US-American view on refugees

Very interesting about the Gallup poll.

The Native American reception of the pilgrims may have been influenced by additional factors:

"However, in 1617–1619, before the arrival of the Mayflower, an epidemic wiped out up to 90% of the Native Americans along the Massachusetts coast, including Patuxet. Although generally thought to be smallpox, a recent analysis has concluded it may have been a lesser-known disease, leptospirosis. TThe absence of any serious native opposition to settlement by the Pilgrims may have been a pivotal event to their success and to English colonization in the Americas."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Colony

I cannot agree with that analysis. It inferentially presumes that the aboriginal inhabitants would have made war on the settlers if they had been sufficiently numerous. The most that can reasonably inferred is that there was not immediately any pressure from land as an available resource. The local trives were familiar with Europeans as Basque, Portuguese and French fisherman had long been landing on the coast of North America in preparation for their summer fishing expeditions. These fishermen could not expect to carry a fresh catch back to Europe, so they relied on smoking and salting the fish. Arriving off the coast of North America, they would leave a crew on the coast to start salt pans and to gather wood for fires. As a ship would fill its hold with freshly caught fish, they would deliver it to the temporary, seasonal settlement to be smoked (to prevent flies from laying their eggs) and salted to preserve the catch for shipment to Europe. We know that this was done as long ago as the 15th century.

In 1608, long before the Plymouth colony, Samuel de Champlain arrived in North America, and began the colony which would become New France. Where Québec now stands, he encountered the Ottawa, an Algonquian people. From 1608 onward, the French enjoyed good relations with the Algonquian people they encountered, who were friendly and helpful. They also enjoyed good relations with the Huron, whom the Algonquian peoples called the Grandfathers, telling the French that they had learned agriculture from the Huron. (See The Pioneers of France in the New World, Francis Parkman, Boston, 1865.)

John Smith was the first Englishman to visit what would become the Plymouth colony in 1614 (Champlain had explored the Cape Cod region in 1607). He describes the local tribes, naming more than a dozen of them, and apparently had no hostile reaction. Where Plymouth, Massachusetts would be founded, there was an Indian town or more than 2000 people. The plague suffered by the aboriginals swept through the area in that same year of 1614, but there is no reason to attribute this to Smith's visit, and no evidence of any hostility or resentment among the aboriginal inhabitants.

The Massachusets, Mohegan, Wampanoag, Pequot and Narragansett were all Algonquian-speaking people, and the evidence is that they were as friendly and helpful as their linguistic cousins whom Champlain encountered in the valley of the St. Laurent. In fact, there were no hostilities until the outbreak of the Pequot War in 1634. By then, the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay was by far the largest, and the Wampanoag and Mohegan traded with them, while the Pequot traded with the Dutch to the west in New Amsterdam. It would not be reasonable to ignore the great accession of land which the Puritans had also in view--John Winthrop declared the Pequot "limbs of Satan," providing an excuse to make war.

While the plagues of the period 1614-17 were devastating for the local tribes, it is ridiculous to suggest that the aboriginals were obliged to accept European colonization because they were too weak to prevent it. There were 102 passengers and 5o crew members (half of whom died over the winter) aboard Mayflower. Had there been outright hostility, the local aboriginals could easily have overwhelmed them--many were ill and nearly half of the passengers were women and children.

John Smith in Jamestown in 1608:

"After that, Smith tried to get food from the Native Americans and it took threats of military force against the Native Americans for them to comply. Powhatan was alarmed at the great number of white men coming and was trying to starve them out."

(Citing: Snell, Tee Loftin (1974). The wild shores: America's beginnings. Washington DC: National Geographic Society (U.S.), Special Publications Division.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Smith_(explorer)

Setanta wrote: "There were 102 passengers and 5o crew members (half of whom died over the winter) aboard Mayflower. Had there been outright hostility, the local aboriginals could easily have overwhelmed them--many were ill and nearly half of the passengers were women and children."

Probably true, but irrelevant. As the text cited above shows, it wasn't the initial colony that the natives found threatening, but the subsequent expansion. Later, when the number of Europeans swelled still further, a native population undecimated by disease might well have decided that enough was enough and that the invaders had to be driven out by force: and their numbers would have made this more plausible to them despite the technical military superiority of the Europeans. The fact that European aggression increased as the growth of their colonies emboldened them, only increases the probability that the natives would have concluded that warfare was unavoidable. But their vastly reduced numbers made this less practicable.

(Against my better judgment, I decided to read one of Setanta's comments. Aside from a single lapse into derisive language, it seemed reasonable and made some points worth responding to. Time will tell whether that was a good idea.)

