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A new book aims to rescue the ancient Germanic tribes of the past from a pernicious, Nazi-era myth: that they were in any way German at all. The True History of the Germanic Peoples: Beyond Myth and Völkisch Ideology by prehistorian Karl Banghard, hopes to show how the ancient Germanic tribes who famously defeated the legions of Rome in the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD were not really the warrior hordes of the popular imagination but a bunch of peaceful, communistic “ragbag hippies.” Anyone prejudiced enough to believe otherwise, the text explains, has just fallen for a racist, Nazi-era fable.
Banghard Blowhard
Banghard is Chief Commissar of the Oerlinghausen Archaeological Open-Air Museum, where a recreation of a prehistoric German village is on display for families to enjoy. I have never visited myself, but I suspect the model village may turn out to be surprisingly full of primitive Bronze Age hammers and sickles.
Banghard’s general mindset can be guessed from a 2020 booklet intended for racial re-education of German schoolchildren, Symbols and Codes of the Extreme Right as Appropriations of the Germanic Past, which argues that, due to lack of substantial contemporary written or archaeological evidence, we know next to nothing whatsoever about the prehistoric German tribes. Here, Banghard is cited as warning this lacuna in knowledge is dangerous, because:
I can project a lot onto an epoch about which I don’t know much. That opens up almost unlimited possibilities for manipulation and interpretations for political ends.
Yes, it might allow a committed left-winger placed in charge of an important national museum to misleadingly claim the Teutons were all a bunch of commies and hippies, for example. But that isn’t the precise kind of willful historical misinterpretation the booklet has in mind:
For the Extreme Right, Germanic culture and religion function as a site of projection for their racist, white supremacist and anti-democratic ideologies: their rejection of a diverse, multicultural and post-migrant society; their disdain for modernity; their repudiation of Christianity; and their antisemitism. They hold humanitarian practices in contempt and regard people who help the weak as weak themselves. In contrast, they present their own Germanic paganism as superior and, cast in racist terms, as a source of power for the German people today.
Naturally, this potential “source of power” for motivating ethnic self-defense has to be removed. In twin publicity interviews for his book with major German newspaper Die Welt and German Jewish publication Juedische Allgemeine, Banghard is at pains to assert everything we think we know about the pagan Teutons is wrong. Far from being “blond, blue-eyed and death-defying” like cartoon Waffen-SS men, their suspiciously Stalinesque love of “communal land-ownership” meant that, just like today’s far-left, they possessed an “almost manic tendency towards equality.”
One thing they DEFINITELY DID NOT possess, however, was a common ethnic or genetic heritage. Referencing new archeological discoveries (I thought the past was all a massive blank in this respect, though, Karl?), Banghard explains this impression is misguided:
In discussions with people with nationalist ideas, I perceive that they cultivate a timeless view of history that does not move by a millimeter. The same Germanic tribes sit … over the centuries in their [same] villages or towns – mobility, movement, change does not occur there. In this idea, there is an idea [of national identity] and a genetic material that was already there two thousand years ago and must be led into the future if possible. Archaeology can show that this is not true.
Instead, similar to the Gastarbeiter-ridden post-Germans of today, Banghart says the Teutons were a peripatetic nation of immigrants: “There was no common consciousness as Germanic people, nor were there any common Germanic genes” as “Germanic tribes were very mobile”, like gypsies. Borders were meaningless to them. In fact, the Teutons belonged to a sort of early pan-European Schengen Zone borderless travel area:
If we only look at criteria such as clothing, hairstyle or religion, then the boundaries between Germans and non-Germans become more and more blurred. Various finds from Denmark, for example, show that the women wore a kind of pan-European everyday fashion with which they could just as easily have walked around Gaul or Italy.
