CL’ed:
re: #229 Blind Frog Belly White

I got into a discussion on FB, with a libertarian-type conservative who’s an IRL friend of New Mexico Bro (aka My Idiot Brother), who is generally able to discuss things respectfully. It was about the Electoral College and that old “We’re a republic not a democracy” wheeze.

One of his friends who joined the discussion posted something from an old Army manual, defining Republic and Democracy. I looked up the original manual, and HOLY HELL! is it racist! It’s about “How To Be A Good Citizen”, but it’s from 1928, and the intro warns that, up until 30 years previous, the US had been mostly populated with good Anglo Saxon stock, who had self-governing traditions, but that more recently immigrants had been coming from Eastern Europe, where there were no such traditions, and this was a DANGER!! to the republic!!

I scanned it. There was almost no mention of blacks, or slavery, or the civil war. It was as if America was entirely - and solely - made up of white people.

It was taken out of circulation in 1932, apparently, and mostly recalled and destroyed. But it give you some idea of the world back then. This was only a few years after “Black Wall Street” was erased in Tulsa.

It’s disturbing that this is still out there, still being quoted by otherwise intelligent people.

I think that’s the dirty secret of how the country got together after Reconstruction. We just acted like there wasn’t a civil war fought over slavery and while there were people in the different political parties that separated civil rights, it was never prioritized. I think the unfortunate consequence of how the New Deal helped so called white ethnics join the middle class is it also had their members forgetting that they were for a long time treated as not really being white. The UK doesn’t have a lot of Hispanic emigrants, residents, and or citizens because most of the people who left places like Spain went to our country, Mexico, Argentina, among others. But the UK does have a sizable Eastern European immigrant community that has gone up recently. The same British nativists that looked down on the Irish Catholics as intruders now do that to Eastern Europeans.