John Smith's comments on the situation in Jamestown in 1608 are hardly relevant to the situation in Massachusetts in 1620-21. The point, which you seemed to have missed, is that there was abundant evidence that Algonquian peoples were welcoming, or tolerant, and at the least not threatening to European settlers. The aboriginal inhabitants of what we now call Virginia were not Algonquian tribes.

You continue to either confuse or conflate the tribes in Virginia with the tribes in Massachusetts, when in fact, the two regions are separated by more than 500 miles. The death from disease to which you referred took place in Massachusetts. The alarm at the number of Englishmen arriving in Virginia was an unrelated event, taking place some 600 miles south of Cape Cod.

There is no reason to speak of "vastly reduced numbers" without evidence that this were true. The Pequot War took place twenty years after the plauge had hit Massachusetts, and nevertheless required the combined efforts of the English settlers and the Mohegan and Narragansett tribes. That hardly argues for "vastly reduced numbers." Do you really not see the distinction between events in Virginia in 1608 and events in Massachusetts in 1620 and 1634?

As for your judgment, good or better, since i saw you lash out at Walter and at JoefromChicago for no better reason than that they had mildly contradicted you, i had given up on you as anyone reasonable with whom to converse. I certainly have no regard for what you call your "judgment." I don't give a rat's ass if you have me on ignore, or whether or not you read what i post. Your pompous conceits are of no interest to me. I post for the record and for others who may read here, not in some silly hope that you will read and approve what i write.

By the way, Walter, for an anti-immigrant political movement in the United States, see the "Know Nothings," a nativist party with strong anti-Catholic sentiment, from 1845 to 1860. An anti-immigrant party by default was the Lily White movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was a racist, white Protestant movement (not an organized political party) which was sufficiently anti-Catholic and antisemitic to spread from the southern United States to the rest of the nation where anti-immigrant sentiment was high. The sentiments of the Lily Whites were sufficiently mainstream, that Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. condemned Margaret Sanger as a "race traitor" for advocating birth control and family planning. The "logic" of that was that lots and lots of little white babies were needed to one day take up "the White Man's Burden" (as Rudyard Kipling called it).

Thanks, Set!

Not all Swedes were that happy about Jews either before1939. Things changed to a certain degree.

During the pre-war years of Hitler's power (1933 to 1939), some 3,000 Jews migrated to Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. Because Sweden was neutral during World War Two, it helped facilitate the rescue of relatively many Jews from Norway and Denmark: in 1942, 900 Norwegian Jews were given asylum from Nazi persecution in their home country, and, most importantly of all, almost the entire Danish Jewish community, some 8,000 people, was transported to Sweden in October 1943
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg also saved thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest by providing them with "protective passports". He also rented thirty-two buildings, funded by the United States, and declared them Swedish diplomatic facilities, thus bringing them under protection of diplomatic immunity.

On the other hand, German companies were allowed to fire Jewish employees in Sweden. Also, Swedish immigration policy during the 1930s was, which the responsible politicians admitted, very restrictive against admitting Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazi terror and mass murder into Sweden, before the deportations of Norwegian Jews began in 1942. Jewish refugees were systematically discriminated against by the immigration authorities compared to other refugees.At the end of the war and in the post-Holocaust debate Swedish politicians and officials tried excusing their previous restrictive policy toward Jewish immigration by using the Jewish minority in the country as a scape-goat, claiming that the Stockholm Jewish Community or "certain Jewish circles" had been even more restrictive than the Swedish state.

Regarding refugees at the moment over 50% of the Swedes thought we should help as many refugees as possible
That was in September 2015 and in December is was around 40% who thought so.

"In the fall of 1621, the Narragansett sent a "gift" of a snakeskin to the newly established English colony at Plymouth. The "gift" was a threatening challenge. The governor of Plymouth, William Bradford, sent the snakeskin back filled with powder and bullets. The Narragansett understood the message and did not attack the colony.

...European settlement in their territory did not begin until 1635, and in 1636 Roger Williams acquired land use rights from the Narragansett sachems. Later, the Europeans and Native Americans realized they had different conceptions of land use."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narragansett_people

So, the Narragansett had been threatening nearly from the first. They understood the calculus of power, and the English offered them both an income (the English purchased furs from them for export to Europe) as well as the possibility of a military alliance against their tribal enemies (one which the Wampanoag took advantage of in a formal treaty early on). Since Narragansett territory was not settled by the English for the first fifteen years after the Mayflower landing (during which time the English greatly increased their local population and military strength, thus discouraging a change of policy), and the English made it clear in response to provocation/testing that they were quite prepared to use force of European arms, the arrangement was more satisfactory to them than war.

