember which tribe it happened to be. The lived exactly like the white people around them but were uprooted, their property confiscated, and sent to the Northwest, where they had absolutely nothing to go to. I don't know whether or not this is the "Trail of Tears" Gaylord was referring to, but I suspect it probably is. Anyway, that was unforgivable and set the tone for later crimes against the American Indians.

Various Washington administrations could never decide whether they wanted to try and absorb these people, keep them separate from the whites, let them roam freely in a large area such as Oklahoma (The Indian Territory) or restrict them to tracts of assigned land. Those settled in reservations were given the land in perpetuity, which generally meant what? Five Years? Ten Years? Or until someone found any sort of use for any of it, at that point perpetuity needed to be readjusted.

Regarding the camps that were set up for the Japanese, yes, another travesty. One of FDR's worst decisions. Not only pointless but blatantly unjust, the more so considering that most of those uprooted and ruined were second and third generation American citizens! There was a simple reason for this; the Government knew it could do so with the Japanese. It couldn't do so with German and Italian Americans, so it pretended their loyalty was not in question.

Also sent to those camps were known fascist sympathizers, members of the German-American Bund and many Italians who had openly expressed sympathy for Mussolini's Government.

Beyond that there is little comparison between those camps and the hell holes of Germany and Japan. In the American camps known nazis were even allowed to display swatztikas and zig heil and speak openly about how they wanted an Axis victory. Their children attended school in the camps and participated in sports and other activities. After the war many of the hard cases were deported. Unfortunately their families were deported with them; guilt by association, unjust but inevitable.

In retrospect some sort of confinement needed to be arranged for Americans who were known to have been disloyal, but it had to be done on an individual basis. If this had been extended to the Japanese Americans, as it was with the German and Italian Americans, it would have been befitting of the American spirit.

I hate to say it, but there was also an awful lot of racism involved in the actions against the Japanese.

[Panzer39]

Every nation has black marks, the English used concentration camps against the Boers, African tribes sold other Africans into slavery, everyone abused the native populations of the new world etc etc. No country is perfect, and no one should expect one to be. I think the USA has done a hell of a lot more to better civilization then to harm it. Everything we have done in our past whether wrong or right has led us to where we are today.

[JerseyJohn]

Gaylord

Everything you mentioned is true, but it can't just be taken out of context. What was going on in the rest of the world?

Before the United States swiped Cuba and the Phillipines, not from Spain but from their own rebelling inhabitants, Britain was using Gattling guns on Zulus, not in Great Britain, but in Zululand South Africa! Which is not an isolated incident. All the industrialized powers were taking what they wanted using any means at their dispossal. Why should the United States power brokers have been any different from their European counterparts?

The United States had all the evils, including child labor and slavery and the slaughter of a race of people who were inconvenient. The only good thing that can be claimed is, eventually, we abolished child labor and made some effort to avoid killing people for the land they lived on.

No group of people should feel it is nobler than the rest of mankind. The United States has been a bit more idealistic than most other countries, but we are not a nation of saints, and never have been.

[jon_j_rambo]

Sir Jersey

I believe alot of strange stuff about U.S. History & ponder many things. Did FDR know about Pearl Harbor & the Jap Fleet getting closer, so the carriers were moved away? Was General George S. Patton killed to keep him from the Whitehouse?

Something is fishy how most of our war entries involved a US ship getting damaged or sunk. Who shot JFK? (I do know who shot JR). How much oil is really in the ground? Does the governement know how much oil is left? With all these smart scientists, somebody has to know how much oil is left. The taxes in the United States are over 50% by the time you add everything up. Drugs dominate society. Divorce is 50%. The Nation lives for the fast buck. We measure success by the size of a Man's wallet. We worship sport's stars. Our music industry produces alot of crap. Movies glorify violence. Our politicians are a joke. The press is not believable. We will probably get WMD used against us. Manufacturing jobs are all gone. Already tech jobs are moving over seas. The State of West Virginia has second source their Welfare Department to India is the most insane thing I've heard lately. The list goes on.

Unfortunately, the USA is a target for WMD. If/when we get hit, you'll see a new One World Order begin to form. The One World Order will be Man's future plan to try to handle this planet. Hope it's not in my lifetime or I get Raptured

[Panzer39]

I wonder if the USA had at some point "gone evil" on a world domination trip how far it would have made it. United Nations of America?

