Vikings and Anglo-Saxons

 I’m 39/324 through Cat Jansen’s River Kings and enjoying it.   References to the “Great Army” of the Vikings who after wintering in and around Repton, and then decided to stay, were hitherto described by traditional researchers as exaggerations.  Excavations didn’t give evidence of a very large number.  But more recently, better DNA analyses have shown that the Viking DNA could not be distinguished from that of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes the preceded the Vikings settling in Britain. 

“Both the terms ‘Viking’ and ‘Anglo-Saxon’ can arguably be seen as purely modern inventions: they are unlikely to have made sense to someone living in the ninth century. Here, the term ‘Viking’ is used to describe in a very broad sense the people and cultural traits that emerged and spread from Scandinavia during the Viking Age. The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’, while subject to a long history of misuse by racists and extremists, remains a widely understood frame of reference for the communities and kingdoms of England between the fifth and early eleventh centuries. Neither this nor Viking is used to imply ethnicity; they are, simply, the most useful, if inaccurate, terms we have available today.”

British Imperialism

In the Nov. 2, 2020 issue of the New Yorker is a review of Time's Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard) by Stanford professor Priya Satia.  The review was written by Maya Jasanoff who early in her review tells us "A March, 2020 poll found that a third of Britons believed that their empire had done more good than harm for colonies -- a higher percentage than in other former imperial powers, including France and Japan.  More than a quarter of Britons want the empire back."

Historians, the good ones, recognize that it is a major historical sin to judge a previous people by the standards of one's own day.  Both Satia and Jasanoff seemed at times to be doing that -- but maybe not.  They don't argue that the British (in the days when there was an empire) knew that having an empire was wrong.  They find evidence of criminal abuse, and beyond that evidence that the abuse was systemically covered up by burning or otherwise destroying imperial records.  India's first day of independence in 1947 was notable in that there was a clear sky in which a rainbow could be seen.  Prior days were marred by the smoke going up from records being burned by the British -- well that does sort of change things if one has been thinking up until then that the British were operating in accordance with the widely held beliefs of the day and were performing their duties in good conscience.

French hostility toward the Anglo-Saxons

From a review by R. W. Johnson of Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Britain and America, 1945-2016 by R. T. Howard:

Johnson writes, “In De Gaulle’s view of history – a European history – England and France had struggled for supremacy for the best part of a thousand years.  For most of that time France had been the dominant power, but now its great empire wasn’t just overshadowed but outmatched by the even greater British Empire.  For De Gaulle France was not itself if it was not the leading power in Europe.  By 1941, however, the opponent was no longer Britain” it was ‘les Anglo-Saxons’.  Asked what was the most important international development of recent times, De Gaulle replied: ‘The fact that the Americans speak English.’”

I recall once French fellow in a forum years ago.  He owned a books store, can’t remember where, and can’t remember his name, but we used to argue about the relative merits of France and the U.S.  He knew English and was on an American forum, but he despised the U.S. and perhaps England as well, I don’t recall.  I had read an interesting article in Foreign Affairs and recommended it to him, implying that it would provide a more accurate view of the U.S. than he seemed to have.  He rejected the idea.  He had no wish to understand the U.S. more than he did.  He didn’t quite challenge me to learn more about France, but at some point he became disgusted with our forum and perhaps especially me and disappeared. 

The referenced review appears in the March 16, 2017 issue of the London Review of Books.  Johnson entitles his review, “Danger: English Lessons” and draws attention to De Gaulle’s and other’s interest in advancing French over English in the modern world.  “Howard quotes Gerard Prunier, an adviser to the French Government, who claimed that ‘the Anglo-Saxons want our death – that is, our cultural death.  They threaten our language and our way of life, and they plan our ultimate Anglo-Saxonisation.”

“When De Gaulle ordered US bases out of France, Lyndon Johnson angrily demanded to know if that meant digging up the graves of American soldiers who had died in the liberation.”  My impression is that many of the French at the time wouldn’t mind digging up the graves and sending the bones back to us.  Many French saw the second front that Stalin had been pleading for, Operation Overlord, as merely the occupation of France by a new set of oppressors.

In reading of these events, we perhaps don’t want to spend much time dwelling upon Churchill’s sadness over the loss of the British Empire, but De Gaulle was even more committed to reacquiring the French Empire.  I read histories of France’s pitiful efforts at Dien Bien Phu and in Algeria.  Many Americans, probably, would lose all sympathy for the French upon learning that Algeria after WWII would have been delighted to be considered part of France as equal citizens, but the Colons would not hear of it and so there was a war.  The Colons were driven out and Algeria eventually became independent. 

