You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Attributed to Leon Trotsky, but perhaps apocryphal.  

Yesterday, while driving home from Laramie after depositions, I listed to a Pritzer Military History Library podcast featuring a retired U.S. general regarding future wars.  It was quite interesting, and the speaker was quite insightful  Included in his comments was the quote above, made in regards to his view that a common failure on the part of the United States is to believe you can elect what wars you choose to be interested in and participate in.  He's quite right.  Indeed, the war with ISIL was at least partially referenced in his quote by suggestion, if not outright.

As I was traveling and haven't been following the news too closely I missed, until last night, that ISIL operatives in France had broken into the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy and killed, and by that we can say martyred Father Jacques Hamel, the pastor of that church, who was offering daily Mass for four people.  They came in and slit his throat, took the church goers hostage, and tried to use them as a shield.  The French police, as is typical for French police, shot and killed them.

These people, that is the ISIL operatives, are at war with you, assuming that you are not a completely observant radical Sunni.  If you are Christian of any type, you are their enemy. For that matter, if you are a Muslim of any other stripe, you are their enemy as well.

It matters not that you have done nothing. You may feel that you are safe and secure loving everyone and wishing the best upon all humanity.  It matters not.  And you'd better wake up.

People are expressing shock and horror that they'd attack a Catholic church in France.  But why wouldn't they?  They've brutally murdered Christians all over the Middle East and torn down churches, and let's be frank, almost all, if in fact not all, of the indigenous Christians they've attacked have been Catholics or Orthodox of one or another various types, and while it sometimes surprises Protestants to learn this, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches, disunited thought they may be, are so close to each other that they regard each other as valid and in the words of Pope Benedict, they are the two lungs of the body of Christ. The disagreement between them is not vast, even if real.

I note that as ISIL attacking Catholic and Orthodox churches is a significant event in ways that Westerners have a hard time grasping.  It's the ISIL equivalent of the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor.  It goes right to the heart of how they perceive us, our beliefs, and our strengths.  It's an attack on all of us, as at the end of the day, as one Central American friend of mine who doesn't attend any church has noted, "we're all Catholic".  Westerners live in a world which, as John Cardinal Newman recognized, has been so impacted by the Catholic Church that nearly everything about our world view, in one way or another, stems from that.  In the Middle East the Orthodox stand a close second, but then they would, as the distinction between the Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church and the Orthodox is one that a person almost has to be Orthodox or Catholic to grasp, and even a lot of them don't grasp it.

In the minds of our enemies, and they are our enemies, as they have chosen to be your enemies, we are all Catholics.  I am, of course, but in their minds, so are you.  You are a "Crusader", in their view, and by using that definition they use a flawed history of that defensive effort in the West.  We need to understand that as well.  The Crusades, a term that didn't exist at the time they were conducted, were not an offensive war against the Muslim Middle East, but rather a defensive war against the advancing Turkish influenced Muslim offensive.  They were not wholly successful long term, but overall, if we consider that they were part of the same history that saw Charles Martel arrest the Muslim advance just outside of Parish, we need to grasp what they're proposing to do.

They don't care if you go to Mass daily, weekly, or if you attend the Assembly of God church in the next town.  They don't care if you go to church at all. They don't even really care if you aren't a Christian.  They do care that you are not Sunni Muslim and that you have a world view that expresses a belief in the equality of all men, the equality of men and women, and the free exercise of free will, all Catholic concepts that the larger culture has adopted.  If you believe in free speech, free exercise of religion, the dignity and worth of women, you are their enemy and you deserve to die.  By striking out at a Catholic Church in France, they're striking directly at that, and they know it, even if you do not.

Well, you should.

And that you do, you have some choices to make, and one of those choices is whether you are going to recognize that there's a war on, and its of an existential nature so deep that it strikes right at the foundations of the world and what the world's people should be allowed to believe, or even if they have the right to believe anything.  

As part of that, and particularly if you are French right now, you also have to decide if your personal beliefs have any foundation at all to them. France, amongst Western European nations, has been particularly troubled along these lines, but all Europe suffers from it today.  You can decide that at the end of the day your values just boil down to it being nice to be nice to the nice, or you can really look at where they come from. If they come from nowhere, you are in real trouble, as they are then pretty meaningless.  If you know where they come from, you should act on that, and indeed, it looks as though France has in fact started to. 

