It’s always the patriarchal conquerors like the Ancient Romans or the Ancient Greeks that they idolize and never the people like, say, the Picts or the Celts or the Gaul that rebelled against the brutal Roman empire. It’s never the Scottish or the Irish heroes who fought back against the British Empire that followed in Rome’s footsteps. None of them probably even know who Boudica is.
Ironically, a lot of the stuff you could call “white culture” was burnt at the stake, banned, brutalized, and literally demonized by the Empires that chuds think are so civilized. A lot of pagan culture was lost to time, or warped by Roman ‘scholars’ for propaganda purposes. If they truly cared about their ‘culture’, then "Muh Christian trad wife’ would be seen as killing the identity of pagan women, rather than an aspiration.
As a slight counterpoint, there are some reactionaries who obsess over historic European pagans (especially Norse but also Germanic and Celtic) for example nazis with their runes. However you do have a point overall, that these reactionaries tend to jerk off to the image of ancient Rome especially
Yeah, it just goes to further prove that there is no definitive ‘white race’. And white supremacy at its core is flawed and silly.
Very true
Reminds me of this sign I saw at the Ren Faire.
Fash can’t create culture: example number 4,345,285,901
Odin is the All-father, not the Some-father
had an uncle working in Wales and he realised one workday that he was the only one on the worksite that didn’t love Hitler. Bunch of nazis decided that Christianity was Jewish so they decided to retvrn to Celtic paganism
The Matriarchal pagan stuff is a Victorian romantic invention. We know extremely little about the societies of the Celts and related peoples, with the vast majority of what we do know coming from two accounts, both Roman, which are very obviously reductive takes of similar academic rigour to Victorian anthropologists talking about the Australian aboriginals.
While of course, much of what people are attached to in their fixations on the Romans and Greeks is also Victorian fiction, we at least have a wealth of first hand written sources and corroborating archeological evidence. For the Celtic peoples across Europe and particularly in Britain, we have essentially nothing. No idea of what their religion looked like, what their laws and traditions were or how they organised their society.
That’s not fair…we have what said Romans wrote about the Celts whom they butchered
I would very much like it if a revival of nature worship occurred as a religious movement. With climate change the way it is I believe it would be quite successful. There is however far too much potential for the kind of burning man crowd to take it over and turn it into cringe instead of a proper folk-ey working class thing.
For a revival of nature worship, we would first have to be sure that pre-christian and pre-roman societies did actually practice anything of the sort, which we are not.
On top of that, I’m not sure that a religious movement is necessary or desirable for nature advocacy or preservation.
Shinto religion is an example of humans still doing a form of nature worship in my mind. Assigning spirits to everything and worshipping those spirits and the “balance” of them is in its way the worship of a natural system. It’s very very against the destruction of ecosystems and nature because it’s incredibly harmful to the spirits, so while nature might not itself be the thing being worshipped by Shintoism the spirits created by nature require the protection of nature in order to exist. It’s somewhat close.
Ok so it’s not based in europe but does it matter? Humans can worship nature elsewhere so you could essentially create such a religion for the european context instead.
american natives were tremendously successful in reshaping the landscape and environment to suit their needs and hold nature in deep esteem. land as kin is totally sufficient. a peer relationship, in other words.
We do know it occurred in Indo-European societies, but it was not born of love of nature but close dependence on it.
Astroturfing the creation of this religion was a minor plot element in The Ministry for the Future
Nature religion depends upon a view of nature as uncontrollable and superior to humans. We’ve learned how to control it. Not 100% but enough we can make rocks into fertile soil and bring back dead forests. We can’t relate to nature the same way earlier societies could.
None of them probably even know who Boudica is.
This is certainly true of the reactionaries of today although strangely Victorian Britain did sometimes use Boudica, and celtic resistance to the Roman occupation in general, as something of a propaganda tool against rival European powers which is pretty confusing. Guess it’s a bit like how right wing Italians will try and invoke Giuseppe Garibaldi even though he was involved in the First International.
Weak men failing to defend Rome…
Why not strong men successfully fucking up Rome?
Boudica entirely makes sense as a British nationalist symbol a very old idea in British politics from the break from Rome and becoming protestant to brexit is that as we aren’t on the continent we will never be respected in continental Europe and as such being part of any collective European identity means foreign rule. It’s a strong throughline in ideas about the Norman Yoke, Roman Catholic clerical authority being resented, the English civil war and now the EU
Boudica being anti-Roman fits neatly into the political ideology of British meaning not European
the First International
The first international what?
