They came, saw and lingered — the Romans never really left Britain

What  the lady below says is mostly correct but how does it jibe with the fact that DNA studies reveal virtually no Italic genes among the English?  The answer to that rides on your definition of who was a Roman.  And they very early on ceased to be restricted to inhabitants of central Italy. As we know from the New Testament, even Israelites could be Romans.

And as we know from "De bello gallico", the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul rapidly fell under the Roman yoke.  And Rome took advantage  of Romanized subject populations to recruit Legions from them.  And because of Roman practicality, it was often  locally recruited troops who were used to defend the borders of the Roman world.  So there is little doubt that the Roman legions that invaded Britain would have been recruited from somewhere in Gaul. What point would have been served by bringing troops from Italy when other troops were much more  nearby?

So the Romans who invaded Britain would indeed have been led by Roman citizens and would have imposed Roman culture but they would have been Romanized Gauls -- Celts.  And we know from various sources that the Celts of Britain and the Celts of Gaul respected and sometimes shared the Druidic religions of Britain.  They were almost certanily two branches of a common ethnicity.

Knowing that the Germanic invaders of Britain  largely adapted to life in  Britain as they found it, we can understand that the Romanized Celts to a considerable extent absorbed the Germans, just as China once absorbed the Mongols.  So elements of Roman civilization did remain in the mixed Celtic/German population of Britain  long after the political authority of Rome was lost.


The English emerged not from the arrival of boatloads of fearsome Saxon invaders but in direct continuity from Roman Britons, an archaeologist claims.

Susan Oosthuizen, of the University of Cambridge, said that analysis of land use, burials, artefacts, texts and linguistics provided no support for the traditional view of a Germanic takeover following the withdrawal of Roman troops in 410 — or for the recent orthodoxy of an “elite replacement”, in which a small clique of incomers imposed its language and culture on a people.

She said that there was considerable evidence for continuity from the Roman period through the following centuries, with people in what’s now England using the same farms and common lands in the same ways as their Roman-citizen forebears and speaking the same languages.

In her book The Emergence of the English, which she discussed in an online lecture this week, Professor Oosthuizen argued that Gildas, a British monk writing around the 500s and often interpreted as describing an Anglo-Saxon invasion, paints a picture of relative stability, with enduring institutions on the Roman model. These included a functioning legal system, an ecclesiastical ­hierarchy and military structures organised on Roman lines.

Although Gildas describes a military threat from Saxons who had been recruited by British leaders as soldiers — following a standard Roman practice — she said that he portrayed Scots and Picts as a greater threat.

A Roman legacy was not only visible in the British kingdoms ­described by Gildas but also in later English-speaking kingdoms, where rulers continued to position themselves as heirs to Rome into the 8th century and beyond.

“The earliest Christian kings of Kent, Northumbria and Deira were buried in the ‘porticus’ of their principal minsters, emulating royal mausolea in Rome, and built churches whose design was based on Roman basilica used for civilian assembly, while the monumental architecture of early medieval palaces, too, may have been based on the forms and layouts of Roman villas,” she said.

Professor Oosthuizen ­acknowledged that significant changes occurred in the period, but said these were evolutions “from a traditional base” and sometimes part of long-term processes. For example, the decline of towns in Britain did not happen overnight after the breakdown of imperial rule but started in the 4th century, during the Roman period.

She said there were undoubted stylistic influences from across the North Sea from the 400s but this did not require there to have been any takeover.

Likewise she said the spread of the Germanic language Old ­English, which is often taken as evidence of conquest, could have been a gradual process, arising through trade or other circumstances that made it a useful lingua franca.

SOURCE 







The ceaseless culture war against Hungary

If you listen to the Western media, you might think that in the weeks following the outbreak of Covid-19 the government of Hungary had transformed itself into a brutal dictatorship. There was a constant stream of articles claiming that democracy had died in Hungary. Opinion pieces insisted that the Hungarian government had exploited people’s concerns about the pandemic to impose a 1930s-style authoritarian dictatorship.

The Covid pandemic has reinvigorated the Culture Wars in various different ways. And these alarmist accounts of democratic backsliding in Hungary were a key theme in these Culture Wars. On the anti-sovereigntist wing of the cultural conflict, Hungary was held up as symbolic of an ideology of evil.

