> >Let's face it, for a long time the US was the human sewer of Europe -
only
> >with the rise of Nazism and cold war it became the destination of brain
> >drain.
>
> No, that's not fair. I have convict ancestors on
> both sides of my family (in all likelihood, I
> can't be bothered finding out for sure.) There
> may even be a few Irish rebels. Americans are
> more likely to have Puritans and other religious
> zealots. Which is worse of course is a subjective
> thing.
>
> Anyhow, there's something vaguely elitist in
> assuming that the poor, uneducated and displaced
> who emigrate are the shit of Europe or any other
> place.
>
WS: That is one way of interpreting what I wrote. In fact, I forged this line of argument some time ago in response to the Bell Curve / hereditary IQ crowd - its basic point was that if heredity really matters in the way these folks argue, then the US whites are on the bottom of the heap because they are descendants of European misfits, criminals, and failures.
But the piece to which you are responding argued a different point - the fossilization of reactionary traditionalism in the US (and other popular immigrant destination countries). Peasant societies might have been traditional but not necessarily reactionary. However, this traditionalism often became reactionary when brought by immigrants to their new countries.
The reason for that were not immigrants themselves but the countries receiving immigrants - or rather their attitudes toward new immigrants. Those attitudes were often derisive, discriminatory and hostile. More importantly, to succeed in their new countries, immigrants had to adapt to new ways of life, values and norms that were totally alien to them. Consequently, for many of them their idealized image of the home country culture and tradition became a refuge and a reaction against their new environment - or rather those elements of that environment that they considered safe to react against.
To summarize, this argues that the reactionary traditionalism of many US communities has it s roots in the immigrant status of these communities, but it is a product of the US society and alienation it produces.
Bill:
> That is, if you want to accept at face value the
> prejudice that peasants are the shit of the
> world. In my experience, they are actually better
> people on balance.
WS: It depends - those whose ancestors feared pogroms would probably disagree. Otoh, those who romanticize "noble savagery" would argue to the contrary. My own thinking is that, ceteris paribus, peasants are probably no different than the urban folk - but the ceteris paribus part often does not hold. That is to say, the peasant folk were more screwed up by land owners and aristocracy than city dwellers, and that makes them more suspicious and more eager to lash out when sick and tired of shit they get.
Bill:
>The descendants of the English
> ruling class who emigrated along with the
> convicts to this place are hardly any
> advertisement for humanity, after all.
WS: I agree. They were scum. Many of them still are.
Wojtek