Foreigners & How To Spot Them Featured

Foreigners and How to Spot Them

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, and I’ll spot the hell out of them

Even though by now most racially insensitive stuff is already out of print in the Western World, you can still find the “classics” online.

You can buy “Mein Kampf” in Amazon (used and new from $4.99).  And I recently bought a first edition of an American biography of Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gomez in which Venezuelans are described as the expected result of mixing lower races. That book is still in print, by the way, but new editions are listed in Amazon with a different author. Perhaps the ghostwriter paid to remove all the racist stuff.

This Penguin Book, however, is so ridiculously on point that it is hard to tell if it is real or not. You could argue about the usefulness of recognizing the different ways human looks have evolved around the world, but we all know that was not why books like this were published. Back in the good old days these were the faces of the enemy. The faces of people that shouldn’t be dating your daughter or looking after your business. People you had to, as the title explains, approach with care.

You could also argue that at some moments in time, you had to be careful about people of certain nationalities. 1943? Yeah, you better don’t tell that Germanic looking guy about that secret weapons project you were hired to design. But that’s not how it works. Defining foreigners is tricky and it was just an euphemism for not Waspy.

Now if they published a book on how to recognize assholes, that would be a timeless piece worth of any collection.

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