I dare say, even though its a hugely unpopular concept in the West (not so much in the East) that it may also be time for Christian leaders, including members of that Faith that was just attacked, to realize that Christianity can have, and has had, a pretty muscular side to it in the past from time to time.  The Crusades itself are an example of that.  And of course Christ informed his apostles that those who did not own a sword should go out and by one.  Christianity is of course truly a religions of peace, and founded by The Prince of Peace, but perhaps that doesn't mean that simply regarding all members of all religions as peaceful and our brothers is called for at all time.  Christians have not tended to want to call a spade a spade in all circumstances in recent decades, and perhaps taking a look at this offshoot of Islam which has drawn the sword and calling it out for that may be in order, and by extension, calling up on all Muslims to make a choice.

The Battle of Jutland Commences: May 31, 1916

The epic clash of the German and British fleets commences off of Jutland.  The end result is still debated, but that the British retained naval dominance in the Atlantic is not.

Of small interest here, Jutland is that Danish peninsula that juts into the North Sea and which some believe gave its name to the Jutes, once of the three Germanic tribes that immigrated to Great Britain in the 400s.

The 1916 naval battle has gone down as oddly contested in its recollections, which it still is today.  The Germans immediately declared it a victory, but as British historians have noted, the end result was that the German fleet was bottled up for the rest of the war where it did nothing other than consume resources and, in the end, contribute to revolt against its employer.

The battle is seen this way as Admiral Jellicoe did not crush the German fleet and because the British lost more men and ships than the Germans did.  In strategic terms, however, its clear that the British turned the Germans back and sent them back into port. . . forever.  Strategically, therefore, it was a British victory.  The debate otherwise is due to the lasting strong suspicion that the British could have actually continued the contest and demolished the German fleet, which would have ended any threat of German surface action for the remainder of the war.  Admiral Jellicoe did not do that, but then as was pointed out by Winston Churchill he was the only commander in the war who was capable of loosing the war in a day, which no doubt factored in his mind.  Had the British guess wrong in the battle, and the early stages of the battle were all guess work, the result may well have resulted in Allied loss in the war itself.

Jutland stands out as such a clash of naval giants that its somewhat inaccurately remembered as the "only" clash of dreadnoughts, which it isn't.  It was, however, a massive example of a naval engagement between two highly competent massive surface fleets.  It wasn't the first one of the war, but it would be the last one.  In spite of the seeming ambiguity of the result, the battle effectively destroyed Germany's surface fleet abilities forever.

We brutes killed them all. . . or actually we didn't. Misplaced guilt.

This related to the item I just posted about Neanderthals and allergies, and I've posted directly on this topic, in regards to our ancient ancestors, before.  But I'm doing so again, as the way this topic has been historically treated is rather interesting. It says something, well. . . about us.  Not them

It's invariably the theory amongst any historical or scientific work written by Europeans or European Americans that our ancestors were Bad. And those Baddies killed off any other group of people that they came in contact with.  Always.

Well, DNA studies are showing not so much.

And I'm not surprised.

Perhaps the classic example of this is the long accepted story of the Anglo Saxon invasion of Great Britain.  Classically, the story is that Horsa and Hengest came in as mercenaries and saw that Britain, or at least southern Britain, was ripe for hte taking and this sparked the invasion of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.  They came in, killed all the British save for those basically north of Hadrian's Wall and who didn't manage to hold out in Wales, and established the series of Kingdoms that became England in later years.  Some, like Winston Churchill in his classic History of the English Speaking Peoples, allowed for the survival of a British woman here and there, but not much.

 Brothers Horsa and Hengest come with the tribe, as depicted in the Renaissance.  In reality, they probably not only didn't look this calm, but they wouldn't have looked this modern, if you will, either. They probably looked a lot like what we imagine Vikings to look like, as they really weren't much different. Assuming they existed at all.  Their names, oddly, mean "horse" and "horse", and they might be allegorical.

Well, a study of DNA on Great Britain reveals that the British, including the English, are mostly truly British. That is, while that German DNA is in there, it's not in there so much.  Seems the Germanic invaders came in, or sort of meandered in really, and ultimately gained political dominance over any one region, but never gained a population dominance. And while entire tribes moved, once settled, they started marrying amongst the existing population.

