You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
I think current thinking on the AngloSaxonification of England is a bit more complicated than that. I'm fascinated by this period of history and read quite a lot about it. It's a bit of a fools errand - there is so little source material to go on that in a lot of cases I just get the same material, differently interpreted. However, as a summary: - the 1066 and all that narrative of Anglo Saxons driving back Britons to the far west was largely based on a couple of written sources - Bede and Nennius. History in those days had a rather weaker relationship to truth and a stronger relationship to hagiography, and in any case Bede is substantially based on Nennius. - there is almost no archaeological record of ethnic cleansing, nor of Cortez-style foreign invaders claiming leadership over British tribes - there is quite a lot of archaeological record of continuity - the genetic record is mixed, but again the record of continuity is strong - there is linguistic evidence of continuity (for example, Cerdic - the family name of the kings of Wessex - seems like a Brythonic name)
There were almost certainly Anglo Saxon settlers, but they were not large in number and there had always been connections and migrations across the North Sea. Why then do the English speak English? It does appear to be a bit of a mystery. There are almost no common English words with Brythonic roots. The best answer, based on what I have read, is 'fashion' - English culture was AngloSaxonised during the dark ages in the same way it has been Americanised in the 20th century. Speaking and acting Anglosaxon was a rejection of Roman-culture and a way of connecting with the way things had been before Rome supressed them - Britons may not have spoken Anglo Saxon but would have had more in common with Anglo Saxon culture than with Roman. Interestingly, after the break with Rome, the west of Britain appears to have become MORE Roman - a conscious rejection of the rejection of Rome which was going on in the east. This seems incredible to a monoglot like me, but appears to be a widely held view among historians currently.
Paleolinguists have recreated Brythonic, and some suggest that Anglo Saxon is essentially a Germanic vocabulary with a Brythonic accent - i.e. the language of a people who at all levels have chosen to adopt the language.
Some historians have suggested that the east of Britain spoke a Germanic language even before the Roman Empire, pointing out that coasts and seas were a much better medium for cultural exchange than inland regions, and that the separation between Old English and Low German appears older than that between, say, Low German and Dutch. But I don't think this view is widely held.
TLDR - the AngloSaxonification of England was almost certainly not ethnic cleansing. Though the Celtification and the wave before that may have been. And the story of ancient Ireland is even more dark and mysterious.
Excellent comment and says a lot of what I wanted to add but left out of my reply. Expecially the stuff about an anglo-saxon vocabulary with a Brythonic grammar. Also worth adding that many of our landscape features, particularly the rivers, are Brythonic not AS names. Trent, Thames and Tyne all being examples.
On the previous invasion, there is very clear genetic evidence that the arival of Beaker people coincided with an effective extinction event for the native British population. In two generations somewhere around 96% of the previous neolithic population are gone. Most likely cause a plague to which the Beaker folk had immunity but which the earlier neolithic inhabitants of the British Isles did not.
There is similar evidence, although not so strong, for an earlier population replacement in the Early Neolithic which brought farming to Britain and replaced the Mesolithic population. Though this one is less well suppported and more contentious.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Richard is describing the process more articulately than me. But just to take issue with Whispering Oracle's point upthread about the ethnic cleansing being not something they wanted to record: this is judging history by the standards of today - the historians and storytellers of the dark ages quite liked to record their side involved in a bit of ethnic cleansing. Bede described how the Anglo Saxons were sent to punish the Britons for being slightly the wrong sort of Christians and to drive them into Wales. His side the winner and the tools of God, see? Only it wasn't true. Although Bede was better than most dark age historians in trying to introduce some sort of truth in his narrative, he had never left County Durham. He was reliant on stories and third-hand accounts and the tiny handful of occasions when anyone before him had written something down - and those sources were highly dubious at best. So while Bede tried to present his side as good honest ethnic cleansers, the truth was probably very different and was much more a case of continuity and the existing populations adapting their culture through choice.
The Vikings, and the Norman’s’ Harrying of the North, OTOH, were every bit as brutal as monkish chroniclers claimed.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
Part of the issue, though, is the behaviour of the Palestinians refugees - you just have to look at their attempt to take over Jordan to understand why they are unwelcome.
But you are right: they are not refugees and they are not going to get their property back because it would dismember Israel
Victim blaming.
One of the main reasons the Oslo accords failed was because the Israeli's were never serious about them. Indeed a large section of the Israeli body politic actively opposed them and did everything they could to undermine them. Hence the settlers taking over Palestinian lands with Government backing and the Israeli's backing - and substantially funding - Hamas against the more moderate Palestinian authority.
The Right wing in Israel created and encouraged this war as an excuse to drive the Palestinians out entirely. Sadly the rest of the world is letting them succeed. It won't bring peace. Just decades more war.
I wrote a long reply which vanilla ate
I am not blaming the Palestinians for being refugees. I am blaming them for attempting to overthrow the Jordanian government.
Rabin was a true hero of our time. Yes Oslo was difficult and controversial but with Clinton’s support he forced it through. Arafat’s rejection of the Accords massively empowered the right in Israel (“they rejected such a generous offer”)
The settlers are a radical fringe in Israel but Likud’s tacit (and sometimes explicitly) support is a hugely negative factor.
All sides need to compromise. The Palestinians rejecting compensation for their property and insisting on the return of the physical property - regardless of how many times it has been developed since - is a huge roadblock. They do this because they know it makes peace impossible.
Or they just want their land back. A simpler answer for most people who are not politicised.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
Probably both, to be fair. And wasn't there a famine and a plague in Britain at the material time, both of which would have resulted in depopulation.
There may be a ceasefire but there are still live hostages being held in appalling conditions, being starved and tortured. There are also the bodies of dead hostages being kept. The cruelty is abominable. Until they are returned, talk of solutions is for the birds.
A 2-state solution has been on life support for some time now. It died on 7 October. It had a stake driven through its heart with the appalling scenes when hostages were released. That stake was driven further into the ground with the knowledge of the death of the Bibas family and that an 8 month old baby and a 4 year old toddler were strangled to death and their bodies mutilated and that the Gazans cared so little for their own people that they initially sent back the body of an unknown dead Palestinian woman in place of the babies' mother. That woman was accorded more respect in the few hours she spent on Israeli soil than she was afforded by her own.
I find it impossible to see how Israel can live side by side with those who choose to behave like this. And now that the US can no longer be trusted, I think Israel will do whatever it takes to protect their country, which will likely lead to appalling policies towards the Palestinians we will all deplore.
Pandora's box has been opened. But I do not see any hope anywhere.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
You seem very upset about something. Is it that Europe is taking over its own defence and paying for it?
As opposed to depending on Donald Trump and chums...
Which bit did you read as me being upset. I am just pondering the seeming paradox.
You lot have constantly assured me that Russia is about to collapse. Why the huge military spend if this is the case. Shouldn't we instead be making more ploughshares.
Well it's not going to collapse if we say 'actually, go on, you can have Ukraine', is it? You appear to be just as guilty of doublethink you are labelling yout adversaries with: Russia is so strong that we must give up Ukraine to placate it, but at the same time it is no threat to us.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
I think current thinking on the AngloSaxonification of England is a bit more complicated than that. I'm fascinated by this period of history and read quite a lot about it. It's a bit of a fools errand - there is so little source material to go on that in a lot of cases I just get the same material, differently interpreted. However, as a summary: - the 1066 and all that narrative of Anglo Saxons driving back Britons to the far west was largely based on a couple of written sources - Bede and Nennius. History in those days had a rather weaker relationship to truth and a stronger relationship to hagiography, and in any case Bede is substantially based on Nennius. - there is almost no archaeological record of ethnic cleansing, nor of Cortez-style foreign invaders claiming leadership over British tribes - there is quite a lot of archaeological record of continuity - the genetic record is mixed, but again the record of continuity is strong - there is linguistic evidence of continuity (for example, Cerdic - the family name of the kings of Wessex - seems like a Brythonic name)
There were almost certainly Anglo Saxon settlers, but they were not large in number and there had always been connections and migrations across the North Sea. Why then do the English speak English? It does appear to be a bit of a mystery. There are almost no common English words with Brythonic roots. The best answer, based on what I have read, is 'fashion' - English culture was AngloSaxonised during the dark ages in the same way it has been Americanised in the 20th century. Speaking and acting Anglosaxon was a rejection of Roman-culture and a way of connecting with the way things had been before Rome supressed them - Britons may not have spoken Anglo Saxon but would have had more in common with Anglo Saxon culture than with Roman. Interestingly, after the break with Rome, the west of Britain appears to have become MORE Roman - a conscious rejection of the rejection of Rome which was going on in the east. This seems incredible to a monoglot like me, but appears to be a widely held view among historians currently.
Paleolinguists have recreated Brythonic, and some suggest that Anglo Saxon is essentially a Germanic vocabulary with a Brythonic accent - i.e. the language of a people who at all levels have chosen to adopt the language.