The International Workingmen’s Association, the first large international organisation of socialists and proto-socialists.
Boudicca was a badass.
Imagine being so angry that you and your mates annihilate a capital city
God football hooligans have been around that long
After her Britain had nowhere to go but down
But trad wife got the booba
But what if matriarch got bigger booba? Like massive mommy milker booba
Big booba pagan wife covered in paint
god i wish that were me
If my boobs were bigger I’d totally start an insurrection against the romans
Ironically, a lot of the stuff you could call “white culture” was burnt at the stake, banned, brutalized, and literally demonized by the Empires that chuds think are so civilized.
don’t worry, norweigian fash appropriated this too
You do get some celt chuds, but most were ran out of Folk communities long ago and settled in country music. Also the Chud trad culture they do like that is celtic or germanic is always half-baked 19th century revivalist stuff.
As others have alluded to here, Boudica is kind of a perfect example of why the matriarchal pagan past stuff is also bunk history largely. Fantastic video recently by J. Draper on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq5oY3Ki7X0
The simplest way to put it is even during Roman times everything we know about her is from 2 sources both of which are different from one another and clearly aim to use her for political ends. Boudica as we know her, as she has existed in any meaningful way in society since she lived was a political propaganda piece. In fact the strong female leader element was part of it from the beginning. In the two wildly different battle speeches the Romans gave her, she speaks about being a female warrior, but it is playing to a different purpose in each. Here is a write-up from askhistorians
The problem is that all three accounts of Boudica are extremely Roman in context. They’re written by Roman historians, and are full of Roman ideas about virtue, femininity, justice, government, etc.
Whenever the supposedly Briton characters in these sources speak (and all speeches in all Roman histories are the work of the author, not the actual words of the historical personages) they do so for a Roman audience, referring to the Roman context. It’s laughably obvious in Dio’s history, where Boudica spends half the speech referring to legendary queens from Greek and Roman myth such as Nitocris and Semiramis, or to powerful women from recent Roman history such as Agrippina and Messalina. Dio actually puts a parenthetical “For we have learned about these from the Romans” after “Boudica” says this, because otherwise all this classical learning from a British queen might have been too much even for his audience to stomach. Even the rather fun dig Dio’s Boudica aims at Nero, “[the Romans] are slaves to a lyre-player and a poor one too,” is clearly more something a Roman historian would say rather than a British queen.
However, even the much more subtle and believable-sounding passages in Tacitus are replete with such Roman contexts and Roman ideas about morality and justice. Where Dio’s Boudica is a brutal, masculine, Barbarian queen, and Tacitus’ Boudica in the Agricola seems quite similar to Dio’s version, his Boudica in the annales behaves and is described like a virtuous Roman matron, avenging a wrong done to her as a Roman citizen by greedy and low-born servants of a rap*cious procurator. Tacitus’ version of the rebellion is a morality tale: The greedy Romans offend against the natural order whilst the (brave, disciplined, properly Roman) governor Paulinus is away, and as a result they are punished by death and defeat at the hands of the Britons. However, the Britons aren’t satisfied with their revenge and continue their war, and are then punished by the returning governor, who restores proper law and order…
We’ll probably never know what kind of a person Boudica actually was, or what motivated her. The sources on her life are extremely interesting, but they teach us much more about what conservative upper-class Romans thought about women, foreigners and justice than they do about the actual personality and motivations of the characters they’re ostensibly describing.
Then centuries later she becomes popular again literally for the British empire. They change her speech to being about empire and prophesizing the British Empire. And they play up her similarities to Queen Elizabeth during her time. So the history you are talking about, the real past of Europe, is literally written by wealthy white Romans for their ends, and British imperialists doing the same. Not to sound harsh to anyone, but this is just more mythmaking. Not even replacing old European myths with new ones, but bringing back the OG Europe myths like Boudica.
More than that though, we don’t need an invented past that is clipped from the very same “history” we decry, we don’t need to invert that by imagining a past in which Pagan was a coherent set of beliefs or something anyone consciously viewed themselves as, etc. James Connolly writes about how we choose to explain archeology and how a surface level feminist approach ended up just further burying the actual Irish women of history. Here it is in its entirety
In its issue of August 8, the Boston Pilot had a very interesting article upon the life of a typical Irish girl of ancient Ireland. The article dealt with the life of the ancient Irish as it has been reconstructed by antiquarians from a study of the gold and silver ornaments found in various bogs in Ireland, and from the allusions to the use of those ornaments made in old Irish manuscripts
All this is interesting, especially to those who desire to have their Irish patriotism or pride of race buttressed up by historical data. And, of course, there are many such.
