Alt Left: The Rind Et Al Study on Long-term Effects of Child Abuse: Its History and Ramifications

A famous study on childhood sexual abuse was done 20 years ago by Rind et al. I think I still have a copy of it on my desktop here.

It provoked wild outrage. Even the idiotic American Psychological Association denounced it, notable as one of the most anti-scientific statements this anti-scientific organization has ever issued. Even the US Congress got in on the act. The Congress passed a resolution condemning the study! Congressmen, mostly Republicans, stood up and denounced it forcefully.

The problem? The study came up with the wrong answer. In other words, the truth was wrong and society preferred to believe pleasant lies over unpleasant truths, so the paper was condemned for discovering the wrong facts.

Usually when theory and facts do not match up, we say that the theory was wrong and go back to the drawing board.

However, in this case and with all ideological arguments by ideologues and politics types, when the theory and the facts don’t match up, the facts are wrong, and the facts are not the facts! Why? Because the theory is said to be automatically a priori true. The theory must be true. It cannot be false. So the facts must be wrong and we need to change the facts, wipe out the truth, and say that reality isn’t real, instead, what is real is some fantasy world that doesn’t  exist.

A number of fake “studies” were undertaken by other behavioral “scientists” taking about the Rind findings and finding fault with this or that conclusion. None of the fake studies denouncing it were worth a hill of beans. That they made it into the journals at all shows that pathetic anti-scientific nature of the social sciences, sadly also including Psychology, which has been trying to become more of a science for a long time now.

But by the very fact that it is a social science means that Psychology will always be a fake science in some ways because its findings have to do with people, and the science of people will always be twisted by politics, ideology, bias, and mostly emotional reaction.

It’s hard to get emotional about a new finding in math or physics. Who cares! But findings in the social sciences are inherently emotional because we are always emotional about ourselves and our fellow humans, and anything people are strongly emotional about will always be tainted by bias, propaganda, politics, and ideology. In other words, lies. This is why the social sciences will always be doomed to the charge of being fake sciences and will always carry the guilty burden of physics envy.

Ritter et al conducted a meta-analysis of a huge number of studies on the effects of childhood sexual abuse on children as adults. Child abuse was mostly defined as sexual abuse below age 13, so sex with teenage girls and boys, a massive minefield, was left out.

The available evidence shows that consensual sex with teenage girls and boys and adults causes little if any damage to teenagers. This behavior is illegal not because it is harmful to the teens, as I doubt that it is. Instead it is outlawed because society’s morals say that members of society do not wish to live in a society where adults are free to have sex with teenagers of various ages.

It’s seen as unsavory, unpleasant, disgusting or revolting, and often morally wrong. But this behavior is not psychologically disordered in any way. This is a moral and legal problem, not a psychological one.

Unfortunately we are now in the midst of a truly insane mass hysteria around the sexuality of teenage girls in which 9

In fact, the people who quote the science and the facts about this question are attacked as pedophiles! Because I guess only pedophiles believe in science and truth when it comes to this sort of thing. If you don’t want to be called a pedophile, just spout the usual lies about this subject. As long as you keep lying and don’t ever resort to facts, you’re in the clear!

Fact: nothing published in an academic journal has ever produced evidence suggesting that teen/adult relationships are harmful or predatory. Literally not even one. Anthropological and historical studies all over the world have found that such relationships are common in many societies and no harm was reported in any society ever studied.

How do I know this? I’ve studied them. A particularly large one was done out of Germany in the 1950’s. You can find this evil science of banned truths on the Net, though I can’t tell you where to look. The pedo advocate sites have links to it, but I don’t want to send you there. I suspect the motives of those who wrote this study, but the science seems good.

Furthermore, historically speaking, I’ve learned from the Psychohistorian sites that teen/adult relations were normal in most of the world including the West up until 1900. Zero harm was reported.

Sadly, mass molestation of children was also reported in the West from Roman and Greek times until 1900. Under the crowded urban conditions that arose with the onset of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, where families were packed together in tiny spaces, a great deal of molestation went on. I’m not happy about this at all, but it’s notable that no ill effects were observed in Greece and Rome until the pre-1900 West.

Perhaps the reason for this was that molestation of children was simply an expected fact of life. If you grow up as a female and get molested and all of your woman friends also got molested, it’s seen as a normal thing. There’s usually nothing inherently wrong with this behavior absent physical damage. Things that are normalized in any society tend to cause little if any damage.

I disagree here with some folks like psychohistorians who argue that all sexual abuse of children under any circumstances, normalized or condemned, results in inevitable terrible lifetime damage to the person. They also believe that many other things experienced in childhood cannot but cause horrible lifelong damage.

I doubt if that is true. If you grow up in a society that normalizes this or that behavior, outside of extreme perversion, aggression, and sadism, it’s probably seen as normalized and shrugged off. In other words, the damage of most of these things is relative and depends on the degree to which your society condemns or pathologizes the behavior.

However, for small children, the true victims of child molestation, it is quite different.

Granted, the victims were interviewed when in college so the abuse was a long ways away. Conceivably if they had interviewed them earlier as minors, they would manifested more damage. The findings were shocking:

Rind et al found that the long-term effects of child sexual abuse were typically neither pervasive nor intense, and men reacted much less negatively than women. Ritter et al also found that less than 1

To explicate that further, the effects were shame about having been abused, blame for themselves for allowing it to happen to them, and confusion about the abuse itself.

The confusion may manifest in various ways. A female friend of mine from 10 years ago was molested. Of course she absolutely hates my guts now, but that’s not an unusual reaction for women who get involved with me in some way or another. I’m used to it.

She told me that she was molested by a pedophile in her church group when she was 8 years old. The molester was a young man and he does appear to have been a pedophilic or preferential molester. She told me, “It’s confusing because it feels good but it’s wrong.” This is part of the thinking behind the confusion that kids experience after being abused.

She also told me that she had completely gotten over it by age 50, but she seemed to have gotten over it much before then. I knew two other women (I actually got involved with these two whereas with the other one it was more email and hot phone conversations) of the same age who were sexually abused as girls, one by a probable pedophile and the other by her opportunistic teenage older brother. They both told me that they had gotten over it by age 50 but implied that they had gotten over it much before then.

The shame, blame, and confusion are apparently short-term effects in most victims, and at the very least have dissipated by college age.

The implication is that children or minors may experience those effects for some time in their youth, but these effects mostly go away by adulthood, and there is no lasting damage in almost all (9

Unfortunately, pedophiles have gotten a hold of the Rind et al study and like to wave it around to try to push for legalization of child/adult sexual relations.

That’s not my intention here. I don’t care if most victims get over it. Good for them. I’m happy that they are not damaged in the long term.

Nevertheless, this behavior still needs to be outlawed because I don’t want to live in a society where adults are allowed to have sex with young children below age 13. I don’t have to have a reason. I just don’t like it. That’s all the reason I need.

Alt Left: A Theory about Race, Personality, and Civilizational Trajectory with Assistance from Spengler, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche

A great new and very long comment from someone who is apparently a new commenter. A fascinating theory about race and personality and how they tie in with civilizational trajectories, be they forward, backward, or flat. He utilizes and owes a debt to Spengler first, then Schopenhauer, and last Nietzsche to help flesh out his theory.

I’d really like to see what you all think of this post. Please feel free to comment if you can make it through and figure out what he’s talking about. It’s a bit dense but it’s not really that complicated and a lot of you ought to be able to understand it pretty well.

Brian: This is a theory that’s been turning around in my head for around a decade, and I won’t go over every detail, just the gist of it, since to think out every caveat would take too long, and it’s not like a primary interest of research for me, but suffice it to say there is Spenglerian influence here, and through him, Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian influence. I’ve often called it the “I think we’re turning Japanese” theory.

The idea here is that Whites are in the middle of a spectrum between Blacks and Asians, where Blacks are the most chaotic, as you say, and Asians are the most orderly and staid, personified by the Spock stereotype.

The Germanic peoples, who pretty much seeded all of Europe during the Migration and Viking period, were, 2000 years ago during Rome’s heyday, barbarians, quite wild, living for the day, warring with each other to the point where, aside from the Battle of Teutoborg Forest, they could not unite with each other to fight a common enemy, which made them easy pickings for Rome.

The Celtic culture never took off into a high civilization due mainly to the Roman conquests of Gaul and Iberia and also of much of Britain, which eliminated the source-lands and most of the territory in which the Celtic culture had grown. So the civilization that arose after the collapse of the western portion of the empire was seminally Germanic: even France is heavily Germanic (land of the Franks), though it lies in between the more fully Germanic Northern Europe and the more Mediterranean Southern Europe.

Through the Dark Ages and High Middle Ages, the tribal polities of Northern Europe gradually coalesced into larger nations with, it must be stated, the help of the stabilizing factor of the Catholic Church. And by the Renaissance, Europe was becoming, artistically and intellectually, the most dynamic place in the world so that by Early Modern times, European art and science had eclipsed anything that had previously existed in the world.

Note how Asians beat Europeans in math and science in terms of raw ability, but Europeans have produced more than the Asians, which led to the core Asian lands (mainly China, Japan, and Korea) being not directly colonized by European empires but certainly feeling colonialism’s effects and even, especially for China, its boot heels. From the wild and more primitive European stock of two millennia ago eventually arose a civilization more advanced than what Asia had produced over thousands of years.

I suggest that the reason for this was that, although primitive, the Germanic peoples were also like a ball of energy that, if properly tamed, which of course means diminishing some of their raw energy, could produce an explosion of civilizational progress, and this taming is exactly what happened over the course of the Medieval Period.

The Church was a great factor, with its universalist vision of all reality being centered on a single thing, i.e. God (basically it’s a rational vision of the cosmos as opposed to a fragmentary and irrational understanding of it).

But another factor in this shift is likely social selection.

Over that 1,500 years of interaction with Rome and then of forging their own kingdoms after the constant interference from Rome had ended with the collapse of the western part of the Empire, European societies were able to grow into nations, become more complex and therefore more demanding about the intellectual demands on their own people and, whether through sexual selection initiated by women or through some other factor, began “weeding out” those who were too dumb or wild from the gene pool.

So by around 1500-1600, there existed a civilization with much of the raw energy of a primitive people but now harnessed and directed to intellectual and artistic ends, ready to make a gigantic mark on the world.

The point is that primitive peoples are like stores of raw energy or pools of potential that can, in the right circumstances, be transformed into a flourishing of civilization that even outdoes what groups with higher (or previously higher) IQ’s have accomplished. The white IQ might have increased during that transition from tribal chieftainships to modern states, with the selection pressures that such a transition brings.

Spengler believed that Western civilization was becoming old and sclerotic, ready either to dissipate or, like East Asia, ossify for a very long time, its main ideas having already mostly been expressed. He saw Russia as the next civilization to rise, since it was in that nether phase of being quite brutal compared to Western Europe and its descendant nations overseas, but nevertheless already being quite tamed.

Perhaps this explains why Europe, for centuries, has had a visceral fear of Russia, from the Great Game in the 19th century to the Nazi invasion and destruction of the country down to the present-day Establishment fear of Russia and Putin. Perhaps there is a sense that if Russia can break free of the West and get its act together, its potential is great, and in time – centuries perhaps – Russia could eclipse the ever-more sclerotic West.

But even more long-term, if this theory is correct, I can see Latin America rising as a major civilization. It would have to go through centuries of real nationbuilding first as Europe did in the Dark Ages and High Medieval Period into the Renaissance, but there is certainly great natural vigor among Latin American peoples, already somewhat tempered by the widespread infusion of Spanish and Portuguese (not to mention some German and other European) genes in those populations.

Perhaps in a millennium, when the raw potential has been converted into actionable works through a combination of genetic selection and cultural controls, Latin America will be a great civilization offering new artistic and scientific insights to the world and perhaps being expansionist, as civilizations born of wild people getting their act together tend to be. There seems to be a golden mean when a people is no longer too primitive but not yet too domesticated when that people makes its mark.

Which brings me to Africa. Africa today is comparable to Germania in Roman times: getting the first inklings of advanced civilization from the West, which had often mistreated it, and struggling to form real nations in the face of their own enormous divisions and external interference. Africans are chaotic but also wildly creative, especially musically – and music is the closest thing to the human Will or Engine of Life, as Schopenhauer teaches.

Africa in the coming centuries and millennia could go through a filtering that eliminates from the gene pool many of the wildest elements, for example through frequent warfare and sexual selection by women who demand more intelligent mates, as it becomes obvious that the trajectory of society is toward greater complexity.

The continued presence of Christianity and Islam are likely also beneficial for taming the most wild spirit of Africa, whose people are truly at present the most primal version of mankind. But in the intervening centuries or millennia some new religion might come along in Africa as shape the minds of the people as Christianity did to the Europeans during Roman times.

I would think that the Africans, in maybe a millennium or two, after the Slavic nations and the Latin American peoples have “come online” so to speak in the procession of great civilizations, could become the culmination of human civilization, since they are starting with the most raw energy that, were it tamed, would entail the greatest outpouring of intellectual and artistic – i.e. civilizational – creativity that humans could produce.

But a great deal of selection pressure and cultural maturation would be required before this could happen.

