The Celtic Diaspora

As most of you know, I am of partially Celtic extraction. Specifically, I am 1/4 Cornish. My Grandma Jean, nee Rowe, is purely Cornish, and her mother and father emigrated to the United States. Her family comes from Cornwall, one of the six Celtic nations; In the linked map, Scotland is blue, Ireland is green, Wales is red, Cornwall is yellow, Brittany is black, and the Isle of Man is tan. The Celts were and are an ethnic and linguistic group of unclear origin, which settled in Middle Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the British Isles in the late centuries B.C.

The rise of Rome and later of the barbarians drove the Celts westward, to Britain. Britain is the most heavily Celtic region of Europe, partially because the Romans arrived there comparatively late in their golden age, and didn't stay very long compared to other regions in Britain. After the Roman retreat across the Channel, the Celts flowered in the Isles, and remained the dominant force there until the Angles and Saxons invaded from Continental Europe. Some Celtic nations made the mistake of allying themselves with the Danes and Vikings against the Anglo-Saxons, and when the Norsemen were defeated, the invaders were even more anti-Celt.

Sub-Roman Britain is a confusing picture. In many ways we know more about the time of Christ than we do about this era. We do know that the British Isles were split into small, frequently warring kingdoms. Cornwall was one, and there were several each in Brittany, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In many ways, it was a very mythic age. It is startling how little we know. Unlike, say, Easter Island, the archaeological evidence the Sub-Roman Celts left has not been left untouched by human activity since the deaths of its builders. Britain was, for at least five hundred years, the crux of civilization, and the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons still felt a genetic distaste for all things Celtic. The greatest medieval myth, and the greatest fruitless quest both came from Celtica: the sagas of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and the Quest for the Holy Grail. Legend has it that Arthur himself was born in Tintagel Castle, Cornwall. In time the Kings of Wessex and the other Anglo kingdoms conquered the Celts, and were in turn conquered by the Normans. But the Celts remained apart, seperated from their continental usurpers by language and a proud heritage.

Perhaps the Celts had something that the straitlaced, conservative Anglo-Saxons, and even more so the later invading, French-speaking Normans, did not. Certainly much modern day fantasy and yearning for the past dwells on the Celtic era. All modesty aside, I am quite well-read in modern fantasy, and I have yet to come across a fantasy with no Celtic aspirations. Tolkien's mythos was drawn from Welsh and Finnish languages and legends, and everyone else has built upon him. The Narnia stories are a sole exception, seeming oddly very Anglo-Saxon. Series' like Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain are explicitly Celtic, and it is perhaps in reading them that I developed my fascination with the Celtic aspect, although some of it can be attributed to my ancestry and my wider love of everything to do with Britain.

Enter Marcus Tanner's Last of the Celts. This thick book devotes a long chapter to each of the Celtic nations, concentrating primarily on their modern state. In brief, I will summarize him. Scotland, although granted some token measures of independence, is still subservient to England in every way. Since the Battle of Culloden and the defeat of the Scottish Stuart claim to the English throne in 1746, the Scottish have been firmly under the British boot, and unlike their neighbors across the Irish Sea, have shown little interest until recently in doing anything about it. The Lowlands of Scotland were settled by Non-Celts very, very early, and lost Scottish Gaelic early on. In the Highland and island regions of Scotland, however, it survived and survives to this day, although there is little support for it and the number of speakers is decreasing dramatically.

Ireland, on the other hand, was in a bloody constant state of rebellion for years, and was finally granted independence from the United Kingdom in the 2os. Since then, it has become the "Celtic Tiger," a powerhouse Capitalist economy, now with a higher GDP than its British neighbor. The language, however, is not in as great shape. There is huge government support for it, but Irish speakers are in a minority, and possibly shrinking. Still, the Irish have much to be hopeful for. Northern Ireland, the part that remains under the Crown, is in some parts like inner-city Belfast, are mini-Irish-language areas, called "Gaeltachts." However, under even less supportive Great Britain, it is unclear, in the years after "The Troubles" between the Protestant Unionists and the Catholic Nationalists, how Irish in the North can move forward.

