Postscript to Pat Buchanan

I was still steaming about Pat Buchanan's crack about Los Angeles' crime problems (specifically with gangs) being related to the fact that it has so many different nationalities living in it.

Funny thing, is, I just saw "Public Enemies" last night, and the more I read about Dillinger and his cronies, the more apparent it becomes that a pure European-American melting pot is hardly a guarantee against crime. Dillinger associates included Belgians (Baby Face Nelson), Lithuanians (Alvin Karpis), Canadians (Karpis and Red Hamilton), Dutchmen (Homer Van Meter) Scotch-Irishmen (Barker gang) and, of course, the obligatory half-dozen plain old WASPs or as Pat might prefer, unhyphenated Americans.

But wait! There were plenty of other notorious Depression-era gangsters, who, wouldn't you know it, were like, totally white! Mad Dog Coll (Irish), Bugs Moran (Polish-Irish), Charles Dean O'Banion (go on, guess), the Gusenberg brothers (German), Louis Alterie (French), Shotgun George Ziegler (Polish), and so on. That's without even mentioning the obvious ones like the Italian and Jewish mafias (or the new ones popping up in the 80s and onward from the USSR, the Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, etc). Hell, apparently even the Greeks have a mafia.

Bad news, Pat. All the criminals I mentioned were white, and most were committing fairly atrocious crimes as far back as the 30s, and it doesn't seem to have had a thing to do with immigrants, legal or otherwise. In fact, in a time of severe economic crisis, all these white folks seemed to mainly target other white folks (granted, almost certainly not because of color). It's almost like ethnonationalism played no role at all in their thought process! For a real treat, Pat, why not read Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York. You'll get to hear about all sorts of white-only gangs, going as far back as the 1860s-- long before Latinos ever darkened our door step.

Well Pat it's looks like yet again we've seen that race, immigration and crime have almost nothing to do with each other, or certainly aren't causal, as you delight in implying.

Your move.

More on Pat and his weird ethnic nationalism fetish, and the strange places it takes him, here. Apparently even neocons think it's creepy.