I got a lot of feedback in reaction to my blockbuster blog yesterday — http://www.democratic-republicans.us/english/english-ominous-treason-by-white-military-officers-doomed-white-south-africa — on the treason by white South African generals that led to the disastrous black takeover in 1994.
I got this email below from a British South African who felt betwixt-and-between as a non-Boer.
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Greetings Mr. de Nugent,
I have been reading your blog for a while now, and am surprised - pleasantly at that, to find us “lowly” South Africans represented in a ”reasonable” piece.
Whilst perusing said pieces, I have found a need to make sure you understand our situation. I’m not talking the colour scaled one, the one that sold us out / handed over the key kind…. I mean the one NEVER discussed in public.
Though numbers were quoted at polls etc., one slight flaw is apparent, one that is never shown, and it’s a huge problem for myself and some others, and needs to be corrected so that the truth is defined and structured.
As the world is experienced, we have a “two-way” conflict in South Africa – black and white. Actually we have a three-way conflict, THAT black and white one, but to boot, a white on white one. This is not a Dem / Rep / Lib problem, but rather a humanitarian one caused by short-sightedness, and a stubbornness born from occurrences of over 100 years ago.
In the beginning the Dutch arrived, followed by the French, followed by the British. In each arrival, more people became citizens, and as such South Africa grew. During this time, the “new” South African has issues with political systems, and as such, dispersed to areas beyond others’ reach, and set up independent areas – hence SA as seen by the four ”republics”.
Since then, after the Union of South Africa ended, the English-speaking South Africa was literally left alone [...]
Since the take over by the Afrikanders, the English have been withheld from any governance of South Africa due to the claims against us for the concentrations camps of the Anglo-Boer war. Unbeknownst to the Afrikanders, they had already sold themselves down the river by befriending and trusting a nation [the writer obviously is referring to the Jews], a race who are still hell-bent on stripping the wealth from this country. This hatred is here again today, whilst the secretive race (who discovered that they could not control the Afrikaner) are doing what they do best…. incite hate and live by greed.
Fortunately, they have missed us (as we ARE / WERE second-hand citizens), and as such the Afrikaner sees us as bound in with them [ = the Jews].
But alas, we are neither Afrikaans, Afrikaner, Afrikander or British, though we can speak the “mother tongues.” The complexity in being a white person in South Africa is horrendous, especially when the Afrikaans-speaking clan divide themselves through religious denomination, culture and heritage. We English-speaking SAns have a joke about the “new” political system coming up: we wonder if we will be aligned by allegiance to sports teams. 
As you will have noted in the news, some Afrikaners have aligned themselves with the governance we now have [ = the black, communist AFC], other with Oriental or Russian alliances. Very few are seeking English-based support – UK or US, unless there is beneficial religious or heritage compliance.
Most of the “waking” or knowledge feeding to the international community [ = about white genocide] is being done through the European and Scandinavian countries, relating to our heritages and alliances of family name.
Due to this, we few English speakers are having to go it alone, as we are not welcome by our own to join in the fight for recognition, and as such have taken the more “open” route through self-finance generation, as even internationally, we are not “seen” as South Africans due to the popular propaganda machine.
I thank you for your time, and hope that this small smidgen of information can help you.
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I replied:
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Dear Mr. [],
Thank you very much for this comment. I already knew some of this but it was very useful to get a further exposition of the situation. May I publish this in my blog with your name and other identifiers?
I really feel for you in this situation, and if there is anyone who can be a helpful, neutral outsider in all this feuding of the various Whites in RSA, it is I, an American of rather unique Norman ancestry, not exactly British, not Afrikaner, not German, not Irish, etc.
I AM JUST WHITE. That is my identity. My warlike family has spread all over the US, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Austria, Russia and even Croatia because of its military talents. Now it is time to slay the real enemies of us all!