Gee, what a surprise.

This is true, by the way, for the Vikings too.

Now, I'm not saying the Vikings weren't bad. They really were.  And I don't appreciate the latter day revision of them which would hold that they were a bunch of misunderstood hippies. Baloney.  They did invade, and they ultimately brought their families with them.

But, missed in the modern stories of them somewhat, their language was intelligible with the Old English of the time, and they weren't all that different in some ways.  A huge difference, of course, was religion, as they adhered to a really primitive form of the old Germanic paganism. . . for a time.

But they started converting themselves. By the last Viking invasion of 1066 their king was a Catholic monarch.  So, like the Angles, Saxon and Jutes before them, they slowly melted into the existing population. You can tell, by their DNA, where they were strong today, but the British remain the dominant British genetic contributors.

Although some British DNA, it should be noted, like Irish DNA, goes back 10,000 years.  That's right. All the way back. Showing, once again, that earlier populations were not slaughtered like people like to imagine.

Now this is becoming increasingly evident about the Neanderthals.  The popular imagination has held that the Cro Magnons, i.e., us, came in and killed the whole lot of them, because we are bad.  Well, not it appears that the populations, which weren't as different as we imagine, merged.  Some would have held that "oh they were too ugly that can't be true", but that's turning out to be less true as well.  They did look a bit different, but then existing populations do as well.  Existing populations of humans mix readily today and frankly there will come a day when the mixing is sufficiently complete that there will be no differences in human populations (i.e., no races), so why we ever thought that it was the case that no Cro Magnon began to think that some young Neanderthal female wasn't somewhat cute is beyond me.

Now, all of these examples go a ways back. But it might serve to reconsider some ideas that became very popular in the United States in the 1970s, about European Americans and their presence in North America.  At that time, the old image of heroic colonist taming a wilderness yielded to an image of savage Europeans dominating the native populations.

Now, the conquering of North America was violent. And, contrary to the popular imagination, the conquering of American east of the Mississippi was much more violent than that event west of the Mississippi. But the use of terms like genocide are really misplaced. The killing impact of disease is very real, but what is probably the case is that it was much more accidental than anything else. That isn't good, but it also isn't quite what its recently been portrayed as. And, as with the other example, populations mixed a lot more than sometimes imagined.  This is particularly true in Spanish and French speaking regions of North America, where there tended to be a lot less fighting and a lot more attraction than seems to be commonly considered.  Indeed, we should be well aware of this as it's well known that the first Spanish Indian couples showed up as early as Cortez' conquest of Mexico and even English colonial populations, which were amongst the least likely to mix in North America, started mixing right from the onset.

Rebecca Rolfe, the wife of John Wolfe.  Known better to history as Pocahontas, although that was a nickname and she had several other "Indian" names.  She married John Wolfe in 1614.

So, what's the point of this?  Well, perhaps simply a pleas that occasionally we slow down and consider human beings as human beings before getting retrospectively indignant and righteous.  It's easy to look back and condemn all of our ancestors for avarice and violence.  But truth be known, most people have always been people.  And, frankly, most people here are the product of mixed ancestries even if they aren't ware of it.  Somebody crossed that color line, cultural line and even that subspecies line at some point.  Probably a lot of your ancestors did.

And, let's give ourselves credit.  We don't always do the right thing.  But we don't have a roadmap to the future either.  And we might do the right thing more often than not.  And at least here, while it's easy to imagine everyone from our culture, as we belong to that human culture that uniquely feels guilt about itself, was a baddie.  More often than not, chances were high that what happened is that young hunter Gronk of the newly arrived Cro Magnons was invited over for aurock by the family of young gatherer Gronella of the old Neanderthals, and things went fine.

 As mundane as it might seem, scenes like this probably have a lot more to do with average human ancestry that warfare.

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

Oh really.  Where were you living?  In a box?

Anyone who has looked at this topic and not been predisposed to be completely and totally enamored with the concept of modern "homesteading" would have been well aware of the fact that these small scale agricultural enterprises are not economic in a modern economy.  I've blogged about it here:
 

The "Homestead" movement

Homesteading then and . . .not now.

For that matter, the economics are tough for people who simply want to get into agriculture, but are unrealistic about a 17th Century agrarian model of farming.  I've blogged about it here:

Lex Anteinternet: You can't do what you want

You can't do what you want

Economic viability of entering agriculture, a question.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 5. How do you become a rancher?