Some historians have suggested that the east of Britain spoke a Germanic language even before the Roman Empire, pointing out that coasts and seas were a much better medium for cultural exchange than inland regions, and that the separation between Old English and Low German appears older than that between, say, Low German and Dutch. But I don't think this view is widely held.
TLDR - the AngloSaxonification of England was almost certainly not ethnic cleansing. Though the Celtification and the wave before that may have been. And the story of ancient Ireland is even more dark and mysterious.
Weird you should mention this. Just a few hours ago I watched a video suggesting that Anglo-Saxons might have been invited to Roman Britain as foederati[sp] (non-Roman military forces who retain their own command structures) when Magnus Maximus, the British governor, left to tilt for the purple. When he failed, the Anglo-Saxons stayed. First time I've heard the theory.
It has been a long established theory. In fact it is proven by archaeology. We know there were AS foederati serving across Britain from as far back as the mid 4th century if not earlier.
They might well have been invited, but I very, very much doubt there was no violent conflict and displacement with the local afterwards.
As I recall, the Saxons were fond of burning the bodies of both their own, and enemies, and some of the Britons used to eat their enemies, as recorded in the West of England.
You do know that huge amounts of information including origin and cultural affinity can be learned fom cremation burials?
I excavated one of the earliest migration period cremation urns in Eastern England on my own land a few years ago. A young male buried in an urn probably made by an Anglo-Saxon potter but with both RB and AS decorative styles. Dates to the second half of the 5th century.
By weird coincidence I was at a potters on Steep Hill in Lincoln yesterday arranging for a replica to be made so we can reinter the remains in the new oak woodland we have planted.
Just off a call with a Hong Kong construction magnate.
Have no doubt, the world is going to look very different in not many years. America turning in on itself and away from world trade is an opportunity China is not going to miss.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
You seem very upset about something. Is it that Europe is taking over its own defence and paying for it?
As opposed to depending on Donald Trump and chums...
Which bit did you read as me being upset. I am just pondering the seeming paradox.
You lot have constantly assured me that Russia is about to collapse. Why the huge military spend if this is the case. Shouldn't we instead be making more ploughshares.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
I think current thinking on the AngloSaxonification of England is a bit more complicated than that. I'm fascinated by this period of history and read quite a lot about it. It's a bit of a fools errand - there is so little source material to go on that in a lot of cases I just get the same material, differently interpreted. However, as a summary: - the 1066 and all that narrative of Anglo Saxons driving back Britons to the far west was largely based on a couple of written sources - Bede and Nennius. History in those days had a rather weaker relationship to truth and a stronger relationship to hagiography, and in any case Bede is substantially based on Nennius. - there is almost no archaeological record of ethnic cleansing, nor of Cortez-style foreign invaders claiming leadership over British tribes - there is quite a lot of archaeological record of continuity - the genetic record is mixed, but again the record of continuity is strong - there is linguistic evidence of continuity (for example, Cerdic - the family name of the kings of Wessex - seems like a Brythonic name)
There were almost certainly Anglo Saxon settlers, but they were not large in number and there had always been connections and migrations across the North Sea. Why then do the English speak English? It does appear to be a bit of a mystery. There are almost no common English words with Brythonic roots. The best answer, based on what I have read, is 'fashion' - English culture was AngloSaxonised during the dark ages in the same way it has been Americanised in the 20th century. Speaking and acting Anglosaxon was a rejection of Roman-culture and a way of connecting with the way things had been before Rome supressed them - Britons may not have spoken Anglo Saxon but would have had more in common with Anglo Saxon culture than with Roman. Interestingly, after the break with Rome, the west of Britain appears to have become MORE Roman - a conscious rejection of the rejection of Rome which was going on in the east. This seems incredible to a monoglot like me, but appears to be a widely held view among historians currently.
Paleolinguists have recreated Brythonic, and some suggest that Anglo Saxon is essentially a Germanic vocabulary with a Brythonic accent - i.e. the language of a people who at all levels have chosen to adopt the language.
Some historians have suggested that the east of Britain spoke a Germanic language even before the Roman Empire, pointing out that coasts and seas were a much better medium for cultural exchange than inland regions, and that the separation between Old English and Low German appears older than that between, say, Low German and Dutch. But I don't think this view is widely held.
TLDR - the AngloSaxonification of England was almost certainly not ethnic cleansing. Though the Celtification and the wave before that may have been. And the story of ancient Ireland is even more dark and mysterious.
Weird you should mention this. Just a few hours ago I watched a video suggesting that Anglo-Saxons might have been invited to Roman Britain as foederati[sp] (non-Roman military forces who retain their own command structures) when Magnus Maximus, the British governor, left to tilt for the purple. When he failed, the Anglo-Saxons stayed. First time I've heard the theory.
It has been a long established theory. In fact it is proven by archaeology. We know there were AS foederati serving across Britain from as far back as the mid 4th century if not earlier.
They might well have been invited, but I very, very much doubt there was no violent conflict and displacement with the local afterwards.
As I recall, the Saxons were fond of burning the bodies of both their own, and enemies, and some of the Britons used to eat their enemies, as recorded in the West of England.
You do know that huge amounts of information including origin and cultural affinity can be learned fom cremation burials?
I excavated one of the earliest migration period cremation urns in Eastern England on my own land a few years ago. A young male buried in an urn probably made by an Anglo-Saxon potter but with both RB and AS decorative styles. Dates to the second half of the 5th century.
By weird coincidence I was at a potters on Steep Hill in Lincoln yesterday arranging for a replica to be made so we can reinter the remains in the new oak woodland we have planted.
This reminds me of Hellenistic-Near Eastern fused styles well beyond Greece, and found in many, many places, even the Indi-Greek.
Co-existence is good, but it doesn't mean there wasn't conflict before.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Not a bad article at all. I don't see how there is a resolution.
Israel will point to the Gaza withdrawal in 2006 and say - see, you can't handle a state because you are too busy trying to exterminate us.
Palestinians will say - you have been occupying "our land" since 1967 (1948, 1917, 0BC) so you need to get out. It's only because of our campaign of violence that you left Gaza in the first place so plenty more work to do.
I am not 100% sure there is a Palestinian voice or strategy that wants to live side by side Israel in peace.
Pedantic point: there's no year 0. We go from 1 BC to 1 AD.
MORRIS ARE YOU USING THE CLOCKQUOTE FUNCTION NOW???
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
Anyone actually paying attention might alternatively think it insufficient, but a reasonable start, in protecting us and our allies against all the superpowers, not just Russia, in the new world order. If we want independence and influence we are going to have to pay for it and back that up with military power. Close political and economic links are no longer sufficient.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
So if a thief keeps the stuff he stole long enough, it's his?
I'm sure that's music to Vladimir Putin's ears. And the Chinese in Tibet and so on. It's not completely unreasonable - it's why the Americans don't restore their land to the Natives after all - but it's a terrible precedent in this case, where the theft post-dates the improvement in international behaviour we optimistically tried to achieve after two murderous world wars.
The right of return of refugees is a recognised principle of intenrational humanitarian law for a reason, and Israel doesn't get a pass just because it has had the military force to renege on its obligations for 70 years.
In fact, of course, given Israel's large settlement building programme in the West Bank, the theft is ongoing. A Palestinian state in Gaza may just about be viable if your rose tinted spectacles are strong enough, but the West Bank would look like Swiss cheese, and with intrusive Israeli border posts around every village, at which Palestinians are delayed for hours while Israelis mysteriously get through in five minutes, there's no realistic way such a state would have the consent of its inhabitants at all.
Then, how far back do you go? If you support returning the Palestinians to their land (I assume you mean those forced out from the designated Palestinian land taken by Israel in 1948) then I assume you would also support a return of Germany and Poland to their borders pre-1945. It's only 3 years apart after all, and in the case of the lost German land, mostly homogenous ethnic German in 1939 so no justification for it being Polish and certainly not Russian.
It is always forgotten that there were very sizeable Jewish populations all over the Middle East, who had been there for thousands of years, who were expelled - often brutally - without compensation. They too - and their descendants (if they are to be included as the Palestinians demand) are refugees. Are they to get their land, property, businesses and money back?
Many Arabs sold their land to Jews. Their tenants were evicted. That does not make them or their descendants refugees.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
I think current thinking on the AngloSaxonification of England is a bit more complicated than that. I'm fascinated by this period of history and read quite a lot about it. It's a bit of a fools errand - there is so little source material to go on that in a lot of cases I just get the same material, differently interpreted. However, as a summary: - the 1066 and all that narrative of Anglo Saxons driving back Britons to the far west was largely based on a couple of written sources - Bede and Nennius. History in those days had a rather weaker relationship to truth and a stronger relationship to hagiography, and in any case Bede is substantially based on Nennius. - there is almost no archaeological record of ethnic cleansing, nor of Cortez-style foreign invaders claiming leadership over British tribes - there is quite a lot of archaeological record of continuity - the genetic record is mixed, but again the record of continuity is strong - there is linguistic evidence of continuity (for example, Cerdic - the family name of the kings of Wessex - seems like a Brythonic name)
There were almost certainly Anglo Saxon settlers, but they were not large in number and there had always been connections and migrations across the North Sea. Why then do the English speak English? It does appear to be a bit of a mystery. There are almost no common English words with Brythonic roots. The best answer, based on what I have read, is 'fashion' - English culture was AngloSaxonised during the dark ages in the same way it has been Americanised in the 20th century. Speaking and acting Anglosaxon was a rejection of Roman-culture and a way of connecting with the way things had been before Rome supressed them - Britons may not have spoken Anglo Saxon but would have had more in common with Anglo Saxon culture than with Roman. Interestingly, after the break with Rome, the west of Britain appears to have become MORE Roman - a conscious rejection of the rejection of Rome which was going on in the east. This seems incredible to a monoglot like me, but appears to be a widely held view among historians currently.
