At this year's 92nd Oscars, the Korean movie "Parasite" became the biggest winner, while "The Irishman", directed by the famous American director Martin Scorsese, was unexpected.
Based on the unsolved disappearance of Irish-American union leader Jimmy Hoffa in the 1970s, "The Irishman" looks back at the postwar history of the United States, which is rife with conflict and change, from the perspective of Irish-American killer Frank Sheeran.
Although the protagonist is Irish, he is talking about the Italian underworld - this is the favorite of Italian director Scorsese, and the italian veteran actors Robert De Niro and Al Pacino starred, which is regarded as a tribute to the "mafia classic film" "Godfather" series.
So, the question arises – why is it a combination of Irish and Italian? Is it just because the population is 11% and 6% of the population of the United States, each bringing about a high probability event?
< h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > irish wash away the stigma</h1>
The history of the large-scale entry of the Irish into the United States is somewhat earlier than that of the Italians.
In Europe in 1845, natural and man-made disasters continued: a sudden natural disaster ignited the flames of anger, and later the cyclical economic crisis spread rapidly throughout Europe, adding fuel to the tide of unemployment. It was this fungal infection of potato (potato) mold rot that pushed the Irish into the american field of vision.
Native to South America, the potato was brought back to Europe by Portuguese colonists, and was originally an ornamental plant before being discovered by the British for its edible value. With its advantages of hardiness and drought resistance, easy planting and high yield, potatoes have become an important staple food in countries in the cold zone of high latitude. Countries that use potatoes as a staple food also include Ireland, but at this time it has long been "no country".
The Irish were Celtic and had never established a unified state since moving into the British Isles; they were invaded by England in the Middle Ages, and continued to colonize until they were completely annexed by the British in 1801. As a result of colonization, society as a whole was degraded, and with the exception of a very small number of upper class people, almost all the people were reduced to sharecroppers of the British, and apart from their free status, their conditions were almost comparable to those of slaves.
Famine in Ireland
Thanks to the high-yielding crop potatoes, the destitute Irish not only survived, but the population exploded 17 times from 1660 to 8.3 million by 1845. After the outbreak of potato mold rot, the Irish, who depended on potatoes for 80% of their rations, quickly fell into distress and despair.
Despite the disdain and discrimination against the Irish, the British could not sit idly by.
However, the British believed in the theory of free economy and tried to relieve the disaster through market forces, but the starving Ireland was not a normal society, and no matter how the market adjusted the price of food, the poor Irish could not afford bread.
Britain's moderate relief measures seem to be economically rational, but in fact they sit back and watch the disaster expand, and even maintain the import of Irish grain into the British mainland as usual, giving priority to ensuring the local food supply.
In 1847, the Great Famine in Ireland was no longer easy to recover. According to a rough estimate of the disaster in 1850, the population of Ireland decreased by about 1/4, of which more than one million starved to death.
A group of sculptures in the Famine Memorial on the Banks of the River Liffey, Dublin, Ireland
The pragmatic British relaxed immigration restrictions to the United States and allowed the Irish to cross the sea to the United States to earn a living. From the data point of view, the United States moved more than 110,000 people in 1845, soared to 370,000 people in 1850, peaked at 420,000 people in 1854, and began to fall sharply in 1855.
The peak hours of 1845-1854 were mainly accepted by the Fleeing Irish. Irish immigrants are so numerous, proficient in English, and desperate that they are tailor-made for the American Industrial Revolution.
Ship after ship, year after year, the Irish, like the medieval peasant crusaders who longed for Jerusalem, came to america with their families in tow, with the dream of milk and honey. For this reason, they had to endure the test of the wind and waves, and endured the living environment comparable to that of the black slave transport ship. Typhoid fever, cholera and capsizing accidents caused Irish migrant ships to maintain a mortality rate of 20%, much higher than the 9% of black slave transport ships in the same period.
Typhoid fever, cholera, and capsizing accidents kept Irish migrant ships at a mortality rate of 20 per cent, much higher than the 9 per cent of black slave transport ships of the same period.
When the Irish came to America, both the host and the guest found that everything was different from what they imagined. Despite low psychological expectations – just eating, a single ticket drained the vast majority of Irish savings and arrived at port with a wide pocket of emptiness and only to stay in the city.
However, they lack urban livelihood skills, are partial and crowded, and settle wherever they are, they are prone to become the local majority ethnic group, which brings great visual impact and psychological pressure to Americans.