Land Values and American Agriculture

And its not just me. Did she check out Kevin Ford's posts on the New Catholic Land Forum, as he slipped slowly into having to abandon his farm? What about Devin Rose's blog as he tried the same thing and also failed?  Hmmm?

Apparently not.

Let's look a little closer at this.

My farm is located in the foothills of Northern California, 40 miles east of Sacramento on 10 acres my partner, Ryan, and I lease from a land trust. In the heat of summer, my fields cover the bronzed landscape like a green quilt spread over sand. Ten acres of certified organic vegetables trace the contours of a small valley floor. Tomatoes glow crimson. Flowers bloom: zinnias, lavender, daisies. Watermelons grow fat, littering the ground like beach balls.

Ten freaking acres, and you rent it?  And you thought this was going to work?

Shoot, this isn't even the classic American homestead acreage model.

 

 19th Century Nebraska homestead. This would be a prosperous homestead.  A married couple with at least three, and probably at least four if not six children (the two adult men are possibly hands).  Nice house, and a windmill.  They've farmed right up to the house.  They're on at least 40 acres, if not more.

No, this is something like the Italian peasant model.

Italian peasants on their way to Tivoli.  They're riding a donkey.  The donkey is carrying their product. In other words, they're poor farmers, probably on a small acreage, taking their product to a big city.  They'd probably have preferred to be in the United States farming on 40 acres.

And, in the spirit of getting older and crankier, let's be blunt. By "partner" here, I'm going to assume that the author means romantic partner without the benefit of marriage.  I'm not going to lecture anyone on this, but farming is a really hard, stressful, way to make a living even in the best of times.  Ryan and Jaclyn would be better off being married partners as at some point any kind of business partnership is pretty darned stressed under in this line of work, let alone a romantic one that has no legal or formal constraints.  But this all says a lot, really.  A hip, cool, couple living the hip cool lifestyle in a hip cool location doing the hip cool organic thing. Of course this is doomed to failure.  There's a reason that farming has never been hip and cool.  It may be romantic, in the classic definition of the word, and I'll admit to feeling that way about it. But hipsters need not apply as it isn't hip.  At some point, when somebody decides its not that hip and cool to be working hard in poverty, the romance of this informal arrangement may very well wear immediately off, and that's the end of it, irrespective of the destructive consequences of that.

The point is that this occupation has been engaged in by human beings for millennia and the basic nature of it, right down to daily living, is highly defined as its been through the refiners fire.  If a person isn't aware of that, and more if they intend to reinvent major aspects of it, they better have analyzed that down to the elemental level.

As a further aside, on using terms, the author of this item says she "owns" the farm.  No you don't.  You lease it.  You are a tenant.  Don't fool yourself.  Owning is owning.  Leasing is leasing.

Wife of tenant farmer on the Texas Panhandle, and therefore a farmer herself.  This farm would appear to be considerably larger than 10 acres.

Son of tenant farmer, 1930s, Oklahoma. At this guys age he was undoubtedly in the Army a few years later, and probably never went back to being a tenant farmer.

Now, a lot of operations lease land.  But to lease 100% of your acreage, save in family operations, does not equate with "owning" anything.

So, back to the acreage.  

So you are committed to an economic outflow on land you don't own, and on an acreage that doesn't even meet the American agrarian standard of 40 acres.  Freed slaves wanted 40 acres, not 10, for a reason.  No wonder that Forbes deemed this farm to be "Medieval".  To quote from Forbes:

There’s a really delightful little essay over at Salon about the trials and tribulations of someone trying to make a living as a small scale farmer. Her point being that despite the vast amounts of labour that she and her partner throw at their 10 acres they’re not in fact able to make anything much of a living. This is entirely true of course: their income looks to be about that of a prosperous peasant farmer in the Middle Ages. And that’s the delightful part of the essay, although it’s not quite noted. Simply because the economics of all this is implacable. If you’re trying to live off the produce of 10 acres then your maximum income is going to be the value of what can be produced off 10 acres: not a lot. This is why the Middle Ages, when 90% of the population were trying to live off such plots (often a little larger, 20-30 acres was about right for an English villein) were so darn poor by our standards. This is also why other areas of the world, where people are living off such small parcels of land, are poor today.