You might find my major essay (below) on the Normans very enlightening as to the dark side of British history, and of course the concentration camps for the Boers were no myth, but neither did the average Brit (a decent chap, like my late grandfather from Yorkshire) have tea and crumpets with the vile murderer Lord Kitchener as he planned them, nor did “Tommy Jenkins” (the Rudyard Kipling word for the working-class Englishman) build them! Tommy Jenkins followed orders just as the Afrikaner generals Meiring and Viljoen “followed orders” when they turned the county over the the blacks.
(The Jews sank Killer Kitchener’s warship in 1916 because he was trying to save the tsar and his armies, but the Jewish backers of the Bolsheviks opposed that, so his karma as a mass killer of white women and children for the benefit of the Rothschild Empire — wrongly called “British” since the average Brit had no say in, or benefit from it — certainly caught up with the fiend.)
It is the Normans, white brother, who started the alliance back in AD 1066 with that “secretive race” of which you wrote above. And this alliance with the very Devil has meant hell for British working-class whites as well as for the rest of the white world!
I just put this Norman info up as a blog, and included your email content, albeit without your name… If you wish, I would be happy to add your name and other identifiers.
***
And now the truth about British history, which is really Norman-Jewish parasitical domination of the brave and good British peoples for nearly one thousand years!
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The Normans: England’s Blessing and Curse
[This is an abridged version of my long 2009 essay on the Normans found here: NORMANS – Dec 12 2009]
Intro:
After my original essay came out four years ago, an English comrade wrote me:
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It was a few weeks ago when you sent me the PDF regarding the Norman invasion, occupation, genocide and transformation of Anglo-Saxon England, and I thought I would thank you very much for doing so. The article was well written and, most importantly, balanced.
From reading the pdf I can tell that you feel empathy with what happened to our Saxon ancestors, I know you carry the name of a Norman but no doubt you are of Saxon blood.
Yours truly with dog Spike in 2010, who looked like an English spaniel but that day, I decided, should try being a Doberman
And as you said, John, the Normans had Viking blood, other Vikings settled in England during various invasions, and in fact the original Germanic tribes that invaded England were from a similar area anyway.
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I was pleased to see you mention the Jews who did indeed first settle in England in 1066. I was also shocked to discover the death toll of the “Harrowing of the North” could be as high as 100,000. This I found truly horrifying. I learned a lot!
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===================MY VIDEO ESPECIALLY ON BRITAIN, WILLIAM JOYCE AND HIS PREDICTIONS FOR THE POSTWAR UNITED KINGDOM — and Adolf Hitler’s love of Britain
http://democratic-republicans.us/pages/video_player_page9.htm
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=====================SHORT VERSION OF THE NORMANS ESSAY
Because that essay was so long, though it contains much, IMHO, fascinating material , here is an abridged version for you now.
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The Normans — England’s curse
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and blessing
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It has been nearly 1,000 years now since anyone, with open military force, successfully conquered the English, a fierce and resolute mixture of Germanic whites (with a dash of Kelts and pre-Indo-Europeans). The Spanish Armada, Napoleon and Hitler all failed to defeat “the Sceptered Isle.” But back in 1066, Old French-speaking Vikings called Normans (from the Scandinavian word for “Northmen”) slew the English nobility and their common soldiers at Hastings, just days after the exhausted and valiant English army had rushed south from defeating an invasion by Danish Vikings in northern England at Stamford Bridge.
Hastings was the catastrophic end of Anglo-Saxon England—of its original language, its purely Germanic culture, and its semi-isolation from the troubles of the European continent and of the world. Ever since that October day in 1066, Normans and the Jewish immigrants they brought in have played a large role in England’s leadership. As a blessing or a curse? Let us tackle this thorny question.
By John de Nugent,
of Norman ancestry myself
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A few years ago this writer wrote to a comrade in England, and happened to mention that I had ancestors from both the English common people, the Anglo-Saxons, (specifically, the Coldwells of Yorkshire), and also from the Norman aristocrats who conquered England in 1066, both Angells and Nugents.
His reply surprised me and made me realize that the English have not yet grown very fond of their longtime overlords:
“Normans, eh? I guess we can forgive you that.”