So, the ancient Germans were wandering, internationalist cosmopolitans, meaning the “New Germans” from lands like Syria are much more truly Germanic than, say, Adolf Hitler was. To disagree makes one a Nazi, engaging in the precise same “exaggerations of the National Socialists, who saw the Germanic peoples as role-models for their ideology.” The “best way to forget” such 1930s lies, Banghard says, would be for his post-countrymen to “stop using the G-word” about such prehistoric people altogether – by which he means the very word ‘German’. So what should we start calling them, then? How about using some different “G-words” instead: Gay and Globalist!
New Angles on the Saxons
In the somewhat inaccurate popular imagination, Angles, Saxons, Goths, Teutons and Vikings all tend to merge together into one big rapin’, pillagin’, horn-helmeted longboat-crew. The Vikings are the most infamously white, virile and masculine of these groups, so they are the ones who have to be deconstructed, deracinated and queered most vociferously, a trend currently playing out all across Europe. Ragnar Bloodaxe is to be forcibly transitioned into Harald Handbag.
A 2014 headline in lefty UK house-journal The New Statesman asked “The Vikings invented soap operas and pioneered globalization – so why do we depict them as brutes?”, whilst a revisionist BBC profile of the Norsemen argues that “They were poets. They wore leather shoes and combed their hair.” Obviously they must have been gay, then. Who but an absolute Erik the Pink would ever bother to comb their actual hair?
As I have recently shown in another article elsewhere, it is not only their traditional status as hetero hard-men that is now being peeled away; there are increasingly loud (and increasing unlikely) claims that, rather than white Scandinavian-type people with stereotypically blue eyes, the Vikings and allied races were in fact much more likely to have been black, Muslim, or both. One revisionist, Dr Annika Larsson of Uppsala University in Sweden, even claims to have spotted the word “Allah” printed backwards upon an item of poorly-preserved Viking burial clothing.
That’s every bit about as likely as the garment having the words ‘”Made In Taiwan” or “Dry Clean Only” printed on it. What other anachronistic messages has she espied on ancient Viking burial garbs? “I Went To Valhalla and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt”? “Ragnarök Around the Clock”?
A 2009 Cambridge University gathering of academics, entitled Between the Islands, concluded that the Vikings were “model immigrants who co-existed peacefully with the natives.” Their “so-called invasion” of Britain, for example, simply led “to the creation of trans-national identities, a process that has particular relevance to modern Britain” now it is so full of Pakistanis with UK passports.
The conference coordinator explained how the Great Viking Replacement process was a deeply enriching one for all concerned, both invader and invaded, pillager and pillaged. “They were mutually transformed in the process, it was two-way interaction” with shared cultural cross-pollination for each side, just like with the Pakistanis today: we get some new curry recipes, and they get to impose sharia law on us and rape all our schoolkids.
It even seems the Vikings were now “veritable feminists”, at least by the standards of their time. Only if you ignore the fact they created slave-trading hubs everywhere from Dublin to Denmark, where they sold on kidnapped women into a life of potential sex-slavery. But did the Vikings even know what a woman was in the first place?
Ivor the Boner-less
Archaeologist Neil Price is a colleague of Annika Larsson at the University of Uppsala, but where she likes to perceive Muslim Vikings lurking in their graves, he prefers to see queer ones, getting easy headlines for his 2020 book Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings, by saying he had identified a “transgender, non-binary or gender-fluid” Viking buried in a Swedish gravesite from the mid-900s in a place called Birka – or “Burka”, as Dr. Larsson prefers to spell it. [1]
DNA analysis showed the corpse was female, but buried alongside her were a sword and two slaughtered horses, plausibly implying she was a female warrior. But Dr. Price guessed otherwise, speculating this was in fact a biological female who self-identified as a man, and therefore was one, and if you say otherwise then it’s a hate-crime, and he’ll have you executed immediately using the technique of the Blood Eagle.
