I can’t believe that today is the first time I’ve ever noticed that England in German means “Not very far away land”.
The internet says that the name of England comes from “Land of the Angles” after a group of northern Germanic people (Anglo = Engla) who settled there in the 5th century to build up the whole Anglo-Saxon tribe with the Anglos coming from north of the river Elbe in northern Germany and the Saxons coming from the south of the Elbe right around Hamburg, where I live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles#/media/File:Anglo-Saxon_Homelands_and_Settlements.svg
Call me crazy, but I like my explanation of the etymology better.
‘Eng land’ = ‘a not very far away land’ that was populated by two groups of people who weren’t really two, self-identified groups, but who were given the names of Angles and Saxons by some very modern, British historians who might’ve been extrapolating from old British texts rather than from the correct, Germanic or Roman texts.
Consider that the Roman maps from the 1st century do not refer to Anglos (north of the Elbe) or Saxons (South of the Elbe) as in the first map I showed. The older maps show Saxons as north of the Elbe and Angli as a small group of fishermen on the East sea. Note that this is a big inconsistency between the 1st century (Roman) and the 5th century (British) maps.
I personally think that the British map is probably based on back propagating 7th century stories from Britain rather than forward propagating 1st century stories from Germany.
One historian wrote that Anglos and Saxons were the same people with the same origin, they were just identified in Britain according to German and Roman conventions according to northern/southern geographical regions. This is consistent with my suggestion that ‘Angland’ comes from how the Germans would refer to the place where they settled rather than to some self-identifying nation of ‘Ang’ that was used back in Germany.
I’ll go back to the British map of the 5th century for a second look at what they got right.
- The Frisians were a different tribe altogether. Today, they speak Plattdeutsch which is more like English than German, but back in the 5th century, their Plattdeutsch (flat/low German) may have been the same language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon migrants.
- The language spoken by the mountain Germans is still hard to understand by the modern day hoh/high Germans who used a more uniform standard for their business dealings. It is something in between flat German and mountain German.
- Jutes were, of course, Danes and their language is more like Swedish than like English or German.
- Franks were, of course, French people who spoke something closer to Latin and Celtic than to the Germanic languages.
Note that these 5th-9th century migrations corresponded to a cold period, after which Viking/Danish settlers grew barley in Greenland in the warm period. The people from harsher climates expanded their territory when the weather got bad, bringing their survival techniques to new lands that needed them. Heck, a kilt is not the right thing to wear when it is cold out. Sassenachs (Saxons) had some pants for sale in the adjacent village.
What I’m trying to point out is that it makes sense that the biggest regional trading partners and emigration source (the cities along the rivers in Germany) would get the privilege of naming the island where their relatives emigrated. “Eng land” = ‘not very far away land’ would be a logical name for Germanic people to choose for the portion of the British Isles where they settled.
The only thing that is certain in Roman history is that the “Angles” of the northern Elbe region were named by Tacitus as – Anglii after their dependence on fishing. Meanwhile, the wiki proposes three completely different theories for the naming of the population of Anglo-Saxon migrants as “Angles”.
- Danish lore describes a mythical king who had sons named Dan and Angul who were given control of modern day Denmark (Dan) and the Anglo-Saxon (Angul) territories.
- The territory of Denmark and Anglo-Saxony are relatively narrow, thus the word Ang = Eng for narrow or not wide or not distant was used to name the region.
- Both regions depended on fishing (Angeln) and that is where the Ang came from in Anglo-Saxony.
I call nonsense on all of these points, since
- There was very likely no king who unified Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein back before the 5th century. These were flat, farming areas with independently guarded, small holdings. I love the classic, coastal Danish farmhouse design. They are built like little castles with an enclosed courtyard in the middle.
- From the perspective of anyone living there, Denmark is not Eng or narrow, nor is Schleswig-Holstein. That would be an absurd idea for people of the time who had no sense of continental scales.
- All of the regions depended on fishing, so having one of the lands name itself after fishing would be stupid. People don’t choose extremely stupid names for themselves.