[Gaylord Focker]

JerseyJohn , the name of the Native American tribe that you and i were referring to was the Cherokee tribe, who were very peaceful.

I agree with your post.

Racisms against not only the Japanese but Asians as a whole were rampant in this country at one time. I remember going to a museum on a field trip for school a very long time ago and seeing old cartoons of i believe they were supposed to be Chinese. The cartoons that appeared all over American culture were nothing more that bigoted mean spirited racists statements. I was used to seeing Garfield and stuff on the funny pages, when i saw this display at the museum it really made me sick, and sad that people can actually treat people that bad.

Also i would like to state that i am not under the impression that the United States is the only country with skeletons in it's closet if you will. If i recall reading correctly in the past, the Japanese did not exactly hold the Americans in such high regard or even as equals either and were very bigoted themselves for instance.

[ September 19, 2003, 12:43 AM: Message edited by: Gaylord Focker ]

[JerseyJohn]

General Rambo

Yes, agreed with all of it; we're watching the dismantling of the country and neither of us are supposed to understand it.

Now that we've gone this far I'll go a little farther.

On 9/11 I strongly suspected people within the United States Government had either set the stage of the tragedy for their own purposes, or even worse, engineered it by manipulating a lunatic fringe group that didn't realize it was being duped. I expected (and feared) that there would be a massive calling up of emergency powers and that this would be the Seven Days in May scenario many Americans have feared for decades.

A little further. Up till the morning of September 11, 2001, I was working on a novel with a retired, shall we say Government man. It was about the hidden government, New World Order, Illuminatti . . .. all things I considered interesting but dubious to say the least. My retired Government friend was writing this with me under a psuedonym. I knew very little about him, maily that he had spent his life working in inteligence and had been based in the World Trade Center for twenty years. We started our novel with the Korean War and were up to the Bay of Pigs fiasco when the Towers were hit.

That afternoon I called my friend, said aside from the obvious tragedy we now had to figure where this left our project. He clammed up, said he couldn't talk, and hung up. I went to his condo, he was a nervous wreck, said I shouldn't use a cell phone because they've been known to explode when someone's name was on a certain list. Also, he was packing his bags! He said he was heading off and didn't know when he'd be back. Now, this is a man in his mid-seventies, not a kid running off on a whim. I asked him to give me a call later and I'm still waiting.

Yes, that sounds like one big B. S. story, a lot of cloak and dagger nonsense, but I'm telling it exactly as it happened. The book is still on hold and is likely to remain that way.

So, do I believe there is a lot of unwholesome stuff going on? Do I believe a lot of it was going on in two vanished buildings I used to see almost from my living room window?

The future is scary. And it's scary for all of us.

[JerseyJohn]

Gaylord

Exactly, and thanks for the info, we don't normally hear much about the Cherokee in their real domain, only as Plains Indians.

I was fully aware that you aren't naive and didn't mean to imply you weren't aware of other nations misdeeds as well, my apologies if it came off that way, it wasn't intentional.

Yes, part of the reason for the resentment of the Japanese was definitely that White Americans felt they were looked down upon by what they viewed as foreigners. My 86 year old mother in law, a sweet old biddy, vehemently hates the Japanese to this day because all she remembers is Pearl Harbor and all the wartime propaganda.

In the fifties, racism in the United States was much more open than it is today. I know that because I was a kid at the time. Now this isn't rascism I'm talking about in some backwater far from civilization, this is racism I'm talking about in New York City! Blacks and Asians were certainly treated as though they were second class citizens. Some people may want to rearrange things to suit their revised memories, but I try to remember it all as it was.

Open racism didn't seem to diminish, as I remember things, till the early seventies. In high school I thought Lynden Johnson was all wrong in trying to legislate these things. Looking back, I now think he set the proper course. Actually, had it not been fot Vietnam, a problem he inherited, along with Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, I believe he'd be considered a very good president.

Racism is an odd subject to me. I was raised to be a rascist. My parents didn't know any better. The past twenty-five or thirty years I've tried to destroy those early traits, but it's very difficult. It must be extremely hard for people who, as kids, were forced to wear a sheet with eye-holes. Those from that kind of background who overcome it have my respect.