In early May, the mistakenly titled US-based advocacy group Freedom House offered up an obituary on Hungarian democracy. In a report it asserted that, because of the emergency laws it passed in relation to Covid-19, Hungary should not be considered a democracy anymore. Given Freedom House’s longstanding hostility to the Hungarian government, its verdict was hardly surprising. The problem was that this verdict was uncritically repeated in the media. At times it seemed that almost the entire Western media were ganging up against this supposed new dictatorship.

The Economist responded to Hungary’s enactment of a state of emergency by claiming that Viktor Orban, the prime minister, ‘has in effect become a dictator – in the heart of Europe’. The Guardian declared that the ‘world must not let Hungary get away with this power grab’. Writing in the EUobserver, Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, claimed that Hungary was now a dictatorship and therefore the EU had ceased to be a bloc of democratic states.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Ben Kelly ranted that ‘if the EU cannot rein in Hungary’s dictator Viktor Orban, it will rot from the inside’.

According to the narrative, Hungary’s enactment of emergency measures meant that the normal process of parliamentary democracy had disappeared forever. It is worth noting that other governments that enacted emergency powers in response to the Covid pandemic were not accused of such malevolent intent. Why was Hungary held to a different standard? The answer was devastatingly simple. ‘Orban cannot be trusted’, Western observers implied. It was really another way of saying: ‘We don’t like him.’

Strikingly, these opinions did not change when, in late April, Die Welt reported that legal experts in the European Commission had said that they saw no reason to act against the supposedly authoritarian powers the Hungarian parliament granted to the Hungarian government. Inconvenient truths about Hungary are always met with a wall of silence in most of the Western press. If, on the other hand, these experts had said the opposite, there would have been wall-to-wall opinion articles praising their judgment and condemning Hungary.

And now there has been a development. This week, the Hungarian government initiated procedures to end the state of emergency. It will end on 20 June. This means Hungary has acted more speedily than many other governments to bring to a close its Covid measures. Will those who spread the idea that Hungary had become a dictatorship acknowledge that they were wrong? Will they apologise for their slanderous statements about Hungary? Don’t hold your breath. It really doesn’t matter what the Hungarian government does; its adversaries in the West will always portray it as a dangerous dictatorship threatening European values.

No doubt, some might argue that Hungary is rescinding these laws precisely because of the international pressure they put on it. But of course, supposedly authoritarian dictatorships are not known for giving up their powers just because of some criticism in the foreign press. ‘Hungary still isn’t a democracy’, others will no doubt cry. In which case, why did it need the emergency powers in the first place? Why didn’t it just carry on being the dictatorship it already was, in the Hungary-haters’ eyes?

In the current Culture Wars, Hungary has become a kind of lightning rod through which the negative sentiments of the Western cultural establishment – especially their anti-sovereigntist views – can be expressed. Throughout most of Europe and the Anglo-American world, the hegemony of the cultural elite remains intact. It is rarely questioned. Though millions of people resent the values of these elites, very few have the voice or the courage openly to question them. When they do – for example, in the vote for Brexit – they are bombarded with immense pressure to shut up and know their place. That is the case even in Trump’s America, where millions feel they have to mind what they say.

In Hungary, support for the Hollywood, Netflix, Big Tech globalist value system is quite weak. Of course, given its broad influence, the global media does have some influence in Hungary. But it is not hegemonic. Consequently, the people and their representatives are able to express opinions and values that are vilified in many parts of the Western world. In the eyes of the Western media, the refusal of the Hungarian government to accept the moral authority of the leaders of the EU or of the Hollywood woke consensus is a kind of cultural heresy. Like the Stalinist heresy-hunters of the 20th century, the globalist culture warriors will use everything in their power to humiliate their opponents and force them to fall in line with the ‘right’ way of thinking.

The cultural elites’ obsession with Hungary is not entirely about Hungary. Whenever a British, German or American newspaper editor or observer denounces the ‘dictatorship’ in Hungary, they are also indirectly attacking movements and politicians in their own countries who oppose the prevailing cultural norms. That is why those of us who supported Brexit in the UK, and who call for the valuation of national sovereignty in countries around the world, have a real interest in supporting Hungary against its Western detractors.

SOURCE 






'I won't take the knee!': Laurence Fox says terms like 'racist' and 'fascist' have become 'casual insults' and lost all meaning and refuses to kneel for Black Lives Matter due to its 'master-servant' connotation

Laurence Fox has said he won't take a knee with Black Lives Matter protesters as it has 'master-servant' connotations.