Not only that, back then people of the regions we know as Denmark and Schleswig Holstein and the Elbe didn’t give themselves such nationalistic identities. Those are modern concepts. The people of those times identified with their towns and cities and when they migrated, they would refer to their destination as the “not far away land”. Eng – land
I suppose it is possible that England’s name came from a variation on Ent-land = land of the ducks or land of the settlers, but the Vikings settled in many places, so this doesn’t sound specific enough.
There you have it. I claim that British historians are wrong about the origin of the name of England. It has nothing to do with the idea that the word ‘Anglo’ is derived from the word for ‘East sea fishing people = Anglii’ via Tacitus.
‘England’ comes from the German word for ‘not very far away land’ and British historians didn’t like the idea that their country had been named by Germans, so they came up with the ‘Anglo’ story instead.
Maybe all this historical rehashing is good for is a reminder that what goes around comes around. Once upon a time, northern German Vikings took over half of England while using wooden boats and setting up trading outposts adjacent to existing, struggling villages.
At this point, I should segue into something relevant to what is going on with Germany, England, Russia, and Ukraine, but that makes me tired. Nevertheless, I think it is worth doing to show our common origins.
Like England, Russia or Russland was similarly named by Vikings, albeit of a more eastern variety. One source attributes the name of Russland to a Norse term for ‘Rus = men who row’. It would make sense for a dominant, trading group to name another group according to their level of maritime skill and, as a more land-locked, iced in country, the Russland people would naturally use transport methods suitable to rivers.
Russia attributes their name and the birth of their nation to the eleventh century connection of north to south that happened when Kiev became the Viking trading outpost with the Byzantine empire.
The Norse naming convention of Russland was already being used in the 9th century when Kievian Rus took over the trade that had previously been dominated by the Khazars. Once the Byzantines agreed with the naming convention, it stuck.
Some fighting was used to establish trade routes, but more often, the Viking expansion method was to set up trading outposts adjacent to existing towns, growing until the older town was consumed by the newer.
I find it interesting that in English, Germany’s name comes from the Romans (Tacitus – Germania) while in German, the name Deutschland is said to mean ‘the free people’s land’ or ‘belonging to the people land’, although a closer look at the etymology suggests that Deutsch stems from the word for Teuton or Teut which looks and sounds like the word ‘tut’ which means ‘does’ from the verb ‘to do’. That’s why I think ‘Land of the people who do’ sounds like a more fundamental definition of the original meaning of ‘Deutschland’ since it draws a contrast with the nearest neighbors, Jutland, a name that references the type of farm people operated, a Gut, or good, suggesting that the people of Jutland valued staying put on the farm as serfs while the people of Deutchland valued going out to do things with more freedom.
I might be extrapolating a bit too much, but I think it is helpful to try to view language through the eyes of those who were in the dominant, land-owning tribe.
- Russland — The men who row’s land
- England — Not very far away land
- Poland — Field land
- Finland — Swamp land
- Holland — Wood land
- Grunland — Green land
- Eisland — Icy land
- Swedeland — Self-sufficient land
- Gottland — God’s land
- Jutland — Collective farming land
- Deutschland — Doing land
What is certain is that Jutland is an older name for Denmark and Jut is a variant of Gut (collective farm or good) and this word is stemming from Goth (Viking) or Gott (god). In its older form, it refers to what the people valued most and in its newer form, it refers to their style of farming with a small, castle-like enclosure with a courtyard in the middle. It is a multifamily arrangement that offers good protection from the perpetual winds.
Where they lived, the Goths referred to themselves as the Gut Puida which basically translates as good people or people of the farming collectives, unless you focus on the etymology in which ‘gut’ means ‘to pour’ or ‘to give birth’. In contrast, when the men were abroad, the name ‘Goths’ refers to men of god or men who felt enslaved to or a duty to Gottland, unless you focus on etymologies in which ‘goti’ is a word for horse or man.
“Who are you?”
“Goths… men.”
How a Roman and a Viking say hello to one another. It makes sense.
The Goths were, of course, the people from an central governance island called Gottland that sent three ships down to harass the Romans while their empire fell apart and was taken over by a Barbarian named Odoacer, but they were also closely related to the Jutes/Gutes of Jutland/Gutland who sent their refugees/settlers to Kent in England to set up cooperative business relationships in the cold, 5th century.