Later this century, Africans are expected to comprise ~4

But this fits not only my thesis but also the Spenglerian model to which it is mostly in debt. The ensuing collapse of the West could be the opening that Slavic nations need in order to truly rise and express themselves fully. The development of Africa into a high civilization is a process I expect to take many centuries amid the vicissitudes of other civilizations rising and falling.

As for current White civilization which is headed by “The West” or those nations descended from or heavily influenced by the Germanic peoples, I think we are turning Japanese. We are past the Golden Middle Period and into a period where much of our primal nature remains but is channeled by genetic and cultural discipline and we are in effect slowly evolving into more staid, quiet, competitive – i.e. more Asian-like – peoples.

You can see it with the younger generations who are subject to far more social controls than even I was when younger, and I am not that old. The younger generations seem socially skittish, often autistic, and very different from kids even thirty years ago. Of course much of this is due to technology, but much is also due to our societies becoming increasingly rule-based and micromanaged.

And it is our culture itself that is insisting on this bureaucratization and rationalization of social life, with technology being merely a tool to push this cultural tendency forward.

As one final note, my theory might not work if indeed the different personality types and intelligence levels of the major races cannot change over a millennium or two in such a way that a wilder and less intelligent race can be pared down through social selection to a more disciplined and intelligent race.

If this is not a long enough span of time for such a transition to unfold, then the rise of the Northern and Western European peoples from tribal barbarians 2,000 years ago to the epitome of civilization just a few centuries ago was not due to a lack of enough intelligence to produce such a civilization.

Instead it occurred because this spark already existed during the Roman Empire, except that its expression was limited by a lack of social development until those cultural constraints needed to mold it into an advanced civilization had taken shape.

If this was true, then difference between the primitive culture and the high civilization it became was sociocultural, not genetic.

But even if this were true, it could mean that Africa could still rise as a high civilization, only that it will take longer, since a lot of not sexual but social selection would have to occur in order for this to happen.

“Bid Calling,” by Alpha Unit

You name it and it’s been sold at auction.

As long as humans have traded with one another, they have staged auctions. About 500 B.C. in Babylon, women were being auctioned off as wives. Ancient Greece and ancient Rome held auctions not just to sell people but to sell all kinds of assets, including war plunder and family estates. In seventh-century China, the personal items of deceased Buddhist monks were being sold at auction.

Auctions in the United States date all the way back to colonial times. Crops, livestock, tools, slaves, and sometimes entire farms were sold at auction. The National Auctioneers Association informs us that during the American Civil War only colonels could auction war plunder, which is why in honor of this history many auctioneers in America today carry the title “Colonel.”

In the early 1900s the first auctioneering schools opened in the United States. The Great Depression created great opportunity for auctioneers, whose services were needed to liquidate assets. Collectibles, antiques, used cars, heavy equipment, livestock, real estate, and all kinds of commodities are sold at auction in the US either by private parties or by government agencies.

No one knows exactly when rapid-paced “bid calling” became a feature of auctions in the US, but it is now the norm. Many of you are familiar with American-style auction calls, where an auctioneer delivers a rapid, almost hypnotic repetition of numbers and words to present items up for bid. Newcomers to auctions might find it indecipherable, but nothing could be farther from the truth!

An auctioneer’s entire job is to communicate clearly and effectively, and if you can’t understand him (or her), then he isn’t doing his job.

An auctioneer uses his chant to hold the audience’s attention and keep the auction moving along at a steady clip while he’s soliciting bids. He’s going fast because he’s responsible for selling all of the items within a relatively short time, and he’s got to create a sense of urgency among bidders. He must at the same time be very clear and specific with his language.

What the auctioneer is really doing is reciting numbers.

An auction chant consists basically of two numbers – the have (the current bid price) and the want (the higher bid being requested by the auctioneer). Between these two numbers are a variety of sounds and filler words to add rhythm to the chant and make the bidding more entertaining. To make it seem that he’s talking faster than he really is, the auctioneer will slur his words to shorten them.

An auctioneering student starts out learning a very basic auction chant, something like this:

One dollar bid, now 2, now 2, will ya give me 2?

2 dollar bid, now 3, now 3, will ya give me 3?

3 dollar bid, now 4, now 4, will ya give me 4?

This hypothetical bidding would proceed in this fashion until the crowd stops bidding and the item is sold to the high bidder.

Filler words are rhythmic but they serve an important purpose: they provide a natural pause between the have and the want, giving the bidders a fraction of a second to make a decision.

Once the auctioneer’s want becomes the have, a new want is created. This number is called the next. A bid caller always has three numbers in mind – the have, the want, and the next.

Suppose you’re at an auction where a vehicle is up for bid. The auction chant might be something like this:

All right, folks, I have up for auction a 1994 Ford Mustang, cherry, lots of new parts, who’ll give me four large?

Four thousand, four, now who gimme four fiddy? Got four fiddy, got four fiddy from the man in the back, now who gonna go five?

Fi fiddy, fi fiddy bid, man in the back, now who gimme six? Fi fiddy bid, who gimme six?

Six thousand! Now who gimme seven? Seven on the board now, who gimme seven fiddy?

And on it goes.

Each auctioneer has his own style – his own favorite filler words, his own preferred speed, and his own cadence. Some auction chants are positively musical. The filler words are just carriers for the most important part of the chant: the numbers.

Keep in mind, though, that the auctioneer can only chant as fast as the bidders bid. So he designs his chant to create excitement and keep the auction moving along at a good pace. It truly is an art form.

There’s no telling where you might hear an auction call. Listen to Congressman Billy Long (R-MO) breaking into an auction chant to foil a protester during a hearing in Congress.

Magic in the Celtic World from Antiquity to the Middle Ages

New from Francis Miville.

Francis Miville: There was a reason why the Celtic cultural world crumbled and was ready to assimilate into the nearest conquering empire passing nearby. Gauls literally begged the Greeks to conquer them, and as they proved too self-interested as merchants, they turned to the Romans as to the second best choice long before Cesar came. The Celtic world was more and more definitely with the centuries passing a culture based upon the preeminence of magic and of magic of a very malevolent kind. Druidic civilization was no fun at all. Celtic civilization was quite like the Brahmanical one in its worst aspects but without any encompassing universalistic cosmogony. It was a universe without any power above that of the elite of all-powerful manipulators having been selected through proof of their psychopathic mind before being taught any bit of initiation knowledge. Above the stage of a mere brute, you spent your own life dodging evil spells and casting ones in return. The only late exceptions which explain their further survival were Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany on both sides of the Channel. This is because it was rather the invention of something radically new by a certain kind of Christians together with a new kind of Celtic languages that bore very little relationship to the original. But Celtic Christianity as it was called came to be later on considered as heretical from the point of view of more classical theology, as it was based on much magic too, though of a more seductive than warlike kind. In the case of Ireland and Brittany, the magicians proved to be oligarchically-minded to the worst degree as all magicians are. These magicians offered their services to the best payers, that is to say the Norman and French invaders. In exchange, the oligarchs were given as a natural resource the whole populace that the magicians controlled as a  passive herd. In Scotland the whole people succeeded as magicians to enter the British Empire as mafia-minded dominants of a worse kind than Anglo-Saxons proper, while playing a key role in the setting up of Masonry. Magical cultures are all social horrors.

Dysgenic Breeding Has Been around Since Antiquity

Greg Rambo: “The current dysgenic behavior of the African-American community is a complete and absolute result of the government subsidizing pregnancy and desertion.* * Professor Thomas Sowell. Agree or disagree?

Sowell is a conservative, so I don’t like him as I am a Leftist. However, he is right on it regarding a number of issues. I don’t mind his theories. I just dislike his politics. You see here he makes an argument about dysgenic breeding and high illegitimacy rates, he turns into a damned anti-welfare argument because he’s a conservative ideologue first and a sociologist second. Breeding is dysgenic anyway. It’s dysgenic among Whites and Hispanics too. For Chrissake, even the Romans wrung their hands and wrote about dysgenic breeding in Ancient Rome. So dysgenic breeding has gone on forever. I doubt if it seriously harms the gene pool since it’s been around since Antiquity. Scumbags, especially psychopaths, have lots of kids. Which is probably why sociopathy stayed in the gene pool. The women keep breeding with the bad boys, and they either became tribal leaders, or they managed to make a few babies before the other tribal members murdered them or cast them out, which was actually the fate of many psychopaths in primitive society.

Anti-Germanism in a Nutshell

Anti-Germanism is a Left philosophy started by, you guessed it, Germans! They hold that Germany has been rotten from the start, that German culture is evil and irredeemably poisoned, and that Germany needs a complete Cultural Revolution to destroy German culture and replace it with something humane. There are only a few Jews in Germany right now, but there are quite a few Jews in the anti-German movement. The percentage of Jews in the anti-German movement is much higher than in the population. However, most anti-Germans are not Jewish. For the life of me, I cannot see why the Jews want to pick a fight with the Germans. Haven’t Germans and Jews fought enough and wreaked enough destruction on the world? I came across this on Facebook and I think it sums up anti-Germanism quite well. I removed some crap about Communism, Frankfurt School, and postmodernism because this is some weird Alt Right crap that got tacked onto what is otherwise a Leftist discourse. It is interesting to see Leftist anti-German theory adopted, modified, and warped by some weird sort of Alt Right types.

The country that I despise the most is Germany. Germany has had only a history of destroying what is right and civilized, not to mention their Germanic love of totalitarianism. During the days of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire, the Romans were spreading civilization throughout Europe, bringing technology and civilization to wherever they conquered. However, the greatest enemy of the Romans were the barbaric and savage Germanic tribes, who later spread all over the Roman world, plundering, destroying, and raiding wherever they went. They eventually managed to destroy the Roman world, annihilating its advancements, and pushing Europe into a Dark Age for nearly 1,000 years. During this period of the Dark Ages, a new power, Prussia, emerged on the European theater. Born from Germanic knights slaughtering an entire ethnic group and enslaving Poles, they brought nothing of merit into the world, bringing only tyranny, militarism, and terror. Once Europe fully recovered from the first large scale attack on civilization, a new Germanic Empire took hold, even surpassing the Roman world, with the spread of new ideas such as Protestantism. This empire was the Holy Roman Empire – which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an empire; but in fact a Germanic tool to fight civilization and anti-totalitarianism. The empire waged brutal wars of religion in an attempt to reinstate corrupt Catholic rule all over Europe. This finally culminated in the 30 Years War, the bloodiest European War until the next European-wide war, also commenced by Germany. However, the German plot was stopped. Finally, a bit later, in a book called Von Krieg (On War in English), the Germanic elite of Prussia revealed their plans, which are still being implemented to this day. Here are a couple of quotes from the book: Just as Prussia has been fated to be the core of Germany, so Germany will be the core of the future German Empire of the West..Conquered people shall be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with. The Germanic states then clamped down further upon liberalism and liberty, maintaining an absolute monarchy until unification. Otto von Bismarck was their leader – an absolute monarchist/militarist. He then started three aggressive wars: against Denmark, against Austria, and against France. He created Germany as a brutal, totalitarian monarchy, hell bent on conquering the world. Prussia had become the core of Germany, and a new leader now needed to make it the future German Empire of the West. That new leader came – Kaiser Wilhelm II. Plotting to destroy all other nations and achieve a worldwide German Reich, he took the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, as his opportunity. Knowing full well that the Habsburgs, his fellow Germans, would use the assassination carried out by one man, who just so happened to be a Serb, to carry out an aggressive war against Serbia, despite knowing full well it would lead to war with Russia and the rest of the world, Wilhelm promised to unconditionally support Austria-Hungary. The Kaiser of Germany singlehandedly began the most destructive conflict the world had ever seen in an attempt to annihilate all non-Germans. He invaded neutral Belgium, raping and massacring innocent civilians; began using poison gas, which was banned by the rules of war; and sunk without warning merchant shipping. However, liberty and civilization won, and totalitarianism and barbarism lost.   After the war, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Ferdinand Foch had the correct analysis, “This is not a treaty, this is a 20 year armistice.” The way that quote is taken in our pro-German history books is that those evil Allies were so cruel, and those evil Allies forced the evil Treaty of Versailles upon those poor Germans. However, the quote meant what the real case was: this treaty was no hard enough, and why is Germany still allowed to exist? Unfortunately, we learned the hard way that it was not harsh enough. Worst of all, we didn’t even enforce the treaty and allowed Germany to expand and attempt to conquer the world again. During the Weimar Republic, there was another Germanic ideology that was created in attempt to utterly annihilate the West – Nazism. As we all know, the Nazis won at first, and with the power they had, they created one of the most totalitarian regimes ever been created in the world, and the Germans marched across Europe and spread genocide, tyranny, terror, and barbarism. However, the world finally managed to destroy the 3rd German Reich and discredit Nazism forever. We thought we destroyed Germanism, however, once again, we were wrong. We made the fatal mistake of feeling sorry for the Germans, and allow the continual existence of the German state.

Guess the Quote

Let’s play guess the quote!

Opposition there was none: the boldest spirits had succumbed on stricken fields or by proscription-lists; while the rest of the nobility found a cheerful acceptance of slavery the smoothest road to wealth and office, and, as they had thriven on revolution, stood now for the new order and safety in preference to the old order and adventure. Nor was the state of affairs unpopular in the provinces, where administration by the Senate and People had been discredited by the feuds of the magnates and the greed of the officials, against which there was but frail protection in a legal system forever deranged by force, by favoritism, or (in the last resort) by gold.

