A Threat of "Porcine Tactics" Against Muslims

My comrade Sean Smith of the Wilmore City Ale House sent me news from Norway, where anti-immigrant politicians threatened to use "porcine tactics" to chase Muslims from the public square in Bergen (left) if they use it for prayer while awaiting completion of their mosque. According to the article in Aftenposten, a city council member named Kenneth Rasmussen suggested that "Bergen residents should hang up pig's feet and play pig squeals over loudspeakers to scare off Muslims, and claimed these tactics worked when he was a soldier for the United Nations in Somalia and Lebanon in the 1990s." Lovely. Apparently, though, this was just a threat, as I've found no articles that indicate that members of the "extreme populist party" ever did anything. I guess they were just trying to be "provocative."

Pigs & Anti-Chinese Racism in 1880 San Francisco

My colleague Eileen shared this image with me from the San Francisco Wasp, a satirical paper founded by Czech immigrant Francis Korbel in 1876. (Yes, this is the same guy behind Korbel champagne, oddly enough). Many of the Wasp's cartoons supported nativism and anti-Chinese racism, including "Devastation" from volume 5, August-December 1880 (above), which depicts Chinese immigrants as pigs with Denis Kearney, leader of the Workingmen's Party, illustrated as an ineffectual scarecrow. To learn more about the Wasp, check out Richard Samuel West's The San Francisco Wasp: An Illustrated History, published by Periodyssey Press. Another version of "Devastation" with a lot more wear and tear can be found on the Library of Congress "American Memory" site here as part of their "The Chinese in California, 1850-1925" exhibit.