I, also, was much interested in the article, but for another reason. To me it was especially interesting as illustrative of the curious effect modern property relations have upon the mind of even the most gifted amongst us. The gifted authoress of the article in question took as the imaginary subject of her sketch an ancient Irish princess and reconstructed her life in the most ingenious manner, describing her lying down and uprising, her hunting and riding and chess-playing and sweet-hearting and, in fact, all the incidents in which an Irish princess is revealed or touched upon by the old Irish manuscripts in song or story.
In all of those pursuits she was waited upon by a slave woman, a different slave woman for each separate amusement; in all, there must have been at least a dozen different slave women waiting upon the one princess, and what appeared to my cold Socialistic mind as curious was that the writer wrote and treated of the princess as a typical ‘colleen’ of ancient Ireland, and utterly neglected to recognise in the slave women any right to be regarded as Irish types at all.
Yet when we remember that for every princess living the life of luxury and ease sketched by the Pilot writer there must have been at least a dozen other women attending her and a hundred other Irish women working in the fields attending cattle and weaving and spinning to feed and clothe and house and ornament her, it must be conceded that any one of these hundred useful Irish women had more right to be considered ‘typical Irish colleens’ than the useless drone whose life our authoress has reconstructed with such loving fidelity and care.
By all means tell us about the typical colleens of ancient Erin, shake up for us the dry bones of history and tell us about the wives and mothers and daughters of the producing classes of our native country, but do not ask us to believe that a princess was anything more than a type of the class to which she belonged – a predatory useless class – a class whose predatory proclivities hindered the free development of the nation and prepared the way for its subjection.
What a history that would be which would tell us the history of the real women of Ireland – the women of the people ! What a record of ceaseless suffering, of heroism, of martyrdom! What a recital of patient toil, of uncomplaining self-sacrifice, of unending abnegation! Aye, and what a brilliant tale of things accomplished, of deeds done, of miracles achieved!
Think of all the insurrections against British tyranny in Ireland, and as you honour the men who went out to front the armed force of the oppressors think also of the brave women who kissed them and cried over them ere they went, but bade them go for freedom’s sake.
Think of all the slimy roll of informers in Erin, and wonder when you remember how seldom even tradition places a woman’s name upon the list.
Think of the long and bloody history of the fight against private property in Irish land – against Irish landlordism, and when you remember how the Irish mother, the woman of the house, consented to suffer eviction and ruin rather than let her husband betray the cause of his friends and neighbours, then if you believe in a God thank Him for the spirit and courage and honour of our Irish womanhood.
But then you will not be accepting princesses as the types of Irish life, you will be looking for types of the real womanhood of Ireland where only they can be found, among the producing classes.
Those Irish girls who in the recent dock strike in Belfast joined their fathers and brothers and sweethearts in the streets to battle against the English troops imported in the interests of Irish capitalism are to my mind a thousand times more admirable ‘types of Irish colleens’ than the noblest bean uasal of Gaelic Erin much as I admire the latter.
What would we think of the historian who would picture the life of the daughter of an Irish aristocrat of today, and then tell us that this was a picture of the life of a typical Irish girl of the twentieth century? We would laugh him to scorn. Yet that is the manner in which history is written.
that’s a fantastic exerpt
The Celtic (probably one of the oldest) version of Cinderella is about a girl (The Girl Who Tends the Ashes) who is essentially an indentured servant of a landlord tyrant who runs an inn. Like in the other variations, the Prince comes to visit and the woman who runs the inn tries to get him to notice her two daughters, and sends the protag out to gather from the woods. The Prince, to escape the overbearing inn owner, finds The Girl in the woods and treats her like a slave and so she runs deeper into the woods, where she meets a based spae-woman who lives alone and who hatches a plan with her to basically fleece the Prince at his big party with conjured golden clothes.
It rocks tbh, Celtic stuff is full of odd class-conscious tales like those. Probably why the Irish Nationalists had so much success bringing back those old tales.
The white version of a hotep is a viking guy. Which still falls into that trap. Cause real vikings were doing arts n crafts and braiding hair for half the year cause it was too cold to go outside.