A fascinating trip with one gifted woman through all the major accents spoken throughout the English-speaking white world; the Norman-led British Empire spread this tongue and made it into a world language.
The British Empire and its offshoot, the United States, around 1920, controlling one-third of the world’s land mass and all the oceans via two vast navies.
My first naïve thought was that the English comrade had been overly influenced by the tales of Robin Hood,
and how this legendary English hero (actually a Norman himself) had led the English common people in resistance to the cruel usurper on the throne of England, the Norman prince John, while John’s brother, good King Richard the Lion-Heart, was away on the Crusades.
But then I read about the shocking “Harrowing of the North” (the North of England) by William the Conqueror right after the Conquest, and discussed further below. The term referred to the utter devastation of man, woman, child, plant and cow in that very Yorkshire where my maternal grandfather, John Thomas Coldwell, was born.
One of my favorite pix of Grampy Coldwell, grilling burgers. He is, I think, one of my guardian angels today. We were close and spent every Sunday together at his farm in Smithfield, Rhode Island.
At least one hundred thousand Yorkshire men and women perished, and it was due to what my own Norman ancestors did. Even the pope, who at the time was, rarely enough, an Englishman, and who actually had supported William’s claim to mount the throne of England, threatened in disgust and horror to excommunicate him.
And Hereward “the Exile” (also known as Hereward “the Wake”; c. 1035-1072), the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Danish champion who fought the Normans for years from a fort in a swamp, may have been foully murdered by the Normans after he had honorably surrendered.
And I read that J.R. Tolkien, the great Oxford professor and author of The Lord of the Rings (the three-part movie version of these novels has been by two billion film goers) actually loathed the Normans as nightmarishly cruel, and as money-grubbing corruptors of souls. He decried their lust for the “ring of gold,” and their terrorizing of the decent, honest English common folk, symbolized in The Lord of the Rings by the brave little Hobbits in their rustic cottages.
(If you can stand the heavy-metal band Metallica, here are some images from “The Lord of the Rings” of both innocent yet brave Hobbits and evil cavalrymen)
I began to get an inkling of why that English comrade would write me as he had.
Anglo-Danish England before the Normans
One reason why Hereward had risen up against the Normans was the atrocious “Harrowing of the North” of England in 1069-70. England had once been a freedom-loving Hobbits country, an island of Germanic and Keltic folk, and it certainly was not interested in being forced to learn French, a foreign tongue, or become any French noble’s serf.
Northern England especially was barely under the control of any king. In fact, there was only one castle in all of Anglo-Saxon England…..because castles were meant to not just resist invaders but also to resist uprisings by hostile, enslaved local populations. An island like England did not need castles for “lording it over” a free people who accepted their rulers.
The Old English kings did respect their own people, they did not fear them or need to, and when they called for volunteers, as King Alfred the Great did in 877 against the invading Vikings, they came a-running to help. Nor did the Anglo-Saxon kings have a heavy tax system, because no one was building vastly expensive castles with moats for overlording their own subjects….
Tonbridge Castle, built just four years after the Conquest as protection for the Normans against the English people.
…..nor did the Anglo-Saxon folk feel a need to pay for a standing, professional army, and they dreaded such a thing as a threat to their freedom.
An Anglo-Saxon mead hall.
Mead is an alcoholic drink made from honey, going back to Indo-European times, at least 3,000 BC. It was a great honor to drink it in the king’s mead hall, sing, and tell stories of heroes past.
In this regard Old England, with its volunteer militia, was very unlike the Vikings from Denmark, who all were professional soldiers……
…..as were the French Viking heavy cavalry that made up the Norman armies.
A dismounted Norman knight. Horses could be brought down by lances, swords or arrows. The Anglo-Saxons preferred fighting as infantry, not cavalry, and it was cheaper than outfitting an armored horse.
