The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Erasing America’s Anglo-Saxon Heritage

Posted on | February 19, 2021 | Comments Off on Erasing America’s Anglo-Saxon Heritage

An inherent problem with the contemporary rhetoric about “white supremacy” employed by the Left is that it is ahistorical. The first time the SPLC accused me of being a “white supremacist,” I was dumbfounded. What does that term even mean in the 21st-century United States? No intelligent person could imagine — certainly, I have never contemplated — that we could revert to something like mid-20th-century Jim Crow. The Left’s rhetoric is about accusing people of secretly harboring such plans, however, and thus is based on a lie.

“White supremacy” has an actual historic meaning, and this term cannot be stretched to cover anything that liberals wish to condemn, as for example restrictionist views on immigration. If we are not allowed to disagree with open–borders enthusiasts without being accused of “white supremacy,” then no debate over immigration policy is possible. And that’s exactly the point, you see. By applying the epithet “white supremacist” to their antagonists, the Left seeks to silence dissent, in effect making it a hate crime to disagree with liberals.

And what does the category “white” signify, historically? For most people, through most of human history, there was little knowledge of racial categories as we now think of them for the simple reason that most people had no knowledge of anyone outside their immediate area. My remote ancestors, living in the British Isles, never in their lives encountered anyone from Asia or Africa, and prior to Columbus’s voyage in 1492, the existence of the Americas was unknown in Europe.

Only with the European colonization of the Americas, and subsequent advances in travel and communication, did the concept of race develop into something resembling our modern ideas of humanity as being divided into several large categories. Prior to this development, Europeans did not think of themselves as sharing any common heredity, but rather the English viewed the Irish as a foreign “race,” and the people of continental Europe also viewed each other as distinct “races” — the Germans, the Italians, the French, etc. — each with their particular characteristics. And these various European “races” fought bitter wars against each other. This is something I addressed last month:

Anyone who thinks the natives of North America suffered a worse fate than other conquered peoples in other places at other times is simply ignorant of history, including the history of England. The original population of the British isles was first conquered by the Belgae, then by the Romans, who made it part of their empire for about 300 years. In the twilight of Roman power, the province of Britannia was invaded by seafaring Anglo-Saxon marauders, from the vicinity of modern-day Hamburg, Germany. The Anglo-Saxon conquest marked the beginning of the Dark Ages of England, two centuries where the light of civilization in the island was practically extinguished. Scarcely had this Anglo-Saxon realm become somewhat of a Christian civilization than England began to be raided by the heathen Vikings from Scandinavia. Once the Viking era had past, and the descendants of those piratical savages incorporated into the population of Britain, England was conquered by the Normans.
By the time William of Normandy crossed the Channel in 1066, his was the fifth conquest of England in the span of about 1,000 years. Every successive wave of conquest was attended by its share of massacres, atrocities and oppression, but this history of our English ancestors is apparently unknown to young Americans, who are taught to despise themselves as perpetrators of heinous violations of “human rights.”

As I explained in that post, the establishment of the English colonies in North America occurred in the context of England’s rivalry with Spain and other European powers. The question was not whether Europeans would settle the area now known as the United States, but rather which of the various European peoples would accomplish this. While in retrospect it may seem impossible that the Spaniards (or the French, the Dutch or the Portuguese) might have beaten out the English in the colonial struggle for North America, the fact is that England faced formidable competition in this struggle. Spain had a powerful navy, and France was far more populous than England, yet nevertheless the English prevailed, and it was this hard-fought English victory against her European rivals that laid the basis for what became the United States of America. What is strange is that it is necessary to remind Americans of this history, which every schoolboy once knew. In their ignorance, our “educated” class now insists that our history can only be understood in terms of white-versus-black (or white-versus-POC), when in fact American history really was more England versus Spain (and France). Again, I remind you:

The oldest permanent settlement in the U.S. is not Jamestown, Virginia, or Plymouth, Massachusetts, but St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spanish conquistador Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. St. Augustine was founded by Menéndez, a commander of the Spanish treasure fleet, as an outpost against the French, who had sent an expedition to Florida led by Jean Ribault. Shortly after the founding of St. Augustine, Menéndez’s Spanish troops killed Ribault and about 350 of his men in two separate massacres.

This history is inconvenient for the SJW crowd, since the Spanish conquests in America are the heritage of today’s so-called Latinos, who for purposes of political activism are lumped into the category POC (“People of Color”), suffering together under “white supremacy.”

Question: Would America today be a better place if the Spanish empire had conquered the whole of what is today the United States?

Answer: I don’t think so. Nor does anyone else, for that matter.

Why is the southern border of the United States a magical demarcation between advanced industrial democracy, on this side, and that particular sort of squalor we call “Third World” on the other side?

Until you can explain this — i.e., the undeniably superior quality of life in the United States, compared to nearly any place in Latin America — you have no business criticizing the United States for an alleged deficit of “social justice” or anything else, for that matter. The fact that the U.S. quality of life is declining in some places (e.g., California) also calls into question the “social justice” critique, in that there is no evidence that advocates of “social justice” have actually improved the quality of life in those places where their political influence is hegemonic.

Why is it that in the 20th century, the U.S. and Great Britain were victorious as allies in the two most dreadful wars in human history? We defeated Germany twice, and added in Japan for good measure the second time, then as soon as WWII ended, we began the “long twilight struggle” of the Cold War against Soviet imperialism — and won that, too.

The very success of our civilization, however, is an offense to the “social justice” mob, and thus in England a couple of years ago, it was decided that “Anglo-Saxon” must be banned from the language:

Leftists academics are pushing to erase the term “Anglo-Saxon” from the study of history, claiming it is “inextricably bound up with pseudohistorical accounts of white supremacy”.
One such academic is Mary Rambaran-Olm, whose Academia page describes her as an “active member of the Medievalists of Color organization”. Her areas of interest include such topics as “Race and Critical Race Studies in Anglo-Saxon Studies” and “Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Post-Colonial Caribbean”.
Ms Rambaran-Olm claimed in comments to The Times: “Generally white supremacists use the term to make some sort of connection to their heritage (which is inaccurate) or to make associations with ‘whiteness’ but they also habitually misuse it to try and connect themselves to a warrior past.”
“The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is inextricably bound up with pseudohistorical accounts of white supremacy, and gives aid and comfort to contemporary white supremacists. Scholars of medieval history must abandon it,” concurred John Overholt, a curator at Harvard’s Houghton Library.

In case you didn’t guess, Mary Rambaran-Olm is a brown person, who is seemingly offended by the very existence of white people. Her desire to banish any reference to the historic origins of England — which, as I have previously explained, involved the Anglo-Saxon conquest of the former Roman province of Britannia — is just the symptomatic tip of a massive iceberg of racial hatred toward white people in general. Do not be deceived as to what is actually involved in this “woke” nonsense.

This is not just a squabble among academics in England. It’s part of the larger project of tearing down Western civilization in general, and this genocidal anti-white crusade — to call it what it is — is intended to deprive Americans of a knowledge of, and love for, our own heritage.




 

Category: Great Britain, Racism

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