The outspoken actor said he would only kneel 'to propose, before god or before the queen' but stressed that others should be 'free to do what they want'.

Speaking on the 76th anniversary of the D-Day landings, Fox also said terms such as 'racist' and 'fascist' are now just 'casual insults' and have lost the meaning they carried during the war.

He said: 'These men died on the beaches on Normandy so people are free to do what they want and if you want to take a knee, you can take a knee you just won't find me doing it.

'I'm not a particularly religious man but the times I would kneel are to propose, before god or before the queen.

'It's a master-servant relationship that comes with taking a knee that I'm uncomfortable with.

'But that's my view and anybody else who wants to do what they want to do must feel free to do that as well.'

This week, police officers were photographed kneeling in front of Black Lives Matter protesters in London. The move showed solidarity with demonstrators.

The actor hit the headlines earlier this year after he accused ethnicity lecturer Rachel Boyle of 'being racist' after she called him 'a white privileged male' for denying the Duchess of Sussex was hounded from Britain for being mixed-race.

Since the Question Time slanging match, Fox quit Twitter stating that he became 'more and more depressed' following a ferocious left-wing Twitter backlash.

In his TalkRadio interview this morning he added: 'It's worth remembering today that hundreds of thousands of soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy 76 years ago to fight fascism which was a real word back then and has now turned into a casual insult.

'And what we want to do is try and keep words like "racist" and "fascist" and all of those and apply them to what they genuinely mean and not use them as casual insults.

'So, it's a very difficult thing because there is racism in the world and it needs to be confronted.

'But also again overreaching the use of words like "racist" and "fascist" are unhelpful to the original cause of trying to get these things out and condemn them together.

SOURCE 





The uncivil war killing liberalism in the West

Many Western democracies have succumbed to the malaise, the US most disastrously, with Australia still conspicuous as a holdout. The malaise is the erosion of the political centre — the once great middle-class suburban stability, anchor of family life, aspiration and widely shared cultural norms.

Beneath the hollowing-out of the political middle ground lies a deeper and destructive phenomenon: the crisis of Western liberalism, evident to a greater or lesser extent today in most democracies.

The story of the past century has been the titanic struggle between three ideologies — liberalism, communism and fascism. Since World War II the Western narrative has been dominated by the victory of liberalism and its legacy — steady economic prosperity, a negotiated distribution of benefits, functioning democratic systems and societies where incentives for harmony outweighed the quest for disintegration.

But the wheel of history has turned. At every point liberalism is under assault. The ethic of liberalism as an idea that both honoured individual liberty and provided principles by which human beings of all races and creeds could live, work, trade and conduct politics short of war and civil unrest is being discredited. The governing idea that made democracies successful is being pulled part, under attack from both right and left.

Much of this assault arises because of the failure of American liberalism. This failure is integral to the current upheavals — liberalism means equality before the law regardless of race, equal access to healthcare and education on the principle of universalism.

Yet the US today is engulfed in a series of social crises, with life expectancy for Americans falling for three successive years from 2015.

Liberalism has always been a broad creed, its basic tenets accepted by social democrats and conservatives as well as card-carrying liberals.

Its favoured prophets, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, will endure but they are far less invoked these days. The new age of rising anger and grievance is defined by excessive individualism and the relentless rise of subcultures, both trends advanced by technology. These are the killing agents stalking the liberal order.

Every political idea is subject to reinterpretation by succeeding generations. Liberalism is in trouble, betrayed by its friends as mirrored by ineffective government and under attack from a wide range of enemies.

From the right and left, ideologues, intellectuals, politicians on the make, champions of new causes and legions of the aggrieved are hacking away at liberal universalism, cursing its moral basis and consigning it to history’s dustbin. The conga line of such groups, extending as far as the eye can see, spans disillusioned Catholic conservatives, identity politics agitators, Trumpian populists and climate change radicals, a quartet that highlights the diversity of the political earthquake.

The shattering of centre-right liberalism in the US saw Donald Trump hijack the Republican Party and win the White House, the single most consequential event so far in the assault on liberalism. The next, with a different twist, was Brexit, where liberalism had been pushed too far in the embrace of open borders and was brought crashing back to earth.

Columnist Ross Douthat, in his 2020 book The Decadent Society, probes the cultural wasteland that Trump exploited: “He (Trump) is both an embodiment of our society’s distinctive vices and a would-be rebel against our torpor and disappointment; a figure who rose to power by attacking the system for its sclerosis while exploiting that same decadence to the very hilt. ‘Make America Great Again’ is a precisely calibrated statement of what you may call reactionary futurism, a howl against a present that wasn’t promised, the mixture of nostalgia and ambition that you would expect a decadent era to conjure up.”

