Exploring (mostly Cultural) Marxism in today's Left

This is a situation from (southern) Italy. The time is the late 19th and early 20th century. Around the time after Marx was known.

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When America Barred Italians

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By HELENE STAPINSKIJUNE 2, 2017

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Women like my great-great grandmother Vita Gallitelli came to America for more than simply a better job. Subject to the whims of their padroni the men who owned the feudal land upon which they toiled Italian women were commonly the victims of institutionalized, systematic rape. There was a practice known as prima notte that allowed the landowner to sleep with the virgin bride of his worker, which extended into the 20th century.

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The husbands couldn’t protest, since they would be barred from working the farm and their families left to starve. As it was, they were barely staying alive. In the 1800s, half the children born in Basilicata the instep of Italy’s boot died before age 5. It’s the reason Italian-American families hold big bashes for their 1-year-olds even today.

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The itinerant workers were considered subhuman and made 40 cents a day if they were chosen by the overseer, doing backbreaking work on land that was not theirs, walking several hours back and forth to the farm each day. They were expected to offer the padrone a tribute to thank him for the work crops, or if they had it, meat they butchered themselves. This was the basis for the shape-up on the American docks on which many of my relatives toiled when they came to this country and the kickbacks they were expected to give to the union bosses and even the mayor.

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In Italy, our ancestors were given meat twice a year on Christmas and Easter by that same stingy landlord but most days they subsisted on bread stretched with chestnuts or saw dust to feed the whole family.

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Opinion | When America Barred Italians - The New York Times

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Your solution to this problem would have been?Here was the idea then.

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ibid.

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So our desperate great- and great-great grandparents came in droves from Italy, spurred on by industrial barons in need of cheap labor who welcomed them with open arms to America. They would scrape together the 300 lire the cost of three houses at the time to book passage here, to the land of dreams, where menial, often dangerous jobs no one else wanted awaited them. Some, like my relatives, came here illegally, under false names. Or as stowaways. On one ship alone, 200 stowaways were found.

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From 1906 to 1915, the year Vita died, Basilicata lost nearly 40 percent of its population to emigration. The Italian landowners the same ones who raped and starved my relatives and maybe yours were devastated by American emigration, left with too few hands to work their land.

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Is this non Marxist solution to human oppression problems satisfactory to you?There were critics.

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ibid.

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The Italian government, initially happy to see its poorest and most troublesome people leave the country, realized that the best and strongest were now leaving as well, looking for a better life and higher wages. Before a United States congressional commission, a politician from Calabria testified that emigration from the South had gone too far, adding that he was sorry Columbus had ever discovered America.

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The United States government used the theories of Cesare Lombroso, a 19th-century Northern Italian doctor, to stop more of his suffering, starving countrymen and women from immigrating.

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Lombroso, a traitor to his own people, was convinced that there was such a thing as a natural born criminal. He measured the heads and body parts of thousands of fellow Italians particularly Southerners and came up with a description that matched the description of most of the immigrants coming over at the time: short, dark, hairy, big noses and ears.

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He compared them to lower primates and said they were more likely to commit violent crimes when they arrived in the United States than immigrants from Germany, Norway, Austria, Sweden, England and every other European country.

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Lombroso and a growing sea of American nativists branded the Southern Italians savages and rapists, blaming them for the crime that was on the rise in the United States.

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The United States Immigration Commission concluded in the infamous 1911 Dillingham report: Certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race. In the popular mind, crimes of personal violence, robbery, blackmail and extortion are peculiar to the people of Italy.

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The Immigration Act of 1924 barred most Italians from coming into the country causing immigration from Italy to fall 90 percent. Even though the vast majority of those coming to America were good, honest working people and not criminals.

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That Immigration Act of 1924 was what caused Jews to die in the millions, when most could not immigrate.(Ironically, Southern Italians have similar Palestinian/Israelite/Phoenician ancestry as Jews do. Many were nicknamed "Il Moro" through the past thousand years plus which means "The Arab" by the northern Italians)What would your solution be to this problem?How should the Italians of the early 20th century have handled this situation?

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah said "woe to them that build house onto house " ,which means that it is evil to own so much land that there will be artificial scarcity. Peasants weren't allowed in the Old Testament.But any effort to give land to peasants ( like 1954 Guatemala ) will earn your country a nasty date with CIA bombs.C-O-M-M-I-E!Communist movements were a side effect of massive racism & discrimination on the one hand and the unjust land ownership issues on the other.The same right wingers who claim that they themselves support "freedom" will quickly use the government to box people into a narrow corner. People who are trapped inside an oppressive situation will get attacked for both trying to get out and away THEN attacked for the progressive movements that they might join from the inside.

From the June 29 Wall Street Journal.

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Iraq's Kurds have de facto independence and are on the verge of declaring it de jere. They fight ISIS to facilitate the creation of a greater Kurdistan. Nonetheless, the Kurds, especially in Syria and Turkey, are hardly monolithic. Not all see the U. S. favorably. In Syria, Kurdish forces fighting ISIS are linked to the Marxist PKK in Turkey.

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The only mention of Marxism and Marxist influence in his entire half page article on post ISIS strategy in the northern half of the Middle East.So much for this Marxism is behind radical Islam.These Kurdish Marxist fighters are nationalist too.The communist party in Israel is where anti nationalist Jews and Arab Christians generally cast their votes.How can you fit this into a giant Marxist frame?How do you shoehorn the Arab Nationalism uprising against the Ottoman Empire in World War I?You can make sweeping claims but I can't find any evidence of any unique Marxist contribution to much of anything going on. I just can't.Sorry.

Faith on homophobia.

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"Pushing the claims of Cultural Marxism" makes no sense. Cultural Marxist is the LEFT for pete's sake. And all the conservatives I know complain constantly about multiculturalism, accusations of racism and Islamophobia and homophobia, which are all straight out of Cultural Marxism. So much for "nobody else does." You don't know what you are talking about, haven'/t a clue, just like the idea of smearing all us conservatives as Nazis, which is another tip from the Cultural Marxist playbook

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Faith from a later post.

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Oh good grief. Cultural Marxism was invented by Jews. There are just as many Jews who see through it and reject it. Were leftists born with some kind of brain damage that prevents them from making meaningful distinctions?

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Remember the David Horowitz issue, that we partially saw eye to eye on? The one I failed to follow up on. There is one issue I wish I would have covered right off the bat.I know that even the neoconservative Jews tended to hate the idea of housing discrimination against homosexuals.There was a right wing obsession (very much alive in the late 1990s for certain) with requiring a renter to be informed of a homosexual living on the same floor. There was also the support for preventing a homosexual for renting simply for being gay.There were conservative Democrats who wanted a warning if a homosexual lived in an apartment right next door. Then there was an issue of a required warning (imposed by law) if a homosexual lived on the same floor. Then a variation had a warning if the entire apartment had a homosexual (even 10 floors down from the unit that was being rented).I seem to remember Horowitz opposing the warning requirements. When he had that organization that had "popular culture" in the name.And the legislative requirements were quite reasonably labeled as homophobic (though he didn't use the term, but he seemed to shrug off the alarmism and fears of homosexuals wanting a place to live without a violation of privacy).A little background might have prevented your attempt to undermine those of us who hated legislative assaults on the privacy of our fellow human beings who just want to peacefully have a place to live.(I speak in the past tense since you seem to distance yourself from right wing obsessions of yesteryear - such as the once fanatical obsession to civil unions. I will grant that you might not necessarily agree with the right wing obsession on legislative housing discrimination and violations of privacy. I do wonder if you agree more with me on this issue.)