Price did admit the “most likely” explanation was that the corpse was indeed just a female soldier, but Price had an entire socially oppressive cisheteronormative patriarchy to subvert, so lamented the very idea that wielding a sword was a characteristically male thing to do as being nothing but an intolerant example of scholars “sexing metal”. In an extract from his book which appeared in no less than Time magazine, Price presents his queer political agenda undisguised:
Part of the Viking image today is a caricature of masculinity … appealing to a supposed ideal of manly behavior. But Viking-age Scandinavian reality embraced so much more, including a true fluidity of gender. Patriarchy was a norm of Viking society, but one that was subverted at every turn, often in ways that – fascinatingly – were built into its structures. The Vikings were certainly familiar with what would today be called queer identities. Gender boundaries were rigidly policed, at times with moral overtones, and the social pressures laid upon men and women were very real. At the same time, however, these borders were permeable with a degree of social sanction. There is a clear tension here, a contradiction that can be productive for anyone trying to understand the Viking mind … Perhaps Viking-Age people chose and renegotiated their identities every day, much as many of us do. Their ideas about gender went far beyond the binaries of biological sex, as scholars are now beginning to understand. Sadly, we are also only now becoming aware of the [white cishetero] privilege that allowed us to overlook this for so long.
The Vikings were actually more advanced, rainbow-wise, than many bigoted white Europeans who vote for right-wing trans-skeptical parties like the AfD are today, then, preaches Dr Price – much as other left-wing researchers now claim the Norsemen and Teutons were also supposedly more advanced when it came to appreciating Islam, borderless travel, feminism, and even collectivized farming. At this point, I feel compelled to repeat the earlier-cited words of Karl Banghard:
I can project a lot onto an epoch about which I don’t know much. That opens up almost unlimited possibilities for manipulation and interpretations for political ends.
Why doesn’t that apply to people like Banghard, Larsson and Price too, though? Because they are on ‘the right side of history’ – probably because they have systematically falsified history to suit their own ideological ends. When Nazis do this, it leads to genocide. When Marxists do it, it leads to genocide too: but the Great Replacement is a good genocide, not a bad one, so any lie peddled in its name is automatically a noble one. Personally, I think these berserk pseudo-scholars are just a cadre of classic Ahnenerbe members upside-down, falsifying prehistory through the lens of a fanatically anti-white, rather than a fanatically pro-white, perspective.
To stick with the Viking theme, all I can say in conclusion is: what a bunch of ‘King Cnuts.
Notes
[1] For a dismantling of left-wing claims about this ridiculous Viking ‘trans-warrior’, see here; turns out she had apparently at one point been buried alongside a man, maybe her husband, and their bones were all jumbled up (either that or she had three femurs), so the sword may not even have been hers!
28 comments
How many people fall for this nonsense, I wonder? Sure, there were movements of tribes within today’s Germany, but it’s not like they were racially very different from one another. But that’s how certain people try to conflate things these days. “They had a different hairstyle, so they must have been diverse.”
I recently read Svante Pääbo’s Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, which was very enlightening. While Pääbo is a bisexual liberal as well, he is honest about the limitations of science. Now, he of course deals with ancient DNA, much of which has been irretrievably lost, as he himself admits. But from his depiction of his work and the goings-on behind the scenes, it becomes very clear that “trust the science” is a perilous statement to make, even when the scientists involved are not trying to be activists.
P.S.: The Oerlinghausen museum takes all this very seriously. See their (highly entertaining, I must say) page “Nazis im Wolfspelz” – Nazis in wolves’s clothes.
“It happened on a rainy Friday in September 2013. An Argentinean group had booked a guided tour of our small open-air museum at short notice. Since I wanted to know what could motivate people from the other end of the world to visit an archaeological destination in the East Westphalian province, I took charge of the tour. Perhaps it had something to do with Oswald Menghin, the Austrian Nazi Minister of Culture who emigrated to Buenos Aires. Or even with Adolf Eichmann, who has a lot to do with modern German archaeology. However, my investigative hopes were disappointed…” Paranoid much?