1. Who wrote this? If you are close, that’s ok. He was a very famous writer, I will give you that much. 2. What is the name of the work that this is written in? Any of the author’s works would be ok. 3. Where in the book can this quote be found? Approximate pages ok. 2. Where was this written? 3. When was this written? Approximate times are ok. 4. What language was this originally written in? This is an English translation from another language. 5. What is the writer discussing in this paragraph?

Last Word on Phoenicians, Phonetics, Etc.

It looks like we finally got the answer to whether Phoenician and phonetic, phonology, phone, phoneme, etc. are related – they are not, but both are from Greek words. Phonetic, phone, phonology, phoneme, etc. are derived from Greek Phonein, which means quite logically “to sound.” Phoenician, on the other hand, derives from a Greek word Phoenikoi for the people and region, derived from the word Phoenix which originally meant a particular conch shell that yielded a nice purple dye and later acquired the meaning via legend of a bird that rises from the ashes after it dies. I am not sure what the Phoenikoi were named after – perhaps the conch shell?

Anyway, the roots have no relationship to each other, but it was a nice hypothesis anyway. “Scientists” always like to chortle with ridicule at the notion of a “bad hypothesis” but I think in many cases, most hypotheses that seem prima facie reasonable are not bad hypotheses. Furthermore, I dislike the very notion of bad hypotheses as it smacks of the horrific arrogance all of the sciences engage in these days, even the ridiculous fake social “sciences” like my own pitiful specialty, Linguistics.

Miville writes:

Phonein (to sound) should first be sounded as the ancient Athenians did: not phoney-in, but pf-hone-een (or pf-honey-an as the Spartans did): the important thing is to try to sound out an f not with the teeth against the upper lip but with both lips as gently as to let off a beautiful soap bubble instead of ordinary spittle.

The Romans despite being the new lords on the block felt they were no match for Greece however decadent and derelict so they made that effort to sound the Greek ph the Greek way rather than like their own f, at least so as to spit gracefully down upon their own people, hence the spelling we inherited from them despite the fact no longer any Roman nor Greek knows any other sound than our own vulgar present f.

Phonein in Greek is written with an Omega, which was sounded Oh like in OMG in Athens and like Awe or (Golden) Dawn in Sparta. Phoenicia is derived, as regards the Greek language, from Phoenix, which was written with the false diphthong (original simple sound lacking a proper letter in the alphabet and therefore written two ones) oi which bore but little relationship whatever with either simple o or Omega and was rather sounded œ as in German Goethe or u as in turn depending on the city. Phonein meant to sound, phoenix rather derives from a word meaning a conch, the particular one whence came a very precious dark red dye, purpur or purple.

It also meant a legendary bird capable of rebirth after having passed through burnt offering. The legend was common (and still is in works such as the One and Thousand Nights) to all Near and Middle Eastern countries and the red color also pictured the Rising Sun, the Orient, hence the name given to the mariners stemming from the land of the rising sun also most renowned for its production of purple dye from the conch and for having given to Greece the alphabet.

The Phoenicians themselves called their own language and nationality Cana’an, so the name we use is a pure Greek creation, like the name Greek which is a Roman appellation for a people who call themselves Hellenes. The letters, of Phoenician origin, meant sounds, or phonemata.

The conch could also be used as a sounding horn, as is the symbol of the primeval creating divine vibration in many cultures, apart from the fact that in many languages a telephone receiver can be called a conch (Muschel in German). The proximate sounds, however, prove no common etymology, even though they are marvelous for poetry.

The early Roman soldiers when it came to name the same people that had settled Carthage did not make the effort their betters made when trying to pronounce Greek names and sounded Phoenikoi like Punici, simplifying the very peculiar Greek ph into p rather than into f. By regressive derivation they likened the word to their own poena, a punishment, and to the verb punire, but there is no common etymology.

"Rodbusters," by Alpha Unit

For millenia humans have created structures out of concrete. The Romans preferred concrete to all other construction materials, and their unique formula is the reason so many of ancient Rome’s monuments are still standing. The concrete we use today, while different from Roman concrete, is an excellent building material but as strong as it is, it has almost no tensile strength: it can’t withstand much pulling or stretching. For that reason builders reinforce it with rebar.

These metal rods, which have spaced patterns of bumps or swirls to help the concrete grip them, allow concrete to bend and flex without cracking or breaking. Rodbusters, the ironworkers who install rebar, have one of the most physically demanding jobs in construction.

Rodbusters will tell you that their shoulders especially take a pounding. They do a lot of lifting, and routinely carry heavy rebar on their shoulders. During hot weather, shoulder burns from hoisting hot steel rods are common. Here’s how one rodbuster describes his work:

Your back is shot, shoulders are raped, you can’t walk from being in the SLDL position all day long, and you literally have no free time aside from our [mandated] breaks.

Another rodbuster has pretty much the same view:

It’s good clean work…but it’s hell on the body. Carrying 150-180 pounds of 30′ rods all day gives your lower back, shoulders, and legs a beating. Not to mention tying [rebar] all day long as well. Picture being in the SLDL start position for five minutes at a time.

SLDL stands for Stiff Legged Deadlift.

Once a rodbuster positions the rebar, he ties it together with wire. He has to wrap wire securely around any area with two or more rebar sections that intersect or overlap. Tied corners are weak, so he installs bent rebar at corners. A job might involve cutting or welding.

Tying rebar requires fast, repetitive hand and arm movements while applying a lot of force. When a rodbuster ties rebar at ground level, he typically works in a stooped position, with his body bent deeply forward. A rodbuster informs us:

For a career as a rodbuster, you’re always bunched forward. You can always tell a rodbuster by how he looks.

Ironworkers in the United States have been represented since 1896 by the International Association of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers. But throughout the country there are rodbusters working without a union contract.

Some non-union rodbusters have walked off the job to protest working conditions. They report making significantly less than the national average for reinforcing ironworkers. They say they can work 18-hour days sometimes, without warning. There are no health benefits, and if there is an accident, it might not get reported to OSHA. Such protests have taken place in Vancouver, Washington; in Houston, Texas; and in Manchester, Tennessee.

Union or non-union, if you can set and tie rebar, you have a skill that’s in demand. Some ironworkers say that in their line of work, the sooner you get in and get out, the better off you are. As one of them put it:

I was a rodbuster for over 30 years, and if you go that route you will find out GOD fucking hates you. The first two weeks every muscle in your body will fucking hate you. But remember this, you are not the only one that will do it or has been through it, and you will survive.

Aztlan and Zionism: Dueling Idiocies

Repost from the old site. In this post, we will take a look at two nationalisms, Zionism, the movement to (re)create the ancient Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Aztlan, the Mexican and Chicano movement that says that part of the Western US is actually part of Mexico, and more importantly, was the homeland of the Aztec people. As with most forms of ultra-nationalism, both movements are exercises in lying and nonsense. And both are similar in other ways, too. Both propose that, because the area in question (Western US, Palestine) was the ancient homeland of the people some 2,000-5,000 years ago, that they have a right to move en mass into the region and even to annex it or possibly make their state there (the Aztlan movement is divided on whether Aztlan should be annexed to Mexico or whether it should be its own state). Both are based on some highly questionable claims of ownership. There is serious question whether or not Aztlan (an area covering part of the Western US – map here) is actually the ancient homeland of the Aztecs, as this article claims, supposedly with authoritative sources. Let us examine the article, by Patrisia Gonzales and Roberto Rodriguez, a writing team that somehow got UPI to syndicate their ultra-radical Chicano nationalist nonsense for many years. The authors found a map in the National Archives in Washington from 1847 with a notation near the Four Corners Area in the US referring to The Ancient Homeland of the Aztecs. This scribbling on a map somewhere by God knows who purportedly “proves incontrovertibly” that all Mexicans and all Central Americans have a right to move to the USA tomorrow, because the US Four Corners is their “ancient homeland”. The authors also note a tradition of the US Pueblo, Hopi, and Lakota (!?) Indian tribes that Nahuatl speakers were their former relatives. There are major problems with this. How would these tribes describe these “Nahuatl” speaking people, since back then, there is no way that they called their language or themselves by that name? Since they called themselves and their language something else, how did these tribes know that they were “Nahuatl”-speakers? And why the Lakota? They are located far from this fake homeland, way up in South Dakota. Further, as one who worked with an Indian tribe on a government grant doing linguistic and anthropological field work, I assure you that Indian legends and oral history need to be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, to say the least! The authors quote Cecelio Orozco, an education professor at my alma mater, California State University Fresno as saying this lines up with his research also putting the Aztec homeland in southern Utah. Professor Orozco has published two books of apparent pseudoarcheology on this subject. Here is how Orozco discovered this homeland (try not to laugh when reading this):

Orozco said he came upon the site through a process called “archeo-astronomy.” He saw a photograph of four rivers in Utah in 1980, and based on previous research, recognized a mathematical formula in the photo that led him to believe that this was the place of origin of the Mexicas’ ancestors. Subsequent trips and research has confirmed his thesis… 

After reading this fascinating article on archaeoastronomy, I still do not see how that science relates to a photograph of four rivers in Utah. Does anyone have any idea how a photograph of four rivers anywhere on Earth contains some hidden mathematical formula? He also found a painting on a wall in Utah from 500 BC that he says he claims corresponds to the the codec containing the Aztec calendar. Those of us familiar with the field realize that finds all over the world look like other finds, or resemble other peoples, or bear this or that passing resemblance to whatever. None of that usually proves anything; much more work needs to be done. According to the article, because Aztecs have a homeland in Utah dating back 2500 BC, Mexicans and Central Americans are no longer foreigners or aliens or even immigrants in the US, but they are simply in their homeland. By that lunatic thinking, all White Americans get emigrate back to Europe and live there, since that was our homeland at some point in the past. The Europeans have no right to stop us, and we can even call it Euroamland or whatever and carve out our own damn country out of several European countries, make English the official language and even sideline the several non-English European tongues spoken there. Then we can demand to be united with the US across the sea or just up and make our own country, dissolving several European countries in the process. It is this sort of nonsense that makes me wonder just how smart your average Mexican Reconquista type really is. On reflection, they are obviously bright people, it is just that ultranationalism, or even often just nationalism, damages people’s brains and makes them incapable of rational thought. It does this across the board to any ethnic group – there is no reason to single out Mexicans or Chicanos. Let us examine some of the other insane suppositions of the Aztlan crowd. We have already delved into this a bit on this on an earlier post. First of all, the Aztecs (Mexicas) had only taken over the Mexico City area about 200 years previous to the Spanish Conquest. The empire reached its peak only about 40 years before Cortes landed. Further, the Mexicas only lived in the area around Mexico City! That’s it. All of the rest of Mexico was not Mexica territory and the tribes (even those colonized by Mexicas) who lived there cannot be said to be Mexicas! As an analogy, let us consider the Roman Empire. Its headquarters were in Rome. The rest of the empire were just colonies, conquered areas paying tribute to Rome. Can we say that everyone in the Roman Empire was a “Roman” or an “Italian”? By the same logic, do those residing in Rome today have a right to claim all of the former Roman Empire as their land? This is what would happen if we applied “Aztlan”-logic to that situation. Do you see how stupid this Aztlan nonsense-lie is? The Aztecs did conquer quite a bit of land in the center of Mexico (map here), killing lots of folks and enslaving others. As noted below, the homeland of the Nahua, according to prominent Mexican archaeologist Eduardo Matos Moctezuma was probably somewhere around Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán* . From this area, 2,000 years ago, various waves of Nahua speakers radiated out through Mexico and even Central America. This is why we have 28 living Aztec (or Nahuatl) languages today. By the way, Wikipedia is wrong that these languages are almost dead. Most are quite vigorously used, and there are 1.5 million speakers of all Nahuatl languages. 27 of these 28 tribes are not, and were not, Mexicas, anymore than everyone speaking a Romance language today is a “Roman”. Follow? A somewhat more rational take on the Aztlan lie can be found on the Reconquista site here. Apparently real anthropologists put the Aztec homeland somewhere around Nayarit on the west coast of Mexico. That’s a lot more reasonable, but it’s probably not true either. This comes from Mexican anthropologist Alfredo Chavero’s theory in 1887. Moctezuma’s locale is probably better. The piece also argues that since Nahuatl is an Uto-Aztecan language and many Uto-Aztecans either lived in or traveled through “Aztlan”, that there is something to the Aztlan notion in that sense. Fair enough. In fact, the homeland of the Uto-Aztecans in my opinion is in southern Arizona or northern Mexico. But all Native Americans traveled through Siberia on their way to the Americas. Does everyone with Indian blood in the Americas get to go back to Russia and take over the place because their ancestors strolled through it sometime in the past 20,000 years? Looking at the linguistic contacts of pre-Nahuatl would be a good way of trying to find an Aztec homeland. We can see that they had contacts with languages spoken around Veracruz, on the east coast of Mexico. As you can see, the situation is complicated. The authors in the first article make an even more ludicrous point. First, as usual, they conflate the “Aztecs” a single tribe called the Mexica, amongst Mexico’s over 200 tribes, that only lived around Mexico City, with all Mexicans. According to idiot Chicano nationalists, all Mexicans with Indian blood are Mexica or part Mexica! That’s nuts. As noted, there were tribes all over the land, and the Mexica were only one of 200 or so. It’s as if one said that every Italian comes from Rome. Next, they say that all of the tribes related to the Mexicas were “Mexicas” because they spoke Nahuatl languages. They certainly were not! It’s nonsense. Are all speakers of Indo-European languages the one and same group because they all came out the Indo-European homeland in Southern Ukraine 8,000 years ago? Even worse, these fools claim that all Central Americans were Aztecs and get to go invade the USA because it’s home sweet home. Ridiculous. There is only one tribe, the Pipil in El Salvador, that still speaks a Nahuatl language, and there are only 20 speakers left. There were a few other Nahuatl languages in Honduras, Panama and Guatemala, but these are long since extinct. They were not “Aztecs” anymore than English-speakers in the US are “Germans”. However, the Pipil did come from the area around Mexico City around 1000 years ago; they were related to Olmecs, but also to the Nahuatl. In general, they were an Olmec grouping. Anyway, at that time, there were no such thing as Mexicas or Aztecs – that group came later. Another group of Pipil had come to Central America 5000 years ago and came under the influence of the Maya. This is around the time when Proto-Uto-Aztecan itself was born in the southwest US. Both of these groups, by 1000 AD, became the Pipil, who came under even more Maya influence. The Pipil are almost extinct culturally and linguistically today, an end result of the Matanza, when 10,000-30,000 Indians were slaughtered in only a few weeks in El Salvador in 1932, while US warships patrolled off the coast in case the victims of the genocide tried to fight back. After that, most Salvadoran Indians took off their Indian clothes and quit speaking Indian languages, especially since Pipil was outlawed. They also intermarried heavily with non-Indians, so that to this day, only The leader of the rebellion that set off the Matanza was Farabundo Marti, head of the Salvadoran Communist Party. The rebels that fought in the Civil War later on took their name, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, from him. The cult surrounding Zionism is much the same as the Aztlan nonsense. True, Jews ruled the area long ago, but only for a brief time, similar to the Aztecs. Further, similar conflations are made about the Judean Empire and the Aztlan Empire, Judean language and religion and actual Jews and Jewish religion and the relevance of ancient Judean religion to the Jewish religion today. Also similar is the outrageous notion that some group has a right to go back to its ancient homeland of 2000-5000 years ago, settle there at will, and even make a state there. Some of the radical Atzlanistas, similar to Zionists, also suggest throwing out the natives (in the case of the Aztlanistas the Whites, who came starting 400 years ago) since they are “invaders squatting on the true homeland”. In this same nonsensical way, Zionists project their own invasion of Palestine and squatting on Palestinian land off onto the victim. The Arabs, who came 1450 years ago, are the “invaders”, who have been squatting on “Jewish land” since then. Never mind that the Jews left 2000 years ago. They owned Palestine in their hearts in the intervening 1900 years, and Zionism claims that that trumps a property deed! Zionism’s proponents are Jews, the smartest folks on Earth, who ought to know better. But ultra-nationalism can easily make a fool of the finest man. See Joachim Martillo’s site, Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel, for more. In particular, his superb Issues and Questions In the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism (90 pp.!), is a piece which deserves much wider reading. Martillo has some tendency towards fanaticism (but this also drives him to produce), can be an ideologue, and is sometimes guilty of trying to make facts fit theory as opposed to otherwise. However, these (especially making the facts fit theory) are chronic problems with most all social scientists, as Kevin MacDonald has observed. At the least, the brilliant Martillo should be more widely read, if only to subject his interesting theories to the critical light of peer review to separate wheat from chaff. And the 90 page link above is just sublime, in particular in the way that it takes apart the primordial nonsense of Zionism in the same way we attacked the similar primordialism of the Atzlanistas in this post. *Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, The Great Temple of the Aztecs: Treasures of Tenochtitlan, New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988) 38.