The local Native American population was then seriously decreased through disease and starvation following Standish's raid of 1622:

"Word quickly spread among the Native American tribes of Standish's attack; many Native Americans abandoned their villages and fled the area. As noted by Philbrick: "Standish's raid had irreparably damaged the human ecology of the region .... It was some time before a new equilibrium came to the region." Edward Winslow, in his 1624 memoirs Good News from New England, reports that "they forsook their houses, running to and fro like men distracted, living in swamps and other desert places, and so brought manifold diseases amongst themselves, whereof very many are dead". "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_Colony#Native_Americans

So disease was very much an active factor in the first years of the Massachusetts colonies.

The Pequot were actively hostile early on. In the early 1630s, even before Captain John Stone was killed by a tributary tribe of the Pequots, "Pequot efforts to oust Dutch kill Indians (probably Narragansetts or a subject tribe) trading at the House of Hope, a Dutch trading post".

But Pequot militarism was undercut first in 1631, when the tribe split into pro-Dutch and pro-English factions, with the latter splitting off to form the Mohegan tribe; then in 1633-34 the Pequots were swept by a smallpox epidemic. Between the two events, the Pequots lost half their warriors.

http://colonialwarsct.org/1637.htm

So again, we see disease, starvation, and still more disease, weakening the Native American demographics: something which surely affected both their strategic calculations and their tactical military effectiveness. And again, we see trade-driven tribal factionalism and competition influencing tribal decisions to ally with or oppose the English. The notion that Native Americans were children of light unaffected by contemporary realpolitik is a particularly fatuous modern dogma.

Setanta wrote: "I post for the record and for others who may read here, not in some silly hope that you will read and approve what i write."

That would indeed be a silly hope, and your forlorn abandonment of it suggests that -- despite all appearances to the contrary -- a tenuous thread still connects you to reality.

On the other hand, I would be remiss if I accepted the first part of your statement at face value. As all discerning members of the a2k community with experience of you know, your vituperative rants, consisting largely of unattributed clip-jobs (thinly disguised with low cunning), are your unoriginal attempts, driven by insecurity and a mediocre, truncated childhood academic experience, to prove your worth with haughty, belittling contrarianism. No doubt that is also why you aren't invited to parties and in the absence of a social life, are driven to inflict your superficial, tiresome, and personally abusive gassing on a captive online audience.

Setanta wrote: "Your pompous conceits are of no interest to me."

Odious hypocrisy was ever your strong suit. Alas, the jibe is ineffectual, proceeding as it does from an overgrown snot-nosed schoolboy.

Setanta wrote: "As for your judgment, good or better, since i saw you lash out at Walter and at JoefromChicago for no better reason than that they had mildly contradicted you."

Good and better, truth be known. But you saw no such thing; and since the truth is not on your side, you're driven to resort to slanderous misrepresentations. The fact of the matter is that (my playful commentary above notwithstanding), all three of you are defective pseudo-sentients. The fact that you are more consistent in your irrational hostility than they are, doesn't change that.

Now take your grubby dog's paws off my legs, you insolent puppy.

I haven't peddled any "fatuous modern dogma." In fact, the noble savage myth has a long history, going back centuries. As usual, you selectively highlight certain "facts," such as the hostility of the Narragansett. The tribe Bradford and the "Pilgrims" encountered near Cape Code were the Wompanoag, who had been the victims of a Narragansett protection racket--in effect, the Wampanoag were paying the Narragansett not to attack them. Bradford's gesture was to demonstrate the power his people had thrown in the balance on the side of the Wompanoag. This was all explained in the Wikipedia article you linked, which also states: "At the time the English started colonizing New England in 1620, the Narragansett were the most powerful native nation in the southern area of the region; they had not been affected by the epidemics. Massasoit of the Wampanoag nation allied the English at Plymouth as a way to protect the Wampanoag from Narragansett attacks." You have linked an article which flatly contradicts your claim about a decimated aboriginal population trembling in fear at the power of the evil English. That's a modern stereotype far more common than the one about the noble savage. In fact, the English population of Massachusetts was very small until the time of the English civil wars, when the breakdown in royal authority allowed much freer migration, after 1640. Mayflower had brought barely more than 100 settlers in late 1620. In 1621, Mayflower and Speedwell brought a few hundred more. I seriously doubt that tribes were living in terror of the English. John Winthrop arrived in Arbella in 1630, with three other ships. They occupied a hamlet on a peninsula in Massachusetts Bay, and renamed it Boston. That was the first large settlement in the area, more than nine years after the Plymouth settlement. No largte scale accretion of settlers took place until after 1640. Prior to that time, King Charles' government required would be migrants to obtain written permission to leave England, largely in response to the so-called "Pilgrims" who had first moved to the continent, before sailing for North America. The Pilgrims were not, by the way, Puritans, as were the colonist Winthrop brought over. One can no more view the English as some cultural monolith than one can do when looking at the aboriginal tribes.

