>and came into being as a "revivalist" ploy to impress visiting royalty from London.
This reminds me of the Mongoloid Laponians in northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula. Supposedly 80,000 people or so, actually much fewer who are pure Laponians. They couldn't even invent the wheel, so to give them some history to extol they are said to be herders of reindeer. Sure. But only since the late 19th century. That part is never mentioned. And ONLY TWELVE PEOPLE actually make money purely from reindeer, by owning enough of them. The vast majority of reindeer owners receive government welfare. "Support for the reindeer industry."
This "tradition that is crucial to Laponian identity" gives them the privilege to push their reindeer into other people's lands. The reindeer eat anything on the ground and chew the bark on the trees, killing them in the cold weather. The Laponians throw trash everywhere. I heard this from a guy who is otherwise leftist but who in this particular topic had the benefit of actually experiencing things for himself, because he lived in Swedish Norrland. Anywhere Laponians, or "Sames", stayed to rest with their reindeer, there was trash strewn by the road. Just like in Indian reservations in the U.S. - a people also said to "live close to nature."
He also said, which I already knew, that when they want some extra money they push a reindeer onto the road in a curve to be hit by a car. Then they cut off the ears with the markings and go to the police to collect insurance money. They say the meat was wasted and couldn't be recovered, but they keep the meat and sell it.
Back in time they were also known to react violently to the use of alcohol or to any sort of conflict. "A Laponian with a knife" was something to be careful around.
Norway's greatest author, the nationalist Knut Hamsun, talks about them in Growth of the Soil, the greatest Norwegian novel ever written, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. It is a fantastic novel about building a home in the wild, turning it into a large farm, and about the interactions with the other farms and the town farther south. It sounds boring but it isn't. In this novel it is mentioned how the Laponians would steal from the most northern farms. When enough people moved to an area the Laponians would melt away, afraid of retribution if enough light was shone on them. An old woman who is a constant hustler, doing odd jobs at farms and stealing some cheese or sausage from the storage whenever she can, befriends a Laponian man, both of them feeling an instinctive kinship. She invites him in to drink coffee - very expensive - in the kitchen of the man she works for.
Anyway. A great novel for seeing what things were really like around the turn of the century. And if you want to read a novel you can point to and say, "this is what conservatism is," this is the novel.
This descendent of clans McGregor, McPherson, Stevens, and Hamilton thanks you for this review. I’m putting this on my list. Last summer my podcast focused on the Enlightenment and David Hume was one of the topics, so I am eager to read this book.
While American conservatives claim they are trying to conserve those values that originated in the Scottish Enlightenment, I think you’d agree with me that living those values may be even more important.
AS an Historian myself, this is one of the modern things that always aggravates the bejeeebus outta me:
"...the snide asides of other writers who feel that even when discussing the good things our ancestors did, they must nevertheless denigrate them with some acontextual reminder of the evil."
That kind of crap makes me wanna gut shoot the bastards who do it. The past is what it is; the people of those times made the choices they made for their reasons. We cannot consider them immoral without the most careful of study to achieve the depth of understanding necessary to fully appreciate their world view and context.
>and came into being as a "revivalist" ploy to impress visiting royalty from London.
This reminds me of the Mongoloid Laponians in northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Russian Kola Peninsula. Supposedly 80,000 people or so, actually much fewer who are pure Laponians. They couldn't even invent the wheel, so to give them some history to extol they are said to be herders of reindeer. Sure. But only since the late 19th century. That part is never mentioned. And ONLY TWELVE PEOPLE actually make money purely from reindeer, by owning enough of them. The vast majority of reindeer owners receive government welfare. "Support for the reindeer industry."
This "tradition that is crucial to Laponian identity" gives them the privilege to push their reindeer into other people's lands. The reindeer eat anything on the ground and chew the bark on the trees, killing them in the cold weather. The Laponians throw trash everywhere. I heard this from a guy who is otherwise leftist but who in this particular topic had the benefit of actually experiencing things for himself, because he lived in Swedish Norrland. Anywhere Laponians, or "Sames", stayed to rest with their reindeer, there was trash strewn by the road. Just like in Indian reservations in the U.S. - a people also said to "live close to nature."
He also said, which I already knew, that when they want some extra money they push a reindeer onto the road in a curve to be hit by a car. Then they cut off the ears with the markings and go to the police to collect insurance money. They say the meat was wasted and couldn't be recovered, but they keep the meat and sell it.
Back in time they were also known to react violently to the use of alcohol or to any sort of conflict. "A Laponian with a knife" was something to be careful around.
Norway's greatest author, the nationalist Knut Hamsun, talks about them in Growth of the Soil, the greatest Norwegian novel ever written, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. It is a fantastic novel about building a home in the wild, turning it into a large farm, and about the interactions with the other farms and the town farther south. It sounds boring but it isn't. In this novel it is mentioned how the Laponians would steal from the most northern farms. When enough people moved to an area the Laponians would melt away, afraid of retribution if enough light was shone on them. An old woman who is a constant hustler, doing odd jobs at farms and stealing some cheese or sausage from the storage whenever she can, befriends a Laponian man, both of them feeling an instinctive kinship. She invites him in to drink coffee - very expensive - in the kitchen of the man she works for.
Anyway. A great novel for seeing what things were really like around the turn of the century. And if you want to read a novel you can point to and say, "this is what conservatism is," this is the novel.
Incidentally, Immanuel Kant was the son of Scottish immigrants to Königsberg, if my memory serves
This descendent of clans McGregor, McPherson, Stevens, and Hamilton thanks you for this review. I’m putting this on my list. Last summer my podcast focused on the Enlightenment and David Hume was one of the topics, so I am eager to read this book.
While American conservatives claim they are trying to conserve those values that originated in the Scottish Enlightenment, I think you’d agree with me that living those values may be even more important.
Great writing as always Theo.
It doesn’t disappoint. Well worth your time.
AS an Historian myself, this is one of the modern things that always aggravates the bejeeebus outta me:
"...the snide asides of other writers who feel that even when discussing the good things our ancestors did, they must nevertheless denigrate them with some acontextual reminder of the evil."
That kind of crap makes me wanna gut shoot the bastards who do it. The past is what it is; the people of those times made the choices they made for their reasons. We cannot consider them immoral without the most careful of study to achieve the depth of understanding necessary to fully appreciate their world view and context.
Of course, Maoris torturing and eating people has to be viewed in its 'cultural context' but everything we did is just evil.
Exactly.
The savages get a pass; our ancestors (an by extension, us) get a bullet to the head.
I read this book in school, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
To this day I still define the term for people when they say, ‘Red Neck,’ thanks to this book.