In Praise of Julius Caesar

But, for Caesar, the all-accomplished statesman, the splendid orator, the man of elegant habits and polished taste, the patron of the fine arts in a degree transcending all example of his own or the previous age, and as a man of general literature so much beyond his contemporaries, except Cicero, that he looked down even upon the brilliant Sylla as an illiterate person–to class such a man with the race of furious destroyers exulting in the desolations they spread is to err not by an individual trait, but by the whole genus.

The Attilas and the Tamerlanes, who rejoice in avowing themselves the scourges of God, and the special instruments of his wrath, have no one feature of affinity to the polished and humane Caesar, and would as little have comprehended his character as he could have respected theirs.

Even Cato, the unworthy hero of Lucan, might have suggested to him a little more truth in this instance, by a celebrated remark which he made on the characteristic distinction of Caesar, in comparison with other revolutionary disturbers; for, said he, whereas others had attempted the overthrow of the state in a continued paroxysm of fury, and in a state of mind resembling the lunacy of intoxication, Caesar, on the contrary, among that whole class of civil disturbers, was the only one who had come to the task in a temper of sobriety and moderation…

Thomas De Quincey, De Bello Gallico, and Other Commentaries of Julius Caesar

The English author De Quincey, who wrote from is not very well know, which is too bad. Most who know of him at all are familiar with Confessions of an Opium Eater, but just about anything he ever wrote is worth reading. Look at that majestic prose above. Sure it’s languid and loping in getting to the point, but so what? So is Henry James. If you can’t hack it, go back to your bodice-ripper or thriller.

As a pure stylist, De Quincey has to be one of the finest writers of the past 200 years. I can’t get enough of this prose. Check out those 50-100 word sentences! Damn. You have to catch your breath while you read them.

Nice comments about Caesar too. Sure he was a conquering imperialist bastard, but he was one of the classiest, most refined and educated ones that ever lived. After him, who else?

Excellent Shot Across the Bow at the Nordicists

This is a great comment from an earlier piece I wrote, The Racial Makeup of Hispanics. It has attracted many an idiotic comment, especially from ignorant Hispanics. However, this comment was a nice one. It was written by a Spaniard in response to a stupid comment by a Nordicist claiming that ancient Greece and Rome were Nordic and that Mediterranean types were inferior non-Whites.

Spain a bastardized race? Britain is by far more bastardized.

Tacitus, a Roman historian made a clear description of how the Romans, Greeks, Celts, Germanics and Middle Eastern Scythians were.

First of all, Roman historical documents describe Carthaginian port towns as far as in Ireland. Carthaginian traders were originally from Phoenicia. These documents from around 300 B.C. clearly describe the phenotype differences of the Romans from other Barbaric tribes.

The Roman description of themselves is clearly the same as modern day Spanish person, Roman nose profiles resemble a Spanish nose profile. Romans describe themselves as having pale, easily tanned skin, dark hair and mostly having amber, light brown and more commonly hazel eyes.

The Celts, contrary to common ignorant beliefs, were described in 300 B.C. as having pale skin that could tan, dark hair and to a large degree, blue eyes.

Many Hibernians (Irish), however, were describe as having brown skin and dark eyes. Others as White with dark eyes and large noses. Ireland was then inhabited by a majority of Basques, some Celtic tribes and many Carthaginian traders.

The Germanic tribes were described as tall, blond and and light blue eyed, and reddish white skin.

Scythians originated in what today is Kazakhstan and were describe by Tacitus as tall, grey eyed and red haired.

These historical descriptions explain why Italians, Spaniards, Southern French, Portuguese, and to some degree Romanians look alike. Romans were never a Nordic race, nor did they ever have blue eyes. The Mediterranean people are not a result of a bastardized race.

The Roman Empire extended its influence to Britain, and many Roman Nobles moved in what is today known as Wales. As an obvious result, a great

Greeks thought that blue eyes were a sign of cowardice and uncivilized people.

Romans viewed Celtic, Germanic and other tribes, except Greeks, as inferior to them. Before the Roman conquest, technologically and culturally speaking, they were right; they possessed a poor writing system, did not have massive constructions and lacked a truly organized state. Germanic tribesmen rarely possessed any metal armor and fought naked. For Romans, Celtic or Nordic features were barbaric.

Ignorant people think mestizo people look like Indians or Arabs. I’ve been to Mexico and have some friends who are blond, blue eyed and both their parents look Indian; some others have green, hazel and grey eyes with white reddish skin, and some are even red haired with swarthy parents.

I’ve seen mixed people in Sweden (a great

Ignorant people think mixed races among European and non-European have to look non-White, which is really stupid.

Hungarians are also a mixed of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Magyar and Mongols. Many Russians absorbed Sami, Ugric and Mongoloid people for centuries. And Jews have also been mixing for almost a thousand years with some Europeans. If Jewish people hadn’t preserved their religion, they would be considered European. In Germany many blond Nordic looking folks were accepted in the Army even when their parents were Jewish.

The final point is that when mestizo populations are constantly absorbed by another group, over the centuries they become part of the culture that absorbed them. That is also the main reason why our languages constantly change; all Germanic languages used to be one but got mixed and changed. Same with Romance, Slavic and probably every single language in the world.

Some very nice comments here. First of all, my prejudices. I regard Nordicists as splitters who are trying to divide out great White race. Further, I like Med Whites a lot, and I surely consider at least all of the Meds in Europe as fully, 10

This comment makes clear that Meds and Spaniards are not some bastardized race, instead, they are simply the Meds, an ancient White people who are the direct ancestors of some of the greatest Whites that ever lived, the Romans and the Greeks.

Furthermore, the commenter notes that the British are quite mixed, with many Med types and Med features, especially among the Welsh. There is substantial Phoenician and Semitic (Middle Eastern Arab) blood in both the Irish and the British. Going back 2,300 years, the Irish were a dark haired and dark eyed people with heavy inputs from the dark Basques and Phoenicians and Celts.

Even the Celts, romanticized as uber-Nordics, are proven here to be have been dark haired with skin that tanned easily. They were very different from the Germanic types. Further, it is important to note a huge Celtic component in the Spaniards and Portuguese, especially in the north of Spain, in Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country, Argaon and Catalonia. There is substantial Celtic input in northern Portugal in the Lusitania region.

Celts are considered to be uber-Nordics, but the Spaniards are heavily Celtic, so are the Spaniards Nordics or what? The whole Nord vs. Med debate starts to get absurd because there has been so much Nordic-Med mixing over the millenia.

I laughed when I read that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought that Germanic Nordic types and features were inferior and barbarian phenotypes and peoples. How the world has changed, but it goes to show that all this crap is pretty subjective and there’s not a lot of “science” going on in the intra-European fights.

Surely the Hungarians are part Asiatic. You can sometimes see it in their eyes. Definitely, Russians are part Asiatic, mostly Siberian, as are Swedes and Finns, who have considerable Sami in them.

And of course Hispanic mestizos look like everything under the sun. One or both parents can be quite dark and indigenous looking, while one or more of the kids can be quite light, and vice versa. In the Caribbean, it works the same way, but the mix is Black and White. A genetic approach to Whiteness is nonsensical when denying Whiteness to someone who looks and acts White.

More On Who Were the Ancient Romans

A new comment on the previous post offers the best explanation yet.

The statues and paintings do not look like Meds or anyone else it seems. Their facial appearance was not as attractive as Meds or modern Italians (who are an extreme mixture of everything). They were a bit shorter than the German/Celts but were much more muscular. The few bones (ancient original Romans used cremation) showed heavy muscularity, much greater even than Moderns. My premise is that the Roman style of fighting served the infantry well, and their battles were of brute strength. Their sword the Gladius used was not as good as the Celtic sword in many ways. The Celtic sword has been shown superior in computer tests. However, the Roman style was to fight in a compact manner and use their superior physical strength it seems. They were even outnumbered by great margins it just about all battles. This fact seems to not to carry much weight, but in hand to hand combat it does. How the Romans won these battles was in part organization, but the endgame was really genetics. Where they came from is anybody’s guess. They do not appear to be like anyone but Romans. Of course in the later stages they were just a mix, sort of like modern day Italians.