That's about right.

 Farming, circa 1330.

Save it doesn't even rise up, or down, to that standard.

The author notes that she heard an interview of people entering this lifestyle, and I've seen quite a few recently about it myself.  I think I've linked some in here.  Here's what she noted, which related to the point immediately above.

What the reporter didn’t ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.

Duh!

Farm incomes have not had rough parity with urban incomes since 1919.  And that's on conventional production farms.  What does that mean? Well, what it means is that the level of income for participation in the economy has been below the average urban income since that time.  In practical terms, that means there's less money around for buying that X Box, or that new television, or healthcare. 

And with only 10 acres are you seriously suggesting you pay labor?  People farming on 10 acres don't have paid labor, and they never have.  Labor on a small farm is husband and wife, father and mother, uncle, aunt and cousins, and close friends whom you are going to help next.  Not you, "partner" and paid labor.

Now, having said that, I'll note that on actual realistic farms and ranches, people often make do around this topic as people are capable of doing and acquiring in a way that urban people are not.  More realistic agrarians, quasi agrarians, and conventional farmers are well aware of that. They fix their own machinery, do things in a manner that is cheaper than a more electronic and mechanized manner, grow much of their own food, etc.  Indeed, one of the real changes in post 1930 agriculture has been a push away from subsistence in farming and I feel that's bad.

But if you are looking at ten acres, that's something else entirely.  If you are a market farmer, you are on a market garden, not a farm.  Or, as Salon says, you are a Medieval tenant.  You aren't even a Russian pre revolution tenant, which at least had the commune to rely on.

And that means you are going to have to live like a Medieval tenant.  No income for health care?  No kidding.  You'll have to rely on yourself, your family (although given your "partner" situation, you don't have a family like they had) and your community, all of whom live in the same tiny village and go to the same small church, all of which matters to them above all else.  You don't have that social network.  They were eating what they produced, caught and killed and that alone, and therefore had a diet that varied little compared to what you are used to. They didn't think themselves hip and cool as they drank fair trade coffee as they didn't drink coffee, or tea, or soda, at all.  They drank beer, and they brewed it and consumed it in massive quantities as the water was lethal.  And they lived close to death.

 

Old Believer village in Alaska. Yes, they live on little plots (I don't know how little), and they fish as well (they don't try to be limited).  But they're not living near the big city and they're an isolated, non hip, group living an intentionally isolated life in a distinct ethnic and religious community with defined community beliefs, relationships and networks.  You, dear hip and cool neo homesteader, are not.

Now, I'll confess to agrarian leanings.  But a person has to be both aware and have some sense of history before they leave their hip coolness and try to engage in the world's oldest fixed labor.  Forbes is correct, ten acre plots haven't been viable since the Medieval period, and even then most farmers were tenants in most of Europe. There's a reason that European farmers immigrated anywhere, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and even Africa, to do the exact same occupation they were doing in Europe. . . farm. And that reason was land. 

And there's a reason that all over Europe farmers, when they had a chance, wanted land reform.  The Irish didn't keep the land lords when the English went, now did they?  And up until 20 years ago farming remained the biggest business in Ireland.  The English farmers struggled for and got their land after World War One. French farmers got it after the French Revolution.  Everywhere you look, you'll see, if you look, that the thing farmers wanted was to own land, not till the landlords land on a tiny substance plot.

Sheesh.

Now, all this from a person who laments the inability of the average person to get into agriculture now, and would frankly like to see that changed.  But at a certain point, you have to look at an ill thought out endeavor and shake your head.  This isn't helping anyone, its confirming the opposite. This is going to fail and fail badly.  Indeed, most homestead in the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century failed, but at least they were more realistic.  Pie in the sky endeavors ignoring agriclutural history and agriculture's nature aren't helping anything.

And that's my problem with the neo homesteading movement in general.

Redrawing the battle lines to fit modern sensibilities, and thereby doing violence to history.

I suppose I'm over-publishing on this topic, due to the recent controversy over South Carolina's continued flying of one of the Confederate battle flags (there were a variety of them).  I've already posted on that immediately below.

On that topic, tonight on the national news I saw a man yelling at the reporter interviewing him when that reporter associated the Stars and Bars with the cause of slavery.  He yelled back something to the effect that Southern solders "were never fighting for slavery".

