Peter F. Stevens

Excellent. In today's attempts to poison the atmosphere for immigrants to the United States by the know-nothing nativist Trump-base (which, thankfully, is more than counter-balanced by the many decent Americans who remember where their forebears came from, and the checks and balances of the American constitution and judicial system) it's useful to read how shamefully Irish Catholic immigrants were treated at the time of the Mexican-American war. John Riley and the people who fought with him against the militias fielded by the American army and its officer class (Riley was known to avoid targeting enlisted men wherever possible) had no initial urge to fight on the Mexican side but 'deserted' to it to avoid the gratuitous violence visited on them by WASP officers in the American ranks. Any true-born Irishman could be tempted to say to himself, after reading this book, that he too would probably have fought on the Mexican side at the time. The book pays due honor to the American army officers and Mexican army officers who acted decently, i.e. in the exact opposite way to the barbarous West Point graduates and the genocidal militias to whose unholy racism many American gun rights enthusiasts and anti-Black, anti-Spick, anti-Mick, anti-Jew homicidal prejudices still pay homage (the latest tale of how this is continuing to happen being Spike Lee's great film BlacKkKlansman).… (mais)