Wales is almost as divided as Ireland. In earlier centuries, the South and North were both deeply Welsh. Anglicization was almost unthinkable. However, the Industrial Revolution turned the tables. Tiny medieval villages were transformed into hellish industrial landscapes by coal and copper and iron. This led to a huge influx of workers, Anglophone workers, and South Wales soon became in some ways a part of England. North Wales, however, where I've been, looks better. Everyone we met and spoke to in the extreme northwest, near Bangor, had a strong Welsh accent. For some, Welsh was obviously their first language. Wales has a space-age Assembly building and some token gestures of devolution granted by London, but still remains subservient to England.

Breton is barely spoken in Brittany any longer. The rampant Francophone centralization of every French government since the Bourbon monarchs, and especially since the Revolution. French was the language of the Revolution, Paris was the city of the revolution. Far worse than in the UK, Breton is actively persecuted in France. This medieval attitude is a further example, as if anyone needed it, of the wine-sodden depravity of the dirty, unshaven vinos across the Channel...sorry.

Cornwall is perhaps the most melancholy story at all. The Cornish language is fully extinct. The last speakers were not recorded in any way. Dolly Pentreath, the improbably famous fishwife from St. Ives who was the last full Cornish speaker, died in the eighteenth century. Revival efforts are doomed to failure. The inflection, the pronunciation are all gone--all that is left is stilted, melancholy phrases. Cornwall itself may eventually achieve its own Assembly, just as Wales and Scotland have, but it is of all of the Celtic Nations, besides the Isle of Man, the only one to have lost its language. A sad state of affairs.

Marcus Tanner's book is pessimistic until the last few sentences, where he quotes an Irish poem talking about putting the Irish language in the river, hoping that it might be picked up by "some Pharaoh's daughter." A somewhat fatalistic and lackadaisical attitude towards the whole future of the Celtic identity.

Why is Celtic identity so important? What do the Celts have that makes them unique. On my Facebook profile, I divide myself this way: "I am from British-Norwegian-Celtic extraction, and my I think I am equal parts British (my worldliness, love of literature and the Bard,) Norwegian, (the Blue-Collar part of me; humor) and Celtic, (the mystical, supernatural side.)" Being Celtic could be summarized as irrational escapism from the emotionless panorama of Anglo-Saxon rationality, but it is something more. The Universe is not rational. God is not rational. God is above both rationality and its opposite, emotion, and his perfect creation is as well. We humans cannot achieve that; we give in too much to one or the other. We need to integrate both into our belief. The Celts, as prime exemplars of the emotional worldview, are worthy of close scrutiny.

Buchanan and the Necessary War

Most sane people acknowledge that World War II was a vertigo-inducing height of human achievement. When my grandfather and the rest of the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion assailed the sheer cliff at Pointe Du Hoc in Normandy, they were fighting, albeit unknowingly, to defend Western civilization, and indeed civilization as a whole, from forces that would have ripped it apart like tissue paper. This, at least, is the widely accepted story.

Patrick J. Buchanan, the irascible but rock-ribbed anti-neo-con/libertarian-leaning Conservative, has a new book out, entitled--with, I'm sure, absolutely no aim to cause controversy--"Churchill, Hitler, and the Unecessary War." Of course, it refers to World War II.

Buchanan is an outspoken critic of the War in Iraq, and it is not hard to guess why he chose to write this book in the current climate of anti-war hysteria. He means, by denigrating WWII's status as a "just war," to provide an analogy to the Iraqi conflict. As if they are really comparable. World War II was a world-shaking conflict of philosophies. The Iraq War is hardly more than a regional turf conflict--granted, with the simmering juices of Islamic Jihad, it could become more--but it is in it's essentials something which is only such an enormous worldwide news item because it is the only conflict going on in the world at this time involving one of the world's Superpower(s).

In his book, Buchanan targets Churchill. Churchill, perhaps the greatest leader of the twentieth century. The man who led Britain through the greatest struggle she has faced since Boadicea met Gaius Suetonius Paulinus where modern-day King's Cross Station stands. Possibly the second-most-quotable man that has ever lived, after The Bard. It is he that Buchanan choses to attack. Hitler was amenable to peace, he says. Appeasement would have worked, he says. This conflict could have been avoided, he says.