[Gaylord Focker]

JerseyJohn , no need for apologies, you did not come off in a negative way at all, i just wanted to make sure i was not coming off as biased since i only made mention of the United States and potentially left what i thought of other countries during that period to the imagination.

As far as racism goes I've seen it first hand.

I spent allot of time in South Boston growing up through the years. Boston itself still has plenty and it's not just designated to black and white, you got Irish not liking Italian and vice versa ect... if i was a racist I'd have to discriminate against myself being half Scottish and half Italian.

I've never been a racist but i am guilty of having used slurs in my life, and will not refrain from calling my mom Mussolini when she starts trying to bark orders sometimes.

I just see people as individuals, we are who we are on the inside, my skin color or anyone elses has no bearing on who i am or who anyone else is, though it would be nice if i could tan easier!

In any case i'm not here to judge and have the feeling you'd treat me the same whatever color my skin anyway.

[Gaylord Focker]

Something i left out and just thought of that would be worth adding, in Massachusetts you don't have to go to the city to see racism, I've been to plenty of towns in this state and it all seems to be the same, it's not like I've ever encountered a racist free town or city or anything because i don't think one exists in the world.

Vatican City mabe.....nah not even.

I'm hopeful that someday it will all be a thing of the past though.

[ September 19, 2003, 01:45 AM: Message edited by: Gaylord Focker ]

[JerseyJohn]

Gaylord,

This response was on hold for two hours thanks to Isabel. Not that I'm complaining, at least she isn't carrying us out to sea!

We probably came from similar backgrounds, South Boston and Brooklyn are can’t be very different. Although seeing it a couple of decades later I noticed how a lot of things had changed over the years. I’m also half Italian and found the Mussolini remark very amusing, I used to call mine Mammy Yokum from Al Capp’s Little Abner comic strip. The other half is German but the marriage took place long before those two countries were even imagining the Axis.

Their sort of racism was fairly subtle but constantly being expressed, so I grew up with it, didn’t like it, didn’t even agree with any of it, but it was a part of me all the same.

It emerged in my mid twenties, after I’d been around a while, was in and out of the Air Force, and no longer a kid. I became aware of how bad it was during a chess game in a park. It was a sunny day and it was just skittles games on a stone table. I was playing a Puerto Rican I liked and respected a lot and he laughed at something I said about a racist leader in the news. I pressed the issue and he said,

“Man, you’re the biggest racist I know, so who’re you to knock – (whoever).”

I became more than a little defensive but to my amazement, and great displeasure, the three other guys nearby chimed in and started throwing little remarks at me that I suddenly recalled making. It was a very revealing moment, what the Madison Ave guys keep calling an Epiphany in their commercials these days, only this was the real thing.

If I'd been a dedicated racist who wholeheartedly believed in the creed, things would have been easier. But I wasn't, just some sort of bigot who, under the surface, believed that a lot of people were on lower evolutionary planes than himself. I didn't want to be that person and had to find some way to change things.

I had to consciously pin down all my inner beliefs and ideas about people and do it honestly. At the end of all that I realized how bad it was, I was much worse than Archie Bunker. I had to work consciously for a few years to get it under control, and have been trying ever since to eradicate it.

My mother died a few days after the 9/11 attacks. She saw it on TV and we spoke about it in our last phone call. I remember exactly how she said it, “Well, what can you expect from the lousy Arabs, they’re even worse than the Jews and the Blacks!”

I couldn’t help laughing, even knowing she’d be dead in a few days, and she laughed on her end while my sister took the phone from her, so I’m glad my final memory of her is laughter, but her final words were racist, that's how deep it was.

They had a harmless racism in that they didn’t want to lynch anyone or send people to death camps, all they ever did was express negative racist opinions, and they did it constantly. The harmful part is in passing these views from generation to generation. Somewhere along the line it emerges in a destructive form.

Thanks for the color of the skin remark, I'm sure that's true of you also. I like to think I could do so these days and really mean it. Earlier I'd have been courteous and considerate but the racist feelings would have been there, hidden and very strong.