Paleolinguists have recreated Brythonic, and some suggest that Anglo Saxon is essentially a Germanic vocabulary with a Brythonic accent - i.e. the language of a people who at all levels have chosen to adopt the language.
Some historians have suggested that the east of Britain spoke a Germanic language even before the Roman Empire, pointing out that coasts and seas were a much better medium for cultural exchange than inland regions, and that the separation between Old English and Low German appears older than that between, say, Low German and Dutch. But I don't think this view is widely held.
TLDR - the AngloSaxonification of England was almost certainly not ethnic cleansing. Though the Celtification and the wave before that may have been. And the story of ancient Ireland is even more dark and mysterious.
Weird you should mention this. Just a few hours ago I watched a video suggesting that Anglo-Saxons might have been invited to Roman Britain as foederati[sp] (non-Roman military forces who retain their own command structures) when Magnus Maximus, the British governor, left to tilt for the purple. When he failed, the Anglo-Saxons stayed. First time I've heard the theory.
It has been a long established theory. In fact it is proven by archaeology. We know there were AS foederati serving across Britain from as far back as the mid 4th century if not earlier.
They might well have been invited, but I very, very much doubt there was no violent conflict and displacement with the local afterwards.
As I recall, the Saxons were fond of burning the bodies of both their own, and enemies, and some of the Britons used to eat their enemies, as recorded in the West of England.
You do know that huge amounts of information including origin and cultural affinity can be learned fom cremation burials?
I excavated one of the earliest migration period cremation urns in Eastern England on my own land a few years ago. A young male buried in an urn probably made by an Anglo-Saxon potter but with both RB and AS decorative styles. Dates to the second half of the 5th century.
By weird coincidence I was at a potters on Steep Hill in Lincoln yesterday arranging for a replica to be made so we can reinter the remains in the new oak woodland we have planted.
People tend to be riveted by finds of gold and silver artefacts, and jewellery, but as you say, pottery utensils and simple artefacts, tell us much.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
You seem very upset about something. Is it that Europe is taking over its own defence and paying for it?
As opposed to depending on Donald Trump and chums...
Which bit did you read as me being upset. I am just pondering the seeming paradox.
You lot have constantly assured me that Russia is about to collapse. Why the huge military spend if this is the case. Shouldn't we instead be making more ploughshares.
We made ploughshares.
Russia took Crimea and the Donbass in return.
More specifically, we guaranteed the borders of Ukraine, in return for them giving up nuclear weapons.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease. But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
This morning's Medium novice ABC (anything but collie) agility jumping is off to a good start: Toto the spaniel takes an early lead with 29.7 seconds clear, after the opening dog chalked up five faults
Next Scout the shetland speepdog goes into second with 30.7 clear. Now another spaniel...29.5 seconds clear, slips into first place!
And another cocker spaniel, clear but slow, into fourth spot.
Eliza, a veteran bearded collie, retiring after this year's competition, 29 seconds clear - goes into the lead!
Bibi, another spaniel, 30.4 clear for fourth.
And the final medium, Echo the spaniel, five faults already. So eleven-year-old Eliza wins!
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
How is it culturally self serving? I am Irish by descent. Anyway, based on the discussions the other day we are all descended form both sides of the divide.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
If you could describe the earlier period as Celtic occupation, then parts of Britain could certainly be described as under Germanic occupation.
As before, we always need to be careful of self-serving frameworks and selectively. The Welsh ancestral memory is rather different, as I recall it.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
I think there are two things here, which can be the same and different: population movements and 'ethnic cleansing'. The latter can cause the former; but the former can have many other causes; for instance famine can cause vast population movements.
Whatever happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will probably be very multifaceted, with no simple single answer as to the causes.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
You seem very upset about something. Is it that Europe is taking over its own defence and paying for it?
As opposed to depending on Donald Trump and chums...
Which bit did you read as me being upset. I am just pondering the seeming paradox.
You lot have constantly assured me that Russia is about to collapse. Why the huge military spend if this is the case. Shouldn't we instead be making more ploughshares.
Any Russian collapse (I'm not yet holding my breath) would only come as the result of the huge military effort - which Trump has just cut in half. Hence Europe's rather strong reaction.
We did the ploughshares thing for the last three decades, which is arguably why we're where we are.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
I don't think there are many on here or elsewhere that think Russia is about to collapse, though definition of what that may mean is likely to vary. Very few people predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it is possible, even if unlikely.
I myself, through having a personal connection with Ukraine, pray for the day when Putin dies or is overthrown, though what replaces him is almost as frightening. What is essential IMO, is that Russia must not be allowed to think that they have won. Their once assumed to be mighty military has been almost thoroughly humiliated by a much smaller one.
They will no doubt try to learn from this and rearm. We need to form a new alliance of democratic powers and release the US from what is clearly too big a burden for them, the grown-up burden of leadership. They can be reinvited to such a club if they return to being a beacon of hope and freedom such as they used to be. I also pray for that day.
We were talking about whether the USA can restrict F35s, eg by turning them off or stopping them flying in particular areas eg over Russia,
A video by a Finnish ex-officer arguing that Europe should gang up and threaten to cancel their orders if they are not given the autonomy that Israel has, or the UK has to a lesser degree. Or cancel it and get other aircraft - Eurofighter and Gripen.
There are €60bn worth still on order, so it's a big number affecting jobs in Texas and Florida.
Large parts of the Gripen are very much dependent on the US - notably the engine. And it's a considerably less capable platform, though the latest iteration is pretty useful.
It offers full software autonomy, though - and while not that much cheaper to buy, costs less than a third to operate compared with the F35.
The engine is built under license in Sweden, no? So they could - in extremis - just continue to build it
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
Combination of both from what we can see. Depended on where the estates were. There was a lot of slave labour used in the Iron working estates of the Weald which were run by the Classis Britannica (the Roman navy) and also on the lands which came under the Colonia system around Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln. Those were huge tracts of land owned and farmed by veterans who used slave labour for the work.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
I think there are two things here, which can be the same and different: population movements and 'ethnic cleansing'. The latter can cause the former; but the former can have many other causes; for instance famine can cause vast population movements.
Whatever happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will probably be very multifaceted, with no simple single answer as to the causes.
My impression is that 5/6th century Britain was like the world of Mad Max. Both Anglo-Saxon, and Roman-British warlords, vying for supremacy.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
If you could describe the earlier period as Celtic occupation, then parts of Britain could certainly be described as under Germanic occupation.
As before, we always need to be careful of self-serving frameworks and selectively. The Welsh ancestral memory is rather different, as I recall it.
I will stick with the evidence rather than relying on ancestral memory.
Gov Sununu is an uber moderate RINO that is why and could certainly win, that tells you sod all about the rest of the midterms which will be a referendum on Trump's presidency and the impact of his tariffs on the economy in particular
There are 35 Senate seats up for grabs.
Only 7 are at all competitive. One of these is the Democrat held New Hampshire. It's quite significant for the Senate midterms if the Dems lose it.
Sununu may in some ways be "moderate" but he's 100% backing Trump since a while back AFAIK
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
Combination of both from what we can see. Depended on where the estates were. There was a lot of slave labour used in the Iron working estates of the Weald which were run by the Classis Britannica (the Roman navy) and also on the lands which came under the Colonia system around Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln. Those were huge tracts of land owned and farmed by veterans who used slave labour for the work.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
The traditional view is that in Italy (albeit at a much earlier period), free tenants and smallholders were replaced by vast estates worked by slaves (which worried the Graachi and other military men). Although, that is now challenged.
We were talking about whether the USA can restrict F35s, eg by turning them off or stopping them flying in particular areas eg over Russia,
A video by a Finnish ex-officer arguing that Europe should gang up and threaten to cancel their orders if they are not given the autonomy that Israel has, or the UK has to a lesser degree. Or cancel it and get other aircraft - Eurofighter and Gripen.
There are €60bn worth still on order, so it's a big number affecting jobs in Texas and Florida.
Large parts of the Gripen are very much dependent on the US - notably the engine. And it's a considerably less capable platform, though the latest iteration is pretty useful.
It offers full software autonomy, though - and while not that much cheaper to buy, costs less than a third to operate compared with the F35.