Well, sure. It’s all starting to make sense now. Along with the earlier post, We Are Not Our Ancestors , it’s all starting to come together. The Romans, like many other ancient peoples of Europe and probably of other places, were part of a race or ethnic group that no longer exists. This is why the Meds and Nordicists have been fighting so long about whether the statues and paintings are Meds or Nords. The reason it’s controversial and hard to figure out in the first place (hence the debate) is that the Romans were neither! They were not Nordics or Germans, nor were they Italians or Meds. They were an extinct race, vanished from the Earth. It’s nice the way some unknown commenter comes along and so neatly ties together loose ends. I found it very interesting that the Romans were outnumbered in almost all their battles but won most of them anyway. The commenters theory sounds better than any others out there. Most combat was indeed hand to hand back in those days. What a terrifying way to fight a war!. Can you imagine having to go hand to hand with a deadly enemy in a kill or be killed battle? I’d rather take my chances in modern way any day. As a side note, I am really getting tired of all of these races and ethnic groups claiming the achievements of ancient folks as their own. In many cases, the great ancients do not seem like the ancestors of those puffing their chests.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans and Their Early Descendants: Proto-Languages and Homelands

The Indo-European languages include most of the languages of Europe, Iran and Northern India. For instance, English, Gaelic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Albanian, Armenian and Kurdish are some of the better-known IE languages of Europe and the Near East. In Iran, the major language, Farsi, is IE, as is the major language Pashto in Afghanistan. In India and Pakistan, the huge languages Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi are all IE. They go back to a proto-language called Proto Indo-European, or PIE. In that the languages are all related, the truth is that the peoples are all related to for the greatest part. So Northern Indians, Pashtuns, Iranians, Kurds and Armenians are all closely related to Europeans since they all sprung in part from a common source, in the famous words of Sir William Jones, who discovered the IE languages in the late 1700’s. Going back 6,500 years, we can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European quite well. One of the best resources is Julius Pokorny‘s Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (or downloadable copy on the blog here (huge file). The homeland of the Indo-Europeans is the subject of much debate, but the modern consensus centers around putting the homeland at 6500 years before present (YBP) around Southern Russia. I have narrowed it to southern Russia, southeastern Ukraine and southwestern Kazakhstan north of the Caucasus. This is more or less the region in between the Black and Caspian Seas. An arid region called the Kuma-Manych Depression is in the middle of this region and seems to be a major center of PIE culture. I could not find a map of the Depression, but it separates the North Caucasus from the Russian Plain. There were also settlements in southeastern Ukraine near the Sea of Azov, about 50 miles north of the Caspian Sea in southwestern Kazakhstan and up around the Lower Volga Region near Samara. A good word for this general region is the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

The homeland of the Proto Indo Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
The homeland of the Proto Indo-Europeans, as of 6,500 YBP. I looked around for good maps of the PIE homeland but I could not find any, so I drew my own. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
From there, it’s not really known how or when the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out, but they show up in Europe some time later. A good map of their migrations or conquests is here. The PIE people had several advantages over their neighbors. They were already into the Bronze Age for one, and not only that, but there were horses running around Southern Russia. The PIE had managed to domesticate the horse. That’s quite an advantage, but the PIE people did one better. They even invented a wheel. Then they logically put the two together and made horse-drawn chariots. With these chariots, the PIE people apparently conquered much of Europe and later parts of Southwest Asia and South Asia. The people in Europe at this time were pre-PIE folks. We know little about their culture, but the master of PIE culture, the celebrated professor Marija Gimbutas (A woman!) calls it “Old Europe.” Old Europe is very little known or understood. A probable surviving language from Old Europe is Basque. Another, long extinct, is Etruscan. The very early people of the British Isles, whose descendants are now known as the Black Irish, populated the Isles between 9000-11000 YBP. They had dark hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. Genetically, they seem to resemble the Basques and may have come on boats from Spain. The Basques themselves and related peoples may have come from the Caucasus long, long ago. Although Basque is said to have no living relatives, I believe it is related to Caucasian languages like Chechen and Ingush. Throughout Europe one finds folks called Black this and Black that. I had a girlfriend who called herself a Black Swede and later on, a girlfriend named Linda of Polish heritage. Both had very dark, curly hair, dark eyes and very pale skin. As a guess, these types of Europeans may be the remains of Old Europe. Gimbutas is also the founder of the Kurgan Hypothesis, which is currently the best PIE theory out there. Gimbutas (photo) sort of lost it towards the end when she got into “Goddess worship” and whatnot, but it’s clear that this Lithuanian archeologist was one of the great scholars of our time. Some time after 6500 YBP, PIE began to break up, but no one knows quite how this occurred. At any rate, by 4200 YBP, a split had occurred in PIE and a separate language had broken off, Indo-Iranian. There are maps out there of the Indo-Iranian homeland, but I don’t like them all that much so I made my own. My best guess was to place it in the far north of Kazakhstan and just over the border into Russia. From there, after 3500 YBP, the Indo-Aryans moved out and migrated into Afghanistan, Pakistan, North India and Iran. Many people in these regions today speak Indo-Iranian languages descended from these people. These folks are thought to be the source of the famous Aryan Invasion of India at around this time.
A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3,500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
A map of the Indo-Iranian Homeland in far northern Kazakhstan around 3500 YBP. This is where the Iranians, Afghans, North Indians and many Pakistanis came from. Copyright Oakhurst Technology 2009.
As I noted, the process whereby these languages split off, other than the Indo-Aryan split, is little known. However, assuming this tree diagram is correct, maybe it can shed some light on the matter.
A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family.
A very interesting tree diagram of the IE language family. Click to enlarge.
Unfortunately, this chart is hard to read, so I will try to decipher it. The first thing to note is the Anatolian split in the tree, apparently the first split. There are problems with the date for PIE. A glottochronological study recently gave a date of about 8500 YBP for PIE, considerably earlier than the usual date of around 6500 YBP. Promoters of something called the Anatolian Hypothesis have used this to suggest than an earlier language called Proto-Indo-Hittite was spoken in Anatolia 8500 years ago. The Anatolian languages split off, and the PIE speakers moved to the Pontic Steppe. The movement of Proto-Indo-Hittite speakers out of Anatolia to the Pontic Steppe to form the PIE people may be related to the Black Sea Deluge Theory which has recently been proven correct. The Black Sea expanded dramatically according to this theory as, around 7600 YBP, a waterfall 200 times the size of Niagara Falls (!) poured through the Bosporus Straits, transforming the pre-Black Sea freshwater lake into the present-day brackish (part-salt water, part-fresh water) Black Sea. Soon after this event, PIE culture appears in the Pontic Steppe. This is a very controversial proposal called the Indo-Hittite Theory, but I have long supported it. The late Joseph Greenberg, one of the greatest historical linguists that ever lived, also supported it. This theory holds that Indo-European has two branches, Indo-European proper and the Hittite branch. The Hittite branch is related to the other branch only in a binary fashion. There is good evidence for this. The Anatolian languages, all of which are now extinct, are very strange and seem distant from the rest. The appear archaic and have retained many forms which seem to not be present on the rest of IE. My guess is these are archaic forms. Anatolian lacks grammatical gender – masculine:feminine, an IE innovation spread through the family. Instead, it has an archaic noun class system called animate:inanimate. This is reminiscent of ancient Niger-Congo languages in Africa. In addition, the Anatolian vowel system is reduced (fewer vowels) and the case system is simpler. Many basic IE vocabulary terms are simply missing in Anatolian. All of this debris tends to add up to the hypothesis of an ancient branch of the language family. Tocharian is visible on the diagram as Italo-Celtic-Tocharian. This branch is extremely strange, since Tocharian was spoken way over in Asia near East Turkestan and Kyrgyzstan, and Celtic and Italic are spoken in the heart of Europe. This is the area where the mummies with blond hair and blue eyes have been found. Tocharian may have split as early as 6000 YBP. The Tocharian language is also very ancient and strange and is only distantly related to the rest of IE. If anything, it seems to look somewhat like Anatolian. A very ancient branch of IE also split off around this time. Known as Balkan or Paleo-Balkan, it may also have split off 6000 YBP. There were two major branches, Thracian and Illyro-Venetic. Thracian is extinct, and all that remains of Illyro-Venetic is Albanian, a very ancient IE tongue that is only distantly related to the rest of IE. Proto-Illyrian and Thracian split around 4200 YBP. Here is a map of the Illyrian tribes before the Roman conquest. It is from this milieu that the Albanians emerged. The Albanian language is quite strange within IE and seems to have very ancient roots dating back to Proto-Paleo-Balkan from 6000 YBP. Another very early split you can see in the chart is something called Indo-Irano-Armeno-Hellenic. The Armeno-Hellenic branch probably split off 6000 YBP. The fact that Armenians and Greeks today still possibly retain a PIE appearance is also suggested by this early split. Only the Greek languages and Armenian remain of this family, as most of the family is extinct. Proto-Hellenic may have split off around 5000 YBP, and Proto-Armenian may have split around 4500 YBP. The proto-Hellenics seem to have been related to the Indo-Iranians. This may be why a number of North Indians look like Greeks, Turks or Armenians. Armenian and Hellenic are also strange IE branches that are only distantly related to the rest of IE. The Italo-Celtic branch broke off as early as 5000 YBP. Proto-Celtic split about 2800 YBP; the homeland is in Northern Austria. The Hallstatt Culture is associated with them. The Proto-Italics are dated to around 3500 YBP in Italy. Before that, the Italo-Celtic Homeland is thought to have been in southern and central Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The fact that Italics (Italians and related languages) and Celts share common roots shows how insane and stupid Nordicism is, as Nordicists say that Italians south of the Po are ‘non-Whites.’ It turns out that those greasy dagos and those blond and blue guys in dresses blowing pipes in the Highlands are the same folks after all, as they share common genetic roots in Austria 3500 YBP. Proto-Germanic also dates far back, with pre-Proto-Germanic possibly being spoken 3800 YBP in northern Germany, Denmark and Southern Scandinavia ( map). The homeland of the pre-proto-Germanics is in Southern Sweden and Jutland. They may have settled this area as early as 5000 YBP. These speakers may have been speaking something called Balto-Slavo-Germanic, a group you can see on the tree above. Proto-Germanic proper probably dates from the Jasdorf Culture. The homeland of the proto-Germanics was in northern Germany, around Schleswig-Holstein south into the Lower Elbe region in what is now Saxony-Anhalt and the Hanover area. It also extended along the Baltic coast of Germany to about the Polish border, down into Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. The original center of the homeland was in Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Balto-Slavic is also a very ancient branch of IE. Lithuanian is an ancient IE language that is very conservative and has retained many ancient IE reflexes that have been lost in the rest of IE. Proto-Balto-Slavic probably split around 4000 YBP. Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic split apart about 3400 YBP. Map of the Balto-Slavic homeland. This homeland encompassed Western Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Poland. Proto-Slavic, dating from 3400 YBP, seems to have its homeland in Northern and Western Ukraine and in Southern Belarus. The proto-Baltic homeland dating from the same time frame is about the southern border region of Belarus around the Pinsk Marshes. The rest of the splits, of Slavic, Italic, Celtic, Indian, Iranian and Germanic into their branches, are pretty well-documented, and all occur within the past 1500-3000 years. Let us move to some interesting dilemmas about the Indo-Europeans. One is the distribution of R1a associated with the Indo-Europeans.
The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
The map of the R1a lineage showing high concentrations in Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
The highest levels of this haplogroup are found in Eastern Europe in a narrow band from the Black Sea in the Ukraine through Poland to the Baltic Sea and in Northern India and areas to the northwest around the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, but that does not mean that these two groups are particularly closely related. Northern Indians are most closely related to Iranians and relatively distantly to Eastern Europeans. The truth is that this haplogroup is only a signature of a split from around the Aryan-Greco homeland in the Pontic Steppe region discussed above. This left high levels of R1a in Eastern Europe and in north India. High levels in North India are not particularly notable but exist only due to a founder effect. Actually, the highest levels are not found in North India but in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and north Afghanistan. The high levels found in North India have led some to assume incorrectly that the homeland of the R1a people was in that area, but this is not the case.
A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.
A map of R1b DNA distribution. The homeland of the R1b line is the Maykop Culture, shown in the shaded pink region between the Caspian and Black Seas.
R1b levels are highest in Spain and the Western British Isles. The launching point for the R1b seems to have been the Maykop Culture of 5500 YBP. From there, they spread all over Europe. The Maykop Culture was an early PIE split that existed between the Taman Peninsula just east of the Crimea east to the Dagestan border in the area that includes part of Southern Russia east of the Crimea, Adygea, Karachay-Cherkessia, Kabardino-Balkaria, North Ossetia, Ingushetia and Chechnya in the Caucasus. The center of the culture was around Maykop in Adygea (Circassia). The region is now inhabited by peoples of the Caucasus and is heavily Muslim. An explanation:

The Proto-Indo-Europeans belonged both R1a and R1b. Their homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, in what is known as the Kurgan culture (7000-2200 BCE).

The presence of R1b in modern times between the Black Sea and the Caucasus hints at the Maykop culture (3500-2500 BCE) as their most plausible homeland, while the Eurasian steppes to the north were R1a territory. […]

A comparison with the Indo-Iranian invasion of South Asia shows that 4 The impact of the Indo-Europeans was more severe in Europe because European society 4,000 years ago was less developed in terms of agriculture, technology (no bronze weapons) and population density than that of the Indus Valley civilization. This is particularly true of the native Western European cultures where farming arrived much later than in the Balkans or central Europe. Greece was the most advanced of European societies and was the least affected in terms of haplogroup replacement. Native European Y-DNA haplogroups (I1, I2a, I2b) also survived better in regions that were more difficult to reach or less hospitable, like Scandinavia, Brittany, Sardinia or the Dinaric Alps[…] The eastern branch of the R1a steppe people was the Andronovo culture (2300-1000 BCE), around modern Kazakhstan, which correspond to the Indo-Iranian branch of languages. Their migration to the south have resulted in high R1a frequencies in southern Central Asia, Iran and the Indian subcontinent. The highest frequency of R1a (about 6

References

Pokorny, Julius. 1959, 2007. Proto-Indo-European Etymological Dictionary. A Revised Edition of Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Published on the Internet: Indo-European Language Revival Association.

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Who Were The Ancient Romans?

