Although on some level I must have known this already, somehow I was surprised to learn (in a book on Celtic history called The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb) that the ancestors of most white Americans were the same people we remember in history as “the barbarian hordes.”
Usually we think of barbarians in the context of the Fall of Rome, a momentous event oft lamented. But in fact, the Romans had spent the previous 200 years “subjugating” the barbarians — Celts, Gauls, and other non-Romans — all over southern and central Europe.
By barbarian, of course, they meant mean “hairy animal.” By subjugate, they meant to kill. The Romans killed as many non-Romans as they could and enslaved the rest. Apparently they weren’t even that into having sex with the locals (a time-honored tradition of armies everywhere). The end result of this killing campaign was to wipe out native culture, i.e., the native French, British, Belgian, Iberian, and southern Germanic people — to such a degree that today we have only the barest idea who the native non-Roman Europeans were.
How ironic then that the British, the French, the Iberians, and the Germans should all conquer territory around the world and commit the same crime of genocide against new “barbarian hordes” — for instance, the “savages” of North and South America, the peoples of Africa and the Middle East, as well as the Jews, Gypsies, and other so-called non-Aryans around the time of World War II.
Is it in our blood, innate and instinctive to human beings? Or was it planted there? History is written by the victors, and we tend, as a race, to ape history even if we don’t actually know any. Who are the “barbarians” of our own day, the people in need of subjugating? Could they be Middle Eastern or North Korean or Russian? Will there ever be a time when subjugating the weaker goes away?