In the eyes of ordinary Americans, the Irish have strange red hair, ridiculous freckles, and are born with a lowly billet, far less advanced than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts; they are also alcoholic, frivolous and impulsive, hostile to reading, and like to resort to violence and threaten law and order; the most criticized is the poor health of the Irish people - in the Irish settlements, there is no feces and urine everywhere, and disease is rampant.
These were the result of poverty and poverty, but they were seen by Americans as the cause of the Irish's poverty, coupled with religious beliefs, from the workplace exclusion of "No Irish need apply" to the ugly image of the apes, anti-Irish discrimination is open, ubiquitous, and justified.
"No Irish, no negroes, no dogs" sign
In this way, the Irish have long been at the bottom of society, fortunately, in the city, there are many dirty jobs that "ordinary people do not want to disdain, and there is no technical content" to earn a living.
Thus, the sale of coolies by men and the servants of women were the long and common state of existence of the Irish in the United States. The Irish were willing to do the work for a dime, and for this reason they were constantly at odds with the black people at the bottom of the same place.
Of course, the Irish people with the doorway can also act as miners, road builders and river diggers, and even rely on Kong Wu's powerful physical capital to join the army, but the military camp is not a utopia of "no clothes, with the same robe".
In general, the social status of Irish people who worked hard in the United States was comparable to that of blacks, but the social acceptance was even worse than that of blacks, so that during the Mexican-American War, there was a collective rebellion of Irish officers and soldiers and defected to the "St. Patrick Camp Incident" in Mexico, which was also Catholic.
Until the American Civil War, the war became a glue to each other: the federal government was in desperate need of soldiers, Irish were in desperate need of jobs, and thousands of Irish people joined the U.S. Army, washed away shame with blood and fire, proved the value of their own ethnic existence, initially won respect, and began to be slowly accepted by other ethnic groups.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > a cherished family of Italian descent</h1>
Just as Irish generally refer to Celtic-Irish rather than Scottish-Irish, strictly speaking, Italians in the American population refer primarily to descendants of immigrants from southern Italy.
Before the large-scale entry of South Italian immigrants in the late 19th century, the number of Italians in the United States was less than 30,000, most of them were navigators, bankers, and craftsmen in the autonomous cities of Northern Italy, with a high gold content, while the immigrants in Southern Italy were basically farmers or agricultural workers. After their arrival, the Italians, whose social image was still decent, suddenly became "water-injected meat".
The Italian War of Independence was a watershed in the change of the structure of Italian foreign immigrants. During the war, there were more wars in the north, and most of the northern Italians who fled the United States to "avoid war chaos" were northern Italians; after the war, Italy did not get much better, at least southern Italy still maintained a pool of stagnant water before the war, and even worsened by the high tax policy introduced by the government for post-war reconstruction - poverty drove southern Italians to cross the Atlantic ocean.
Southern Italians share the same misfortunes as Celtic-Irish: most of the Southern Italian peasants were sharecroppers, but in Italy's mountainous and lowland environment, agriculture and transportation conditions were poor, production efficiency was low, labor intensity was high, and farmers spent a lot of time on the way to and from the country every day in addition to labor.
Since the collapse of the Roman Empire, Italy, located in the center of the Mediterranean trading circle, has become a place of contention, and southern Italy is a fringe area where different civilizations frequently clash.
Under the long-term destruction of the army, the southern Italians became extremely closed, conservative, insensitive, resigned to fate, and seemed to lack initiative in everything. Although there is no caste system, there is a kind of caste system, and the peasants are like untouchables. Between different regions, there is also open discrimination between nobles and lowly. In order to survive, the southern Italian peasants who relocated to the land reluctantly embarked on a trip to the United States.
The sea traffic conditions of the 1880s were more developed than during the period of mass Irish immigration: steam iron ships generally replaced sail wooden boats, and the voyage was safer and cheaper. In South America, the industrial environment of Argentina, a rich and developed agricultural power, was favored by Italian farmers who cared for the land, which greatly diverted the tide of immigration. Therefore, the number of Southern Italian immigrants who immigrated to the United States is not as high as that of the Irish predecessors, but it is also considerable.
The film "The Irishman" tells the story of conflict and change in the post-war United States
Americans did not like the overly negative style of Italian immigrants, believing that this was a concentrated manifestation of Catholic conservatism and backwardness, but the bad Italians were more accepted than the grumpy Irish.