This is an interesting question mostly because it would be academic and noncontroversial except that Nordicists have chosen to shove their hateful snouts into the matter and create a bunch of lies. The proto-Italics, later to become the Romans in part, came from Austria 2900 YBP. No quite knows who Austrians were at that point racially, as Germanics don’t show up in Austria until late in the Roman Empire near the Fall. A sector of the Nordicists have created a lie to disinherit the Italians of their claim to the Roman Empire. According to this lie, the ruling class of the Romans were pure Germanics, and the rabble/refuse were just a bunch of racially degenerated dagos. They enlist all sorts of nonsensical evidence in favor of this supposition, including looking at statues and paintings and whatnot. The Nordicist notion stems from their incredulity that a bunch of no good wops could have created one of the greatest empires known to mankind. It’s interesting that many Nazi racialist authors did not subscribe to the standard Nordicist lie of today. The Nazis were quite clear that the Italians of today were the descendants of the Romans. In fact, Nazi racial hierarchy placed Meds only slightly below Nordics on the racial scale. Both were seen as highly superior races, but the Nordics were seen as a bit better, as supremacists always have to put themselves on top. Nazi theory held that both Meds and Nords had a lot of good and bad racial tendencies, and held that Meds were superior to Nords in many ways. In particular, the Meds were seen as one of the most, if not the most, creative race in modern times, or possibly ever. The Nordicist distortion of today stems from the UK and the US. The US was settled by Northern Europeans and the Southern Europeans, including Italians, who immigrated starting 130 years ago were seen as highly inferior on a racial basis. Science has not born this claim out, but it remains a part of US founding stock culture, and it was a motivating factor being the restrictive 1925 Immigration Act. I don’t know the UK racially very well, but I suspect that they have always looked down on the Continent in general, and probably the Southern Europeans in particular. Not when it comes to partying in Mallorca though I guess. Anyway, the truth is that modern Nordicists have so distorted even Nazi Nordicism that most modern Nordicists would have probably been booted out of the Nazi Party at the time. I am not trying to romanticize the Nazis here, but in terms of racial science, they were correct in some ways. Contrary to popular nonsense, Nazis did not hold Jews to be inferior. Nazi racialism quite correctly recognized the superiority of the Jews. Instead, they just held that the Jews were evil. The Nazis employed racialist academics who followed the army on their gruesome deeds. Over by the Caucasus, these academics undertook deep scientific studies that concluded that certain Jewish groups in that area were not racially Jewish, but instead were culturally Jewish. The Nazis were not as insane as everyone says, and they held by the findings of their scientists and saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews on that basis. The pro-Meds have been battling the Nordicists about this for nearly a century now, and I support the Meds’ side of the argument. From Roman sources we get reports describing Romans in quite the same way as the peoples of Abruzzo to the Po would be described today. Germanics were described as blond, blue and very different looking than Romans. The only difference between the Romans and the Abruzzo to Po Italians of today is that the people in this region are actually more Germanized today than they were under the Romans! To the South, there have been some changes, including a large injection of Arab, Phoenician, Spanish, Corsican, French (Norman), Greek and Albanian genes. This is most marked in Sicily. One lie is that the Abruzzo to Po Italians have lots of Black blood in them. To the South, yes, there is some Black blood, but it is minimal. It is most prominent in Sicily at around Academics have stayed out of the debate only to say that the ancient Romans were the same people as modern day Italians. A similar lie was spread about Greece on the same basis. How could these dumb-ass Southern European inferiors have produced one of the greatest societies in history? It’s obviously not possible, so some mysterious Germanics must have infiltrated that rocky land to surreptitiously ruled over those swarthy inferiors. Once again, statues and whatnot are enlisted in support of this, and Nordicists study art and statues with magnifying glasses claiming to see secret Master Race features in Greek art. The Meds have gone at them again in this argument, and once again, I side with the Meds. The Nordicist argument is curious. If Romans and Greeks were secret Master Race types, then obviously the central Italians and Greeks, as largely racially unchanged folks, are their descendants anyway. The argument becomes circular. The Nords try to say that the Central Italians and Greeks underwent some massive racial degeneration after the Falls, but there is no evidence for this. As with Southern Italians, there seems to be some Black blood in the Greeks, but only about Some Nordicists make a truly insane argument about Ancient Egypt which is almost as insane as the Afrocentric crap about Black Athena. According to this, some Master Race White types created Egypt, then Egypt underwent racial degeneration with an infusion of Black blood and collapsed into the Hellish Cairo of today, trash dumps everywhere, mangy stray dogs in the streets, and rats about as big as the dogs scurrying through the open air markets.

Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.
Garbage in Naples. Descendants of the great Romans? Afraid so. How so? A historian might say that down through time, shit happens.
Not only that, but nothing works, and in order to get hooked up to the non-working system, you have to wait in line forever and pay off a bunch of lazy pricks. Academics once again stay out of this one, except to say that they think there was continuity between Ancient and modern Egyptians. I saw one piece in the Journal of Physical Anthropology that compared genes of ancient Egyptians with those of modern Egyptians. Amazingly, racially, they were about the same at 9 The truth is somewhat interesting. While the Afrocentrist notion must be discarded, it’s certainly true that at least historically, a bit of Black blood mixed with mostly White stock has produced some of the greatest societies the world has ever seen. At 90-9 It’s difficult to come up with a theory to explain why this stock did so well, but possibly mixing a bit of one stock to a lot of another produces an excellent genetic set. Anyway, this is how animal and plant breeders have been operating for centuries. It would be surprising if humans were different. If you think this website is valuable to you, please consider a contribution to support the continuation of the site.

Nice Map of the Roman Empire

Great map of the Roman Empire at its height with original Roman names of all of the provinces.
Great map of the Roman Empire at its height with original Roman names of all of the provinces.
This is a very interesting map. In case you can’t read it very well, a better copy is here. I had no idea that the Romans conquered so far. They conquered “the known world” as it was said at the time. That wasn’t really true, as even the Romans admitted that they did not conquer the Germanic tribes in Germania Magna, Sarmatia, Aethiopia, Iberia, Arabia Felix, Caledonia, Hibernia, etc. These names are instructive, as these are the places that the Romans did not conquer. Hibernia was Ireland; to this day, Irish English, which can be very hard to understand, is called Hibernian English. Caledonia for Scotland makes no sense to me, but there is a province in the Solomon Islands in Melanesia called New Caledonia, FWIW.  Iberia for the Caucasus makes no sense either, as Iberia usually means the Spanish Peninsula nowadays. All of Africa outside North Africa is simply referred to as Aethiopia. Arabia Felix is the Arabian Peninsula. Germania Major (Greater Germany) is the area of the fiercest German tribes; perhaps they were just too much hassle to conquer. Sarmatia is Russia; this means nothing to me. Now for the provinces. Egypt is Aegyptus. Libya is Creta et Cyrene, apparently a combination province of Crete (Creta) and Cyrene (Libya). Israel/Palestine is Judea. Syria, Lebanon, etc. is Syria. This notion of Greater Syria lives on with Pan-Syrianists such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Iraq is Mesopotamia. Armenia is Armenia, but much larger than today. Bulgaria is Thracia. The regions of Western Turkey are familiar to me, but mean nothing anymore. Romania is Dacia. The name of Dacia is important. Nordicists claim that some mysterious Northern European superior folks came down to Italy, conquered inferior greasy dagos, and became the ancient White Romans. Like most Nordicist crap, it’s a lie. The Romans, true, did not come from Italy. Instead they came from Dacia. No one really knows who the Dacians were, but I doubt they were Germans. They probably looked dark like the Romanians of today. This group has also had some Scythian-type Ossetian/Iranian inputs 1600 years ago or so. So the Romans were Southern Europeans. Italy was Italia, and Sicily was Sicilia. Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, etc. were Dalmatia. This name lives on in the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia. Sardinia and Corsica retain their Roman names. Portugal is Lusitania, and Portuguese speaking nations today are called Lusophone regions. North Africa,  for some reason, is Mauritania – is this a reference to “Moors?” Western France was Aquitania – think Eleanor of Aquitaine. Southern France was Norbonensis; there is a city called Narbonne in the region today. The Balearic Islands were called Baleares. Northern Greece was Macedonia. A region called Belgica covered northeastern France – think Belgium. The part of Germany known today as the Rhineland was conquered and referred as Germania Inferior and Superior. The area in and around Switzerland and Southern Germany was referred to as Raetia. The branch of the Romance Language family that today contains Romansch is referred to as Rhaetian. The Southern Germans and Swiss have a large dose of “Roman” in them, and their languages have a Romance influence. I recently met a Bavarian man who looked for all the world like a Frenchman. England and Wales are Brittania. This name lives in on the British nationalist phrase, “Rule Brittania.” I left off a number of place names that mean nothing to me. There are also some cities there, but the names are very hard to read. Londonium is London. Salamanca is a now a region in Spain. Roma is Rome, and Syracuse is in Sicily. Carthaga is in Tunisia. Alexandria yet exists in Egypt. Caesarea was a city in northern Israel, now abandoned on the sand dunes. Thessalonika in Northern Greece still exists, as does Antiochia in Turkey (Antioch). The legend of this map, as you can see, is in German. The shaded area of the Roman Empire is the Romanisches Reich, a nice touch. Romanisches Reich it was.

Nords Versus Meds, Game Starts at 8 Eastern Time

In the post, Albanians Are Neither White Nor Europeans? Lafayette Sennacherib takes issue with some of my anti-Nordicist POV, suggesting that ancient Greece was populated from the North, specifically the Baltics:

…there may turn out to be some truth in the notion that the Myceneans came from the North (though I think it unlikely that many went back).

I mentioned here before that I’d recently come across this book by Felice Vinci: The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales.

Homer, as you are no doubt aware, is credited  (it’s not known if he was one or many authors) with the creation of the earliest European literature with his epic tales ‘the Iliad’ about the Trojan war, and ‘the Odyssey’ about the journeys of Odysseus as he tries to find his way home, with a boatload of men, after the war.

Last I heard, the best guess is that it was composed about 1200BC and written down about 7oo BC. Trouble is, there’s a lot of description in Homer, but none of it fits the Mediterranean.

You’ve guessed what’s coming: Felice has matched all the descriptions and journey times and directions to the Baltic. Apparently there was a verifiable drastic climate change before which the Baltic was a lot more user friendly.

I think ( I haven’t read the book yet), from reviews I’ve read, that he places some of Odysseus’ travels quite far afield up the North Sea coast of Norway, and even to the Shetlands and Orkneys and possibly Scotland and Britain.

If you’ve ever seen the ancient underground towns in Shetland or Orkney (the back of beyond these days; in fact even the Romans called them Ultima Thule – the ends of the Earth), which seem to have had efficient plumbing maybe as early as 1500 BC, you can’t help but wonder how such refinements came to be in this most unlikely of places – Felice’s theory would locate them in a lively interlinked maritime world centering on the Baltic.

Of course, this isn’t proven, but I get the impression that some serious people are taking this seriously enough to fund more research.

Felice speculates that deteriorating climatic conditions caused many of these Baltic peoples to migrate south, and that they took their myths and poems with them, and that the reason that some of the names of towns correspond to known and existing Greek sites is that they named places in their new home after places in their old home, as Europeans have so obviously done in the USA, Australia and so on.

Well, I agree that the theory is interesting, but in the long run, none of it really makes sense from a Nordicist POV. Germanic tribes went all over Europe, so the very idea of Med and Nordic doesn’t make a lot of sense. And Meds went all over up into the north too. The two groups totally mixed in with each other. Nordics are part Med and Meds are part Nordic. Bottom line is that modern Greeks are the same folks as ancient Greeks, no matter where they came from. Modern Italians are the same as the ancient Romans, no matter where the Romans came from. Nordicists take issue with this, and say that Rome and Greece were created by some glorious Nordic types, and then after the Fall, some kind of mud people* or nigger people* from the South (I guess that means Arabs, North Africans, Ethiopians, Lebanese) came into Greece and Italy and muddied up these beautiful White German folks, creating the present day swarthy Med. Nordicists are serious assholes! The ones here in the US really, really, really, really hate Southern Europeans. They think they are inferior greaseball part-Mud*, part-nigger* people. Most US Nordicists say that Meds are not even White. Anti-Southern European prejudice and discrimination, especially discrimination against Italians and Catholics, is pretty much history in White America, but at one time, this was a prominent trend. Italians have moved into the White Ruling Class, and the Catholic JFK was elected and ruled Camelot 50 years ago. Even the KKK lets Catholics in now, and says let’s let bygones be bygones. The fact that probably 8 If you read the original Nazi racialist authors, they do not say this at all. Say what you will about them, but they pursued this stuff as a science. They agreed that Meds were a great White people, and that the modern Meds are descendants of the great cultures of Greece and Rome. They listed many attributes of the Meds and said that in many ways, Meds were superior to Nordics. However, Nordics were also superior to Meds in many ways. When it all tallied up, the Nordics came out on top, but only slightly. To say that the Nazis felt that Meds were inferior is completely mistaken. Meds were a great White people, but Nordics were also great, and Nordics were somewhat greater the Meds. Of course they had to put themselves on top, all Supremacists do. One thing the Nazi racialist scientists did say was that Meds were very creative, perhaps the most inventive and creative Whites that ever existed, or maybe the most inventive and creative humans that ever existed. They said that Meds were superior in terms of the arts, which is somewhat related. I concur. Modern day Nordicists (neo-Nazis in general) who despise and disparage Meds as non-Whites, in all honesty, would have been thrown out of the Nazi Party in Germany! That’s how out of it they are. This is sort of a peculiarly American and Australian thing – the Nordicist contempt for Meds. I’m not sure if you see it that much in Europe, though people are always going to be rivals. It does exist in Italy though, where the Padanianists pour scorn on the “part-nigger”* Southerners. The Padanianists also take pride in being “Celtic.” However, non-racial frustration with the South extends as far south as Abruzze (east of Rome) in Italy. Even in Abruzze, they think that they work hard and they don’t get all their tax money back. Instead it goes to the unproductive South, who take more in revenues than they contribute in taxes. Further, in Abruzze, there is frustration that any tax money sent South in the form of revenues is wasted, as it just goes to the Camorra (Mafia) anyway. The notion of the South, and that means Naples south (Naples is thoroughly Camorra-overrun) as being the Land of the Camorra is not misplaced. The Camorra for all intents and purposes practically run the show down there. Police try to fight them, but they are overwhelmed. Most of the politicians are paid off, and those who are not might get shot. Judges and investigative journalists are routinely threatened and gunned down. There was also something like this North-South rivalry in the former Yugoslavia, with the notion being that Slovenia and Croatia were the economic engines of the place, and everything south just took in more revenues than they paid out in taxes. In the north of Spain, there is some pride once again in being “Celtic”, but I am not aware that Northern Spaniards hate Southern Spaniards all that much, or at all. Some of the north, especially around Leon and Asturias, is in bad shape economically, and I’m sure they take more in revenues than they pay in taxes, so the North-South thing doesn’t really work. In Western Asturias in particular, the region is depopulating, and most towns are losing population. Even wolves are coming back to the hills and foraging in garbage dumps outside of towns. In 20 years, many villages in Western Asturias may be effectively abandoned. The economic and industrial engines of Spain are in the Basque Country and Catalonia (industry in the Basque area, corporate offices in Catalonia). This is one of the main reasons why Spain is dead-set against having these regions secede. *Used sardonically.

