Tuesday 21 December 2010

Fewtril No.275

It has been said that disgust arises in man from the consciousness of those things which remind him of his beasthood. That must explain my visceral reaction to libertarians.

An Oddness

“[G]o back far enough in history and no group outside Olduvai, in eastern Africa, can lay claim to being truly ‘native’.” [1] 

How long will we have to put up with the sinister eccentricities of these beautiful-souled, would-be race-killers? Likely until either they or their target-groups have been destroyed. In the meantime, amongst other things, we may grapple with their oddities, though I must admit that I am stuggling to understand the sense of this one. Here we are faced with the mystery of how the truth of a land’s not existing three million years ago could mean that no group is native to it when it does exist. Normally one would hold that nativeness to an ethnic group falls within an ethnic category; and that nativeness to an ancestral land or polity falls within an ethnic-territorial or geopolitical category, but here the belief seems to be that no group is native even to its own homeland unless it lives in the same geographical space that was once occupied by a different group first-ancestrally related to it, despite that the group may be of another species, despite that first-ancestorhood depends on what group is being considered, and despite that it is groups in the first place which form the ethnic-territorial bounds wherein they are normally understood to be native. As I say, it is odd, weird even, but then our beautiful-souled fellows aren’t normal, and reasonableness, one may be sure, is not high amongst their priorities.

[1] James Mackay and David Stirrup, “There is no such thing as an ‘indigenous’ Briton”, Comment is Free (The Guardian’s weblog), 20th December 2010.