The 5th century migration to England may have corresponded to a lot of flooding throughout Jutland (Denmark) and Saxony (Germany, Deutschland), but it is hard to tell since there are no written records of the migration in Britain until the 7th century. At least that is what the wiki says.
What I know for certain is that a Landgut today is a sort of farming collective owned by a type of noble and naming Jutland after this farming practice would distinguish the people of Jutland/Gutland (the collective farming land) from Deutschland (the doing land) where a more independent type of farming or commerce was practiced because of the extensive network of rivers.
Within the Viking tribes there was some distinction between the Jutes/Goths/Gutones (the good ones — the ones who stay put on the communal farm) and the Germans/Saxons/Teutones (the tribal ones — the ones who do [tut=do]). They didn’t always like one another. One group functioned like a collective in Jutland or Gutland (the collective farming land) and the other functioned more tribally with more independent parts in Deutschland (the doing land).
People have changed a lot over the past century. Their addictions have especially changed. Back in the Viking times, the only entertainment available was sex, a warm fire, and spices from the Orient, so that was what people fought for. Nowadays, they fight for their sanity amid technological transformation and the fragmentation of their communities via social disconnection.
What does it look like when people go to war to reclaim their sanity? Do they smash their iPads? I saw a Russian father doing just that in response to the start of the war. “We don’t need your pretty things!” he said as his son hammered on the iPad.
It doesn’t look like that is what the Russian soldiers are fighting for today. Is it brutalski glory they are after? That would fit the heroic, anti-nazi narrative they want to create. Is this a resurgence of the Gutonic-Teutonic, collective-independent conflicts of old? They don’t seem to be fighting for the right to have an X-Box, but perhaps there is a way to connect modern-Nazism to X-Boxes and iPads. Equivocating brain death via isolation with physical death in concentration camps sounds wrong, though. They can’t pry those devices out of every child’s hands, so there must be a better solution that provides a moment of catharsis and gives everyone something that they want and need.
That is the motivation behind the horrifying yet ultimately beneficial scenario I will sketch out. It relies on people to choose the blue pill over the red pill and reject cowardly chaos in favor of an almost unendurably courageous ice magic.
It is worth thinking about what is motivating those who fund this conflict, poking the bear, so to say. I think this is a method to take back state control from people who have become too independent. This event, when taken far enough, could drive a group of pre-conditioned financial criminals into bunkers/prisons from which they might only be released once they realize the errors of their ways. When they re-emerge on the other side of the bottleneck, up is down and down is up. While for those who led balanced lives, little change will be detected. All they will notice is that law and order have won the day and preserved the governments of all countries that were threatened by criminality imported via the internet. Essentially, it is in the interest of any government to trigger a military conflict and use the fearful responses of people to adjust their places in society. If they run and hide, they lose their place. If they contribute to law, order, and functioning supply chains, they maintain status. If they fight and win over those who are weaker, well.. when you win in this game, you lose. It is a stress test of a system grown corrupt and inefficient.
If that stone is cast, this conflict does not stop with Ukraine. Think of the million refugees pouring over the Polish border. How many of the old, Ukrainian ladies are Russian men in drag? How many of the Syrian refugees waiting on the border between Belarus and Poland are actually Syrian? How many of the weapons sent to defend Ukraine will be used to attack Poland? This all makes me think that passive resistance is the only reasonable response to an unwinnable situation. They march through the flat lands and only get turned around at Kassel, the highest point between the flatlands and Frankfurt. Under the right conditions, urban warfare and taking cities wouldn’t be worth doing other than to blockade reinforcements. The nukes the US put in Germany are just to the south of Frankfurt in the Eifel and that would probably be their symbolic/strategic goal. If they were handed over, then the fight would be over. They don’t want to rule Poland or Germany, they just want the missiles out — and they want their natural gas pipelines to go through. Catching a few criminals in the crossfire and finding a few science Nazis also wouldn’t be a bad result. After all, what was Naziism other than state-sanctioned criminality? If the government funded some bad, criminal scientists and didn’t hold them to task, they’ve allowed Nazis to take root in their system.