They are probably trying to influence children, teens, and people in their early twenties with this wishful thinking. By declaring this racism to question this premise, the author has already lost the argument.
I think you might be mistaken. I have it on good authority that all ancient “European” tribes – especially the “Germanic” ones – were composed of a motley mix of sub-Saharan Bantus, Afghanis, and Syrians. There might have been a few “Germanic” people around too, but they were the weak and evil ones.
Darn! What were my teachers back in the day thinking of not telling us?! Good thing Mr. Banghard came along to set the record straight.
“Angles, Saxons, Goths, Teutons and Vikings all tend to merge”
Don’t forget about the Jutes. I thought when reading about the Battle of Jutland as a 12 year old, that it was called that because the Denmark peninsula “jutted” out into the North Sea. It’s still confusing. Was Jutland naned for the jutting quality of the peninsula, the Jute people, or both?
The Jutes were the junior partners in the invasion of England, but Kent, they say, still has some Jute customs and land patterns different from the rest of England. “They” being some early twentieth century historian who wrote the classic book on Anglo Saxon England, can’t remember his name.
I figure it was the Jutes who brought at least most of the Gothic language influence into Anglo-Saxon. They were neighbors, and probably related. They may well have been the “Spear-Danes” of Beowulf, to which the story is addressed in the opening line. When I read it, I was puzzled by the occasional words that didn’t have equivalents in German or Old Norse. Then I started looking into Gothic and found some of them. I have to wonder if Jared Taylor is descended from them; he’s revived the letter “huair” 🙂
Karl Banghard, is it? I’d almost assume this whole thing is clever satire, but I realize that the leftist mind has absolutely no shame where it comes to distorting history.
Does this twit even read Tacitus?
This is not only rewriting history, but projection on the part of these so called academics.
Tacitus said the Germans were a people only like themselves, that is unmixed racially, almost as if they had sprung from the earth itself.
In university, the more “problematic” a source is, the more it is only accessed through and “interpreted” via secondary literature, so this person probably read 10 pages of postwar drivel against Tacitus for every page of Tacitus. That’s how you can end up with a “historian” who can claim that everything the primary source said on the subject was wrong without feeling any shame or embarrassment.
Add selection for particularly Left-leaning/Anti-German historians, and this specimen can be sufficiently explained.
He suggested that there was very little known about this time period. That simply isn’t true. Tacitus wrote in great depth about the subject, and there’s plenty of other contemporary documentation. Someone in Banghard’s position should know it, no matter how much activists pretending to be historians try to hand-wave it.
They fear Tacitus so much a lackey scholar named Krebs wrote “A Most Dangerous Book” which explores the profound impact of Tacitus’s “Germania,” revealing how this ancient text influenced ideologies from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich. They say Himmler read it on the subway and was enthralled for life. Dangerous, indeed.
Douglas,
I’ve heard / read a lot about Germania, but have never grabbed a copy, as I’ve got a back-log of interesting books to read. Thanks for piquing my interest (Beau as well) into making it my new priority read.
Also, thank to the author for a great and witty article. Harald Handbag? Good one!
The “Banghard” part might be wishful thinking…
No, cause Tacitus is close to tactics and that’s Eastern Front Nazi stuff.
This is further evidence for why higher education is losing respectability in the west, especially the social sciences. This is at the most lazy scholarship. Academics in the past have attempted to claim that Great Brittan had a sizable minority of Muslims during the middle ages. When “Cheddar Man” was in the news years ago, many people prematurely assumed that he was brown when he was white. It remains to be seen whether or not an ethical academic will expose this for what it is, a feminist fantasy about a period of history.
Tom Rowsell (Survive The Jive), has already thoroughly debunked this. Academics like Mr. Rowsell no longer inhabit the Academy.
Canadian academic Ricardo Duchesne is very good on this. When the woman who saw jeebus in the grilled cheese sandwich that sold for tens of thousands of dollars, I knew something was seriously wrong with amerika.