Perhaps here the French book seller would take offense at Americans who blithely assumed that democracy and equality ought to prevail throughout the world and that Britain and France ought to willingly give up their former colonies.  What right did the U.S. have to insist upon such a thing, especially when Eisenhower took up in Indo-China where the French left off not to preserve it as a colony, but to “prevent its becoming a Communist puppet.”  “As if,” the French scoffed and saw only hypocrisy. 

There is plenty of room to build a variety of arguments to support a variety of opinions.  After reading the above article in the LRB, I checked back through the recent editions of Foreign Affairs to see if there were any recent Gaullist-type efforts to advance French supremacy in Europe, but couldn’t find any.  And yet, I suspect, many of the French, even today are hostile toward Britain and the U.S. for reasons much like De Gaulle’s.  They don’t see the Vichy period in the same way we do.  De Gaulle, who spent the bulk of the War in Britain wanted to get past the Vichy period as quickly as possible.  Most Frenchmen, it seemed to be implied, were really in the resistance. . . but not so much anymore, becoming with Germany the “big two” in the EU – the EU whose capital is in French-speaking Belgium. 

Freeman Dyson's review of Hastings Armageddon: 1944-1945

    I read Freeman Dyson’s reviews of Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-1945 by Max Hastings, and The End: Hamburg 1943 by Hans Erich Nossack.  The reviews appeared in the April 28, 2005 issue of the NYROB. 
    I couldn’t always tell whether it was Dyson speaking for himself or paraphrasing Hastings.  Dyson writes, “It is not possible to calculate the numbers of lives saved in the West and lost in the East by following and not following the Geneva rules.  The numbers certainly amount to hundreds of thousands in the West and millions in the East.”  This may be true if prisoners in the east were killed more often than in the West. 
    Dysan goes on: “A second important lesson of World War II is the fact that German soldiers consistently fought better than Britons or Americans.  Whenever they were fighting against equal numbers, the Germans always won, a fact recognized by the Allied generals, who always planned to achiever numerical superiority before attacking.”    This may not be true.  We learned in the American Civil War that defenders require fewer men than attackers.  Defenders always have the advantage, all other things being equal.  They can dig in, find the best places for defense whereas the attackers must encounter each new defensive position as experiencing it for the first time.  Americans and British during the time period Hastings refers to were on the attack whereas the Germans were on the defensive. 
    Dyson goes on “This was the main reason why the Allied advance into Germany was slow.  If the Allied soldiers had been able to fight like Germans, the war would probably have been over in 1944 and millions of lives would have been saved.
    “Hastings explains the superiority of German soldiers as a consequence of the difference between a professional army and a citizen army.  The Germans were professionals, brought up in a society that glorified soldiering, and toughened by years of fighting in Russia [“years”?  Germany invaded Russia in June 1941; so three years, but were the soldiers on the eastern front used against the British and Americans?  Not in very large numbers if I recall correctly].  The British and American soldiers were mostly amateurs, civilians who happened to be in uniform, brought up in societies that glorified freedom and material comfort, and lacking experience of warfare.  The difference between the German and Allied armies was similar to the difference between Southern and Northern armies in the American Civil War.  The Southern soldiers fought better and the Southern generals were more brilliant.  The Northern soldiers won in the end because there were more of them and they had greater industrial resources, just as the Allies did in World War II.  The leaders of the old South romanticized war and led their society to destruction, just as the leaders of Germany did eighty years later.”
    It is true that Southern armies didn’t take up defensive positions as often a they could have.  Perhaps for political reasons they felt a need to fight offensively in order to achieve victory quickly.  Also, many in the North did not understand the need to fight against the South, or at least not as long or as hard as they were doing.  General McClelland ran against Lincoln in 1864 and it was believed would have negotiated a peace with the South.   Lincoln told Grant he needed some military victories in order to win the election.
    Also, it isn’t true that Southern Generals were “more brilliant” than Northern Generals.  They were all trained at the same military academy.  They knew each other, and were it not for the Mexican War the political leaders would have no idea as to which officer was likely to make a brilliant general.  And then three of the most brilliant generals (albeit Northern), Grant, Sherman and Sheridan did not seem brilliant when they were first starting out.  As to Lee and Jackson, two generals Hastings and Dyson probably have in mind.  Many modern military historians think they are over-rated.
    Dyson goes on: “Hastings says we should take pride in the fact that our soldiers did not fight as well as Germans.  To fight like Germans, they would have had to think like Germans, glorifying war and following their leaders blindly.  The Germans have a word, Soldatentum, which means the pursuit of soldiering considered as a spiritual vocation.  Fortunately, the word cannot be translated into English.”
    I wonder if the Japanese had a word like Soldatentum.  They did have a long history of fighting.  Their soldiers had considerable experience in China and elsewhere and yet I suspect that few would say that man for man they were superior to the Marines that invaded their fortified islands.
   
