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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (64770)	12/2/1999 10:24:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Neo, I would not credit the doctrine of "Manifest Destiny" -- to which by no means everyone subscribed -- for American encouragement of immigration. Immigrants were encouraged to come, often recruited to come, because factories needed labor, railroads needed labor, newly acquired territories needed setllers, etc., etc. You can't expand, after all, unless you have people to do the expanding with. And don't forget that the overwhelming majority of immigrants, up until about 1890, were Northern Europeans -- "Anglo-Saxons" and "Teutons" (who were welcomed) and also the less-welcome Irish. Although the latter were Northern Europeans, they were Catholic, and the master race is supposed to be Protestant, not -- ugh! -- Papist. The Asians were always personae non gratae (witness the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882). Then in the 1890's came waves of Italians, Jews, Poles, etc., etc., eventually sparking a nativist reaction that led to the racially exclusionary immigration restrictions of the 1920's. It was precisely those who subscribed to the "manifest destiny" doctrine who were most likely to support immigration restrictions on "undesirable" and "inferior" groups like southern & eastern Europeans, Jews, and Asians. It seems to me that you cannot speak of the "abuses" that occurred in "securing the continent," as if they were something incidental. They were part of the essence of an expansionist doctrine firmly based on a conception of racial/national superiority. When you read, say, about the deliberate -- and unpunished!! -- slaughter and enslavement of thousands of peaceful (if "inferior") California Indians by all those degenerate Gold Rushing greed-faces, it's enough to make you puke! Securing the continent, indeed! Good grief, Tsarist Russia expanded across the Asian continent in a far more humane fashion than Democratic America expanded! Once Tsarist Russia conquered a territory, it won the loyalty of local elites by making them members of the Russian nobility, then left the natives pretty much alone to run their own affairs according to their traditional laws, and it never exterminated them, or confiscated their land. (The North Caucasus, alas, was a different story -- more like the American one, for a variety of reasons.) Anyway, immigration has served us well, in the long run. Most of us are a mixture of nationalities and even races; and most of us have learned to be accepting and tolerant of others. And for all the ritual intoning about Our Forefathers, I think we are, on the whole, much nicer, much kinder, than Our Forefathers were. Joan