It was a big mistake, though, in a psychopathic world to not have a professional military. Militias are cheap, with part-time soldiers and weekend warriors, and professional armies on the other hand do cost a lot, but freedom isn’t free, as the expression goes, and the Anglo-Saxons lost it. By having only a militia they paid an incredible price – centuries of enslavement that, somewhat less openly brutal that before, lasts in my view to this day.
Northern England, the region William the Conqueror would decide to devastate, had been settled heavily by both northern German Saxons and by the Scandinavian Danes, and was even more rich in Nordic genes than the south. The dialect of Yorkshire and the whole north, in fact, was heavily influenced by Danish, so much so that the Londoners down south could barely understand it. Many nobles up there, in fact, were Danes. The region was even called “the Danelaw,” and the historians of today call that region, in that era, by the name “Anglo-Scandinavia.”
In fact, “English”-seeming place names that end in -thorpe, -borough, -wick, or in -by, such as Oglethorpe, Warwick, Attleborough, Bixby, Hornby, Frisbee or Albee all come in reality from the Danish. “By” is still today the Danish word for a village. Thus the meaning of the English word “by-laws” is “village laws,” hence one never hears of federal or state “by-laws,” but only the by-laws of towns, local clubs and associations. Hundreds of the most basic English words came in through the Danelaw, such as take, skin, sky, he, they, anger, bask, bawl, bet, build, blunder, crash, crazy and other basic “English” words.
(One can hear a northern English dialect — very hard for Americans to understand, because our own American accent comes from southeastern England — in the unique and touching 1997 English tragicomic film “The Full Monty,” written by a Simon Beaufoy – “Goodfaith” in French – with as Norman a name as you can imagine. It depicts six very desperate unemployed ex-steel mill workers in Sheffield who resort, quite bashfully, to putting on a nightclub striptease in their despair to raise money to pay their back bills and their child support. This is from the very area that William the Bastard had genocided nine hundred years ago.)
Trailer to the touching comedy “The Full Monty”. I had a lot of trouble understanding some of the accent, though not in this trailer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nA3W36JVnRc
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Given both their heritages, Scandinavian and Saxon, the ingredients of a double bravery, the doughty Yorkshiremen up north told William the Bastard in no uncertain terms that he was not welcome as their new master after they saw how he was enslaving the south of England.
At the legendary Battle of Maldon, 75 years before, their brave Saxon brothers in southern England had already fought honorably to the very death rather than pay any tribute to Viking marauders. (They finally began paying Danegeld, “money for the Danes,” only after their total annihilation at Maldon). The Maldon Yorkshiremen of the year 1066 were just as brave as the men of Maldon had been a mere 75 years earlier.
In 1916 the great British poet Rudyard Kipling…
….penned a notable, even jarring poem that expressed the innate Anglo-Saxon fierceness, resolve and hatred of oppression:
When the Saxon Begins to Hate
It was not part of their blood.
It came to them very late.
With long arrears to make good
When the Saxon began to hate.
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They were not easily moved.
They were icy – willing to wait.
Till every count should be proved
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
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Their voices were even and low;
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.
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It was not preached to the crows;
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate
Henry Tandey, the most decorated English soldier in WWI. It was truly he who who spared German corporal Adolf Hitler’s life in Marcoing, France in 1918. (He refused to shoot a groggy soldier who was just coming to after being knocked out.) Look at that resolute Saxon face, the blue eyes, straight nose and strong chin…The highest British medal for valor, the Victoria Cross, is to our left on his chest, next to a button.
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It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead
When time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.
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Although this poem was composed during World War One, when Kipling had just lost his son at the front fighting the Germans, it reveals a fundamental mindset: We don’t seek quarrels, we Saxons, but if you start it we will finish it.
The Old English language becomes Norman English
The Old English language which the English then spoke was a dialect of northwestern German (with some Scandinavian thrown in, as stated above) because the Anglo-Saxons had come to Britain around 400 AD from Germany, right when Roman rule in Britain was collapsing. In fact, three whole provinces in Germany have the same ethnic word “Saxony” in them. (Dresden, bombed ironically to smithereens by the British in WWII, is in fact the capital of “Saxony.”)