It is a good question how many people (apart from a few woke academics and journalists) actually accept this disenchantment and distortion of older history. I think that despite the best efforts of wokeists, this version of history has not caught on very much. For example, young nerds who are interested in Vikings or the Middle Ages tend to lean toward the traditional view of those periods. Is it possible that naive members of today’s “minorities” revel in this? Like two young lesbians taking a trip to such a woke museum and feeling “empowered” by this nonsense? Or is it rather that the real target audience is grant agencies? The author of such a book is probably also counting on success with woke media, which will start inviting him as an “expert.”
Fortunately, these people are driven by their own brainwashing and so lack the insidiousness needed to create actually effective (= subtle) propaganda.
Their narrative can be disproven very easily and clearly by anyone with for example amateur knowledge of ancient genetics.
For example, we can use the K12 analysis from Eupedia to compare ancient and modern populations in Central Europe:
https://eupedia.com/genetics/genomic_analysis_ancient_europeans.shtml
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GWhNZcfTQ2hMSK9Ni1IqG7aXHB00SRE5L6ED2osPs9M/edit?gid=0#gid=0
It took me 3 minutes for example to check that Czech Bell Beakers 4,000-5,000 years ago were genetically basically indistinguishable from modern Germans.
Mr. Banghard! Is that a real name?
Communism keeps morphing in terms of its stated goal and the target that stands athwart it. At this point the only conclusion is its only goal is destruction.
That said, it has arrived at the only thing left to destroy. Once what it seeks to destroy there isn’t anything left to destroy lest the non-White peoples of the world turn on themselves and destroy themselves. This is all just a thin veneer over the real aim – White Genocide.
“The Germania has been the most influential source for the early Germanic peoples since the Renaissance. Its reliable account of their ethnography, culture, institutions, and geography is the most thorough that has survived from ancient times, and to this day remains the preeminent classical text on the subject. The book signifies the emergence of the northern Europeans from the obscurity of archaeology, philology, and prehistory into the light of history half a millennium after the emergence of the southern Europeans in Homer and Herodotus.
Though Tacitus at times writes critically of the Germans, he also stresses their simplicity, bravery, honor, fidelity, and other virtues in contrast to corrupt Roman imperial society, fallen from the vigor of the Republic. (It has been said that no one in Tacitus is good except Agricola and the Germans.)”
—-Andrew Hamilton, Tacitus’ Germania @ nationalvanguard.org
This kind of historical revisionism is ludicrous. It only works because most people will never read ancient sources.
While the Romans did write that ancient Germanics were more egalitarian, tribal, and nomadic then they were, you would have to be insane to equate them with today’s leftist values.
This sort of thing makes me sick to my stomach. It appalls me that so much money is wasted on such subversive drivel. I envision the future to have far fewer institutions of higher learning (because fewer are needed) with far higher standards, and the Marxist academics who produce mental fecal matter such as this being paid minimum wage to clean streets and public toilets. I’m actually quite serious. That would be justice for trashing Western Civilization and undermining the White race.
It is sick and it is an appalling waste of tax-payers money to promote garbage history. Sometimes I wonder whether they even believe it themselves.
However, deep down I think that these weirdos are aware that they are of less use to society than the janitor, street-cleaner or the garbage collector. And that probably shits them completely.
The Marxist academics who produce mental fecal matter such as this being paid minimum wage to clean streets and public toilets. Reopening Unit 731 is harsh justice for destroyers of our civilization. Let’s not forget that this garbage has an ocean of blood on its hands. We have had to bury those we care about because of them.
Banghard be damned!
The Vikings, Teutons, Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Geats and Goths were all a bunch of ‘hardecanutes’ and no limp-wristed academic geek can bloody well tell me otherwise.
The Hibernians, Picts, Britons and the Gauls as well!
Weird article! 🙃
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