Buchanan does not, it seems, believe in the just or necessary war. Most people, as I mentioned earlier, think that despite the horrible human toll, World War II was worth fighting--that it in fact was just an necessary. By glossing over Hitler and punching down Churchill, Buchanan undermines the basis for WWII. But what does he mean by it?

David Pryce-Jones, in his review of this book for National Review (unfortunately behind the subscriber barrier, says,

As the book unfolds, the puzzled reader is driven to ask himself more and more insistently what Buchanan’s intention is. What is the point of trying to twist Churchill’s wartime role inside out? Does he seriously believe there is no such thing as a just war? He can’t want to denigrate democracy, can he? Nor can he really want to rehabilitate Hitler, can he? He can’t think Stalin might have been a sincere ally, can he? Whatever is an American doing bewailing the end of the British Empire and criticizing his own country for picking up as many of the pieces as possible? Why the superficiality of the argument? Why the aggressively politicized tone?

Pryce-Jones is as puzzled as I am, because in the end, Buchanan can only mean to say that on some level, Hitler was not worth fighting, or alternatively, he's stretching the truth and even what he believes into knots, attacking the current war with analogy. So, there are two possibilities. Either Buchanan doesn't have it in for old Adolph like the rest of us do, or he is shamelessly lying to undermine the idea of a "just war," and thus the War in Iraq.

Neither of those conclusions are particularly appealing. I expected better of Buchanan, who after all did run for the Republican nomination in 1996.

Are there really just wars? Some people, even some Christians, do not believe so. To study this question in depth would take more time and Biblical knowledge than I have at the moment, but perhaps just one small example I think pertinent: When Jesus ransacked the temple of everything unclean, he was fighting. Fighting against the hypocrisy in the Jewish religion, fighting the desecration of His Father's temple. The soldiers in World War II were also fighting. Although no one would claim that Great Britain and its allies were perfect, they were orders of magnitude better than their opponents. Of course, the latter is a human endeavor, and perhaps it is arrogant to compare the two things. However, when the Allies pulled down the Swastika flag from the Reichstag, they were striking a blow for freedom. Freedom, if nothing else, is a Biblical concept. Christ set us free with his sacrifice.

God gave Man the world in Genesis. He remains in ultimate control, but we have power over what we do in this world. And our actions in this world are ultimately accountable to God. So, there were two choices Americans and Britons faced in the early stages of the Second World War: appease Hitler and allow him to do untold damage to the Jews, the Roma, and everyone else who stood in his way, or fight him to the last man and secure a "new birth of freedom" in the Republic and around the world.

I hope the right choice is clear.

I hesitate to compare the Iraq War to WWII. I can safely say that there are tyrranical regimes just as bad as Saddam Hussein. North Korea, Cuba, and Iran come to mind. The Al-Qaeda terrorists aside, why did we have to attack the country on this list with the greatest oil reserves. Sure, we have struck a blow for freedom in the Mideast: the only question is, will it last?

Pryce-Jones concludes:

After hundreds of pages, the final sentence of the book suddenly illuminates these questions: “And to show the world he means business, President Bush has had placed in his Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill.” So here’s another wretched so-called statesman repeating old mistakes by setting off in search of adventures abroad that are not in the national interest, indeed unnecessary. So Churchill had to be knocked down in order to scotch any notion that President Bush in his foreign policy might have been following a good and brave example.

The method behind Buchanan's madness comes to light: discredit Bush at any cost. Even if this needed doing, I think Buchanan could have chose a far better argument against Bush than attacking his role model, Winston Churchill, perhaps the greatest leader of human endeavors since Nelson, a century and a half earlier, who also struck a blow for freedom at Trafalgar, and gave his life for it.

In the end, this hit job on Churchill can only fail miserably. If it was written for some other motive than to discredit Bush, it might be worth something historically, but even that is denied to it. It never works to go back through history and change things to suit your premeditated conclusion, which is exactly what Buchanan did.