01-20-2018, 11:50 AM
(01-20-2018, 09:18 AM)nebraska Wrote: The reason Europeans fled to North America was to escape tyranny.
Danger and poverty also had their roles. Mass migration from Scandinavian countries to the USA had nothing to do with tyranny. The mass migration of southern Italians to America around 1900 related not so much to oppressive and brutal government (Italy then had a functioning democracy) but instead to lack of opportunity. More Italians settled in Brazil than in the USA.
Jews fled Imperial Russia (which was fairly easy to leave) in part because of poverty and lack of opportunity -- but also because of pressures against them for their religion. Paradoxically many Jews fled Russia for Germany, which like America was a good place in which to be a Jew - until 1933, when Germany came under the rule of a demonic leader.
And let's not forget the Irish potato famine. Emigrate or starve?
...If it were 'only' tyranny, then the biggest blocks of emigration to America would have included people fleeing Hitler and Stalin. I can imagine no Jew who, given a chance to emigrate from the diabolical regime of Hitler, would not have taken the opportunity. But Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union were difficult to escape at a time that Amewrica largely closed the doors to immigration.
Your thesis is terribly flawed. Refine it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.