Let’s hear it again for that wonderful thing called “diversity”:
Racist Aldi customer yells in female worker’s face that ‘everywhere I move there are fucking Eastern Europeans’ in xenophobic rant.
Okay, a couple of points. A British man shouting at an Eastern European woman isn’t “racist”, any more than an Israeli shouting abuse at an Arab is racist — both groups are genetically identical, the Brit to the European, the Israeli to the Arab.
That being out of the way, let’s look at the larger issue.
The only thing the newspaper headline got right is that the tirade was xenophobic.
And what, I ask, is that wrong with xenophobia (literally, a fear of strangers, now magically transformed into a hatred towards strangers)?
Here’s the thing. When you grow up in an ethnically-homogenous society, it is an inherent human trait to be suspicious of strangers, for all sorts of historical reasons which go back so far they’ve become genetic — countless millennia of social conditioning have seen to that. It’s precisely the same impulse which gets parents to teach their children not to get into the red van with a stranger. Outsiders, as any respectable anthropologist or Old Western sheriff will tell you, are potentially dangerous because they have no roots in the community, and often have values and morals which are completely different from (and in some cases are hostile towards) a settled community’s values. (And for a reality check: immigrants all over the world engage in criminal behavior out of all proportion to their actual numbers.)
Oh I know, in these modern oh-so tolerant and accepting (ha!) times, we should seek to deny our human nature because it’s eeeevil and diversity is wonderful and all that. The “melting pot theory” fantasists are completely wedded to that concept, even though both history and the human condition have proven that it is complete bullshit. The plain fact of the matter is that if foreigners are to come into a settled community which is ethnically and socially different to theirs, they are the ones who need to assimilate, to make the effort to submerge themselves into the dominant culture — it’s not up to the locals to accommodate them, even though you’re still going to find those irritating “Habla Español” signs everywhere. (That, by the way, is a courtesy and not an obligation, although many would say it’s the latter.)
I’m acutely aware of this, of course, because I myself am an immigrant and still speak with something of a South African accent after nearly forty years’ residence in my beloved adopted country. (Blame my vocal cords, which had stiffened beyond adaptability by the time I got here in my early 30s.) But culturally, I defy anyone, native-born or naturalized, to be more American than I am because when I came here, I was determined to become an American and not remain some malcontent foreigner forever rooted in my home country.
This is not always the case with immigrants, though, and that is why people like that Brit in the article let loose: he had reached the limits of his xeno-tolerance. Race had nothing at all to do with it.
Here’s the final word. In one of those little exquisite twists of irony, the Aldi supermarket chain is actually of German origin. But when you step into an Aldi store here and in Britain, all the signs are in English, not German; and the currency is local and not euros. And while Aldi often hires non-locals, that’s an economic rationale because immigrants are prepared to work for lower wages than locals, and Aldi’s marketing policy is to be the low-price retailer in town. But even this approach is fraught with hazard:
“You can ban me from every Aldi in the fucking world, the sooner this fucking store is shut down and kicked out the fucking UK the better.”
I bet he’s not the only bloke in town who feels that way.
Once upon a time, immigrants to America did everything possible to fit it. They came here because they thought America was a better place than the one they had left and wanted to keep it that way. I think most legal immigrants to America still think that way. It’s too many of the people here that think differently. I actually have a lot of sympathy for the Muslims that have come here to join the modern world only to have the slow reimposition of Sharia law on them.
And well said, as per usual, Kim.
I’ve worked with large numbers of Russian immigrants over the years, and many are better Americans than most native Americans. It’s almost as if people who left their homes and moved half-way around the world to ESCAPE Communism don’t want to see it implemented in their adopted home.
My last office had lots of people from Third World nations, and when the world comes to its senses and elects me Benign-Dictator-Until-I-Decide-I’m-Sick-Of-It, one of the requirements for entry (either as an immigrant or visitor) would be proven ability to use American plumbing fixtures. I swear some people stood on the seat to squat, and it’s depressing how often I walked into the men’s room at work and muttered “How the fuck did you get shit THERE?”
I think that all the SJWs who want to force folks to be more accepting of foreigners ought to start in Japan as a training ground. Then move on to China and purge “foreign devil” from the vocabulary. That’ll keep ’em busy.
Kim, while you may technically be a South-African-American, I think you qualify as a damn Texan, and as Woodrow F. Call would say, you’re as American as anybody from Tennessee. 🙂
That Brit might want to remember that if it wasn’t for a few million Eastern European Slavs and Americans he’d be speaking German.
And if it weren’t for the Brits, the Eastern Europeans would be speaking German.
If not dead to provide _Lebensraum_ for the “master race”.
Before WWI, Germany and Austria-Hungary dominated most of the Slavs other than Russians and Ukrainians. In WWI, the Russians collapsed, but the British and French fought a war of attrition to the point that any of them could have collapsed, and the USA only provided part of the final push. Freedom for the Slavs from the Baltic to the Balkans was part of the settlement. But at least the Kaiser didn’t want to exterminate any nations.
In WWII, the major actions of the war were between Germany and Russia – all the other Allied armies put together had fewer men than Stalin’s hordes. But Stalin survived only because the Brits persisted in being a threat to the German rear and eventually an American base, and because they pushed supply convoys to Russia around the long length of Norway’s German-occupied coast. If the Brits had made peace in 1940, Stalin would have faced Germany alone, and the American-Japanese war would have been a separate conflict. With peace in the Atlantic, we might even have been selling food, fuel, tanks, and aircraft to Germany – until Hitler declared war on us, most Americans understood that however bad Hitler was, Stalin was worse. (Unfortunately, Americans tend to naivete about _RealPolitik_; Churchill described the alliance with Soviet Russia as a necessary and temporary deal with the devil, but for 4 years Americans thought the Soviets were friends.)
I love the Slavics – and they definitely have a dash of Hun and / or Mongol in them. Those sexy eyes on women like Melania aren’t just angry or squinting (at least some of the time).
Having lived with a Serb (of astonishing beauty) for half a year, allow me to inform you that mostly, they’re angry eyes.
Or maybe that was just me.
Those that have met you say…..it was him (Heh).
Point taken, Kim. I would have one question for the British man. Would he prefer to abide that Slavic woman or would he prefer a Muzzie from wherever?