I looked up Freeman Dyson.  Perhaps this article is relatable to his review of Hastings book:  http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/11/freeman_dyson_interview/

Or perhaps not.  In reading Dyson’s review of Hasting’s book it is probably safe to save that Dyson considers the loss of life in war a bad thing, and yet in his Register interview we see that he believes we ought to be good stewards of our planet.  And it is safe to say that in earlier periods of our history our population was controlled by wars, famines and plagues.  We have eliminated the plagues and famines and Dyson would say that it would be a good thing if we could eliminate or at least reduce war in the future, the last hope for reducing the world’s population and its consequent pollution.
    No one will volunteer to reduce himself and his family, nor do we perhaps have any advocacy in the U.S. for the reduction of the size of families.  But Dyson the mathematician knows that our planet cannot withstand an unlimited increase in population.  The question I would have asked him in the interview was what he thought might become of us as a result of unending population growth.   
    I’ve suggested colonies on the moon and Mars as the means to siphon off some of our excess numbers.  Saturn’s moon Enceladus is another candidate. http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10330/saturn-moon-enceladus-ocean-habitable-16659862/
    Perhaps this will all work out.  We don’t seem to be in any rush to colonize available planets and moons in our solar system, but as we increase in number, the return of plague-like disease and of famine seem likely.  War, especially if Iran or North Korea employ their atomic weapons may also contribute to the reduction in population.  The U.S. and Britain as Hastings (apparently) and Dyson applaudingly tell us have only citizen soldiers who will never want to start a war.  

 

How infectious diseases helped the Old world conquer the new

Here are a few paragraphs from Cochran and Harpending in regard to the ease with which the Spanish conquered the Amerindians of America: 

“The Amerindians migrated from Northeast Asia some 15,000 years ago. They did not carry with them crowd diseases that arose after the birth of agriculture, nor did they carry the genetic defenses that later developed against those diseases. Since their path to the New World went through frigid landscapes like Siberia and Alaska, they left behind some of the ancient infectious diseases that were vectorborne or had complex life cycles—malaria and Guinea worm, for example. . .”

“Although Amerindians did develop agriculture independently—a very effective agriculture that included some of the world’s most important crops, such as maize and potatoes—they domesticated few animals, mostly because they had already wiped out most of the species suited to domestication. . .”

“. . . infectious disease was so unimportant among Amerindians, selection most likely favored weaker immune systems, because people with weaker immune systems would be better able to avoid autoimmune disorders, in which the immune system misfires and attacks some organ or tissue. Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin, and multiple sclerosis, where it attacks the myelin sheaths of the central nervous system, are well-known examples—both are rare among Amerindians. A less vigorous immune system would have been an advantage under those conditions.

This Amerindian vulnerability was a primary reason for European success in the Americas. Epidemic disease, particularly smallpox, interfered with armed resistance by Amerindians and thus played an important part in the early Spanish conquests. In Mexico, where Hernán Cortés and his troops had made the Aztec emperor their puppet, the Aztecs rose against them, killing Moctezuma II and two-thirds of the Spanish force in the famous “Noche Triste.” The Aztecs probably would have utterly destroyed the invaders, were it not for the smallpox epidemic under way at the same time. The leader of the Aztec defense died in the epidemic, and Cortés and his men conquered the Aztec Empire. It is hard to see how Cortés could have won without those microscopic allies, since he was trying to conquer an empire of millions with a few hundred men.