Good post, before the west colonized the world we had already been colonized by Rome and the church
We don’t even really know who the fuck we are anymore or where we came from and yet those ignorant white marble statue avatar dipshits are proud of this instead of sad, it’s pathetic
We don’t even really know who the fuck we are anymore or where we came from
i don’t really think there’s a “secret truth” or whatever to be learned. the traditions are destroyed and resurrecting them would be as illegitimate as modern hebrew. we “came from” the settler empire. there is no “we” in that historical sense, only the present and the culture of exploitation we reject.
None of them probably even know who Boudica is.
there was an infamous bnp “educational” video once that gave a mediocre recounting of her and the iceni’s exploits (ending with the godawful line “and boudica was WHITE!”) and they couldn’t even say her fucking name right
Yeah, they don’t give a shit. Just the usual appropriation that right wingers do before idolizing her oppressors the next day.
Oh god I remember that shit, they also invoked Henry VIII as a great white UK hero which is hilarious given that he was a lousy king who undermined the Kingdom of England’s position as a regional power with all of his bullshit. Not sure why they didn’t go for Elizabeth I who was a far more competent English leader from a right wing/establishment perspective. I guess they didn’t want to include too many women.
Of course, fascists are never going to be good at understanding history, it was around the same time that the BNP was sending out leaflets with a picture of a Spitfire on the cover - a Spitfire in Free Polish markings lmao.
Didn’t Henry #8 do pretty well in his youth? From what I remember reading it was moreso when he got old that things got bad. Young Henry curtailed the nobles and stabilised the place or something like that
Henry the 8th was for everything else he was a genuinely cunning statesman who among other things did break the power of the feudal barons over the English state
We focus a lot on funny fat guy obsessed with a son. But he wanted a son because without a son the barons would never stop thinking “Henry is powerful but I have to look to the future who comes after” and marrying off his daughters as heirs would mean being forced to allign as a subordinate power to either Spain or France.
He was also a brutal serial killer who would have close friends killed on a whim. But it’s inaccurate to portray him as just a buffoon
I think there are two distinct lines running through Western cultural history, the one that results in imperialism and the other in Marx. Like one is idealistic and religious and obsessed with ideas like purity and order, the other is cynical and humanist.
Historically there’s good reason to think the West was Matriachal originally, and it was the indo-European invasion or migration that brought patriarchal systems and religions
Historically there’s good reason to think the West was Matriachal originally, and it was the indo-European invasion or migration that brought patriarchal systems and religions
We have functionally no evidence at all for what any European culture was like pre-Indo-European migration. I’d like to know what reason we have to think they were a matriarchal society.
We have functionally no evidence at all for what any European culture was like pre-Indo-European migration
yea we do, the Etruscans. Romans would write about how embarrassing it was that their women were full equals and stuff
All their rulers were men. Their women were allowed to read and attend banquets, but were not equal in power.
my bad, I was paraphrasing from stuff I read years ago
still, they were more equal than in Roman society
The Etruscan language was not Indo-European, but all historical accounts we have of them are all well past the Indo-European migration.
So? That would still mean their culture was more reflective of the native Europeans
I only know about it from reading Robert Graves which is comparative mythology (his books The Greek Myths and the White Goddess are very interesting if not exactly solid evidence), although I know there are archeologists who have done more serious work on it. There is archeological evidence from before the migration, just no writing obviously. The Minoan civilisation is generally accepted to have had at least a partially matriachal society and religion, and they were a native/pre migration society.
We know that the Minoans had lots of images of women, and that those women were frequently depicted as high status, but that’s not really evidence that the society itself was matriarchal.
Were the women depicted regular people? Priestesses? Rulers? Deities? We don’t know. But there’s a lot of space between “not as patriarchal as their neighbours” and “A Matriarchal society”.
Archaeology without an associated written record is necessarily speculation, and while we can always interpret more interesting conclusions from them, they’re not any more valid than the less interesting ones that can be supported on the same evidence.
Minoan dudes were simply paypigs who loved making art of their findoms.
I don’t think you could easily separate Marx from his predecessors or people who came afterwards. He was very much operating in the western philosophical tradition, his PhD was even about Greek philosophy, his contemporaries were western philosphers. Marx’s economic work heavily cites Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Not to mention the modern fields of sociology and anthropology were forged by people well read on Marx’s work. I heard someone here once say he was the last Enlightenment thinker, he was the final culmination of that whole group of guys before him like Hegel, Hume, Kant, etc.