The engine is built under license in Sweden, no? So they could - in extremis - just continue to build it
The complexities of both international relations, and arms manufacturing deals go some way beyond simple binary choices like that. I think we're trying to avoid 'in extremis'
Restarting the Snecma study to modify the the M88 for Gripen would get GE lobbying Washington not to jeopardise their business, I'd guess.
If we amend up in a position where we might not be able to use US weaponry at all, then there will be bigger things to worry about.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
I think there are two things here, which can be the same and different: population movements and 'ethnic cleansing'. The latter can cause the former; but the former can have many other causes; for instance famine can cause vast population movements.
Whatever happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will probably be very multifaceted, with no simple single answer as to the causes.
Indeed. There may have been co-existence, violent conflict, and other, more neutral incentives, that we still don't know.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
Combination of both from what we can see. Depended on where the estates were. There was a lot of slave labour used in the Iron working estates of the Weald which were run by the Classis Britannica (the Roman navy) and also on the lands which came under the Colonia system around Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln. Those were huge tracts of land owned and farmed by veterans who used slave labour for the work.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
The traditional view is that in Italy (albeit at a much earlier period), free tenants and smallholders were replaced by vast estates worked by slaves (which worried the Graachi and other military men). Although, that is now challenged.
One view is that soldiers settled on farms when legions were demobilised ended up selling to the wealthy, leading to massive estates. In the long term, this helped weaken the natural source of native soldiers (until it was sort of recreated by the Anatolian approach in the Eastern Roman Empire, which is why losing that ground rapidly after Manzikert was so bad for them).
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
I think there are two things here, which can be the same and different: population movements and 'ethnic cleansing'. The latter can cause the former; but the former can have many other causes; for instance famine can cause vast population movements.
Whatever happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will probably be very multifaceted, with no simple single answer as to the causes.
My impression is that 5/6th century Britain was like the world of Mad Max. Both Anglo-Saxon, and Roman-British warlords, vying for supremacy.
When I hear this stated, I wonder about the delta between the supposed state of affairs and the City State period in Greece.
How much cooperation, as opposed to conflict, was there between the various polities?
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
Answer the question. Which model do you support. If you support indigenous people then the Jews belong in Israel. If you support the coloniser model then the Jews belong in Israel.
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
I don't think there are many on here or elsewhere that think Russia is about to collapse, though definition of what that may mean is likely to vary. Very few people predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it is possible, even if unlikely.
I myself, through having a personal connection with Ukraine, pray for the day when Putin dies or is overthrown, though what replaces him is almost as frightening. What is essential IMO, is that Russia must not be allowed to think that they have won. Their once assumed to be mighty military has been almost thoroughly humiliated by a much smaller one.
They will no doubt try to learn from this and rearm. We need to form a new alliance of democratic powers and release the US from what is clearly too big a burden for them, the grown-up burden of leadership. They can be reinvited to such a club if they return to being a beacon of hope and freedom such as they used to be. I also pray for that day.
*Raises hand* - I'm tentatively predicting the collapse of Russia, within 20 years or so. But there's a lot can happen between now and then. Very broadly, we are much better off if we are in a position to contain and shape the Russian collapse than if we are not. And importantly, the fewer people Russia is able to kill and the less of the world economy it is able to control between now and then, the better.
Russia is currently, clearly, a major threat to Ukraine, and if it is able to conclude its war in Ukraine favourably, it will be a major threat to our allies in Poland, the Baltics and Scandinavia. This strikes me as a bad outcome and I do not understand the view of those who are indifferent to it.
However, while there are good and bad outcomes for what remains of the west, there are no good outcomes for Russia. If it loses, it has lost millions of people and most of its cash reserves for nothing and its people are likely to be a bit cross. If it wins, it has expanded its empire, but a significant share of its population will be sullen and resentful. History suggests this is more likely to be an expensive burden for it than a benefit.
Why shouldn't Palestinians have the right to return? After all Jewish people were in exile 2000 years before reclaiming their homeland.
Should Americans of British descent have the right to residency here?
Some years ago, I pranked some rather progressive types with a story about immigration from the US to Wales (I think) in connection with mining. Rednecks from Coal Country, essentially.
They very rapidly disproved some earlier statements they had made about welcoming all immigration.
Gov Sununu is an uber moderate RINO that is why and could certainly win, that tells you sod all about the rest of the midterms which will be a referendum on Trump's presidency and the impact of his tariffs on the economy in particular
There are 35 Senate seats up for grabs.
Only 7 are at all competitive. One of these is the Democrat held New Hampshire. It's quite significant for the Senate midterms if the Dems lose it.
Sununu may in some ways be "moderate" but he's 100% backing Trump since a while back AFAIK
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
Answer the question. Which model do you support. If you support indigenous people then the Jews belong in Israel. If you support the coloniser model then the Jews belong in Israel.
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
The choice you ask for is invalid. Hence the reason I don't bother to answer it. For one thing the Jews are not 'indigenous' to the area. Even by their own beliefs they travelled there and took the land from others.
Try engaging with the actual issues rather than creating false dichotomies and you might one day be a useful contributor to these pages.
Not enough, their sovereign wealth fund has made many multiples of that in windfall profits from the higher energy prices following Russia's invasion. They could also afford much more without significant pain unlike most of Europe.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
I don't think there are many on here or elsewhere that think Russia is about to collapse, though definition of what that may mean is likely to vary. Very few people predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, so it is possible, even if unlikely.
I myself, through having a personal connection with Ukraine, pray for the day when Putin dies or is overthrown, though what replaces him is almost as frightening. What is essential IMO, is that Russia must not be allowed to think that they have won. Their once assumed to be mighty military has been almost thoroughly humiliated by a much smaller one.
They will no doubt try to learn from this and rearm. We need to form a new alliance of democratic powers and release the US from what is clearly too big a burden for them, the grown-up burden of leadership. They can be reinvited to such a club if they return to being a beacon of hope and freedom such as they used to be. I also pray for that day.
*Raises hand* - I'm tentatively predicting the collapse of Russia, within 20 years or so. But there's a lot can happen between now and then. Very broadly, we are much better off if we are in a position to contain and shape the Russian collapse than if we are not. And importantly, the fewer people Russia is able to kill and the less of the world economy it is able to control between now and then, the better.
Russia is currently, clearly, a major threat to Ukraine, and if it is able to conclude its war in Ukraine favourably, it will be a major threat to our allies in Poland, the Baltics and Scandinavia. This strikes me as a bad outcome and I do not understand the view of those who are indifferent to it.
However, while there are good and bad outcomes for what remains of the west, there are no good outcomes for Russia. If it loses, it has lost millions of people and most of its cash reserves for nothing and its people are likely to be a bit cross. If it wins, it has expanded its empire, but a significant share of its population will be sullen and resentful. History suggests this is more likely to be an expensive burden for it than a benefit.
Russia will continue fighting in Ukraine. The war will become increasingly "broken back" if the sanctions stay in place. If they do not, a measure of recovery is possible.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
Answer the question. Which model do you support. If you support indigenous people then the Jews belong in Israel. If you support the coloniser model then the Jews belong in Israel.
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
I think it was you that presented the false dichotomy. I am sure Richard is more than capable of defending himself, but he already answered, and it was one based on rules of international law. Anyone who thinks that international law should be ignored is dumb in the extreme.
I hear on the news that the EU is going to free up $800bn to rearm. SKS is talking about "boots on the ground."
Seems overkill to oppose Russia which is set to collapse any minute now according to PB war-watchers.
You seem very upset about something. Is it that Europe is taking over its own defence and paying for it?
As opposed to depending on Donald Trump and chums...
Which bit did you read as me being upset. I am just pondering the seeming paradox.
You lot have constantly assured me that Russia is about to collapse. Why the huge military spend if this is the case. Shouldn't we instead be making more ploughshares.
Russia is staggering along, having achieved stalemate.
If the conditions that led to that stalemate are changed, then the stalemate will not continue.
Former Liverpool Mayor Joe Anderson and Derek Hatton charged with bribery:
Former Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson and city politician Derek Hatton have been charged with bribery and misconduct relating to council contracts, along with 10 others, police have said.
The charges come after a Merseyside Police probe, Operation Aloft, focused on a number of property developers.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
Just off a call with a Hong Kong construction magnate.
Have no doubt, the world is going to look very different in not many years. America turning in on itself and away from world trade is an opportunity China is not going to miss.
So do I buy or sell the dollar/pound/euro/renminbi/gold?
Why shouldn't Palestinians have the right to return? After all Jewish people were in exile 2000 years before reclaiming their homeland.
The Jews bought most of their homeland. I suppose the Palestinians could make an offer.
I don't think that accurate even in Israel proper, and certainly not in the West Bank.
Palestinians are not allowed to buy land in Israel, nor can Israeli Arabs, apart from from other Israeli Arabs. The law is that once land is Jewish owned it can only be bought by Jews.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
Answer the question. Which model do you support. If you support indigenous people then the Jews belong in Israel. If you support the coloniser model then the Jews belong in Israel.
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
The choice you ask for is invalid. Hence the reason I don't bother to answer it. For one thing the Jews are not 'indigenous' to the area. Even by their own beliefs they travelled there and took the land from others.