Cochran, Gregory; Henry Harpending (2009-01-27). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution . . .. Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

Comment:  We’ve known about the conquering of the Amerindians by the Conquistadors for a great many years, but what we didn’t know until scientists began working with the human genome (completed in 2003) was that the Amerindians didn’t have the diversified HLA systems.  In the Old World with all its years of agriculture since 8,000 BC, humans were subjected to a variety of diseases from animals, poor hygiene, and the close proximity they were to each other in cities.  Having different HLA alleles expands the range of pathogens that our immune systems can deal with.  Amerindians didn’t have that diversity.  Many tribes had only a single HLA allele.  

This also explains why the British had such an easy time colonizing North America.  The Amerindians had been decimated by disease.  The New World was largely empty. 

On peopling the British Isles

Well, yes, Oppenheimer refers to controversy, but the advantage of his book is that he is attempting to look at all the most recent data, recheck the various conclusions and draw new ones if necessary. The advantage of studying the British Isles is that during the LGM (the coldest part of the last ice age) the Isles were either covered by Ice or an uninhabitable icy desert. In other places there was continuity, but not on these islands. At some point people came from some place and colonized them. The ideas scoffed at by Sellar and Yeatman are old and abandoned my most scholars. Genetic studies have pretty much convinced everyone that Romans, Jutes, Frisians, Vikings, Angles, Saxons and Normans were not as big a deal as was once thought. A "foundation stock" was already there, perhaps as early as 12,000 bc and it stayed there and flourished during all the famous invasions. When in recorded history these invasions took place, some of them were of the same stock as the people who were already there. Here is Oppenheimer:

"At the time of the great post-LGM European expansion of 15,000 years ago, there was no North Sea. Instead, there was a flat grassy plain stretching all the way from Poland and the southern Baltic, through southern Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Frisia and Holland across the North Sea and into eastern England (Figure 3.3). In fact, had they wished, our forebears could have walked in a straight line all the way from Berlin to Belfast, although in practice they seemed to prefer wandering along beaches. If it still existed today, the North Sea Plain would be in the centre of the Ingert distribution (Figure 3.8). Ingert dates overall in Europe to 21,000 years and may have originated in a Balkan Ice Age refuge (see below).59 Three British founding clusters from Ingert (I1c-1, 2 and 3) date to around 13,000, 14,000 and 12,000 years ago, respectively.60 This suggests a pre-Younger Dryas (i.e. Late Upper Palaeolithic) spread for at least part of the Ingert branch. While Ingert is present at a low rate of about 3.3% throughout the British Isles, this figure rises to over 10% on parts of the English north-east coastal region, in particular York and Norfolk. Given this distribution, the age of Ingert in the British Isles,61 and the fact that he is no more common on the neighbouring Continent, the chances are that this represents the echo of an ancient intrusion. To me this is the first of a series of specific, dated, early British genetic intrusions from the Continent which tend to mitigate claims of a later Anglo-Saxon genocide." [Oppenheimer, Stephen (2012-03-01). The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (Kindle Locations 2422-2430). Constable Robinson. Kindle Edition.]

Some place Oppenheimer said that during the Younger Dryas the sea dropped something like 127 feet. That apparently permitted the North Sea area to become the plains he refers to. So while I'm not willing to read all the books that Oppenheimer did, his argument seems persuasive that after the Younger Dryas receded and temperatures warmed, southern parts of Britain, Wales, and Ireland (which during the Younger Dryas had land extended much further south than it does today), enabling groups to walk across the North Sea Plain as early 12,000 bc forming the foundation stock that spread north as the ice receded.

Except . . . there are apparently two famous "refuges" where people clustered during the Younger Dryas, the Basque and the Balkan. The first people to people the British Isles, in Oppenheimer's opinion came from the Basque refuge. Those people moved north peopling the Western Area of Europe which included crossing the grassy plain which is now the North Sea. The earlier view was that this peopling was done from the Balkan refuge, spreading people across central Europe and then to the British Isles.

I do wonder about the names various scholars assign to genetic markers, "Ingert" for example. There is some sort of fame involved, like naming a mountain or a feature on Mars. Do scholars acknowledge other scholars marker names? Some time ago I read Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, the genetic roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes. He assigns a number of names represented by genetic markers, but I don't find those names in Oppenheimer's book. Since Sykes wrote his book in 2006 and Oppenheimer in 2012 perhaps Oppenheimer is using more recently identified genetic markers. However, I thought that only the discoverer of these markers got to name them and I hadn't the impression that Oppenheimer was doing research that extended to the identification of markers. That worries me a little, for if he is renaming other researchers' markers, how will the casual reader ever keep track?