The immigration debate then and now....

[carolinw]

I've noticed something interesting as I'm working on my historical novel set in the 6th century AD in the Italy of the Ostrogoths.  The immigration/assimilation questions the Ostrogroths faced are frighteningly similar to the ones our various illegal/legal immigrants face now in the United States

Comments

[yakalskovich]

The difficulty of merging people -- I have been thinking about that, too. Theodoric even went so far to get a Roman to distribute the Goths among the Romans, and they did settle there for fifty years or so, with constant small-scale conflict.

And then the whole construct delaminated suddenly.

It happens again and again, as I've said elsewhere. It happened in post-colonial India, it happened on the Balkans, it happened in the Near East, it happened in Rwanda. Suddenly, ethnic groups that have been living peacefully side by side, if not with each other, are at each other throats, and blood flows copiously.

I think if we want to understand how to help ethnic groups to melt or weld properly, we'd best understand that delamination process -- because what we need to stand up against are the first signs of that.

P.S. That Theoderich quote? I think, nobody said that again between him, and Frederick the Great who decreed that in his land, everybody should be able to 'reach heaven in his own fashion' ('in seiner eigenen facon selig werden

[carolinw]

I think the original problem here is that the construct is artificial to begin with. Theoderich planted his Goths next to the Romans, and similar things happened in other places. The whole thing wasn't organic to begin with, a bigger power decreed that such and such ethnicities had to live next/with each other. And generally, some catalyst destroyed the whole construct. And the result is what we call so euphemistically now "ethnic cleansing" - call it by its true name - "mass murder," why don't we

[yakalskovich]

Not every such experiment has to fail - Frederick the Great successfully settled French Huguenots and Dutch artisans in Prussia, and that never fell apart. Frederick, however, fought lots of wars, but those were 18th century wars against neighbours, not really those brutal 'ethnic cleansing' affairs that people had in the 20th century, and in the 6th.

I think I said somewhere that I suspected Felix Dahn didn't fully realise how horrible such all-out war was, and quite comprehend what sort of atrocities people would commit on each other in such situations. In one of those 18th and 19th centuries for territory, you'd try not to break too much or unsettle the entire population, as you wanted them later.

[carolinw]

No, I don't think Dahn realised this at all - if you believe Procopius, starvation got so bad in some sieges that there were instances of cannibalism. Also think of the sack of Milan or Tibur (that one by Totila), where pretty much the whole male population got killed and what was left of the women was either sold into slavery or given wholesale to the Franks in the case of Milan. Dahn doesn't go there... but then he wouldn't, as that kind of thing wasn't openly discussed in his time