Try engaging with the actual issues rather than creating false dichotomies and you might one day be a useful contributor to these pages.
The Jews were there there thousands of years ago. I mean how is that not indigenous.
And if it is not, then, as others have pointed out, you accept that populations change over time. There is no eternal right to return to any particular place. Countries are created and change via "international law" and also by facts on the ground.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
So if a thief keeps the stuff he stole long enough, it's his?
I'm sure that's music to Vladimir Putin's ears. And the Chinese in Tibet and so on. It's not completely unreasonable - it's why the Americans don't restore their land to the Natives after all - but it's a terrible precedent in this case, where the theft post-dates the improvement in international behaviour we optimistically tried to achieve after two murderous world wars.
The right of return of refugees is a recognised principle of intenrational humanitarian law for a reason, and Israel doesn't get a pass just because it has had the military force to renege on its obligations for 70 years.
In fact, of course, given Israel's large settlement building programme in the West Bank, the theft is ongoing. A Palestinian state in Gaza may just about be viable if your rose tinted spectacles are strong enough, but the West Bank would look like Swiss cheese, and with intrusive Israeli border posts around every village, at which Palestinians are delayed for hours while Israelis mysteriously get through in five minutes, there's no realistic way such a state would have the consent of its inhabitants at all.
Then, how far back do you go? If you support returning the Palestinians to their land (I assume you mean those forced out from the designated Palestinian land taken by Israel in 1948) then I assume you would also support a return of Germany and Poland to their borders pre-1945. It's only 3 years apart after all, and in the case of the lost German land, mostly homogenous ethnic German in 1939 so no justification for it being Polish and certainly not Russian.
I agree that the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland and Poles from the USSR after the Second World War was a huge crime, comparable to the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians at about the same time, and perhaps even worse, in terms of lives lost, than the disaster of Indian independence.
There's a crucial difference, though: the Germans and Poles have accepted their current borders, though they were determined by ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians, as you may have noticed, have not.
In fact, even the Israeli government in the 1950s felt a bit guilty about their theft and ethnic cleansing - they offered to take 100,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians back in return for a peace treaty, thereby fulfilling a seventh of their international obligations. The Arabs refused, because Israeli had a clear obligation to take them all back.
Hence seventy years of instability, and realistically probably another seventy.
Thanks to Gareth for an excellent thread. Two observations: I'd suggest you could add a list for "third parties" for who need to make sacrifices. Israel would need to accept that it can no longer carry out security missions / reprisals directly and that Arab countries would need to take the lead in dealing with terrorists. That applies to the Arab countries as much as it does to Israel.
The lesson is that Israels’s current military strength could be vulnerable to a changed geopolitical situation. On this, they should consider the potential for another maverick taking over the States who doesn't like Israel. It's only good luck for Israel that Trump is supporting them. It could easily have gone the other way.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
Combination of both from what we can see. Depended on where the estates were. There was a lot of slave labour used in the Iron working estates of the Weald which were run by the Classis Britannica (the Roman navy) and also on the lands which came under the Colonia system around Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln. Those were huge tracts of land owned and farmed by veterans who used slave labour for the work.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
The traditional view is that in Italy (albeit at a much earlier period), free tenants and smallholders were replaced by vast estates worked by slaves (which worried the Graachi and other military men). Although, that is now challenged.
One view is that soldiers settled on farms when legions were demobilised ended up selling to the wealthy, leading to massive estates. In the long term, this helped weaken the natural source of native soldiers (until it was sort of recreated by the Anatolian approach in the Eastern Roman Empire, which is why losing that ground rapidly after Manzikert was so bad for them).
I think in Britain - and my memory here is slightly hazy and I am happy to be contradicted - that tenant farmers were common in the early Roman period - but in the late period, the reach of the monetary economy became weaker, and 'working the land in exchange for paid rent' became increasingly replaced by 'working the land in exchange for free labour' - i.e. a sort of feudalism.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
By the very start you presumably mean when the Jews were expelled from Egypt back in the day.
It is indeed ironic that the Israelis use the same methods against the Palestinians that they have condemned in others down through the centuries.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
Let me spell it out for you.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel. Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
I prefer the model where they stick to the lands they were given under international treaty and stop stealing it from the Palestinians. It appears you are an apologist for genocide and ethnic cleansing. No wonder you are a fan of Putin as well.
Answer the question. Which model do you support. If you support indigenous people then the Jews belong in Israel. If you support the coloniser model then the Jews belong in Israel.
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
I think it was you that presented the false dichotomy. I am sure Richard is more than capable of defending himself, but he already answered, and it was one based on rules of international law. Anyone who thinks that international law should be ignored is dumb in the extreme.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
Borders get redrawn - look at Europe. There is no inviolate Palestinian border and a state there going back into antiquity. I support a Palestinian state, but there has to be reality thrown into the mix - they are not going to win back the lands that are now Israel.
Had the arab neighbours - some of whom are also new countries - actually accepted this reality, we could have resettled those displaced just as has happened as other borders have been drawn and redrawn. We did not - and "refugees" gets tossed around to identify people who need to go back generations to have any claim on any land. A viable solution to settle these people is at the heart of any solution.
The trouble with that is it is an invitation to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Get everyone off the land you want and then hang on to it long enough to claim they don't exist anymore. It has been the Zionist playbook from the very start. Just as it was the Nazi playbook before them and the White American playbook against the indigenous populations before them.
Sadly, this is human history in a nutshell. Intervals of comparative peace between neighbours interspersed by periods of destructive migration. Governments have never been able to resist it with laws, walls or bullets, though they're often elected on that premise.
Indeed. It was probably the history of anglosaxon removal of the Britons, too, although the ethnic cleansing part was not something they wanted to record.
I suspect the Britons themselves may have done something similar with earlier populations, a couple of thousand years before. We're supposed to have moved on from this level of development, though, but Netanyahu is still languishing there.
Almost certainly not. There is no archaeological evidence for a large scale displacement and ethnic cleansing of Britons by the Anglo-Saxons and large amounts of evidence for them coexisting.
Sub Roman southern Britain was a largely emptied landscape as a result of the collapse of the villa economy and the abandonment of the towns and cities. With a few notable exceptions. This happens decades before the migration period. Where we do still see Britons remaining they live alongside the immigrants and there is an exchange of culture going both ways.
I'm not sure how archaelogical evidence can necessarily record ethnic cleansing and displacement, and I highly doubt this was a rosy process.
Almost people wishes to believe they have a uniquely advanced history, and it's almost always nonsense ; intermarriage and co'-existence also, very, very, often tends to follow violent conquest.
There are many examples of co-habitation between the Anglo Saxons and Brythonic peoples across southern British archaeology. Shared cemeteries, shared settlements and a notable absence of the signs of destruction which can be seen in the arhaeological record for the later Viking incursions. Look at the evidence from West Heslerton in Yorkshire. A classically Anglian cemetery with Germanic style burials and grave goods dating from the earliest migration period. Except when you do strontiumand oxygen isotope studies you find that all but one of the burials were of people who were born in the British Isles, not in the AS homelands.
Ethnic displacement isn't necessarily evident from archaeology.
I remember that there's also evidence of a move West by the Britons.
No not really. It is not surprising that the Britons remained stroing in areas that had not been part of the villa landscape economy. Indeed it is possible that the ethnic cleansing you refer to had happened much earlier, during the Roman occupation, when the Romans cleared everyone off the land except for those working on the villa estates. Rather like the Highland clearences of more recent times. This meant that when the villa economy then collapsed in the late 4th century, there was not much of the original Celtic occupation to reimpose itself. They had all been expunged generations earlier.
Would you say the villa economy was mostly slave-based, rather than based on tenants paying rents?
Combination of both from what we can see. Depended on where the estates were. There was a lot of slave labour used in the Iron working estates of the Weald which were run by the Classis Britannica (the Roman navy) and also on the lands which came under the Colonia system around Colchester, Gloucester and Lincoln. Those were huge tracts of land owned and farmed by veterans who used slave labour for the work.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
The traditional view is that in Italy (albeit at a much earlier period), free tenants and smallholders were replaced by vast estates worked by slaves (which worried the Graachi and other military men). Although, that is now challenged.
One view is that soldiers settled on farms when legions were demobilised ended up selling to the wealthy, leading to massive estates. In the long term, this helped weaken the natural source of native soldiers (until it was sort of recreated by the Anatolian approach in the Eastern Roman Empire, which is why losing that ground rapidly after Manzikert was so bad for them).
I think in Britain - and my memory here is slightly hazy and I am happy to be contradicted - that tenant farmers were common in the early Roman period - but in the late period, the reach of the monetary economy became weaker, and 'working the land in exchange for paid rent' became increasingly replaced by 'working the land in exchange for free labour' - i.e. a sort of feudalism.
Diocletian (3rd century) changed the law so that sons had to follow fathers into a given profession. That also had a feudalistic element.
