01-10-2022, 09:22 PM
(01-10-2022, 01:42 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: German is the most common ancestry in northern middle America.
I have some, and a smattering of Dutch, French and Irish too, though I am mostly an ancestral Brit. I'm American for something like 8 to 10 generations on most of my lines. Doesn't that make me, uh, American?
I know. In my case I am about half German and Swiss and about half English, Welsh, and Scots-Irish with a smattering of Dutch, French, Belgian, Irish, Danish, and Norwegian. But go back beyond some early settlers in New England and you find people who had aristocratic ancestors and ultimately Royals. Royalty was an interlocking directorate, with royal houses of England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal (Portuguese kings were really French and Spanish in origin), and Hungary serving as a sort of "interlocking directorate" that lasted until Henry VIII divorced his Spanish wife. King Duncan of Shakespeare's Macbeth is an ancestor and not a pure legend.
Obviously there are plenty of ways to be an American, far more than someone like Classic X'er would admit. I'd say that the plantation slaves could only be American because they had no connection other than genetic to Africa. Slave-masters brutally obliterated any trace of African culture among them in order to destroy any sense of community among them. We of course know who the First Americans were. It may be surprising that the Aztecs who established a remarkable empire, barbarous only for having bloodthirsty gods, are descended from Ute and Shoshone people of the Great Basin. Many Mexican-Americans thus have genuinely-American ancestors through the Aztecs.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.