But given the Germanic root of English, as a boy in New England in America I always wondered why sheep meat, sheep flesh, was not called just that in English, like the related German Schafsfleisch. Why instead was sheep flesh called “mutton”? Why was the English word borrowed at all from the French word “mouton”?
“Mutton-busting” for kids in Utah
Why was swine flesh (as in the related German Schweinefleisch) called “pork” (from the French “porc”), and why was calf flesh called, again after the French, “veal”? Why was cow flesh called “beef” (from the French “boeuf”)? Why were the English names different for the animal out in the peasant’s field from the same animal when its meat was carved up on the lord’s table?
Why on earth do court sessions in my native New England, such as in Massachusetts (one of the oldest British colonies) still open with the bailiff calling out: “Oyez, oyez, oyez”?
(“Oyez” is very Old French, meaning “Hear ye!”)
Why does the coat of arms of the United Kingdom say in French, for goodness’s sake, “Dieu et mon droit” (“God and my right”)?
And wherefore doth the Order of the Garter motto proclaim, around the center of that coat of arms, above, in naughty French: “Honni soit qui mal y pense” (literally, “Shame on him who thinks dirty thoughts”)?
Why do we have both the word “think” (German “denk”) and the word “reflect” (French “réfléchir”)? Both “right” (German “richtig”) and “correct” (French/Latin)? Why was Henry VIII a “king” but the usual adjective for a king is not “kingly” but instead “royal”? The king in France is called a “roy”, but not for us!
Furthermore, why did Britain, an Anglo-Saxon country, side in both world wars with France and against a blue-eyed, kindred nation, Germany, the very home of its honest, hardworking ancestors?
An American WWI poster that closely copied British Germanophobia. How on earth could people who looked like us be “Huns,” a mongolian people? The average Brit or British-American has literally no idea he is of heavily north German ancestry. Even the German’s white face is turned gray, and his blue eyes become an eerie whitish. But the bayonet is blood-red….
It all began with a brutal conquest in 1066 that eradicated Germanic rule in Britain and then an even more brutal genocide of those who rebelled against their enslavement.
William the Bastard (his original nickname for he was born illegitimate, but after 1066 he was accurately called “the Conqueror”) had no respect for the Anglo-Saxons as brave and honorable foemen in war. After massacring the Saxon soldiers at the October 1066 Battle of Hastings, he resolved to also slaughter their helpless civilians to spread terror, and thence to annihilate the beautiful north English countryside to set a dread-provoking example: submit or die.
Already after the battle of Hastings, William and his army had marched about southern England, on Dover and on Canterbury in a huge show of brutal force before he arrived on the outskirts of London. He met resistance in Southwark, and in an act of revenge set fire to the area.
Londoners still refused to submit to William, so he turned away and marched through Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire, ravaging the once beautiful green English countryside.
By the end of the year the people of London, surrounded by devastated lands, submitted to this man who can only be called a foreign terrorist. On 25th December, 1066, William was reluctantly crowned as king of England by Aldred, Archbishop of York, at Westminster Abbey, which had just been completely remodeled.
But then the still uncowed north of England rose up in revolt.
William begins his genocide
Orderic Vitalis (1075-1142) had a strong opinion of William’s reaction. He was an Anglo-Norman chaplain to Roger de Montgomery, a key friend and war companion of William (yes, of the same family that later gave birth to Field Marshal Montgomery of WWII fame). He later became a monk in Normandy, and normally was an open admirer of Duke William for his skill and bravery as a soldier, ruler and builder too of beautiful cathedrals.
However, Orderic wrote in his Latin-language chronicle Gesta Normannorum Ducum [“Deeds of the Norman Dukes”] of his horror, as a believing Christian, at the Normans’ merciless scorched-earth policy toward the North.
It proved to be far worse even than the “March to the Sea” through Georgia in 1864 by Union (federal) troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman. (“Sherman,” by the way, is a classic Norman, not Saxon name.)