So strong that I wasn't even aware of them.

[ September 19, 2003, 04:28 AM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]

[Curry]

Folker you stated "the name of the Native American tribe that you and i were referring to was the Cherokee tribe, who were very peaceful."

The Cherokee was "trained" out to Oklahoma. IN US history it is called called "the trail of tears." (called that by the Cherokee's). However, they are not the only tribe that was deported out west. The Seminols from Florida were perhaps more wrongly treated than the Cherokee's in this regard. Many "white men" in that day (The Cherokee's were deported I believe around 1830) thought they were doing a good deed for themselves and for the Indians. Obviously we do not see it that way today.

However, one point I disagree with that the Cherokees were "very peaceful". That argument can be made of some native American tribes (mostly our in the far west) but I do not think it would apply to the Cherokees nor would they desire it themselves for they were tough warriors. The Myth some have is that the Indians got along with each other until the white man came. That is just a myth. The Indians had great battles and wars between tribes before the white Euro's ever game to America.

[ September 19, 2003, 07:54 AM: Message edited by: Curry ]

[jon_j_rambo]

"I'm George Armstrong Custer, officer of the United States Army. Now the Captain here tells me that you understand English, is that so? Because I want you to understand me very clearly. I know the only reason you have come here is to threaten me. If I don't promise to keep the miners out of Indian territory, you're going to start killing them. Isn't that true? Am I speaking too fast for you? I hope, I can make it plain to you. That I won't bargin with you about the miners. I will not be blackmailed into making any promises, I'm not in a position to make any promises. Whatever I decide to do, I will do, because it is right according to my way. I know you have human rights, treaty rights, moral rights, & if I should ever forget any of them, there is always Captain Bentein here to remind me everyday. But I am not a politician, not a moralist, not a preacher. When I say moralist, I'm mean, I'm not the best of all men. I'm a soldier, the only rights that concern me are the rights of my soldiers. The only duty that concerns me is the duty of my command. I'll make it very simple for you. The fact that we seem to be pushing you clear off the Earth is not my responsibility. The problem is precisely the same when you Cheyenne decided to take another tribe's hunting ground. You didn't ask them their rights, you didn't care if they'd been there a thousand years. You just had more men & more horses, you destroyed them in battle, you took what you wanted. And for right or wrong, for better or worse, that is the way things seem to get done. That's history, I'm talking about history. You are a militarily defeated people, you are paying the price for being backward. Whatever my personal feelings, and I'm not saying that I have any. There is nothing I can do to change all this. Do you understand?"

General George Armstrong Custer speaking to the Leader of the Cheyenne

[ September 19, 2003, 08:50 AM: Message edited by: jon_j_rambo ]

[Iron Ranger]

Nice read guys, and exellent job tieing up the ends, Curry. Thought I'd jot down a few side notes, some are real obvious but apply to the 'deap' ends of this discussion:

The Victors write the history - All this discussion on Hiters kills, USA kills ect... War brings out the worst in everyone, but the victors get to paint thier own canvas.

Might makes Right - this is not true but the world follow's this creed still. We in the western world don't see the basic's of this but go to Samoia with its Clan warfare - Indochina/Columbia with its sub goverments and drug war - Ivery Coast with its Diamond war ect... and in many places you will find some group trying to elimiant a another group.

Genaside of Native Am - Lets be realist, for right or wrong, the US tried to wipe out these many different groups. And we did our best against the least violet, the 3-5 (?) different tribes that lived on the west coast. I think we did compleatly wipe out one or two in Calf.

Bottom line,nice read guys -some very interesting stuff - Liked you post on the book and 9/11 JJ.

[Piumarcobaleno]

["I find the views expressed by Oliva and Piumarcobaleno offensive and wrongheaded to a degree with leaves me shocked. Comparing the US use of the atomic bomb with the Holocaust is wrong on so many levels. The US during WWII was, along with the UK, the saviour of the human race.

The age-old harangue of the anti-semite: that the Jewish people "control" capital is the position of the ignorant and the racist. There is no excuse for this type of comment, and it's revealing of the inherent brutality and vileness of the anti-semite permeates through the fuzziness generated by posting in a second language."]