Edited extra bit: unsure if this was blanket or only applied to certain jobs, off the top of my head.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
You have used a word which everyone does, and I think it is at the heart of why therer has been no solution possible: refugees.
People fleeing their homes in Gaza as the IDF bomb them are refugees. The multi-generational decedents of the people who left what is now Israel in 1948? Not refugees.
So if a thief keeps the stuff he stole long enough, it's his?
I'm sure that's music to Vladimir Putin's ears. And the Chinese in Tibet and so on. It's not completely unreasonable - it's why the Americans don't restore their land to the Natives after all - but it's a terrible precedent in this case, where the theft post-dates the improvement in international behaviour we optimistically tried to achieve after two murderous world wars.
The right of return of refugees is a recognised principle of intenrational humanitarian law for a reason, and Israel doesn't get a pass just because it has had the military force to renege on its obligations for 70 years.
In fact, of course, given Israel's large settlement building programme in the West Bank, the theft is ongoing. A Palestinian state in Gaza may just about be viable if your rose tinted spectacles are strong enough, but the West Bank would look like Swiss cheese, and with intrusive Israeli border posts around every village, at which Palestinians are delayed for hours while Israelis mysteriously get through in five minutes, there's no realistic way such a state would have the consent of its inhabitants at all.
Then, how far back do you go? If you support returning the Palestinians to their land (I assume you mean those forced out from the designated Palestinian land taken by Israel in 1948) then I assume you would also support a return of Germany and Poland to their borders pre-1945. It's only 3 years apart after all, and in the case of the lost German land, mostly homogenous ethnic German in 1939 so no justification for it being Polish and certainly not Russian.
I agree that the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland and Poles from the USSR after the Second World War was a huge crime, comparable to the Israeli ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians at about the same time, and perhaps even worse, in terms of lives lost, than the disaster of Indian independence.
There's a crucial difference, though: the Germans and Poles have accepted their current borders, though they were determined by ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians, as you may have noticed, have not.
In fact, even the Israeli government in the 1950s felt a bit guilty about their theft and ethnic cleansing - they offered to take 100,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians back in return for a peace treaty, thereby fulfilling a seventh of their international obligations. The Arabs refused, because Israeli had a clear obligation to take them all back.
Hence seventy years of instability, and realistically probably another seventy.
I mean there was a war in 1947-48. And borders, whether we like it or not, are often determined via war. We only get exercised when the wrong side wins.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
You could re-engine the Gripen and tell the US to go hang (though ITAR is unlikely to be an issue; it's more the question of immediate operability in the face of any attempted US veto).
With what? Neither EJ200 or SNECMA M88 are designed for single engined applications. Saab and GE spent a lot of time and money re-engineering the F404 for Gripen. If anybody wants a non-ITAR combat aircraft any time in the next decade it's Eurofigher, Rafale or get to fuck.
The other airframe offering a non US light fighter option, of course, is the S Korean FA50. RR looked at reworking the EJ200 for that as part of a failed bid for the T-X program.
I'd guess the dust is being blown off that study, too.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Through expediency for some, perhaps, but I doubt by a modern concept of democratic choice. The Saxons did not travel from town with consultative roadshows.
I suspect more likely, those who resisted headed somewhat to the West or got burnt, and the rest stayed put and got converted, like the Muslim Greeks.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Lack of evidence doesn't prove the alternative, though. Would nascent Romano-British rulers willingly cede to new Anglo-Saxon arrivals?
Apropos the discussion of UK spy satellites a few days ago & why a nation might want one or two of their own just as an insurance policy even when high quality commercial satellite imagery is available - Maxar has just cut Ukraine off from their service: https://mil.in.ua/en/news/maxar-cuts-off-ukraine-s-access-to-satellite-imagery/
I wonder how many satellite imagery companies there are that are entirely outside the reach of the USA that might still be willing to supply Ukraine with data? Probably not many.
Just off a call with a Hong Kong construction magnate.
Have no doubt, the world is going to look very different in not many years. America turning in on itself and away from world trade is an opportunity China is not going to miss.
So do I buy or sell the dollar/pound/euro/renminbi/gold?
As an aside, I once had a bizarrely good-nature disagreement with a stranger on Twitter about this subject. She preferred the more modern/revisionist view that the Saxon migration was largely peaceful, I'm more towards the traditional approach it was closer to being just a conquest. Given the subject matter, it was surprisingly polite and civilised.
Back in the old days, before countless bots liked comments.
You could re-engine the Gripen and tell the US to go hang (though ITAR is unlikely to be an issue; it's more the question of immediate operability in the face of any attempted US veto).
With what? Neither EJ200 or SNECMA M88 are designed for single engined applications. Saab and GE spent a lot of time and money re-engineering the F404 for Gripen. If anybody wants a non-ITAR combat aircraft any time in the next decade it's Eurofigher, Rafale or get to fuck.
The other airframe offering a non US light fighter option, of course, is the S Korean FA50. RR looked at reworking the EJ200 for that as part of a failed bid for the T-X program.
I'd guess the dust is being blown off that study, too.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Lack of evidence doesn't prove the alternative, though. Would nascent Romano-British rulers willingly cede to new Anglo-Saxon arrivals?
No - the story I am telling (again, I am a reader of history, not a historian, so this is second hand) is one of cultural adoption even by the big men of the time. Who were the warlords of the post-Roman world? Almost certainly many, if not most, were the 'big men' and their descendants of the late Roman world - who in many cases would have been the descendents of the 'big men' of the pre-Roman world who had successfully adapted to Roman Britain. There would have been others, too - Germanic warband leaders, Romans from elsewhere in the empire - but the picture as I understand it is that it was essentially the same people in charge, just speaking a different language. They didn't cede - they just behaved differently to their forebears.
I have a bit of a problem with this - language is so ingrained in my idea of identity that I cannot imagine willingly changing it. But as I understand it, that is what happened.
The book I am reading at the moment is Max Adams's 'The First Kingdom'. But this is just one of a number telling variations on essentially the same story (though an enjoyably well-written example). I recommend it.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Through expediency for some, perhaps, but I doubt by a modern concept of democratic choice. The Saxons did not travel from town with consultative roadshows.
I suspect more likely, those who resisted headed somewhat to the West or got burnt, and the rest stayed put and got converted, like the Muslim Greeks.
But it wasn't Anglo Saxons forcing this, in most cases. As an example: the house of Cerdic, the original rulers of the kingdom of Wessex. Cerdic is believed to be a Brythonic name. Brythonic leaders of warbands adopted an Anglo Saxon culture and claimed descent from Odin.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Lack of evidence doesn't prove the alternative, though. Would nascent Romano-British rulers willingly cede to new Anglo-Saxon arrivals?
No - the story I am telling (again, I am a reader of history, not a historian, so this is second hand) is one of cultural adoption even by the big men of the time. Who were the warlords of the post-Roman world? Almost certainly many, if not most, were the 'big men' and their descendants of the late Roman world - who in many cases would have been the descendents of the 'big men' of the pre-Roman world who had successfully adapted to Roman Britain. There would have been others, too - Germanic warband leaders, Romans from elsewhere in the empire - but the picture as I understand it is that it was essentially the same people in charge, just speaking a different language. They didn't cede - they just behaved differently to their forebears.
I have a bit of a problem with this - language is so ingrained in my idea of identity that I cannot imagine willingly changing it. But as I understand it, that is what happened.
The book I am reading at the moment is Max Adams's 'The First Kingdom'. But this is just one of a number telling variations on essentially the same story (though an enjoyably well-written example). I recommend it.
Language and cultural changes can willingly happen, as per Bulgarians and Slavs, the Eastern Romans becoming Greek speakers and so on. I think a modern problem with this might be that the preservation and distribution of knowledge on a massive scale helps to keep language steady and less fluid than it was before.
Apropos the discussion of UK spy satellites a few days ago & why a nation might want one or two of their own just as an insurance policy even when high quality commercial satellite imagery is available - Maxar has just cut Ukraine off from their service: https://mil.in.ua/en/news/maxar-cuts-off-ukraine-s-access-to-satellite-imagery/
I wonder how many satellite imagery companies there are that are entirely outside the reach of the USA that might still be willing to supply Ukraine with data? Probably not many.
Another point in favour of a European reusable launch capability.
There may have been periods of co-existence, and also a smaller British population in some areas, but I'm extremely suspicious of culturally self-serving history, especially it it doesn't tally with patterns of human migration and conflict in the rest of Europe at that time.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
But there wasn't a movement west. That is the '1066 and all that' version. The modern Welsh in, say, Cardiganshire, are to a surprising extent the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Cardiganshire 2500 years ago. The modern English who live in, say, Worcestershire, are the genetic descendents of Britons who lived in Worcestershire 2500 years ago. Those in modern Wales retained a Brythonic culture - those in modern England adopted an Anglo Saxon culture.
Hmm, I am not sure there is much scientific basis to that is there? My understanding is that all peoples of the British Isles (excepting recent immigrants) are pretty much ethnically identical from a genetic perspective. I think it was a controversial Welsh historian (can't remember his name) who stated that Welsh people are largely "Roman bastards" and if they were truly Celtic they would be tall and blond.