From the Humber River to the Tees, for four seemingly unending years, from 1066 clear through to 1070, William’s rampaging, sadistic Norman cavalry burnt whole villages to the ground …….
….and killed the unarmed civilians of northern England – an especially brave and blondish folk – like helpless sheep.
The death toll is believed to have been 150,000, with substantial social, cultural, and economic damage. Due to the scorched earth policy, much of the land was laid waste and depopulated, a fact to which the famous Domesday Book, William’s great tax and inventory list of all the properties in England, readily attests in 1086, almost two decades later.
And it provoked as much bitterness and hatred of the Normans as did, 800 years later, General Sherman’s march through Georgia among all Southerners, especially after the willful burning of the gracious old city of Atlanta. (This wanton crime was memorably depicted in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind.”)
Norman names abound to this day
Besides “Sherman,” Here are some other typical Norman names, and you will see them making a lot of history amongst the white English-speaking peoples:
Allison, Davison, Angell, Duke, Nugent, Tiffany, Dawes, Curtis, Harris, Morris, Pierce (from Pierres, a name that no longer exists in France), Piper, de la Beckwith, Chase, Doggett, Blodgett, Fitzwater, Disney (d’Isigny), Drury, Dillon;
Chamberlain, Grant, Gibbs, Goddard and Pinkerton, but also Lindsay, Murdoch, Quincey, Day, Denny (as in the restaurant chain), Dench (actress Judy Dench),
Dennis (as in white nationalist author Lawrence Dennis) (from le Danois = the French
word for “the Dane”), Denton (d’Eudon, a companion of the Conqueror), Devine, Dillon (de Lion), Dingell (D’Angell);
Agnew (Agneau), Cheney (de Chesne = “of the oak”), DeLay (former Speaker of the House), Doocy (as in Steve Doocy, FOX News), Arby (as in the roast-beef chain, Darby (d’Arby), Dunhill, as in the cigarettes (d’Oisnel);
Fitzgerald, Fitzhugh, Pugh, Richmond, Landry (Dallas Cowboys coach), Blanchard, Montgomery, Cushing (Cuchon), Dorset, Dwight (de Doito), Dyer (d’Iore), Dyson, as in the chicken-processing giant in Arkansas, from “Tesson”);
Blanchett, Barrett, Beckett, Crockett (as in our Davey), East (as in the late U.S. senator and patriot from South Carolina, from d’Est), Edmonds, Everett, Fairfield (from Fierville; most names that end in “-field” come, not the Anglo-Saxon word “field,” but instead from the French “X-ville,” a ville meaning “large town or city” in French);
Faraday as in Michael F., the great chemist (from “de la Ferté”), and so forth.
The horror of the Harrowing
The deliberate annihilation by William and his Normans of all foodstocks and livestock – like Stalin’s “Holodomor” in the 1930s, a famine genocide which the Soviet dictator deliberately caused in the Ukraine to break the independent farmers – meant that anyone who survived the initial Norman massacres with the sword or lance would still die eventually of starvation over the northern European winter.
The land was even salted by the Normans – just as the Romans had done with Carthage – so as to destroy its fertility for decades forward.
As the monk Orderic relates – and again, this Orderic was otherwise a blatant admirer of William – the wretched survivors were reduced literally to the horrors of cannibalism and necrophagy. Some killed and ate their dying family members, and cracked open the skulls of the dead to devour their brains.
This is a chapter of British history of unparalleled darkness, unequaled until the Irish genocide by British Normans 1550-1850, and then the bombing by Norman-ruled Britain of the Saxon capital of Dresden in 1945, which killed at least 350,000 civilians (and horrified many good English people).
This deliberate campaign of terror or horror explains the Pope’s threat of excommunication. Unsurprisingly, among the starved, wretched survivors – with their immune systems severely weakened by hunger, physical abuse (including rape) and emotional trauma — a plague also followed, killing even more of England’s finest northern blood.
