antoine-roquentin:

kontextmaschine:

antinegationism:

I may be an immigrant, but I believe in good old fashioned American values. Like apple pie, baseball, and unquestioning support for the state of Israel.

You joke, but “Foreign policy yoked by fixations of incompletely metlted immigrant cultures” is a longstanding trait of America

A lot of the Industrial Age immigrants came from countries with failed revolutionary movements. Liberal, nationalist, socialist, anti-clericalist, altar-and-throne clericalist, all of which picking up the French “the people should rule” theme and ran with it

Oh and did they ever get pissy about it. A lot of the northern or central euro types hated Prussia, which was the “feudal modernism” authoritarian state that was grindingly taking over continental Europe and helped to suppress people’s risings. So they hated Prussia, and its successor state “Germany”.

Which was complicated by the fact that German immigrants were probably the second most prominent nation in America, after Anglophone whites but before blacks (and they were filtered on “Germanophone who doesn’t want to live under European governments, anyway”)

But then in WWI the federal state started to pull together and aimed itself against “Germany” and all those populations bandwagoned on and created a massive wave of anti-German domestic repression that we mostly overlook now except Wisconsin v. Yoder

Also the Irish, christ, the Irish, their immigrants and descendants were always trying to get us in a war with the U.K. — the preeminent Atlantic naval force — over their own shit.

Hell they launched Al Qaeda-style attacks from us - starting w/ the Fenian Raids of the 1860s, where Civil War veterans spontaneously invaded Canada and invited Britain to spank us where they had merely love tapped us in 1812. The hilarious thing about Boston getting mad about that Rolling Stone cover “romanticizing” their bomber. From the Fenian Dynamite Campaign of the 1880s into the 1990s peace process, the city of Boston was the world HQ of terrorist bombing romanticization.

Maybe there’s a tie-in to “people smoking the scraped propaganda resin of the last defining war” tho, there’s also the bit where the US’s first soft antileft dictatorship, the Alien & Sedition Acts, was resisting an anti-British, pro-(Revolutionary) French sentiment taken too far

in one of the fenian raids, since there was no canadian militia of note between buffalo and toronto, the key leadership apparently pulled the entire military history class of university of toronto, who were about to take exams, to be military officers. they promptly assumed the correct stances for napoleonic war-era and moved into a box formation (ie what you do when cavalry charges at you circa 1812). the dudes they were fighting were all civil war veterans who apparently handled their single shots so well that everybody assumed they were using repeating rifles. the canadians got completely wrecked and 3 of the students died. it was a rout. anyways the fenians got freaked out at their success and assumed the british were doing some kind of crazy pincer movement and so they swam back to the us and hundreds of them got arrested or drowned.