But that’s just Marx the guy and scholar. You’re more correct if you said there are two lines through contemporary western thought: liberalism and Marxism.
It was just an off the cuff comment not really a serious analysis, I guess the way I would put it is ‘humanist’ and anti-humanist, like a lot of the kind of aesthetic and intellectual concerns that modern white supremacists have do have a long history in Western thought, but there is also a counter-tradition that has always opposed them
Your dichotomy makes Stalin an imperialist. This is anti-materialist and simply hegel before Marx refined his works.
Hunter-gatherers tend more towards egalitarianism, and early societies may have been matriolinial, but matriarchy has never existed.
Sure maybe it is a half assed dialectic but all I mean is these Return types aren’t interested in the heritage of, say, Montaigne or William Blake or anything from that strain of Western culture that celebrates and has faith in humanity, they are kind of aesthetically entranced by the aspects of Western history that degrade and narrow humanity, the Church, Empire, etc., - the ‘Dark Enlightenment’ is a pretty telling name for how they view Western history.
I don’t see how I made Stalin an imperialist, that wasn’t my meaning.I just don’t think you can meaningfully delineate things like that. The church has spiritually and mentally uplifted many people, as well as holding back others. Some of them obsess over the enlightenment and think we should go to that. Take Marcus Aurelius. He was literally an emperor of Rome, and we have his stoic diary for reading. Many fascists and right wing shit heads read that, and retain their views. But I’ve met some left wing people, and some at least anti-bigot people, who read it and found it deeply inspiring. Lots of queer people grow up finding something fascinating in Greek mythology, just as do the bigots. Shakespeare is not a bad thing, but right wingers flock to it or sometimes despise it. I’m sure there are return types who like Blake. Casper David Friedrich was an artist who the nazis used as an example of great German art. He wasn’t a fascist, but his art was used by them. Now it’s more broadly enjoyed again.
Hunter-gatherers tend more towards egalitarianism
the archaeological evidence doesn’t line up with this, apparently. Graeber, in Dawn of Everything, expands on this at length - the evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies routinely experimented with all kinds of social organization, ranging from deeply hierarchical to completely egalitarian. they didn’t tend to stick to any one system of organization - a surprising number changed political/administrative systems semiannually (this may be the root of various holidays in the early spring, where social hierarchies are inverted for a day). this tendency persisted into the earliest agrarian societies - in the Americas, it lasted until European contact in many, many places. there were, of course, plenty that did maintain systems for hundreds or thousands of years - the lack of consistency across civilizations is perhaps the only defining feature.
Marx, of course, could not have known this. the archaeological evidence was just not available. it’s worth re-exploring historical materialism in light of the now available evidence - Graeber’s analysis is extremely useful in this light.
What kind of evidence supports a hierarchy among hunter-gatherers? Genuinely curious, I’ve never seen this suggested before. People living in those societies generally have the same kind of gear to my knowledge, it would be hard to differentiate based off grave goods then, and they don’t leave a written record.
The one I know about off-hand are the Chumash people of California. They had complex social hierarchies throughout the possibly thousands of years they spent as hunter-gatherers, and most of it had to do with control over labor specialization by their elites. They would regularly move around their territory, sometimes going more inland, sometimes more on the coast, and sometimes on the nearby North Channel islands, all of that depending on tides. And so their hereditary elites were usually the ones who knew the land and when the tides were due to change, so they’re the ones who’d direct productive labor.
Most of their social hierarchy was hereditary, although they at times had legit cult-like secret societies that would influence whoever the hereditary chiefs were. I’m an amateur at anthropology, but it seems to me like the Chumash had such a stratified social hierarchy due to their relatively complicated production. They had much more advanced boats than most other indigenous Americans, so advanced they’d navigate dozens of miles out into the Pacific ocean. Their boats were so good they’d even regularly go whale hunting (image of a modern version of a Chumash boat) . They had rock quarries and complex basket weaving as well. They had a rudimentary currency based around carved beads or bones, and even contingencies against counterfeiting because their beads were made using a specific kind of drill bit.
A vulgar way of describing it is they somehow had some kind of vague feudal mercantilism while still existing as a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer society. The Chumash are really interesting and I’d suggest reading about them.
That is definitely interesting. I’ll have to give them a look. That does sound significantly more nomadic than hunter gatherer though.
you can’t actually fight ahistorical nonsense with ahistorical nonsense that makes you feel good, sorry.