If the second paragraph is somewhat related to the first (and it seems so, given the last sentence about the second language), i believe you really misinterpretated what you read of my entries, CC Baxter.

I ask you to show me where you can find anti-semite words in my posts.

The only wrong level of a holocaust\a-bomb comparation is the political\winner's ethic one. In my opinion Nazis killed intentionally thousands of people, and the A-bomb equally did.

I just said that killing someone is NOT a matter of good or evil, is just a murder; i don't care if you kill someone to end a war or to satisfy your racial hate, you are just another man who kills his neightbour.

And please. don't say that USA's victory in 2nd world war has really 'saved the human race', because that is the kind of sentence that Hitler and Mussolini used to convince their people that the war was right.

[Gaylord Focker]

Originally posted by Curry:

Folker you stated "the name of the Native American tribe that you and i were referring to was the Cherokee tribe, who were very peaceful."

The Cherokee was "trained" out to Oklahoma. IN US history it is called called "the trail of tears." (called that by the Cherokee's). However, they are not the only tribe that was deported out west. The Seminols from Florida were perhaps more wrongly treated than the Cherokee's in this regard. Many "white men" in that day (The Cherokee's were deported I believe around 1830) thought they were doing a good deed for themselves and for the Indians. Obviously we do not see it that way today.

However, one point I disagree with that the Cherokees were "very peaceful". That argument can be made of some native American tribes (mostly our in the far west) but I do not think it would apply to the Cherokees nor would they desire it themselves for they were tough warriors. The Myth some have is that the Indians got along with each other until the white man came. That is just a myth. The Indians had great battles and wars between tribes before the white Euro's ever game to America.

You make some very good points that i agree with, but in my previous post i meant peaceful as in they were very peaceful to Americans, i should have been more clear about that, my bad.

[Gaylord Focker]

JerseyJohn , i salute you for acknowledging, confronting and working hard changing some long held views you once had.

If i had spent my whole youth in South Boston, who knows maybe i would have had different views, but in the town of Winthrop as a kid was a much more diverse town. There were allot of Jews, i lived near a synagogue, my landlord was Jewish, though i was a pain in the ass to him form time to time ( dropping little fish tank pebbles from the 2nd floor down on to his head one at a time once) it had nothing to do with his race or creed, i was just being a kid.

A girl i was friends with had darker skin then me and i even made mention of it innocently when i was 6, just comparing our skin color and how hers was allot darker than mine, i thought it was pretty cool, and I'm glad i mentioned it to her so i did not inadvertently hurt her feelings. There were plenty of Italians and Irish too, everyone seemed to get along just fine, except i remember seeing a swastika spray painted on the synagogue i lived near one day. At the time i was just thinking what kind of jerk would graffiti a church, then when my mom told me what the symbol actually meant i was even more disgusted, and just didn't understand why people would be like that.

The times i have used slurs i never meant them against a whole race of people, for instance I've called my friends dumb mics before, or guineas or whatever just kidding with them, i don't even bother doing that anymore unless one of them makes some racist remark that they are not kidding about, as we all know there is a derogatory term for literally every race in the world, so just the idea of anyone being racist against anyone else make that much less sense not that it ever made any.

Though i do remember a time when i was in Somerville walking down the street with someone and he made mention of Arabs and what not since allot of them moved there and for some reason in my reply i referred to them as towel heads, he laughed, and i didn't even have anything against them, i don't even know why i said that except that when i was 21-22ish i had slight chip on my shoulder in those days.

[ September 19, 2003, 12:48 PM: Message edited by: Gaylord Focker ]

[JerseyJohn]

Iron

Glad you liked the book and 9/11 posting, after writing it I began orgnizing some of the material and decided to finish it without my AWOL partner, which will be awkward as his first hand knowledge was invaluable and also, the whole thing was his idea so it will be rough deciding how to treat his contributions up to the point where we stopped.

Gaylord

Yes, you've pretty much nailed down the main points. We also moved to the suburbs, I was ten, then we moved back to the city, renting the country house for two years, then we returned to the suburbs again. Going back and forth like that was good in the sense of being exposed to different types of people, but bad in terms of orientation.

