An Example of Perspective

I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed. Looking Glass is dead. Toohulhulsote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led the young men is dead. It is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are--perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

- Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, 1877

Today's mindless rant is born of technology, or more precisely, the failure of technology. In essence, I am using my little soapbox here to reply to someone else's blog because their "Leave a Comment" function isn't working. It's not their fault, but sound off I must, or otherwise possibly suffer a stroke. This is in reference to Dr. Mike Milton's 2008 blog -- hey, I'm just catching up now! -- about Norman Davies: "Norman Davies and the Appalling Problem of a Failure to Stand" (September 2, 2008; www.mikemilton.org). Now, I'll admit to being a Norman Davies fan but my point isn't to defend a man who doesn't need defending. No, I have other issues to grab my pitchfork over. First, take a moment and read Dr. Milton's entry. Go ahead; I'll wait.

I tripped across this entry by mistake while I was searching for something else. My reaction is not anger, just a sense that something fundamental is being missed. Whenever I read the quote above by Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, my heart breaks. It is a quote saturated with sadness, weariness, exhaustion, but more importantly, defeat. This kind of experience is unknown to most Americans. Yes, the Confederacy lost the Civil War, and the Vietnam War ended in failure, but the Civil War was almost 150 years ago, and while the Vietnam experience was bitter for many Americans, it was ultimately something that happened over there -- somewhere else. Chief Joseph isn't just humiliated in having lost, he was speaking those words as a subjugated man whose destiny (and whose people's destiny) was forever more in someone else's hands -- his enemies' hands, to be specific. The Nez Percé's homes, their way of life, their beliefs; all were crushed and taken away by this defeat. It wasn't even just foreign occupation, it was exile, expulsion and virtual imprisonment in reservations, forever more at the mercy of their enemies' good will.

In his review of Davies' book The Isles, a History -- a history of Professor Davies' native British Isles -- Dr. Milton is upset at the book's seeming lack of British patriotism, and what he sees in both Dr. Davies and other similar Welsh experiences Dr. Milton had during a sojourn in Wales as a sort of Welsh tendency towards Balkanization, a centrifugal tendency among some peoples of Britain which fails to recognize just how good the British peoples have it in the United Kingdom, and how important unified national identities are. I'm not going to take issue with the last two statements, but I feel the need to explore the world a bit from the Welsh point of view for Dr. Milton's benefit.

I'll start by mentioning that I am neither English nor Welsh by ancestry. However, coming from a background in Eastern Europe, I have some insight into the kind of cultural forces that drive a people to behave as Dr. Milton witnessed in Wales, forces born of historic defeat and subjugation. The Scots were partners in creating the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, through a long process that began with the Scottish Stuarts holding both the Scottish and English crowns in the 17th century -- that part didn't end so well -- and ended ultimately in the Act of Union of 1707 by which Scotland and England united to form, well, the United Kingdom. This was a voluntary act by both countries which entailed debate in both their parliaments, and ultimately came down to a vote in both. For all the blustering of modern Scottish nationalism, the leaders of early 18th century Scotland chose to join with England.

Wales is a bit different. The Welsh are the descendants of the ancient Celtic Britons who fled first the Roman, and then later the Anglo-Saxon-Danish invasions of the British Isles. It is no mistake that Wales is a mountainous region; the ancestors of the Welsh literally fled to the hills. Turns out that wasn't enough, however; From before even Alfred the Great united Anglo-Saxon England in A.D. 845, the Anglo-Saxons and their English progeny constantly invaded Wales, and over several centuries' time, colonized its few towns. The Welsh survived as a culture by retreating further and further into the mountain wilderness, until there was nowhere left to retreat. Wales has spent its entire history ruled by Englishmen, often quite brutally. The last time a Welshman ruled Welsh territory, English was not yet a language, existing still as an Anglo-Saxon-Danish peasant language incomprehensible to even later Middle English-speakers like Shakespeare. Only in the 20th century has Welsh culture finally been able to openly be expressed, and Welshmen been able to take the first feeble steps in limited self-government since the 14th century, thanks to the Plaid Cymru revival movement. This is not so much a sob story as an opportunity to point out that Wales was decidedly not a voluntary party to the creation to the Act of Union in 1707. Wales existed only as a legal entity, whose title belonged exclusively to the British crown. The Welsh people were inconsequential to the British political unit called 'Wales'. The British 'Wales' effectively existed in London, not Swansea or Cardiff.

Now, the 20th century Wales that Norman Davies grew up in is a very different place and the massacres and humiliations of previous centuries are a thing of the past, but a culture that spends centuries under subjugation cannot so easily forget the past. Can Dr. Milton imagine what it's like to belong to a culture which has suffered foreign occupation and often brutal subjugation so long that most of your people forget their own language, adopting instead the language of the occupiers? Ask the Irish about that sometime. Norman Davies, in an earlier book on Polish history, quotes a Scotsman as advising the Poles who were recently (re-)subjugated by the Russians: "If you cannot stop the bear from swallowing you, at least do not let it digest you." These are words to live by for all subjugated peoples for preserving their cultures in the face of long-term hostile foreign occupation. And even today, because of arcane British laws, despite the relative sovereignty Wales has regained in the modern U.K., most Welshmen -- who are not Anglicans -- cannot hold many of the highest political offices in the U.K. True, the same is true of all non-Anglicans in the U.K., including in England itself, but a much higher proportion of Welsh are not Anglicans than English. It is a mere detail and a holdover from days when Britain truly was serious about religion, but still, it is an active remnant of one part of a system which denied the Welsh control over their own land.

Now, my purpose here was not to bash the British; I admire Britain -- including the English -- and consider the U.K. one of the sanest countries on the planet. My point was merely to point out however that the historical experiences of the English in relationship to Britain, similar to the experiences of European-derived Americans in their relationship to the United States, is one very qualitatively different from, say, African-Americans, Native Americans...or the Welsh. Though these peoples may now enjoy (finally) the full benefits of citizenship and relative self-government, and are no longer hindered in expressing their culture(s), it is only after a very long history of extreme mistreatment and the current benefits of citizenship notwithstanding, they will never be able to look upon the Union Jack or old Stars and Stripes in quite the same way as a Connecticut-born Yankee with ancestral ties stretching back to the Mayflower. Norman Davies describes this reality in his book by mentioning that for whatever ultimate loyalty the many peoples of Britain may muster for the United Kingdom -- and there is little indication that Wales will attempt to secede any time soon -- any sense of a 'British' patriotism (as opposed to 'English', 'Scottish' or 'Welsh') will not surprisingly often be quite weak outside England (and to a lesser extent, Scotland) itself. Remember that there is no 'British' soccer team; England, Scotland and Wales all have their own teams. How many American flags would you expect to see flying on Lakota Indian reservations in South Dakota this July 4th?

To sum it up, I'll paraphrase an example from an article in Time Magazine from 1992, commemorating the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyages to the Americas; the article quoted two friends in Brazil, one a descendant of Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, the other the descendant of local Native Indians. Looking out over the ocean, the Jewish Brazilian said, "Columbus' discovery meant salvation for my people," while the (Native) Indian Brazilian responded, "...and it meant disaster for mine."

That's history for ya.