It's indeed a huge, and hugely wrong, cope. That the Anglo-Saxons were divided into several kingdoms until the Viking invasions forced them to come together under Wessex or die doesn't mean there was no Anglo-Saxon identity (as much as any ethnic identity could exist in a time long before nation-states anyway), any more than Italy being disunified between the Lombard conquest of the peninsula in the late 6th century and the Risorgimento in the 19th meant there was no such thing as an Italian in those 1300 years or that there were no Spanish people between 711 and 1492 because Castile, Leon, Galicia and Aragon all existed as separate kingdoms throughout most of the Middle Ages. And that argument doesn't even work because England had been a singular, unified political entity for about a century & a half before the Normans ran it over.
The English kingdoms didn't speak different Angle and Saxon and Jutish languages, they just spoke different dialects of the same language (Englisc, or Old English). Their adherence to Roman Catholicism set them apart from the pagan Vikings and, to a lesser extent, the distinct Celtic Christianity of the Britons/Welsh. An Englishman from Wessex would most definitely not consider himself interchangeable with a Welshman from across Offa's Dyke, and a Northumbrian would find that West Saxon more familiar than he would a Pict from past the ruins of the Antonine Wall.
Even the political organization of Saxon England was different from those of the continent until the Normans rolled in and imposed what we would recognize as feudalism (the 'Norman Yoke', if you will) on the locals, which included things like eliminating allodial (inherently private) property - now all land in the kingdom belonged to the Norman king and you were only just renting it - unlike the situation under the English and Danish kings. (No shit an Enlightenment era liberal like Jefferson, who liked the ideal of yeomen farmers owning & running small farms, would prefer to identify with the Saxons than the centralizing and more directly oppressive Norman ruling class)
Finally the argument that Anglo-Saxons aren't Anglo-Saxons because they weren't the first people in Britain is stupid enough that I don't even need to address it. Suffice to say that if that's the case, then there are no Europeans outside the Basques and Georgians because everyone else's Indo-European ancestors were native only to the Ukrainian and Southern Russian steppe; no non-Bedouin Arabs from Hejaz and the Najd are actually Arabs; the only true Africans outside of West Africa are pygmies and the Khoisan, and so on. Literally every-fucking-body outside of these very few groups exclusive to a few regions with terrain that ranges from 'highly defensible to 'inhospitable' aren't autochtonous, they've conquered and been conquered by somebody else at some point in history. That obviously has no bearing on whether the non-autochtons are distinct ethnic groups themselves.
Tl;dr this Jonathan Davis-Secord is wrong and the America First caucus' organizers should've had the stones to commit to their plan regardless of how much the media screeches about how evil & racist they are, because the presstitutes are going to do that anyway regardless of what they do or don't do.
Excellent response. Some of those points came to me as well, but not in such a detailed way, and you mentioned several arguments that never occurred to me
It's indeed a huge, and hugely wrong, cope. That the Anglo-Saxons were divided into several kingdoms until the Viking invasions forced them to come together under Wessex or die doesn't mean there was no Anglo-Saxon identity (as much as any ethnic identity could exist in a time long before nation-states anyway), any more than Italy being disunified between the Lombard conquest of the peninsula in the late 6th century and the Risorgimento in the 19th meant there was no such thing as an Italian in those 1300 years or that there were no Spanish people between 711 and 1492 because Castile, Leon, Galicia and Aragon all existed as separate kingdoms throughout most of the Middle Ages. And that argument doesn't even work because England had been a singular, unified political entity for about a century & a half before the Normans ran it over.
The English kingdoms didn't speak different Angle and Saxon and Jutish languages, they just spoke different dialects of the same language (Englisc, or Old English). Their adherence to Roman Catholicism set them apart from the pagan Vikings and, to a lesser extent, the distinct Celtic Christianity of the Britons/Welsh. An Englishman from Wessex would most definitely not consider himself interchangeable with a Welshman from across Offa's Dyke, and a Northumbrian would find that West Saxon more familiar than he would a Pict from past the ruins of the Antonine Wall.
Even the political organization of Saxon England was different from those of the continent until the Normans rolled in and imposed what we would recognize as feudalism (the 'Norman Yoke', if you will) on the locals, which included things like eliminating allodial (inherently private) property - now all land in the kingdom belonged to the Norman king and you were only just renting it - unlike the situation under the English and Danish kings. (No shit an Enlightenment era liberal like Jefferson, who liked the ideal of yeomen farmers owning & running small farms, would prefer to identify with the Saxons than the centralizing and more directly oppressive Norman ruling class)
Finally the argument that Anglo-Saxons aren't Anglo-Saxons because they weren't the first people in Britain is stupid enough that I don't even need to address it. Suffice to say that if that's the case, then there are no Europeans outside the Basques and Georgians because everyone else's Indo-European ancestors were native only to the Ukrainian and Southern Russian steppe; no non-Bedouin Arabs from Hejaz and the Najd are actually Arabs; the only true Africans outside of West Africa are pygmies and the Khoisan, and so on. Literally every-fucking-body outside of these very few groups exclusive to a few regions with terrain that ranges from 'highly defensible to 'inhospitable' aren't autochtonous, they've conquered and been conquered by somebody else at some point in history. That obviously has no bearing on whether the non-autochtons are distinct ethnic groups themselves.
Tl;dr this Jonathan Davis-Secord is wrong and the America First caucus' organizers should've had the stones to commit to their plan regardless of how much the media screeches about how evil & racist they are, because the presstitutes are going to do that anyway regardless of what they do or don't do.
Excellent response. Some of those points came to me as well, but not in such a detailed way, and you mentioned several arguments that never occurred to me