First of all, when the wave of Italian immigration to the United States rose, the United States has formed a strong ethnic group with numerical advantages such as British, German, and Irish, and the impact of Italian immigration is far weaker than that of the Irish at that time; secondly, Italians have a negative personality and do not drink alcohol, at least to ensure that they do not cause trouble and do not disturb the people; finally, Italians cherish the values of the family and the Protestant ideas, like good people who will live a down-to-earth life. In fact, the Italian community gets along well with most other ethnic groups.
The only thing that is hard to accept is that the Italians' overly strong self-enclosed tendencies and nativist complexes are too out of step with the American spirit. Italians seem to see the United States only as a place to work and make money, they will send the money back to Italy to help relatives, although they are kind to people, but they are also reluctant to integrate into the United States, always remain estranged, and even return to their home countries after some people immigrate for several years. This non-isolated phenomenon is unique among all ethnic groups.
Francis Coppola's film The Godfather
Since Italians do not regard the United States as their own, American society will inevitably have a sense of "not my race, its heart must be different", and exclusion and discrimination will follow. Both the government and the opposition tried to change the Italians, but the Italians were unmoved and responded negatively with the intensification of the homecoming tide. Prior to anti-Italian discrimination, the proportion of returnees as migrants averaged 3 per cent per year, then rose to nearly 6 per cent, peaking at 8 per cent.
After the outbreak of World War I, due to the urgent need for military resources in Europe, the sea was full of dangers, and the export of labor to the United States was close to stagnation; after the United States entered the war, it also faced the problem of labor shortage. As a result, the U.S. government and opposition suddenly became friendly to Italians, and the army recruited 300,000 Young Italians in one go. Like their Irish predecessors during the Civil War, with the help of the war thrust, The Italians actively integrated into the mainstream and participated fully in social affairs.
After the outbreak of World War II, although it was also questioned because of its home country, there were Japanese Todi, and Italians escaped the crime of "enemy overseas Chinese" and once again repeated the glory of World War I. In the Pacific Theater, Lieutenant John Basilon, who was praised by MacArthur as a "one-man army", single-handedly blocked a group of Japanese troops on Guadalcanal for three days, refreshing the image of Italians.
Lieutenant John Basilon of Italian descent
Italians have also proved their existence in the United States with blood and fire. The self-identification that "I am An American, not an Italian" has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right", >", "Proto-society", "New society"</h1>
There are many commonalities between Irish and Italians in the history before immigration, although there are first-come, first-served, but the time difference is only 30 years, the motivation of immigration and early experience are similar, and the starting line is roughly similar. However, with the passage of time, the living conditions and social status of the two ethnic groups in the United States have become very different.
Irish people are scattered, no matter the military or the military, it seems that any profession can easily find people with Irish blood, and even nearly 1/3 of the Us presidents have Irish blood; Italians live a full and leisurely life, but the elite seems to be concentrated in the literary and artistic world. Irish are clearly better than Italians!
Naturally, this cannot be explained by the starting line, the Irish were in a more miserable situation than the Italians, and they suffered more pain and blood and tears; nor can they be blamed on the racial quality, the early Irish were as illiterate as the Italians; and it is even more impossible to render the love of struggle to win, because the Italians are generally more practical at work than the Irish. There are many factors that lead to success, but many times, choice is more important than effort.
As immigrants, there are natural places of emigration and infiltration, and immigrants will more or less have traces of emigration because of their age and circumstances. In recent years, Chinese mainland a popular sociological term "original family" (corresponding to "newborn family"), almost flooded, mostly used to answer all kinds of parents, and can always be attributed to the husband and wife's respective original families.
The reason why the concept of "original family" is popular is that Chinese mainland is in a period of drastic changes in industrialization and urbanization, with frequent migration of people, and the collision of different regions, class lifestyles and values brought about by this change through family combination. In fact, in addition to the difference in the size of the spanned space, a Sicilian sharecropper immigrating to the United States and a Jiangxi code farmer settling in Shanghai are no different in principle.
Let's call the place of emigration and the place of migration "the original society" and the "new society".
Migrants migrating from their native societies to their nascent societies inevitably have to adapt to the new environment. The more compatible the native society is with the nascent society, the easier it will be to adjust to itself. vice versa. So, how do Irish and Italians adjust themselves to the nascent society?
It seems that they are all facing the loess and facing the sky, both are Catholic, and they are poor and rotten, but there are fundamental differences between the native societies of Irish and Italians, which in turn makes a completely opposite choice in the self-adjustment of the new society.