I think there's quite a lot of genetic evidence to that effect - though if you're asking me for a source I would have to gesture vaguely in the direction of my bookshelf and mumble. But genetics shows that people have stayed in the same place for a remarkably long period of time.
... After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
On the coast of Asia Minor, there are still many Turkish people who are of Ancient Greek descent, more recently mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern throughout history.
Again, not always - and there is a striking lack of evidence in England during the dark ages of cultural-change-by-force. When cultural change IS by force, you can normally find evidence of it. I believe the consensus of medieval historians currently (though I suspect Richard, among others, is better informed than me; I'm just a reader of history, not a historian) is that the cultural change in England in the post-Roman period was largely through choice - just as the cultural change in the UK in the 20th century was through choice.
Lack of evidence doesn't prove the alternative, though. Would nascent Romano-British rulers willingly cede to new Anglo-Saxon arrivals?
No - the story I am telling (again, I am a reader of history, not a historian, so this is second hand) is one of cultural adoption even by the big men of the time. Who were the warlords of the post-Roman world? Almost certainly many, if not most, were the 'big men' and their descendants of the late Roman world - who in many cases would have been the descendents of the 'big men' of the pre-Roman world who had successfully adapted to Roman Britain. There would have been others, too - Germanic warband leaders, Romans from elsewhere in the empire - but the picture as I understand it is that it was essentially the same people in charge, just speaking a different language. They didn't cede - they just behaved differently to their forebears.
I have a bit of a problem with this - language is so ingrained in my idea of identity that I cannot imagine willingly changing it. But as I understand it, that is what happened.
The book I am reading at the moment is Max Adams's 'The First Kingdom'. But this is just one of a number telling variations on essentially the same story (though an enjoyably well-written example). I recommend it.
Something to consider is the Greek empires, after Alexander. Which involved a takeover of existing kingdoms by a new ruling class, who specifically regarded other cultures as inferior.
Tons of fusion of art, culture etc. But it was far from an idyllic everyone-sings-along-round-the-campfire meeting of minds.
You could re-engine the Gripen and tell the US to go hang (though ITAR is unlikely to be an issue; it's more the question of immediate operability in the face of any attempted US veto).
With what? Neither EJ200 or SNECMA M88 are designed for single engined applications. Saab and GE spent a lot of time and money re-engineering the F404 for Gripen. If anybody wants a non-ITAR combat aircraft any time in the next decade it's Eurofigher, Rafale or get to fuck.
The other airframe offering a non US light fighter option, of course, is the S Korean FA50. RR looked at reworking the EJ200 for that as part of a failed bid for the T-X program.
I'd guess the dust is being blown off that study, too.
T50/FA50 (like KF-21) is ITAR.
Of course. The point is that manufacturers will be looking at non-ITAR options for the future.
Rafale is, as you note, the existing option. But that's not of much use to RR or BAE.
A one state solution is impossible because there are almost equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews in the area of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Now, one could attempt some kind of Northern Irish solution and try and force power sharing, but I simply don't buy it; simply you would be asking the Israeli Jews to give up control of their life and their state. If there were twice as many Jews and Palestinians, then some kind of Bosnian confederation might work, but there isn't. So, it can't work,
A two state solution is also impossible, because the Settlers make up an ever greater proportion of the Israeli population (and voters), and there is no appetite to remove them from the West Bank.
The only "solution" is ethnic cleansing, which results in the Palestinians being forced out of the West Bank and Gaza, and into neighbouring countries. That is what several members of the current Israeli cabinet openly propose. But that is morally repugnant.
So, war will continue. The Palestinians will suffer. While Israel will continue to endure terrorist attacks, because if you are a Palestinian, what do you have to lose?
Just off a call with a Hong Kong construction magnate.
Have no doubt, the world is going to look very different in not many years. America turning in on itself and away from world trade is an opportunity China is not going to miss.
So do I buy or sell the dollar/pound/euro/renminbi/gold?
Short Dollar v Long/Neutral the rest
Thank you. I have small (four figure) holdings in EUR and USD as a hedge against currency movements (see my comments around the time of Brexit). Monitoring day-to-day is pointless so I've just left it alone but with the end of the tax year coming up and the requirement to plug holes in my state pension it might be a good idea to sell USD. Hence my original question.
A one state solution is impossible because there are almost equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews in the area of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Now, one could attempt some kind of Northern Irish solution and try and force power sharing, but I simply don't buy it; simply you would be asking the Israeli Jews to give up control of their life and their state. If there were twice as many Jews and Palestinians, then some kind of Bosnian confederation might work, but there isn't. So, it can't work,
A two state solution is also impossible, because the Settlers make up an ever greater proportion of the Israeli population (and voters), and there is no appetite to remove them from the West Bank.
The only "solution" is ethnic cleansing, which results in the Palestinians being forced out of the West Bank and Gaza, and into neighbouring countries. That is what several members of the current Israeli cabinet openly propose. But that is morally repugnant.
So, war will continue. The Palestinians will suffer. While Israel will continue to endure terrorist attacks, because if you are a Palestinian, what do you have to lose?
Agree with all of that up until the very end. Do you think the Palestinians had something to lose in 1967?
We were talking about whether the USA can restrict F35s, eg by turning them off or stopping them flying in particular areas eg over Russia,
A video by a Finnish ex-officer arguing that Europe should gang up and threaten to cancel their orders if they are not given the autonomy that Israel has, or the UK has to a lesser degree. Or cancel it and get other aircraft - Eurofighter and Gripen.
There are €60bn worth still on order, so it's a big number affecting jobs in Texas and Florida.
Large parts of the Gripen are very much dependent on the US - notably the engine. And it's a considerably less capable platform, though the latest iteration is pretty useful.
It offers full software autonomy, though - and while not that much cheaper to buy, costs less than a third to operate compared with the F35.
The correct answer is to accelerate the Tempest programme.
It's already on a rapid trajectory, so I'm not sure what could be done (not that I know much detail.).
AIUI the Japanese need them by 2035 as their deadline for countering China, which will prevent any more countries joining, for example.
Also it's not clear that Tempest is an alternative to F35 - it is a far larger platform.
There is 0% chance that Tempest will be an operational combat aircraft in 2035.
If the situation is desperate then the funds need to be directed into getting the Eurofighter FALs running flat out, resurrect the Aerodynamic Modification Kit that Airbus did and nobody wanted to pay for, ditto conformal tanks and the other partners should join the German EK variant purchase.
Tempest is about as relevant as an X-Wing until 10-15 years hence.
Tie-fighters or no dice. Much cooler engine noise.
You could re-engine the Gripen and tell the US to go hang (though ITAR is unlikely to be an issue; it's more the question of immediate operability in the face of any attempted US veto).
With what? Neither EJ200 or SNECMA M88 are designed for single engined applications. Saab and GE spent a lot of time and money re-engineering the F404 for Gripen. If anybody wants a non-ITAR combat aircraft any time in the next decade it's Eurofigher, Rafale or get to fuck.
Rafael is carrier-capable and mature. We have carriers with F35s that the US can turn off. We have (dating from the Cameron days) a pre-existing cooperation structure with the French. Fitting the carriers with cats and traps and buying Rafaels is doable in, what? Three years? Sounds good.
Comments
On the previous invasion, there is very clear genetic evidence that the arival of Beaker people coincided with an effective extinction event for the native British population. In two generations somewhere around 96% of the previous neolithic population are gone. Most likely cause a plague to which the Beaker folk had immunity but which the earlier neolithic inhabitants of the British Isles did not.
There is similar evidence, although not so strong, for an earlier population replacement in the Early Neolithic which brought farming to Britain and replaced the Mesolithic population. Though this one is less well suppported and more contentious.
A 2-state solution has been on life support for some time now. It died on 7 October. It had a stake driven through its heart with the appalling scenes when hostages were released. That stake was driven further into the ground with the knowledge of the death of the Bibas family and that an 8 month old baby and a 4 year old toddler were strangled to death and their bodies mutilated and that the Gazans cared so little for their own people that they initially sent back the body of an unknown dead Palestinian woman in place of the babies' mother. That woman was accorded more respect in the few hours she spent on Israeli soil than she was afforded by her own.
I find it impossible to see how Israel can live side by side with those who choose to behave like this. And now that the US can no longer be trusted, I think Israel will do whatever it takes to protect their country, which will likely lead to appalling policies towards the Palestinians we will all deplore.
Pandora's box has been opened. But I do not see any hope anywhere.
But I am not sure that was the message you were intending.
You appear to be just as guilty of doublethink you are labelling yout adversaries with: Russia is so strong that we must give up Ukraine to placate it, but at the same time it is no threat to us.
The movement West by the Britons does not suggest a rosy garden of perfection.
I excavated one of the earliest migration period cremation urns in Eastern England on my own land a few years ago. A young male buried in an urn probably made by an Anglo-Saxon potter but with both RB and AS decorative styles. Dates to the second half of the 5th century.