Orderic, though half-Norman himself and a supporter, like the pope, of the winner, could find no way to defend William after this unparalleled holocaust:
The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies. He cut down many people and destroyed their homes and land. Nowhere else had he shown such cruelty.
To his shame he made no effort to control his fury, and he punished the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food should be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of hunger.
I have often praised William in this book, but I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.
Interestingly, after that prediction, in his later years William’s wife died prematurely, and William’s own son
Robert Curthose rose up in revolt against him, ravaging his father’s Norman French domains.
The older William then became grossly fat, and in 1087 he was told that King Philip of France had described him as resembling a pregnant woman. Feeling insulted, a furious William then mounted an attack on the French king’s territory.
But after capturing and setting fire to the innocent city of Mantes, he was thrown high in the air by his horse, landed hard on his groin on the metal pommel of his saddle…..
Ouch… that is the pommel sticking up.
……and died after three weeks of agony from a ruptured groin. He was then friendless and absolutely, “utterly alone,” as Orderic notes.
Sadly, the four-year “Harrowing of the North” by William was just the beginning of a new, long dark age of Norman oppression, of the crushing of ancient freedoms for the English people, and soon after that for the Welsh, Scots and the Irish against whom English armies were sent.
William Wallace fights against the Normans (not against the common people of England!).
In some ways the Norman Conquest was not unlike the Bolshevik Revolution, which only involved about 50,000 bolsheviks, who took over a vast country of 150 million. The Norman Conquest, like the Bolshevik putsch, brought war, enslavement, exploitation and fear to the vast majority of the people.
And from this “harrowing” we can see that although the Normans had picked up the French language (from settling in northern France between 900 and 1066), and French certainly is the vehicle of a high culture full of wine, women, song, poetry, cuisine, beauty and elegance, the Normans themselves remained merely Viking marauders in their hearts, still being – to this very day – what the Anglo-Saxon “Battle of Maldon” poem said once of the Vikings: “pirates,” “scavengers” and “slaughter-wolves.”
All the British peoples had to learn bitterly that “if you make it, a Norman will take it” – your land, your crops, your pride, and if possible your wife’s or daughter’s virtue.
It all reminds me exactly of what, over in Eastern Asia, the psychopathic mongol Genghis Khan once said boastfully, giving his own infamous, peculiar definition of pleasure:
The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to
see his cities reduced to ashes, to ride his horses, to see those who love him
shrouded in tears, and to take to your chest his wives and daughters.
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Psychopaths in Power
In the Barnes Review of January-February 2007 my article “Psychopaths in History” discussed the phenomenon of the large role played by psychopaths in world history.
I showed the latest scientific research on psychopaths, indicating that a shocking four percent or more of the general population may be psychopathic, and I defined that term. I showed that we can now look back on seventy years of hard medical case studies of psychopaths by top doctors and scientists such as Hervey Cleckley of Oxford, Martha Stout of Harvard, and Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia. And their medical findings have been buttressed since the 1990s by extensive physical brain scans of the cerebral tissue of certified psychopaths.
Many of these brain scans have been analyzed by Adrian Raine, Ph.D., an Oxford graduate who was a full professor at the University of Southern California 1994-2007 and is now a professor of criminology and psychiatry at the Ivy League’s University of Pennsylvania.
These reports and brain scans all show that there are monstrous individuals who are born not just with a bad attitude — which of course sometimes can be changed by therapy, by sincere religious conversion, or just by making different friends.
No, psychopaths seem accursed with the gravest and most dangerous physical birth defect possible: They are simply born monsters; they have no conscience or shame; they cannot feel remorse no matter what evil they plumb; and they can derive no happiness from helping others (though they may enjoy getting praise from others for doing something good; many Wall Street buccaneers, for PR reasons, are “philanthropists,” and so is the infamous Bill Gates).
But what really “turns them on” is power, and even more, sadistic uses of power; vengeance turns them on; hatred makes them feel alive, and any other intense emotional “trip” that involves taboos awakens their real lust for life.