In Brooklyn we lived with a Synagague a few doors down and earlier we'd lived with one across the street. It was a hodgepodge. I remember my older sister warning me when I was a kid to make sure the Rabbis never grabbed me and dragged me inside. She scared the hell out of me, I was around four and this Synagogue had huge brass doors that shined in the sunlight. Closed I'd hear muffled non-English coming from inside and it was easy for a young kid to imagine Pagan rituals going on inside. Churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, never had that same sense to me, but then I was regularly going inside one so there wasn't any mystery.

True there was always a mix of different caucasion types, but any prejudice in that regard was of a different nature; more a rivalry. An Italian and an Irishman might be prejudiced against each other, but in the long run either will come to grips with his sister marrying into the other ethnic group. This wasn't the case with what was perceived as other races. A marriage outside certain rigid bounds, in the fifties, would have been traumatic and probably led to a small wedding reception at best.

In my own immediate family, the "Merry Widow" crazy younger sister I mentioned in the General area a while back, did a lot to change that for us. Among her four was a Palestinian and a Jewish guy. They were both very likable. The Palestinian was ultimately too old fashioned for her, they had two sons and one day he decided they should all relocate to Palestine and it spiralled out of control, they've since had lawsuits and court orders against each other because he can't see why he can't raise his two sons his way and in his country. Naturally they never discussed any of that before getting married. I kind of sympathize with him because he had a lot of assumptions that were valid where he came from but meaningless in the U. S..

The Jewish husband was very easy going, the one with a heart defect which nobody knew about till he keeled over dead one day. He used to joke that her next husband would be a Hindu. It wasn't. After burying that poor unfortunate she had a quick fiery marriage with a Florida guy I never met, and has settled down since.

I've got to admit that a lot of derogatory things I'm inclined to feel about the Arabs didn't happen because of the Palestinian. We discussed Israel from the Moslem viewpoint and I became very sympathetic to thier situation.

It would be great if, as you said, all these petty prejudices cease to matter. In time I think that will come to pass. The biggest factor is positive exposure. Despite my feeling that, economically the U. S. is being hurt by all the rampant immigration (the horrible job market) in a social sense it's positive. Up till a few years ago I'd never known Hindus, for example, now we have four or five for neighbors.

Regarding resident aliens effect on the job market, they don't appear to be getting anything wonderful out of it either; three Indian men I've come to know followed the same pattern, they're here for a while then some visa expires and the Government tells them to leave. And it seems they're quickly replaced by some other guy in the same position. None of them want to return to India and they'd all like to become U. S. citizens. Which would be fine with me, if we only had the jobs for them and the people who were here in the first place!

Which brings us back to a new stage of the cycle, jobless or underemployed U. S. citizens who aren't angry at the government for creating this economic nightmare, but instead are mad directly at the people coming in and taking the jobs they rightfully feel should be theirs (but at a livable wage -- one of the problems).

It reminds me of survivors fighting for a life boat who, instead of being angry at whoever was responsible for allowing the ship to go down, are instead enraged against the other poor bastards trying to climb aboard.

[JerseyJohn]

General Rambo

Enjoyed that Custer entry. One thing that is always forgotten in discussions is what the plains looked like to settlers and to the natives. Endless expanses to both, but to the Indian there were great masses of white people racing to destroy both his home and his way of life. To the Settlers, mostly displaced farmers or working class people looking for a better life, an endless nightmare to cross with murderers on horseback looking to kill them at the earliest opportunity. Add to that the perils of bands of outlaw whitemen and the fact that a wrong turn meant dying of thirst! So these were not people who were in a mood to talk about human rights; they wanted to get where they wanted and settle down. Anything between them and that had to be eliminated.

Probably there was no chance, seen in the historical realities, of doing it differently. Sure, it could have been settled with greater fairness, but that can be said of almost everything.

Curry and Gaylord

Aside from the North American Indians tribal wars going back to pre-European contact, there was also the much larger invasions and wars in South American, primarily by the Aztecs in Central America and the Incas much farther south in Peru. Though records are scant regarding the details, they must have been very similar to the wars of antiquity.

In colonial North America, much of the fighting between the British and French was conducted between rival Indian Tribes with loyalty to one of the European nations.

[ September 19, 2003, 04:46 PM: Message edited by: JerseyJohn ]