Oh, yes they were.

Oh sure, a person can put any number of nuances on this.  Drafted men, for example, fight (sometimes) because they were drafted. But at the end of the day, the argument that Southern soldiers didn't know that the war was about slavery are fooling themselves and dishonoring history. No matter what else the motives of individuals solders were, and no matter how hard, and even valiantly, they fought, they knew that if they one, slavery as an institution was going to be preserved, and that's what had taken their states into rebellion.  Individual motives may have been, and likely often were, much more complicated than that, but that's the simple fact.

What's also the fact, however, is that there's a tremendous desire on the part of people to make combatants of the past, even the near past, fit their sensibilities.  People don't like to think that people who fought really hard, and who had some admirable qualities, let alone people who are related them, fought for a bad cause, and knew it.

So, let's see how some examples of this work.

"The lost cause" has been a romantic Southern perception since some point during Reconstruction, when Southerners ceased confronting what they'd fought for and reimagined it.  As they did so, something the opposite of what Americans did to their returning servicemen during the late 60s and early 70s occurred, as they began to imagine the cause as noble and every Southern soldier a hero.  This stayed largely a Southern thing up until film entered the scene, and Birth of a Nation spread the concept everywhere.  It's likely best expressed in Gone With the Wind, which no matter what else a person thinks of it, has a very racist and rosy view of the old South.  It well expressed the concept that every slave was like Pork, Mammy or Prissy, and ever Southern soldier was Ashley.  The slave holding South is presented as a romantic dream, and effectively. Heck, I like the film. But it doesn't express reality.

The reality of Southern secession was that the Southern slave holding states had such a hair trigger about slavery the election of Abraham Lincoln was too much for it to endure, simply because he expressed the intent not to let slavery spread.  Southern legislatures went out of the Union, or tried to, on that point.  

That doesn't mean every Union soldier was enlightened.  But it should be noted that Union soldiers fought for the more philosophical point of preserving the Union.  At one time, their service was hugely admired, but in recent years, somehow, the romance that surrounds the Southern cause is the one that tends to be remembered.  That skews history.  Sure, the individual motivations of Southern troops may be more complicated, but that's still a fact that can't 'be ignored.

It probably also shouldn't be ignored that a huge percentage of the Southern fighting force had deserted by the end of the war either, or that regions of the South were hostile to the Confederacy.  

Which brings me to Italians during World War Two, truly.

For some reason, Italians, who actually did fight pretty hard in North Africa and in the Soviet Union (you didn't know that they fought with the Germans in the USSR, they did) are regarded as cowardly as they gave up when it became obvious that Mussolini wasn't worth fighting for.

Now, exactly what's wrong with that?  That doesn't make them cowards, that makes them smart.

I don't know what that says about the German fighting man in World War Two, but whatever it is, it isn't admirable.  But here too there are apologist who would excuse the German soldier.

German troops fought hard everywhere right to the bitter end, and they did so for an inescapably evil cause.  That's not admirable, and I don't care if most of them were drafted.  Most Italian soldiers were drafted too, and by 1943 they were giving up where they could, including their officers.  Some German officers did rebel, but mot didn't, and most German troops fought on until late war.  They shouldn't have.  They shouldn't have fought for Hitler at all.

The Japanese have gotten more of a pass about World War Two than the Germans have on every level, and I do suppose that the fact that Japanese soldiers were largely ignorant of things elsewhere may provide a bit of an excuse for the barbarity that they engaged in, but only barely.  And the occasional confusion of Japanese Medieval chivalry for later day Japanese "honor" is bunk.  The Japanese were brutal during World War Two and the fact that they claimed to liberate other Asians and then acted brutally shows that they should have known better.

Speaking of chivalry, however, the recent trend to show the enemies of Medieval Christendom as primitive nobles and the forces of Medieval Christendom as baddies is also revisionism in need of a dope slap.  Crusaders who went off to the Middle East weren't on a confused mission, they were repelling an invasion, and the Vikings weren't admirable in their pagan state.