For the politically “gifted” among them, the ultimate high is the organized mass murder called “war.” This is the reason why Martha Stout’s 2005 bestseller is called The Sociopath Next Door – because psychopaths are not all locked up in prison, but instead many are roaming the halls of power, or appearing nightly on TV and twisting the news, or wreaking havoc inside the families around us.
(The Germans have a striking expression: Strassenengel, Hausbengel, translatable perhaps most deftly as “Street angel, house devil.”)
And according to Stout, these psychopaths are not, as the expression goes, “one in a million,” in other words, as rare in the population as a Ted Bundy type. (Bundy was the infamous Florida serial killer of college women.) Instead, they represent a staggering four percent or more of the population. So a small city such as my own Pittsburgh, with a 300,000 population, could be infested with as many as twelve thousand full-bore psychopaths.
Some scientists speculate that psychopaths lack proper levels of dopamine, and thus they have no ability to experience stimulation from the simple and decent pleasures which normal persons enjoy, such as a beautiful sunset, petting a dog, making a friend feel better by a compliment, or performing a secret act of kindness for the needy.
No, only the most intense, animalistic and visceral thrills bring psychopaths to life. And the breaking of every moral taboo, such as assaulting the weak, the old or very young (à la Jerrry Sandusky), or thefts, rapes, arson and murder, are the kinds of ultra-intense events that succeed in stimulating their dopamine-poor brains.
All this recalls Nietzsche’s too-little known quotation: “The most underrated factor in human history is the flight from sheer boredom.”
And it recalls the Colonel Kilgore that was played by Robert Duvall in the Vietnam movie “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” Spreading terror from a helicopter gunship on a village, roasting people with jellied gasoline, exerting a godlike power from the sky – for a psychopath, what’s not to like?
A traumatic young life
The early life of William the Conqueror (1028-1087) was full of extreme trauma, and such trauma can create a borderline psychopath, called in psychiatry a “disadvantaged psychopath. “ William hardly led the safe and luxurious life of the current British royal children, such as the Prince William we see today, or his brother Harry.
Prince Harry leads an active life.
Duke William (Guillaume) smarted from childhood over being mocked as “William the Bastard.” His mother was a beautiful French peasant girl, and his noble father, Robert, duke of Normandy, dubbed “Robert the Magnificent,” saw the fetching wench one day while riding by as she was washing clothes in a stream. In short order Robert the Magnificent got her with child, but never married her, of course, she being a peasant, though a beautiful one. But he did put the bastard son of this union defiantly on the ducal throne in 1035.
Robert the Magnificent, Duke of Normandy and father of The Bastard
William was nearly murdered several times as a child by other nobles, not wishing to see a bastard rule over them, and right in his own bedroom, as a young teen, he saw his manservant killed defending him from assassins with swords. He once had to flee in the pitch of night for his life on horseback, a very dangerous high-speed ride— especially if one considers the uneven and rutty roads of that time, with of course no street lighting at all back then, low-hanging branches, etc. William could have been thrown by a stumbling horse and broken his neck at any time. (In our own times, actor Christopher Reeve found out how dangerous horses can be even in the daytime when he was thrown and paralyzed.)
Years of trauma may well have shaped William’s psyche, and it was he who set the tone for Norman rule over England. Life for young William was a jungle of murder attempts on his life, and became a question of winning and living or losing and dying, crushing or being crushed – it was about masters and slaves.
I began in 2004 my own voyage into that part of my own ancestry, visiting Normandy, France (Rouen, Omaha Beach, Étretat,
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……and Caen, William’s capital) to learn all I could about those Normans, the French-speaking Vikings who had transformed England into war-land.
The stupendous castle William built at Caen
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As for me, I descend via both parents from Thomas Angell, one of the co-founders in 1636 of the colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (now called “State of Rhode Island”), growing up in my ancestral Providence, Rhode Island. My distant ancestors were those very Vikings who, after conquering Normandy (“Northman-land”) in northern France, went on to conquer England in 1066 and then settled in Ireland in the 1100s.
Coat of arms of Nogent-le-Rotrou in Normandy
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