The movie "New York Gangsters" tells the history of the Irish ethnic immigrants to the United States after constantly fighting to win social status from the perspective of gangsters
Ireland itself has long been oppressed by the British, and the livelihood of the whole people is in trouble. The Irish, who grew up in a continuous battle of wits and courage with the occupiers, have an extremely strong national consciousness, and are accustomed to hugging and twisting into a rope when things happen, unanimously external, and socially organized.
Italy, on the contrary, after the Roman Empire, due to its unique geographical characteristics and unfavorable international environment, long-term political divisions, constant wars, huge economic disparities between rich and poor and geographical differences, loose social organization, close to atomization; the southern peasants lived at the bottom of the pyramid, and could not even be counted as human.
Oppressed by their own people, they become cowering and shrinking, confining themselves to small families or in cramped spaces a little farther away. They are not good at organizing tandems, preferring to believe in small circles of blood ties.
In the native societies of the agrarian economy, irish and Italians lived with each other. The two ethnic groups, after entering the nascent society, except for a few Italians who became rich by growing grapes in California, most of them chose to stay in the cities on the east coast and do some manual work instead of returning to crop work. This is because the nascent society is a new industrial society with too little land available for farming.
The original social identity of the two ethnic groups reacts differently from the completely heterogeneous nascent social soil.
When Irish Americans entered the United States, the United States was undergoing the first industrial revolution, railways, ships, emerging cities, new cities, where the new city was built, Irish people were where to work as municipal personnel, police, firefighters.
The accompanying urbanization of industrialization has changed the social structure and strengthened the power of the common people. Despite being at the lower levels of society, the grumpy but not stupid Irish found an opportunity in it – I was poor, but there were many people; more people meant votes.
In addition, with the deepening of industrialization and the rise of the labor movement, the Irish took advantage of the situation and gave full play to the organizational experience and street agitation skills accumulated in the anti-British struggle to bring the American labor movement to life. Although the Irish took the violent, dark side of native society with them as a private goods, it is undeniable that it was through their participation in the labor movement and participation in government governance that the Irish quickly became a force to be reckoned with in American politics.
One generation sells coolies, the second generation gains a foothold, and in the third generation, Irish people begin to participate fully and deeply in social management, and consciously educate future generations elitely. Politics became a new faith and a new tradition for Irish people.
In this regard, the history of the Kennedy family is a typical example. So was The Irishman's union leader, Jimmy Hoffa, whose position as president of the truck drivers' union was even inherited by his son James.
In March 1961, Kennedy met with The Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt
In contrast, the time node for Italians to enter the United States is not a blue ocean period of opportunities everywhere, but they have not actively adapted, but have chosen not to forget the fundamentals, and transplanted the original society to the new society unchanged.
Industrialization and urbanization have facilitated population mobility, creating a society of strangers that can only operate on rules. The social model of Italians who only care about small families and small circles in everything is completely contrary to the openness required by the basic characteristics of "gathering" in industrial society. Who would vote for an Italian with a mind full of thoughts?
Italians cherish the family as a precious quality, but if they are too late, it hinders the integration of ethnic groups into the new society and the entry into a broader new world. Although the flexible Italians have achieved good results in business and art, and their economic situation is generally better than that of Irish, in the political and social fields, they are inexpressible. Even pelosi and Giuliani's generation cannot be generalized from point to surface.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
Returning to the film and looking back at Scorsese's work, it is not difficult to see his preference for marginalized groups in society, especially gangster themes. Thanks to his mafia films with Francis Coppola earlier, the originally low-crime Italians were exaggerated and stigmatized to some extent.
The movie "The Godfather" exaggerated and exaggerated the original low-crime Italians, and to a certain extent, they were stigmatized
"The Irishman", which was conceived as early as 2009, is just another epic masterpiece of the Italian-Old Man". From the perspective of video art, there are many remarkable points, but far-fetched attachment will force The Italians to be pulled together, which is not wise.
The Irish and Italians of European "serf origin" were once marginal ethnic groups in the United States, and through struggle, they realized their respective American dreams to varying degrees. It's just that a chest has a gully, and the world is just; a broom is self-cherishing and addicted to the trail. It can be seen that choice is indeed more important than effort.
Author | Zhao Boyuan
Edit | Xie Yiqiu [email protected]
Typography | Lan Fan
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