Speaking of mounted troops (chivalry) another odd one has been the modern tendency to view all native combatants as committed against the United States in the 18th and 19th Century, or even against all European Americans.  Many Indians view things this way themselves, but it doesn't reflect the complicated reality.  Many tribes allied themselves with European Americans in various instances, sometime temporarily and sometimes not so.  In the West an interesting example of this is the Shoshone, who were allies of the United States and who contributed combatants to campaigns of the 1870s.  In recent years I've occasionally seen it claimed that the Shoshone were amongst the tribes that fought at Little Big Horn, in the Sioux camp.  It's not impossible that some were there, but by and large the big Shoshone story for the 1876 campaign was the detail contributed to Crook's command against the Sioux.  I'll note I'm not criticizing them for this, only noting it.

Regarding the main point, the fact of the matter is that we admire those who fight for us bravely, and bravery is admirable.  It's hard to accept that bravery for a bad cause is admirable, however. That doesn't mean that all bravery serves honor.  Quite the opposite can be true.  Redrawing the motives of combatants doesn't do history any favors, and it doesn't do justice of any kind to the combatants on any side in former wars either.

Random Snippets: How to tell you are really out of the mainstream and too history minded.

"Adrian Peterson finding a new normal with Vikings" read the headline on the net.

And, having not had enough coffee I read that and thought to myself "well, Peterson could be a Norse name. . . but wait, we don't have vikings anymore. . . ."

It took me a few seconds to wake up and realize that, of course, Adrian Peterson is a football player with the Minnesota Vikings.

The Big Speech: The St. Crispian's Day Speech from Henry V.

WESTMORELAND. O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!

King:  What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin, Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin's day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Lex Anteinternet: Vikings, maybe not so much after all.

I've recently posted this item about Vikings:

Lex Anteinternet: Vikings, maybe not so much after all.: One of the most interesting introductions into the field of history in recent years has been the study of DNA.  The populations of various ...

And then there's that television show, "Vikings".

Ack.

First a disclaimer.  I'm going to run down Vikings.  That will eventually somebody who reads this entry, sooner or later. But I'm entitled.  I'm partially entitled because anyone is entitled to argue historical truth.  I'm also entitled as I can claim Viking ancestry.  Anglo Norman, actually, on my mother's side, with those Anglo Normans ending up in Ireland.  But any Norman was, by descent, a Norseman.  More specifically, part of that group of Vikings who ended up with Rollo in France, his having secured Normandy for a residence for his band.

Rollo, who was baptised (a not uncommon thing in the second half of the Viking era) takes the hand of Gisela in marriage, which may or may not have actually happened.  He probably didn't look quite so pacific and mild in real life.  He's buried at the Cathedral in Rouen.

So, some of my ancestors having boarded long boats in Norway and having followed Rollo to France, I'm entitled.  I'm slamming my own distant ancestors.

Well, actually I'm not, I'm just being honest.

The Vikings are really interesting, which is why they're featured in a television series right now.  But they were bad.  Really bad.

Extremely bad.

Their raids on the British Anglo Saxon and European coasts were horrific, featuring murder and the worst sort of perverted actions imaginable.  They not only exhibited a thirst for gold, but for blood and just simple debased and gross violence. They were most young men, and they were as bad as any criminal gang made up of young men. The television show that currently debates them as rough, pretty, people has it wrong. They were way beyond rough. Some of them may have been pretty. But at least at first, they weren't farmers looking for homesteads.  They came to attack and attack they did.   When they were met with serious armies, as for example those of Northumbria, they didn't do that well, after all, they were just floating gang members, really.  Later on, when they were real armies, the story was different.  But evolving from street gangs into armies, like the NASDP did in Germany in its day, does not credit the effort.

Then something happened to them. Something I doubt we'll see in the television show.

In their later years their adventures became bigger and more advanced.  They evolved from sort of a seagoing street gang (or rather gangs) into what we can sort of regard as Mafia families.  Much more skilled and advanced, and larger.  Then they did in fact begin to settle in other lands (although we now know in the case of England, they never swamped the existing population.  

And they became Catholic.

On another blog, I suppose, might say they "became Christian", but we try to present full accuracy here, and they became Catholic.  The entire Christian world at the time was Catholic, Catholicism and Christianity being the same thing.  They became, largely, Latin Rite Catholics, although I suppose, as some were hired out to the Byzantine Empire, and others, the Rus, located in the Slavic nation now named for them, became Eastern Catholics.  Indeed, a few in the late stages of their conversion became well recognized saints who are still recognized in the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

And they took to it more completely, and indeed rapidly (keeping in mind that everything moved slowly in prior times) than movies and whatnot would credit.