By weird coincidence I was at a potters on Steep Hill in Lincoln yesterday arranging for a replica to be made so we can reinter the remains in the new oak woodland we have planted.
Have no doubt, the world is going to look very different in not many years. America turning in on itself and away from world trade is an opportunity China is not going to miss.
Russia took Crimea and the Donbass in return.
Co-existence is good, but it doesn't mean there wasn't conflict before.
Surely the end of days.
Feels good, though, amiright?
Many Arabs sold their land to Jews. Their tenants were evicted. That does not make them or their descendants refugees.
I have no solution.
But thanks for the header @GarethoftheVale2.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
Next Scout the shetland speepdog goes into second with 30.7 clear. Now another spaniel...29.5 seconds clear, slips into first place!
And another cocker spaniel, clear but slow, into fourth spot.
Eliza, a veteran bearded collie, retiring after this year's competition, 29 seconds clear - goes into the lead!
Bibi, another spaniel, 30.4 clear for fourth.
And the final medium, Echo the spaniel, five faults already. So eleven-year-old Eliza wins!
Next up, the Intermediate category...
As before, we always need to be careful of self-serving frameworks and selectively. The Welsh ancestral memory is rather different, as I recall it.
Whatever happened in the fifth and sixth centuries will probably be very multifaceted, with no simple single answer as to the causes.
Hence Europe's rather strong reaction.
We did the ploughshares thing for the last three decades, which is arguably why we're where we are.
I myself, through having a personal connection with Ukraine, pray for the day when Putin dies or is overthrown, though what replaces him is almost as frightening. What is essential IMO, is that Russia must not be allowed to think that they have won. Their once assumed to be mighty military has been almost thoroughly humiliated by a much smaller one.
They will no doubt try to learn from this and rearm. We need to form a new alliance of democratic powers and release the US from what is clearly too big a burden for them, the grown-up burden of leadership. They can be reinvited to such a club if they return to being a beacon of hope and freedom such as they used to be. I also pray for that day.
I don't think anyone disputes that the Jews were indigenous to the area a couple of thousand years ago.
So, the world can have two acceptable models. Indigenous and colonisers. The US, for example, are colonisers, some other nations might be indigenous.
Which model do you prefer?
Indigenous? Then the Jews belong in Israel.
Colonisers? Then the Jews have a right to stay in Israel.
Take your pick.
There is very little direct evidence - archaeological or written - for tenanting in mid to later Roman Britain though I think it would have been more common earlier on.
Next up, Lofty the labrador, doing well but picks up five faults close to the finish
Nigel the Nova Scotia duck retriever, clear on 38.5 secs, into the lead
But pipped by the next Nova Scotia, 32.1 secs clear
Willow the mix breed labrador/cocker next...38 secs clear for second place
Florrie the black labrador, 37.3 secs clear to take the second spot
Seamus the black working cocker/bichon cross....a noisy dog going round, like mine - five faults
One more to go, Nero another Nova Scotia
Only 7 are at all competitive. One of these is the Democrat held New Hampshire. It's quite significant for the Senate midterms if the Dems lose it.
Sununu may in some ways be "moderate" but he's 100% backing Trump since a while back AFAIK
The Malinois opens, five faults, 31.5 secs
Willow the four y-o lab, slow, clear on 41.6, first place for now
Indy the Belgian Shepherd, five faults, goes wrong, eliminated
Fire, the labrador, 35.2 secs clear to take the lead
Samson the mix breed, rescued from Bosnia, goes wrong, elminated
Now Bob the poodle, just avoids some faults, slow but steady, 45.1 secs clear
Next, Crash the noisy portuguese water dog, fails the weaves, five faults, goes back, 41.5 secs into fifth place
I think we're trying to avoid 'in extremis'
Restarting the Snecma study to modify the the M88 for Gripen would get GE lobbying Washington not to jeopardise their business, I'd guess.
If we amend up in a position where we might not be able to use US weaponry at all, then there will be bigger things to worry about.
“This strengthens Ukraine, supports a peace plan, and enhances European security,” he claimed
https://x.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1897748522813845770
How much cooperation, as opposed to conflict, was there between the various polities?
But no, you don't have the intellectual capacity to have a view of your own so you reach for the nearest dumb one. As you have done since I have known you on PB (recommending Public Service Broadcasting aside).
Russia is currently, clearly, a major threat to Ukraine, and if it is able to conclude its war in Ukraine favourably, it will be a major threat to our allies in Poland, the Baltics and Scandinavia. This strikes me as a bad outcome and I do not understand the view of those who are indifferent to it.
However, while there are good and bad outcomes for what remains of the west, there are no good outcomes for Russia. If it loses, it has lost millions of people and most of its cash reserves for nothing and its people are likely to be a bit cross. If it wins, it has expanded its empire, but a significant share of its population will be sullen and resentful. History suggests this is more likely to be an expensive burden for it than a benefit.
They very rapidly disproved some earlier statements they had made about welcoming all immigration.
Try engaging with the actual issues rather than creating false dichotomies and you might one day be a useful contributor to these pages.
If the conditions that led to that stalemate are changed, then the stalemate will not continue.
{Claude Rains mode}
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you.
...
After a quick glance at the bookshelf, "The Origins of the British" by Stephen Oppenheimer might be where I read it. Perhaps.
Palestinians are not allowed to buy land in Israel, nor can Israeli Arabs, apart from from other Israeli Arabs. The law is that once land is Jewish owned it can only be bought by Jews.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians
And if it is not, then, as others have pointed out, you accept that populations change over time. There is no eternal right to return to any particular place. Countries are created and change via "international law" and also by facts on the ground.
There's a crucial difference, though: the Germans and Poles have accepted their current borders, though they were determined by ethnic cleansing.
The Palestinians, as you may have noticed, have not.
In fact, even the Israeli government in the 1950s felt a bit guilty about their theft and ethnic cleansing - they offered to take 100,000 of the 700,000 Palestinians back in return for a peace treaty, thereby fulfilling a seventh of their international obligations. The Arabs refused, because Israeli had a clear obligation to take them all back.
Hence seventy years of instability, and realistically probably another seventy.
There was an argument a few weeks ago to suggest Putin was on his knees. Trump has since 20th January put a spring in his step.
The lesson is that Israels’s current military strength could be vulnerable to a changed geopolitical situation. On this, they should consider the potential for another maverick taking over the States who doesn't like Israel. It's only good luck for Israel that Trump is supporting them. It could easily have gone the other way.
Edited extra bit: unsure if this was blanket or only applied to certain jobs, off the top of my head.
mixed with more people from Anatolia.
The flags and culture have changed, but the people are still the same. But that change of culture and languagd was not particularly peaceful, or universally accepted; that's the pattern
throughout history.
RR looked at reworking the EJ200 for that as part of a failed bid for the T-X program.
I'd guess the dust is being blown off that study, too.
I suspect more likely, those who resisted headed somewhat to the West or got burnt, and the rest stayed put and got converted, like the Muslim Greeks.
I wonder how many satellite imagery companies there are that are entirely outside the reach of the USA that might still be willing to supply Ukraine with data? Probably not many.
Back in the old days, before countless bots liked comments.
Who were the warlords of the post-Roman world? Almost certainly many, if not most, were the 'big men' and their descendants of the late Roman world - who in many cases would have been the descendents of the 'big men' of the pre-Roman world who had successfully adapted to Roman Britain. There would have been others, too - Germanic warband leaders, Romans from elsewhere in the empire - but the picture as I understand it is that it was essentially the same people in charge, just speaking a different language. They didn't cede - they just behaved differently to their forebears.
I have a bit of a problem with this - language is so ingrained in my idea of identity that I cannot imagine willingly changing it. But as I understand it, that is what happened.
The book I am reading at the moment is Max Adams's 'The First Kingdom'. But this is just one of a number telling variations on essentially the same story (though an enjoyably well-written example). I recommend it.
Tons of fusion of art, culture etc. But it was far from an idyllic everyone-sings-along-round-the-campfire meeting of minds.
The point is that manufacturers will be looking at non-ITAR options for the future.
Rafale is, as you note, the existing option. But that's not of much use to RR or BAE.
A one state solution is impossible because there are almost equal numbers of Palestinians and Jews in the area of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Now, one could attempt some kind of Northern Irish solution and try and force power sharing, but I simply don't buy it; simply you would be asking the Israeli Jews to give up control of their life and their state. If there were twice as many Jews and Palestinians, then some kind of Bosnian confederation might work, but there isn't. So, it can't work,
A two state solution is also impossible, because the Settlers make up an ever greater proportion of the Israeli population (and voters), and there is no appetite to remove them from the West Bank.
The only "solution" is ethnic cleansing, which results in the Palestinians being forced out of the West Bank and Gaza, and into neighbouring countries. That is what several members of the current Israeli cabinet openly propose. But that is morally repugnant.
So, war will continue. The Palestinians will suffer. While Israel will continue to endure terrorist attacks, because if you are a Palestinian, what do you have to lose?
He's worth half a billion.
Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today in NYC: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream”
https://x.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1897697918456332478