Who Are We?
Over at Gates of Vienna Baron Bodissey has a truly remarkable post up, tracing the cultural history of the independence-minded warrior spirit of America from the first Indo-European tribes of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, to the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Roman conquerors, Viking raiders, the English yeomen, and the American colonists.
For the tens of thousands of years of the Würm glaciation, Paleolithic hunting tribes lived at the southern edge of the ice fields in Europe and Asia. About 10,000 years ago, as the last of the glaciers receded, some groups chose to follow the retreating ice northwards. While their cousins in the warmer regions to the south were smelting metal, these hardy tribes were knapping flint. While the southerners were inventing agriculture, slavery, and the ziggurat, the northerners were hunting large game in the chilly grasslands and forests of Central Asia and Northern Europe.
Two major waves of Indo-Europeans migrated into Western and Northern Europe. Celtic tribes swept through Central Europe to take up residence in what is now Germany, France, the Low Countries, and the British Isles.
The history of Anglo-Saxons and the Celts is traced from the Roman conquests, the fall of Rome and the waves of Germanic and Scandinavian Viking conquests, and the ascendancy of first Christianity and then the Roman renewal via the Normans.
English governance was transplanted successfully to North America, but the character of the new land was not solely English. The landless younger sons of the gentry, the fugitives and criminals, the religious refugees, and the political outcasts who initially came to America were drawn from the most adventurous and entrepreneurial of the Anglo-Saxon and Danish bloodlines.
These, in turn, were soon supplemented by massive numbers of Celts, first the Scots-Irish, driven by poverty and political maginalization. They pushed beyond the English settlers into the Appalachian highlands…
This, then, is the complex American character, which is the largest facet of what is now known as the Anglosphere. But it is no more English than it is Irish or Scottish or Danish or Welsh. It is the character of the Men of the North, and is best represented by the Minutemen, the freeborn citizens who took up arms in 1776 to retake their ancient liberties.
What was originally a racial characteristic had long become a cultural one. It remains open to anyone who cares to accept the rules and join the game. After all, Thomas Sowell has shown that the descendents of African slaves adopted Southern redneck culture, and not just its positive aspects. Prior to the Multicultural Age the main attraction of our country was that anyone who came here, obeyed the law, and took the oath became an American.
The Pharaonic model was neither understood nor welcomed here. We are the descendents of those Paleolithic hunters, and when the Minutemen rose up in self-defense, they were, in effect, confronting another mastodon with their flint-tipped spears. They were a voluntary and self-organized group, taking collective action by common consent to serve a common purpose.
We are not so many generations removed from the Men of the North; their spirit can still be revived. The welfare state is only a recent graft onto the tree of Liberty. It is as ephemeral as was the Norman yoke on the shoulders of English yeomen.
The Men of the North faced lethal reality with nothing more than their courage, their wits, and a willingness to co-operate with one another. We will need to do the same again.
As I said, this is a remarkable post, well worth anyone’s time, tracing a heritage that we Americans are very much in danger of losing. Thosw who would deny this heritage are now locked in a battle to wrest control of the Democrat Party and ultimately the country.
Read the whole thing, and ponder not only who we are, but who we will have become 100 years from now.
