I have a hypothesis related to this. I believe that surviving being a child refugee in America is something that really brings out the grit in a person. Seeing the things your family goes through to provide a normal life for you in a strange and new place, overcoming ethnic biases, language barriers, and life on government assistance really brings out the attitudes of drive and perseverance toward reaching one's goals.
I'd be curious to see how the likeliness of refugees to reach higher income brackets over their lives compares to native-born Americans.
I was just speaking from my own experience; but I'm sorry about how I phrased my comment. I never mentioned that in my comment and it can be easily read as referring directly about Andy Grove (who I know almost nothing about).
He may have acquired his grit through other means, in his words:
> By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.
I'd be really curious about his viewpoints on the current US political landscape, considering he experienced real, actual fascism and not the label everyone throws around willy-nilly trying to tar and feather each other. Personally, whenever I hear the terms racist or fascist thrown around, racism and fascism never actually enter my mind, or at least extremely rarely. I just think "Oh, another person who disagrees with someone else," because that's how the words are used in modern day politics. The words have lost their actual meaning to me due to their incorrect usage, and over saturation of their usage. You can only cry wolf so much.
If the only time you can recognize fascists is when they already have power, then you are completely helpless at preventing fascists from attaining that power.
There are always fascists. Some people who "throw around" that word have correctly identified them, perhaps others are mistaken. Surely it is up to you to figure who's figured it out if you would like to prevent fascists from seizing power.
That's a little difficult given that he died in 2016. There are not so many people left alive who remember the hard end of WW2-era fascism.
The one I always refer people to, written in 1995 but applicable to any time, is Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism". http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf - written from his personal experience as a young boy in fascist Italy at the time of its liberation.
The full essay is long and detailed, and interestingly contrasts Italian fascism with Nazism; Eco's view was that Nazism was a specific philosophy and programme that was capable of clearly delineating what it was about, while fascism was much less intellectually coherent.
> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one
or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from
fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have
the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism
(which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic
mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have
one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.
But he ultimately distils it down to fourteen characteristic points. It is up to the reader to apply them to modern movements and see how well the resemblance holds.
(cult of tradition; rejection of modernism; irrationalism; disagreement is treason; appeal against intruders; appeal to middle class; obsession with a plot against the nation; feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies; life is permanent warfare; popular elitism; heroism as death cult; machismo; selective populism & anti-parliamentarianism; and "newspeak")
People losing their minds over this would sound a lot more sincere and principled if they'd been even half as upset about Obama placing kids in actual cages with a much higher per capita death rate. Now they just sound like ideologues grinding a political axe.
I saw a lot of people called racists because they disagreed with the implementation, if not the goal, of the US ACA health care reform. Now I see nearly every single presidential political candidate dumping on the ACA - whom I assume will shortly be labeled racists by all right thinking people.
I think his family had to do a great deal of adapting when their whole life was turned upside down. From his Wikipedia Biography:
> When he was eight, the Nazis occupied Hungary and deported nearly 500,000 Jews to concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Its commandant, Rudolf Höss, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months.[9] To avoid being arrested, Grove and his mother took on false identities and were sheltered by friends.[7] His father, however, was arrested and taken to an Eastern Labor Camp to do forced labor, and was reunited with his family only after the war.[10]
> During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria. Penniless and barely able to speak English, in 1957 he eventually made his way to the United States. He later changed his name to the anglicized Andrew S. Grove.[1][11] Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs:
> By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint... [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.[1]
Or maybe those people feel grateful to escape hell they experienced home and take advantage of all the opportunities America provides for them? That's surely true for part of my family that emigrated to US.
You kinda feel you get a new shot at life if you suddenly find yourself in a country so rich, full of opportunities and free as USA, especially if you came from war zone or a communist country.