Like most conservatives, Douthat believes politics follows culture. He sees Trump as a product of liberalism’s slide into cultural decadence. Trump exploits the decline of liberalism while being an agent of that decline. Douthat asks whether Trump’s meaning is that “our system could decay much more swiftly into authoritarianism or collapse into simple chaos — or whether Trump is instead fundamentally more farcical than threatening, too decadent himself to be a real threat to the system”. A clown at the bonfire.

Trump and Brexit have forged the stereotypical view about the assault on liberal values — that it comes from right-wing nationalistic and xenophobic populists. But this completely misunderstands the story.

The earlier assault on liberalism came from the centre-left in the form of a new elitism. It was the newly ascendant, highly educated, cosmopolitan, secularised, morally superior, opinion-making class that decided liberalism was hopelessly vapid and shifted to a more aggressive progressivism.

Its chief political casualty has been Hillary Clinton, whose presidential 2016 campaign based on a coalition of minority groups defined by race, gender, sexuality and generation led Clinton to mock Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a taunt she never lived down.

These forces possess their distinctive Australian parallels. At home, Scott Morrison seeks to hold the centre ground against pro-Trump conservative populists demanding he imitate their hero, while Anthony Albanese must calculate how many concessions he makes to the noisy progressive interest groups as the price for losing mainstream voters. With Labor’s vote at 33.3 per cent last election the nexus is set — the more progressive Labor gets, the more it loses middle-ground votes.

The progressive mantra is that Western liberalism is immoral with its tolerance of colonialism, invasion, racism, inequality, climate cowardice, sexism and patriarchy. While Australians are pragmatic and responsive to sensible changes in the liberal status quo, progressivism demands a new moral order that unnerves and divides the community. It is about power. It sees every issue in terms of a victim class and an oppressor class. It is more interested in power than solutions. It demands people change their values to fit its moral impositions and it is disgusted by how liberalism has tolerated so many reactionary views.

The betrayal of liberalism by progressive elites has been seductive, subtle and long in the making. As early as the 1990s this change in liberal culture was brilliantly captured by American writer Christopher Lasch, whose essays appeared in his 1995 book, The Revolt of the Elites.

Lasch wrote: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy.

“Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their backs on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion and popular culture. Patriotism, certainty, does not rank very high in their hierarchy of virtues. ‘Multiculturalism’, on the other hand, suits them to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar … The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival or to an undiscovered resort.”

Lasch was describing what would become the central event on the left — the retreat from liberalism to progressivism. Elites decided that liberal universalism was boring, unexciting and out of step with the empowered individualism in which they exalted, finally freed from every cultural restraint.

American writer Yuval Levin argued in his 2016 book, The Fractured Republic, that culture was being re-engineered. It was now what the individual preferred it to be. Once your guiding star becomes your own self-expression then, as Levin says, we “recoil from any demands that we conform to the requirements of some external moral standard — a set of rules that keeps ‘me’ from being ‘the real me’, ‘true to myself’ ”.

Such rules were to be discarded. Indeed, they were to be mocked, with the Christian religion top of the list. Such individual empowerment leads to defiance of moral instructions handed down by church, state or nearly any authority. Those defying the authority are applauded because being “true to yourself” is seen as the ultimate morality.

Liberalism accepted the principle of non-discrimination. But this cannot satisfy progressives. They want minority-group distinctiveness to be validated. Rules and laws must change so any form of diversity and separateness is validated and celebrated. This is the super-highway to tribal culture and permanent political disruption.

In 1955 only 4.5 per cent of children in the US were born to unmarried mothers, while by 2015 it had risen to 41 per cent of births. If you believe the traditional family had a role in social and economic stability this transition is decisive. Data in the US shows deep tribulations in two groups — among African-Americans and the white working class. In their “depths of despair” analysis of American life, academics Anne Case and Angus Deaton find the most troubled category is people without a four-year college degree. Marriage rates at age 40 among that group declined by 50 per cent between 1980 and 2018, and this trend combines with falling wages and a dearth of good jobs.