In our modern era, television, which basically has a thing against conventional Christianity, likes to portray troubled and disenginuine Christians struggling against rustic but sincere pagans.  But that's not the way it happened.  Violent enemies of the Church at first, for economic reasons, once exposed to it, they converted pretty quickly and sincerely, keeping in mind that they lived in remote locations and that in that era, 300 years (which is about the length of the Viking era), wasn't really a long time. 

Iceland, a Viking island, but incorporating a fair number of Irish Catholic slaves within it, converted by vote, with the deciding vote cast by a pagan priest. The other Scandinavian lands were exposed to the Faith by raids which seemed to be particularly influential amongst their leadership, and also by missionary activity. By the later stage of the Viking era, Scandinavian Christian monarchs, such as St. Olaf, who had been a Viking, appeared.  Really tough men, they brought the faith to their lands, which remained pretty rough places.

This isn't to say that the Faith came instantly or perfectly to these places.  It didn't.  It took quite awhile, as we reckon time today, before the old beliefs were abandoned, and there was a period of imperfection where behavior was somewhat mixed.  King Cnut, the Dane, and King of England, for example, had two wives, even though he was a Catholic.  But it did come, and pretty completely.

What's the point?  Well, basically, the Vikings are really interesting.  A forgotten northern pagan people whose population exploded during a period of dramatically warming climate, their displaced young struck Europe with a barbarous fury, during which they raided as far as North Africa, and into the heat of what is now Russia.  In the end, they evolved into a military people and then a Christian one, which in its final stages gave us three Norman political entities, one in Normandy, one in England and Ireland, and one in Sicily, that were vibrant and hugely significant.  Over time, they became the peoples they are today, who are not at all associated with the acts of their fierce forebearers, and they left a record of their presence throughout Europe and even extending to North America   That's a much more interesting story than the one television is giving us.

But its one today that television won't give us.  A barbaric people whose first exposure to Europe included acts so vile that even modern television, which dwells pretty much in the sewer, can't touch it, and who in the end become a Christian people with values that television would rather lampoon than feature.  History more interesting than anything TV will offer us, and which has a message that television, which operates as sort of a modern early Viking culture amongst our own, wouldn't want to touch.

Vikings, maybe not so much after all.

One of the most interesting introductions into the field of history in recent years has been the study of DNA.  The populations of various regions that have more or less static modern populations have been, in some cases, studied, sometimes with surprising results.  Perhaps no place has received more of this attention than Great Britain.

The classic story of Britain has been that it was settled in ancient times by some Celtic population. Following that, it seems a second one invaded at some point.  The Romans conquered it, or at least the southern half, and then in the 400s the Saxons, Angles and Jutes arrived and conquered the southern half of Great Britain, and the Irish Celts the north.  Or so the classic story goes.  Celtic holdouts from these invasions kept on only in Wales.  A couple of hundred years later Vikings from Denmark and Norway arrived, principally as brutal raiders at first, and later somewhat as invaders.  After that, in 1066, the Normans came over from France (the Normans themselves been descendant from Norsemen) and the process ceased, with no further invasions being successful.

Or so the written record held.

Then the study of genetics came in, challenged much of our assumptions, and with the most recent studies it would see that, well. . .the original story was probably more or less correct.

There's been different genetic studies of the British population, and they haven't all been uniform by any means, but the most recent one pretty much overturns the prior one.   The new one concludes that but for a single region of Britain, Scandinavian ancestry is slight.  This reverses the most recent prior conclusions which was that the Vikings came not so much as raiders, but as settlers. Well, they did do some settling, that's been known for a very long time, but it appears that, in fact, they were mostly just raiding.

In contrast, about 40% of the overall British DNA is German, which shows that the prior assumption that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes did in fact invade in strength is correct.  They didn't do under the British Celtic population, however, which was at one time the general assumption, although even Churchill questioned that in his classic multi-volume text on the history of the English speaking peoples.  A conquering people, their culture came to dominate but they obviously mixed with the conquered people, the overall human norm really.

As for the Celts, well it looks like people from Europe had started settling in Great Britain about 10,000 years ago, but we already knew that.  And it appears that the Celts were not one uniform people, but we already knew that too.

So, it seems, the written record was better than it was recently supposed.