A Brief Look at the History of Art in the West, 300 BC – 1350 AD

Updated February 24. I added a few more things here. I’m just getting into the history of art, and most people don’t know the slightest thing about it either, so let’s take a little jaunt into art history and you’re welcome to come along on my journey. This will focus mostly on the history of art in the West. This post isn’t complete at all, but at least it gives you an overview of the subject. What it does in brief is gives a list of the finest art produced in the West from 300 BC until about 1400 or so, with a brief jaunt into the 1800’s. I only link to one of these works of art, but if you are interested in some of the greatest works of art ever produced by men, just copy paste the names of the works below into Google images and you should be able to get a look at what I’m talking about. I’m too lazy to track down links to all of these works, sorry. First of all, a previous post that suggested that there was little art in the Dark Ages was completely mistaken. What is true is that there was a decline in the great art and architecture produced by the Romans. Roman art came from the Greeks, and I think the Greeks were better sculptors. Great Greek buildings and statues include The Treasury of the Siphnians and Battle Between the Greeks and Giants (Delphi), Achilles or Spear Bearer, the Parthenon and the Temple of the Olympian Zeus (Athens), Temple of the Athena Nike (Acropolis), Aphrodite of Knidos, Hermes and the Infant Dionysus, the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (out of this world), Warrior A, The Scraper, Venus de Milo, Gallic Chieftain Killing His Wife and Himself, Athena Attacking the Giants and Dying Gallic Trumpeter (Pergamon), Laocoon and His Sons, Nike of Samothrace and Hellenistic Ruler. Statues such as the Venus de Milo are some of the finest statues, albeit classical statues, ever made. They are very realistic; one could even say that they are hyper-realistic. It is better to say that Greek art was idealized realism. That is, it is more real than real. If you look at Greek statues of humans, they are more perfect than humans actually are. Anatomists have studied these statues and concluded that these statues are in fact more perfect than actual humans could be, down to the last detail. It’s an idealized and perfectionist vision of man and what he could be. Greek art, and the Roman art that followed, is very secular. This sets it apart from the art that followed in 1000 years following the Fall of Rome, in which art become focused solely on religion. So in this way, the Greeks and Romans were extremely advanced for their time. In contrast to the wildly religious-obsessed art of the Middle Ages, Greek and Roman art nearly avoids religion, as if it was not important. What was important, instead, was the secular, quotidian lives we live on Earth and all of the hopes, dreams, tragedies, comedies, joys, etc etc. of the human journey. In this crucial way, the Greeks and Romans were as modern as we were. If we could go back in time and air-drop cars and planes into their cities, I’m pretty sure they could go to town with them pretty fast. Quit thinking of these ancients as primitives. They were just like us! Some Greek art such as Gallic Chieftain Killing His Wife and Himself and Dying Gallic Trumpeter, while secular, is also histrionic is a staged sense. These are the exaggerated emotions of our films and plays, the timeless saga of man, his travails, conflicts and emotions. The point here is that the emotional content is wildly exaggerated in the way that it often is on stage in plays. Plays, like opera, since they lack the fancy sets of cinema, rely on exaggeration of emotion, to convey what they lack via fancy sets and multimillion dollar crews. The Greeks made some great tile art too, like Alexander the Great Confronts Darius III at the Battle of Isos and Stag Hunt. In a previous post I asked why the very early civilizations all built pyramids. The truth is not so surprising. A pyramid is the most basic and rational architectural structure to build. It’s a natural. If you empty salt onto a table, it ends up in a pyramid shape. A pile of about anything often ends up pyramidal. A pyramid is going to stay upright. Building large things other than pyramids that are going to stay upright is a lot more difficult. This is why the Roman invention of the arch was so essential. In architecture, the arch is an essential ingredient to any advanced building. If you see some of the reconstructed Roman structures in the context of the time, it’s as if they were built by aliens. That’s how far advanced they were beyond anything else of the time. I have seen interiors of large Roman structures that look like modern airport terminals (see the Central Hall of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome). Roman cities were laid out very rationally on perfect grids. They also made atriums, pillars, coliseums, on and on. Buildings had elaborate carvings made in them, often of men in combat. Roman paintings do exist, but due to the fact that they used wood and paints that decayed, little has remained. Most remaining Roman “paintings” were done with tiles. I have seen Roman paintings that achieve a look that was not achieved again until the 20th Century (see The Unswept Floor by Herakleitos). Pompeii has many of these. As with just about everything else, Roman art and architecture was out of this world. Some of the great statues, tilework, carved artwork on buildings, buildings and cities are Head of a Man, Aulus Metellus, Imperial Procession, Commodus As Hercules, Augustus of Primaporta, Gemma Augustea, the House of the Silver Wedding and the House of the Vetii (Pompeii), Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Battle Between the Romans and the Barbarians, Still Life (Herculaneum), the Colosseum, Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli and The Battle of Centaurs and Wild Beasts (at Hadrian’s Villa), Timgad in Algeria, the apartment blocks of Ostia, and the Arch of Titus, the Arch of Constantine and the Column of Trajan (all in Rome). The Pantheon in Rome may be one of the greatest buildings ever made, though the competition is tight. The Dome of the Pantheon is out of this world. It’s commonly said that Romans fell to barbarians, Germanic tribes. It’s true that they sacked the place, but it’s not true that the Dark Ages lacked art, as I noted above. What happened in the Dark Ages was a decline in the quality of art over that produced by the Romans and Greeks. Furthermore, art became very restricted. Paintings, usually done with tiles, have a dark, depressing and Hellish theme, overridden with a harsh moralism. The world was a cruel and nasty place, and if you didn’t watch it and pray all the time, you were going to Hell. Almost all paintings were of religious figures of one type or another. People often have a strange, otherworldly look. This is because as I noted in an earlier post on the Dark Ages, the Church had the only money at this time. If you wanted to get funded, you had to go to the Church and the Church would only fund Church-related stuff. Plus probably most art was being done in monasteries, as with most other productive activity beyond mere survival. The people looked strange because the Church frowned on realistic looking people. That looked like real life, and the Church did not want to portray real life. They only wanted to portray the otherworldly realms of religion. In this attitude we can see the common religious attitude that the worldly life is permanently tainted with sin and must be avoided as much as possible. Although this was a dark time for art and society, the focus on religion was reasonable. Truth was, life was so dark and dismal that the Church was where it was all going on. All art was about the Church because there was nothing else happening and life was really bad. All science, education, learning, reading, writing, wealth creation, art, architecture – it was all coming out of the Church. The money factor was crucial. Nowadays, if you want money, you go into business. Back then, you got into religion. The reason that things fell apart so much in the Dark Ages was the collapse of urbanization. Country folks and back to the landers may not like city life too much, but when cities collapse, most everything tends to go to Hell. By contrast, the greatness of Greece and Rome was actually related to their high level of urbanization. City life seems necessary for advanced civilization to occur. With urbanization, some crucial factors probably jell together that start to mandate civilizational advances. Characteristic of the time is large halos around everyone in the painting. It is accurate to say that art did not progress during the Dark Ages, that it actually went backwards. Nevertheless, much fine material was produced. Some of the excellent paintings, sculptures and buildings produced during the Dark Ages include the Church of Santa Sabina (Rome), the Church of Santa Costanza, the Mausoleum of the Galla Placidia, the Dome of the Baptistry of the Orthodox and the Church of San Vitale, the Transfiguration of Christ with Saint Apollinaris, First Bishop of Ravenna – a painting in the Church of Saint Apollinaire of Classe (all in Ravenna, Italy), the Hagia Sofia (Istanbul) – one of the finest buildings ever built, the first written Bibles such as the Rabbula Gospels from Syria, the Paris Psalter, the Ebbo Gospels and the great Crucifixion with Angels and Mourning Figures cover of the Lindau Gospels (all from France) and the Book of Kells from Scotland (Out of this world!), the Cathedral of Saint Mark (Venice), the Palace Chapel of Charlemagne (Aachen, Germany), ornaments from the Sutton Hoo burial ship (Suffolk, England), the Gummersmark brooch (Denmark), the Labro Saint Hammers (Gotland, Sweden) the burial ship from Oseberg (Oseberg, Norway), the Gero Crucifix from the Cologne Cathedral (Cologne, Germany) and the Church of Saint Cyriakus (Gernrode, Germany). Note that fine art was even produced up in Scandinavia. These people were not primitive by any means. The problem up there is that most art was created out of wood. There was plenty of that, but it doesn’t make very good art, and most important, it doesn’t last. For really great art, it helps to have some big rocks, and I think there are a lot more trees than rocks in Scandinavia. Greece looks like while God was creating the world, he took a break to throw rocks at Greece. The place is littered with stones. Hence all of the fine stone sculptures, buildings and cities of Greece. Great art continues in the High Middle Ages, such as the Church of the Monastery of Christ in Chora (Constantinople) and the painting Anastasis on its apse, the Doors of Bishop Benward at the Abbey of the Church of Saint Michael (Hildesheim, Germany), Doubting Thomas in the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Castile, Spain), Christ in Majesty in the Church of San Clemente (Tahuil, Catalonia, Spain), the Borgund Stave Church (Sogn, Norway), the Durham Cathedral (Scotland), the Church of Saint Etienne (Caen, France), the Speyer Cathedral (Speyer, Germany), the Church of Saint Ambrogio (Milan, Italy), the Cathedral Complex (Pisa, Tuscany, Italy), the Church of San Clemente (Rome), printed works such as the Worcester Chronicle (Worcester, England) and the Winchester Psalter (Winchester, England), the woven Bayeux Tapestry (Bayeux, Normandy,  France) and the Portable altar of Saints Kilian and Liborius from the Helmarshausen abbey (Helmarshausen, Saxony, Germany). The Leaning Tower of Pisa is also in the Pisa Complex. The tower is leaning not because it was top heavy, though it is, but because it was built on sand. It would have fallen over long ago without our efforts to shore it up. These efforts are vast and ongoing. We are tunneling under the building and shoring it up in various ways to keep it from falling. Right now things are so bad that it is so dangerous to be around the tower that visitors are forbidden from walking within toppling distance of the thing. One reason that the art above is so great, even those famous Bibles, is that monks would spend 20 years, 40 years, or a lifetime making say one Bible, one treasure box, painting one church. Not only that, but a whole team might work for many years on an object or interior church design. These monasteries were like miniature factories. They weren’t producing a lot, but no one else was either. They were very inefficient, but there was no competition. Gothic is in the High Middle Ages, and this is starting to head into the Renaissance, although everything is still about religion. Gothic had some superb works, and now we are looking at some of the finest churches of all, including the Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Chartres, France), another of the greatest buildings ever built, the Amiens Cathedral (Amiens, France), an incredible building, another Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Paris), a competitor with the Notre-Dame in Chartres and possibly better, another Cathedral of Notre-Dame (Reims, France), possibly the best one of them all, the Saint-Chapelle (Paris), yet another awesome building, and the Salisbury Cathedral (Wiltshire, England) – too much! Gothic architecture clearly produced some of the finest buildings that have ever been built. It’s characterized by tall, thin cathedrals with vast spires jabbing away at the sky. The purpose of those spires was to point towards heaven. The idea of the tall buildings was to make them closer to Heaven, and also the various monasteries and bishops were in competition with each other to see who could build higher buildings. The tall, thin shape that gets more pointed towards the top is the best way to build a tall building for the same reason that a pyramid is a natural form. A building that gets more pointed near the top is less likely to topple over than a top-heavy building that has as much weight at the top as at the bottom. One of those Gothic cathedrals actually had a building that did not get more pointed as it rose and that part of the building toppled over. How did they build those cathedrals? They used scaffolds. Often families of men, fathers, sons, grandfathers, multiple generations, would work on the buildings.  They usually worked for free or room and board. The Church told them, “Hey, if you guys work on this church your whole life, you will go straight to Heaven.” Yeah right. One purpose of the cathedrals was conversion. Life was pretty dismal in those days, and the life of a serf was bad. So you took a humble person and should him this wild cathedral, so beyond anything else he had ever seen that it may as well have been built by aliens, and you pretty much had a convert on your hands, so awe-struck was he. These cathedrals show us just how much money the Church had at this time. For all intents and purposes, the Church had all the money and no one else had a dime. It’s a truism that while the Roman Empire did formally fall, really it just morphed into the Roman Catholic Church. The fundamentalist crowd wonders why we care so much about separation of church and state. We care because back in those days, the Church was the state. English kings pondered for lifetimes ways to get the Church out of the business of running the damn country. No wonder Henry VIII threw the Church out and set up the Anglican Church. It was the only way to get free of this octopus and its tentacles. In the Late Middle Ages, great works continue, including the Exeter Cathedral (Exeter, Devon, England), a mind-boggling structure, the Ely Cathedral (Ely, Cambridgeshire, England), the dome of which makes you wonder how they even built it, the Cathedral of Palma (Mallorca, Spain), up there with the greatest and the Church of the Holy Cross (Schwabisch Gmund, Germany), the Virgin and Saint George, the altarpiece of the Church of San Francisco, Villafranco del Panades (Barcelona), the Shrine of the Three Kings (Germany), the Florence Cathedral (Florence), an incredible building, the Siena Cathedral (Siena, Italy), another awesome structure, the Life of John the Baptist on the doors of the Baptistry of San Giovanni (Florence), Giotto di Bondone’s Last Judgment on the west wall and Life of Christ and the Virgin on the north and south walls of the Arena Chapel and Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maesta Altarpiece for the Siena Cathedral. Around 1340, one of the first works including landscapes and regular people with no religious significance was done, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government in the City and Allegory of Good Government in the Country, two frescoes in the Sala della Pace in the Pallazo Pubbico in Siena. The moving away from religion and focus on our real world shows how the Late Middle Ages were leading into the Renaissance. The periods of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance seem to blend together. The Renaissance ran from around 1350-1600. The Late Middle Ages are thought to be from 1300-1450, so there is definitely overlap. The truth is that the Late Middle Ages shade into and lead into the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, we get the first non-religious art since the fall of Rome. I don’t have much to say about the art of China and Japan except that it is good. It’s difficult to compare this art with the art produced in Europe. They all had their own styles  and it’s hard to say if any one of them is better than the other, but I don’t think that Japanese art is any better than what was being done in Europe at the time. Islamic art is actually very good, especially the tilework on the interior of mosques up on the domes. This is excellent art, and as good as what was being done in Europe. The only thing you can say about Islamic art is that their ridiculous religion bans them from drawing humans. I have seen some early Jewish art, but I wasn’t much impressed by it. Jews are very smart and many modern artists are Jews, so Jews can clearly make great art. The problem here is that like in Islam, Jews were forbidden to make graven images, and the forbidding of idol worship means you can’t draw people, and that tends to really limit your artwork. The fact that Islam has the same prohibition means to me that Islam has borrowed from Judaism. The art of Central America is interesting, and some of it is not bad. I don’t think it’s superior to European art, but I’m not sure if it’s inferior either. Some of the gold ornamentation is really great. I really hate to bag on Blacks here, but I should say something about African art. I was not very impressed with it. The best building was the Great Friday Mosque in Djenne, Mali, built in the 1200’s. It’s made of mud and wood. It’s ok, but compared to what was being built in Europe and the Arab World at the time, it’s not much at all. Afrocentrists like to go on about the Great Zimbabwe built around 1300. Yes, it’s a long wall made of stones with some conical structures here and there. If this is Africa’s greatest architecture, I don’t know what to say. It’s not much. However, I was very impressed by statue heads and masks out of Benin from 1400-1650 and continuing on to 1900. Some of that is excellent. It is usually made of brass. However, I am told that they were already coming under the influence of Europeans, especially Portuguese, and this spurred this nice art. I don’t care what influenced them. There is some cool art coming out of Benin around the time of European Renaissance. I’m not so impressed with the earlier stuff out of Yoruba or the very early stuff out of Nok in Nigeria. However, we must acknowledge that Nok was one the flashpoints for early African civilization and more was accomplished here sooner than anywhere else in Africa. At any rate, today Africans produce some superb art, especially African masks. Travelers to Africa with some cash often pick them up and it’s a great investment. I’d love to have one on my wall. In the 1800’s, all art and music was in the classical traditions. If you wanted to be an artist of a musician, you had to go to school and study the classics. That was really the only way to paint or make music. Hence, art and music had stagnated. The classical art and music had been taken to the limits and the best had already been done. Michelangelo and Beethoven were not going to be surpassed. There was nothing to innovate anymore. One of the first impressionist was Édouard Manet. His first impressionist painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) (1863) was a strange painting of a two clothed men eating a meal with a naked woman in a park. It caused a scandal because the people pictured were real people, not religious, historical, mythological, political or monarchic figures (the five permitted types). It was not really possible to paint a real person. All art had to be of one of the five types of persons above. The idea of painting a real person was ridiculous. Manet’s painting caused a scandal not because the woman was nude. It was ok to paint nudes if they were of the five types of persons allowed. The idea that someone would paint a nude of a real life person was outrageous. It was made even worse because people knew the names of those who were painted – the men were his brother, Eugene Manet, and his girlfriend’s brother and future brother in law, Ferdinand Leenhoff and the woman was Victorine Meurent, Manet’s favorite model and later an artist in her own right. Further, the subject matter was seen as shocking, nearly pornographic. What were the clothed men doing eating with the naked woman? It was as if they were both going to have sex with her at the same time in a menage a trois . What Manet did with that painting was like saying, “Screw you,” to the Art Establishment of the time. It was like punk rock, an act of artistic defiance. It was anti-art, anti-classical art, and anti-Art Establishment. Manet many and his supporters got banned from a major art exhibition in 1863, the Salon de Paris. The jury of the contribution to support more of this valuable research.