The American demonstrations reveal a troubled but divided nation. In his New York Times column, Douthat said the riots were not just a testament to Trump’s “provocation and abdication” but exposed, in effect, the crisis on the left — what he called “the coalition of the liberal city” (think Democratic mayors and governors) — relying on an alliance of highly educated urbanites and an underclass “sharing a common political opponent but lacking a common way of life”.

Douthat nailed the malaise: “Above all, the liberal city lacks a middle — the ballast of a substantial middle class” and “the cement of shared religious and cultural institutions”. He said recent studies showed white liberals (think progressives) were “increasingly angrier about racism than the average black American”.

This links to my interview last year with American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, whose 2012 book, The Righteous Mind, remains the masterclass in answering “why is it so hard for us to get along?”.

Identifying the real nature of the US domestic conflict, Haidt said: “The current political civil war is between two groups of educated white people with radically different views about what the country is, what morality is and what we need to do to move forward. The modern civil war is being fought by the extremes. Most Americans are non-political, but in a sense they don’t exist.”

The killing of George Floyd is an undisguised act of racial violence and abuse of police power. Blacks and whites have every justification to protest. But these demonstrations have become about something much bigger — about competing views of America. And the ideological battle between these views is spearheaded largely by rival white politicians, leaders and agitators.

Reflecting last year on the divisions in America, Haidt said: “We just don’t know what a democracy looks like when you drain all the trust out of the system. So I don’t know what the future will look like. It may just be a continued decline in trust and efficacy such that everything is contested, everything is fought.”

But Haidt, again, nailed the core problem, saying the battle between progressives and conservatives was akin to a struggle between “different cultures”.

He urged Australians to avoid following the US down this path. He warned that any nation seeking to save its liberal democracy must work “very hard to turn down tribal identities and inter-group conflicts”.

Haidt said liberal democracy was predicated on the ability of groups “to compete but also to co-operate”. He predicted violence in the US would increase because this was a contest between competing moral claims where more people believed “the ends justify the means”.

This is the consequence when the universal liberal culture — based around nation, family, community and shared benefits — is weakened from within and without. This is not just an American problem; it is rife in Australia.

The essence of liberalism has been treating people as people regardless of race, gender, sex, religion, age and ethnicity. This idea is now being dismantled in both the US and Australia under the flawed notion of progressive social justice. It attacks the universalism that has been the cement holding the social structure together.

While progressives are pulling apart the ideals of liberalism, the alienated ranks of Catholic intellectuals are in ferment, appalled by the damage being done to human life particularly among children, the decline of cultural tradition, the attrition of Christianity and the growing inroads of progressive morality. This Catholics movement has become one of the most powerful critics of liberalism, blaming its inherent weakness for the moral and social ills they see nearly everywhere.

The ultimate statement reflecting this rage is the 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, by Catholic academic Patrick J. Deneen, a social conservative, economic primitive and misguided political analyst. The thesis is that liberalism is to blame for the decline of religious faith and the destruction wrought by progressive morality. Deneen says 70 per cent of Americans believe their country is moving in the wrong direction and half the country thinks its best days are behind it. He said liberalism, with its ideals of limited but effective government, independent judiciary, responsive public officials and free and fair elections, has betrayed virtually every promise made in its name.

“Liberalism has failed — not because it fell short but because it was true to itself,” he said. “In practice (it) generates titanic inequality, enforces uniformity and homogeneity, fosters material and spiritual degradation and undermines freedom.” Deneen argues the tragedy is that liberalism — the first of the modern world’s competitor political ideologues after fascism and communism — is now exposed for its vices.

So alien is its view of human nature that America may be witnessing “the bankruptcy of its underlying political philosophy”. He wonders whether liberalism is approaching the “natural cycle” of decay that limits the lifespan of all human creations. Deneen says the contradiction of liberalism is that its triumph meant the undermining of “the classical and Christian understanding” of liberty, tradition and individual primacy.

Deneen’s mistake is his misallocation of blame. He blames liberalism for the failures of the conservative and religious movement when its failures are its own. It is true, however, that the growing alienation of religious people from what now constitutes liberalism is another burden it must carry. The bottom line is that regardless of whether liberalism’s critics come from the left or right, populists or priests, Trumpians or progressives, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1999: “Liberal democracy has always been dependent on certain shared cultural values to work properly.”

Twenty years later, it is obvious those shared values are gravely undermined and equally obvious that liberal democracy is no longer working properly. History, however, suggests liberalism has been in worse trouble at various times in the past. Its demise has been frequently predicted but such predictions always misjudged its immense recuperative ability.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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