The Rise of Archaeologists Anonymous
unherd.com
unherd.com
I couldn't quite figure out what they were saying, apart from the usual 'woke' is bad, reactionary 'science' is being oppressed.
Something like, all historical immigration has wiped out the current inhabitants so we should be right-wing and oppose immigration today? It's really not clear, presumably because if they just stated it plainly it would be obviously stupid.
I do know, however, that "all historical immigration has wiped out the current inhabitants so we should be right-wing and oppose immigration today" is not something that this article is arguing for, at least not explicitly.
I myself am neither a left-winger nor a right-winger but I usually dislike it when academia is dominated by dogma rather than by the search for truth. To that extent, at least, I agree with the author.
https://stoneageherbalist.substack.com/p/hating-the-saxon-th...
Lots of stuff about Germanic people's ethnic destiny to rule the world, then how people found that problematic after world war II then a weird genetics has proved the woke wrong finale without ever really stating a case clearly.
Particularly weird is the treatment of the Normans, who are treated as non-germanic interlopers, barely worth mentioning except as a foil to the noble anglo-saxons.
As for the Normans, I do not remember any mention of them in the article but maybe I should give it a re-read.
> The eminent antiquarian William Camden (1551 - 1623) in particular emphasised the founding stock of the Saxon peoples, that powerful Germanic tree from which flowered the English branch. Leaning on Tacitus’ description of the Germans as a peculiar and pure people, untainted by marriage with others, Camden and his colleagues, such as Richard Rowlands, connected England’s Saxon heritage with the Germanic languages and the cluster of northern peoples - the Danes, Germans, Normans and Dutch. This was to have profound consequences for how the nascent British Empire came to view itself, with a magnificent national story of freedom-loving Germanic settlers, capable of self-discipline and self-rule, free from outside interference, England could confidently project its destiny out into the world. This is what others have dubbed ‘Anglo-Saxonism’, the belief in the unique and masterful qualities of the English race, which could be traced back to the primeval forests of Germania. Self-government, free institutions, conventions of liberty, common law and the English language defined Anglo-Saxonism prior to WW2.
Instead it goes on and talks about how after WWII people reacted against that, and then makes vague noises about how all that "revisionism" has been proved wrong by recent genetic findings but you're not allowed to talk about it because the woke left control academia.
And then you see the other writings where Mongolian Nazis are being praised as being based, western liberals are attacked for being too concerned with Neo-Nazism and so on. Or publishing old research papers that argue that reducing heirarchy will destroy society and the elite need to maintain their superiority to save civilisation from democracy. I mean it's not particularly subtle, but sure he's not at Kayne "I love hitler" levels of blatancy, so if you want to pretend to ignore it then that's an easy option.
What do other writings have to do with evaluating the truth or falsity of this one?
To me it seems pretty obvious that modern Western academia is an environment where certain ideas get censored based on factors other than whether they are true or not.
This is not a new phenomenon. Before the woke controlled it, other power groups did. The woke are just the latest in a long line of ideological groups to control academia.
*The claim is not "all historical immigration has wiped out the current inhabitants", but the weaker and obvious claim that "some historical immigration has to varying degrees wiped out the current inhabitants". To dispute that would be to argue that throughout all of its history, all of humanity has been perfectly pacifist.