Fascinating times on the Twitter yesterday, after I posted a remark about the incoherent racism of the “indigenous population of Britain” component of the ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory and attracted a lot of very angry people with English flags in their handles. One suspects they’ve been conducting broad searches for the key terms ‘indigenous population’ and ‘racist’, since none of them looked like the sort of accounts who would normally be looking for random thoughts on Thucydides and jazz composition.
Two things really stood out for me. The first is that the vast majority were perfectly polite; angry, yes, and incredulous that I was not backing down in the face of their powerful assertions about genome analysis, but apart from one assertion that obviously I was simply obeying the orders of my masters in the communist media and one person apparently cross that my profile picture includes a Siamese cat, a total absence of abuse, threats of violence etc. Perhaps there would have been more if I’d bothered to engage, but basically this is another data point for the general truth that being a man on social media is playing the game on its easiest setting.
The second is how far the responses essentially proved my starting point: this is an incoherent ideological claim whose sole function is to present a far-right racist agenda as a matter of objective scientific and historical truth and natural justice. This is OUR land; WE were here first; other indigenous peoples get special privileges (they seem particularly furious about the Maori, for some reason), so it’s only fair that the Native British should too. This then entails a frantic two-step between claims about unbroken genetic heritage since the builders of Stonehenge, with invading forces contributing minimally to the pure bloodline, and claims that Celts, Vikings, Normans etc. are all closely related so that gene mixing is all good and historical (don’t mention the w-word…).
This suggests that they disagree with each other almost as much as they disagree with me: the British Exceptionalists versus the Pan-Nordics, the Genetic Purists versus the Selective Input Of The Right Sort Of Blood, the Autocthonists versus the Spirit Of The Volk crowd and so forth. But of course this is either beside the point – they started with the conclusion, that they should have special status in Their Own Country, and are simply developing arguments to justify this in publicly acceptable terms – or it’s precisely the point, that True Britishness in these terms is highly malleable and inclusive much of the time, just not in the one obvious respect. Which isn’t racism, or else it’s racist to talk about Native Americans, so there.
I was a little surprised to be accused of denying the existence of Britishness, suggesting that it’s not a real thing because it’s made up of different ingredients (What about a cake, EH?!?). On the contrary, that’s why I like it as a cultural identity; it reasonably characterises my own mongrel heritage, and it can be open and inclusive and capable of constant change and refinement – a cake that’s significantly improved by West Indian sugar and Indian spices and so forth rather than sticking rigidly to the bland 1930s recipe…
Part of the agenda here is to make ‘British’ a less accommodating identity by making it less cultural; going beyond the infamous ‘cricket test’ (which would have got me thrown out of the country…) to suggest that identifying with Britain is not enough, you need to have ancestors who were born here centuries ago, or millennia, or at any rate before 1948. Some people, then, can never be truly British – but that’s fine, because none of this is about discriminating against them (that’s what Bad Racists do), just treating Proper Brits fairly.
What worries me is how much of this stuff I can imagine receiving nods of assent from otherwise decent people whom I used to meet at drinks parties down here in darkest Somerset, back when such things happened or at least when I used to go to them; it’s all just common sense, and it’s expressly claimed as Not Racist so that’s all right. The discourse is cleverly designed to mainstream ideas that justify and promote racial discrimination without ever stating this as the intended outcome, while making it ever harder to call them out without appearing to disparage the natural, blameless feelings of ordinary decent folk. After all, the Maori…
I must go and find a white van to respect.
Sphinx 
Hi from Norway! I think your blog looks really enticing, and I’ve heard that you’ve worked with Walter Scheidel and that your work focuses on ancient socioeconomic history. Where did you study, and could you recommend some academic literature to read?
I studied at Cambridge with people like Peter Garnsey (my doctoral supervisor), Keith Hopkins, Paul Cartledge and John Patterson. I met Walter at a conference he organised there, and at regular intervals since. What sort of topics are you interested in, and how much background do you have in the subject? Some of the literature can be pretty inaccessible to non-specialists…
Garnsey? Good heavens. He was (briefly and inconsequentially) my Tutor when I was an undergraduate. (I was at Jesus, 1979-82.)
On the OP, I do like this idea that you can discriminate in favour of the majority without actually discriminating *against* anyone. Digressing slightly, there was a time when I used to argue with Libertarians online, and their ultimate argument against public provision was always the Men With Guns – i.e. having publicly-funded services means nobody’s free, because they’re not free to opt out of paying for them, because if anyone does opt out (by withholding their taxes) the Men With Guns will come and sort them out. (A theory which William Cooper proved to be correct. Thanks, Bill!)
The flaw in the argument is that it’s trivially true of any system of government – which is to say, every government claims a local monopoly of force and every government wants some things upheld and others banned, so as long as there’s a government there’ll be something you can do that’ll bring out the MWG. Questions of public policy are, in the last instance, questions of what you’d be prepared to see implemented by force, if all else failed.
Which is why there are no good-faith discussions of racialised public policy. (See Brimstone and Treacle.)
Peter was and is a lovely man, but rather scary as a supervisor…
Ancient/modern ideological, intellectual, cultural, political/diplomatic, military (somewhat), social, economic and demographic history are my chief interests, so pretty much the whole package. In relation to economic and demographic/social history, my background consists of reading “Escape From Rome” by Scheidel, Ober’s book “The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece” and quite a few of Scheidel’s older research articles. In addition I like to look at these through a global or comparative approach.
The British autochthonists are clearly lacking a Hephaestos/Athena-style foundation myth