I earlier mentioned John Smith because he sailed most of the coastline of what became known as New England in 1614. He reported on the tribes, their numbers and their trade potential. (Captain John Smith Describes Early Massachusetts, at History of Massachusetts-dot-com) Even if three quarters of the population of some of the tribes were devastated by the plague, there were still thousands of aboriginals while the English population numbered in the hundreds. As i also mentioned above, European fishermen routinely set up summer camps on the shore, which was probably the origin of the plague in 1614-17. The aboriginals were used to Europeans long before the so-called Pilgrims showed up to settle permanently. The relationships of the Algonquian peoples with Europeans were good, and more often than not they were friendly and helpful, at worst indifferent.

The Pequot War was a political and economic struggle between that large and powerful tribe and the tribes further east in Massachusetts. The Pequot traded with the Dutch and wished to divert the fur trade to New Amsterdam. The Mohegan and Narragansett enlisted the aid of the English, making the point to them that they would benefit from the fur trade being funneled through Boston. Your simplistic statements of the case, as with all of your simplistic statements about history at this site, derive from a shallow and incomplete knowledge of history, and a propensity of studying history by benefit of Wikipedia. Without a thorough grounding in a reliable historical narrative, you're going to wander into error, and not reading sources you link is going to lead you to make blunders such as linking a source which contradicts your thesis.

So, i will state once once again that by and large, the Algonquian peoples, from the valley of the St. Laurent to Massachusetts Bay, were friendly and helpful to the new European settlers in North America.

Ah yes, personal slurs is undoubtedly your best tactic, given that you don't know enough history to make and defend a coherent position.

Oh my! I feel the return of something to the thread...a presence. But it's not a mighty wind, it's a dyspeptic flibbertigibbet. And since I have him on ignore (and I DO so love getting the last word), I'm going to let the flaccid little "user-ignored" that he is lie there limply whilst I go find something comparatively interesting to do. (Perhaps I'll scrub the toilet. Joy!)

I love it when some idiot replies to me, saying that they have me on ignore. At least you do provide some small entertainment.

Your performance in this thread is equivalent to that hilarious thread you started suggesting that the French and the Germans were all descended from the Franks. Then there was that truly hilarious post you made in a thread alleging that the American ambassador to Japan and the American Secretary of the Navy knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor in January, 1941. That was a pretty good trick on their part, given that even the Imperial Navy did not know in January, 1941, that Yamamoto had ordered his chief of staff to plan for a possible attack on Hawaii in November, 1940. It was not until January 1941, when Lt. Commander Genda returned from sea duty that Yamamoto ordered him to being planning for an attack, specifically on the ship basin at Pearl Harbor. I know that you cited a source, but it was an unreliable source, and undoubtedly one of the FDR-Pearl Harbor conspiracy sources. That's the kind of silly error one makes when one has only a shallow knowledge of history. But even common sense should have lead you to question how those two gentlemen would have learned of such a plan when no one other than Yamamoto and his chief of staff knew of it.

Really, when it comes to history, you always show up for a gun fight with a knife in your hand.

For those interested in the Puritan settlement of Massachusetts, i recommend Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma; the Story of John Winthrop. Alas, it will have nothing to say about the narrative of English relations with the aboriginal people's. However, it does look at the exigencies of forming a new government, and the failure to deal effectively with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, which is a lesson in the failures of intolerance, and should be at least tangentially pertinent to Walter's thesis. The Puritans did not deal well with even English immigrants, if their religious principles were not acceptable to Winthrop and the other Puritans.

Merkel stated publicly she expects refugees to return to Syria when the war is over. Opinions vary on why she said it. Refugee carries the connotation of seeking temporary asylum, yet some say Merkel would never have intimated a time stamp on refugees' welcome were she and her party not under serious pressure due to deep resentment of refugees' behavior.

I don't agree that refugee has any connotation of a temporary situation. The religious refugees who came to North America rarely had plans to return to their homelands. (Some did return during the civil wars in England, but it was a trickle compared to the flood that flowed toward North America.) Certainly the German Pietists who settled in Pennsylvania had no plans to return to Europe. Several other sects settled in North America with no prospect of returning. I don't think one can say that of economic refugees, either. I completely agree that Merkel's remarks constitute furious backpeddling.

Whatever some say and regardless of what others think why Merkel said it: qua definitonem and law, asylum is just a temporarily status. (The "Aufenthaltsgesetz" regulates how long someone can stay here, something very different to the asylum and/or refugee status.)

To what behaviour do you refer here?

Gang rapes in Cologne.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35231046

Are Europeans and Germans particularly, pressured to pretend the offenses weren't committed by refugees? Many articles were written, such as the first one, warning against connecting the attacks with the refugee attackers.

Then, you have this: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/rape-refugees-not-welcome-protesters-7162503

I'm sad for the ethnic violence that seems to have migrated to Germany.