Nice Timeline of the Late Roman Empire

This is a really cool timeline that I happened upon that gives a brief history of the Late Roman Empire, with specific focus on Britain. I didn’t find it on the Internet, so there is no link. I really don’t understand a lot of what is in this timeline, as I’m just learning about the Dark Ages now, but you may wish to look it over with me. My previous post on Orthodoxy versus Roman Catholicism needs some explication. The truth is that before the split between the Roman and Eastern Church, there was only one Catholic Church. There was no Roman Catholic Church. There was no Orthodox (Catholic) Church. There was one and only one church, the Catholic Church. “Catholic” itself just meant something like for everyone, for everyman. The actual Roman Catholic Church and the actual Orthodox (Catholic) Church only begin formally with the split in 1054. Sometimes the head of the Church was in Constantinople and at other times it was in Rome, and sometimes it seems to have been in both places at once. Ancient British history is much more complicated than modern British history. We can summarize modern British history quite easily. We can generalize about what Britain did in World War 2, and what it has done in the past decade. We can’t do this was Dark Ages Britain, because there was no unified Britain. There were kingdoms, mini-kingdoms and super-kingdoms scattered all over Britain and at any given time, there were, say 10-20 different important things going on in each small bit of territory. A friend of mine is currently taking a course in British History and he says that this period is maddeningly complex. A study of early British history is practically the tutelage of a lifetime. Rome, in a way, continues on even after the Fall. There are post-Roman or pseudo-Roman kings after the Fall in Britain. They had Roman names, Roman values and probably even spoke Latin. The Dark Ages were a time of a great loss of knowledge. Only the monks could read and write; even the Kings typically could not read or write! The monasteries were where it was all happening, Daddy-O. All of the art, science, education, technology, the works. You had lots of single men here who did not have wives and kids to keep up. Your ordinary working man slaved away all day and had no time left over for study, science, technology, learning, reading, writing, anything. This sort of tradition continued up into the modern era when the rich, the leisure class, replaced the monks. Up until recent times, nearly all science, technology, scholarly work, literature, poetry, etc. was produced by wealthy men. The working class guy simply did not have enough time to do much other than work all day and support his wife and kids. By the same token, women were excluded from most of these roles. It was wife and mother, or get thee to a nunnery. In one area, literature, women did start to produce in late modern era. It is interesting that many of the first and best female novelists from  the era were lesbians (Yes, it is true.) There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, only an unmarried woman had the time to write novels. A wife and mother was too busy slaving all day to have time to write any book, much less a great novel. Furthermore, writing, even literature, was regarded as men’s work – only men were writers. This conceit survives today in the expression “man of letters.” Writing was just not ladylike! It was downright dykey. Women were just not seen as writers. Their talents were ridiculed. If someone told you that a woman wrote a book, you might start laughing. “What about?” you might ask. “Cooking?” It was assumed that this was practically the only subject a woman could write sensibly about. In the early days, monks did not have to be celibate, and incredibly, nuns and monks lived together in a single monastery. Some of the monks and nuns were not celibate, but most were. Those who were celibate were not so by directive but by choice. These were deeply religious people who really wanted to give up sex and leave the opposite sex alone, so enforcement of a celibacy rule was not much of a problem. Also, there were very strict rules that they had to live under, even if celibacy was not one of them. Later, there were separate wings, one for women and another for men. At some later time, celibacy was enforced. The horror of deflation, a terrifying spiral that is difficult to stop, is exemplified by Dark Ages economics. There simply was not much money, period, for anyone. Where there is little money anywhere, there is little money to be accumulated by would-be wealthy elites. Hence, even kingdoms, Duchys, etc. were quite weak. The economy centered around the monasteries. This was where capital was being accumulated. You had lots of good workers who were for all intents and purposes slaves. The monasteries produced all sorts of items and were almost the only source of industry during the Dark Ages. Where did the surplus profits produced by the monasteries go? Good question. Usually back to the Church – to the abbots, bishops and even back to Rome or Constantinople. In those days, abbots did not have to be celibate either. An abbot was often a family man; he would just be some ordinary guy living in the area. The Church people would come up to him and say, “Hey, you’re the abbot.” It was a great job, so must assented. There was little art produced in the Dark Ages. It was one more thing that fell by the wayside. It is little-known, but the Romans produced quite a bit of art. The painted all of their buildings in all sorts of gaudy colors. The problem was that they used inferior paints that decayed and did not last, so very little has survived. People were even making paintings in the Dark Ages, but they were using this lousy paint and, to make matters worse, they were painting on wood. Wood doesn’t last, so little of this art remains. Much of the remaining art from the Dark Ages comes from the Byzantines. The Byzantines used tiles to make religious tile paintings. Tile, a ceramic, tends to last. Byzantine art looks strange to our eyes, almost always religious pictures of Jesus, Mary, etc., often with prominent halos. Canvas is obviously a much better choice for painting, and canvas is still used today. Canvas did not start to be used a lot until after the Dark Ages and heading up into the Late Middle Ages – probably around 1300 or so. Timeline follows: 324 – Foundation of Constantinople (Byzantium) by Constantine. 368 – Count Theodosius routs barbarians in Britain and puts down rebellion of Valentinus. 382 – Magnus Maximus defeats Picts and Scots. 395 – Division of the Empire between the sons of Theodosius. 398 – Britain suffers from attacks by Saxons, Picts and Scots. 406-7 – Legions in Britain elect a series of usurpers – Marcus, Gratian, and finally Constantine III, who crosses to Gaul with Roman troops. 408 – Britain is devastated by Saxon incursions. 410 – Sack of Rome by the Visigoths; Rome formally renounces Britain. 429 – St Germanus visits Britain to combat Pelagian heresy. 439 – Vandals conquer Carthage and the African part of the Empire. 451 – Defeat of the Huns at Chalons. 455-485 – Ambrosius Aurelianus leads a series of victories over the Saxon invaders. 476 – End of the Roman Empire in the West (Fall of the Roman Empire. 490-526 – Theoderic the Ostrogoth rules Italy. 486-511 – Reign of Clovis, King of the Merovingian Franks. 506 – Franks convert to Catholic Christianity. 507 – Franks defeat Visigoths and annex Aquitaine. 527-565 – Justinian attempts reconquest of Italy and Roman Africa. 542-3 – Plague ravages the Empire, eventually reaching Britain in 549. 545 – St. David establishes St. David’s in Wales. 549 – Gildas writes De Excidio Britanniae. 563-65 – St. Columba establishes monastery of Iona and begins mission among the Picts. 573-594 – Gregory of Tours is bishop of Tours. 577 – Battle of Dyrham – British towns of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath fall to the Saxons. 587 – Recared, King of the Visigoths, converts to Catholicism. 597 – Mission of Augustine to Britain. Establishes bishopric at Canterbury in the Kingdom of Kent. 600 – Invasion of Italy by the Lombards. 628 – Conversion of King Eadwine of Northumbria. 633 – Armies of Islam begin to attack Syrian province of Eastern Empire.

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