The way to engineer a situation in which an invading army is not attacked even once and in which no cities are damaged is with a children’s crusade. One sends half of a million 18 year old kids to ‘defend’ the border. Their leaders make them terrified and cause them to surrender almost immediately without engaging in any real fighting. They are then spread throughout the invading convoy as human shields — one kid per invading soldier. Mothers along the invasion route create signs for their children and leave offerings before the convoy rolls past their town towards the heavily fortified mountain pass at Kassel. In principle, the entire convoy could be destroyed at this point at a cost to the lives of their children, but no lives are lost. Both sides bravely refrain from attacking one another. The nuclear weapons are handed over and the convoy turns around without blowing up a single building or killing a single person. Everyone goes home with their honor and dignity intact. The 18 year old children are left at the border as the invaders depart. Try as they might, those who wanted to engineer destruction could not make these people kill one another and the US couldn’t bomb the convoy without making all of the parents of the 18 year old boys turn on them, nor could the soldiers be ordered to fire on their own children.
Imagine how Iraq would look today if the invaders had been sent hundreds of thousands of defenseless children as escorts in their search for weapons of mass destruction.
There is so much symbolism in this situation. The youth are ordinarily the segment of the population that the police are trying to control and in this picture, they have been offered up as bait while the older people are kept safe. It is so absurd when the rhetoric of war is stripped away and the process is laid bare as a sacrifice of the young. How could those children not feel betrayed and how could their captors not feel sympathy for them. After surviving such an ordeal, they would be entitled to a power shift between themselves and their parents and respect for enduring a rite of passage into manhood. What is it that they all dream of? Getting married and rescuing animals? Animal care provides good practice for figuring out how to raise kids in a situation where the state or video games don’t take over. How strange it would be for a move towards greater independence to take hold in that generation. Independence weakens that collective mindset that Germans have always relied upon to survive, but certain threats require an independent mindset. If every young person was stuck in an apartment block during the next pandemic, they might all die unless some subset created islands of independence to which they could run.
In this scenario, none of the normal people are hiding in bunkers. They are still moving goods through the economy and conducting as much business as usual.
Most of war is economic and if rewards were created for those who cooperated with all of the terrifying, surrendering strategies, there could be indirect penalties for those who hid in bunkers. To create this distinction, the financial markets have to dive by a factor of 3, hitting bedrock at 1999 and ending the era of expansionary monetary policy. Expansion is a good way to keep money flowing, even if it is based on an illusion and I’m not sure what a factor of 3 hit would mean for the bond markets which make up the majority of capital since inflated stock prices are used to allow companies to pay off their debts (bonds). That would mean that many bonds become worthless when the stocks drop and the company loses solvency without government credit lines. Without a major adjustment to social security or without a targeted replacement of pension funds (without regard for billionaires), one would have to re-inflate everything to keep that from happening and keep up the artificial inflation indefinitely. I don’t think that is a good solution. The present system is designed to force everyone to take part in the financial system — pension system, but if the air was let out of the post 1999 bubble, there would be less of an incentive for participation in this version of corporate communism that calls itself capitalist. It would become something that only bankers dealt with rather than every Tom, Dick, or Sally with a set of AI managed Vanguard ETFs that shift the blame away from the real decision makers when things fall apart.
The goal of any economic system is to make sure that people take care of their property and don’t let it fall into disrepair while hiding in a bunker or retiring at age 30 because of a big stock portfolio, so one has to have a way of transferring responsibility from bunker dwellers who didn’t do due diligence into the hands of people who will protect the property and that typically entails a partial transfer of ownership. Ordinarily, a bank would gradually take that ownership due to defaults on debts, but a bank can’t directly protect property, so there might be a modern, internet solution to cut out that middleman. This calls to mind a type of insurance company that sells primarily to bunker dwellers in exchange for partial ownership in case of crisis.. but this could easily turn into a criminal, extortion situation. That’s not good, so you need a bank as a middleman to ensure that the shares do not go to members of a criminal organization. Basically, if you join a gang, you’re not going to gain ground, but if you join a taxed organization, you get the option to purchase property. I haven’t thought about this enough and am surely writing something stupid here.
What I know is that in the economic system, there is an illusion of heat because of money pumped from inflating stock prices into corporate debt and this gives many people the illusion of wealth so that they go out and spend money on vacation properties and restaurants. This makes the country a nicer place to be, so one doesn’t want to destroy that enthusiasm. The alternative to ever accelerating expansion is to artificially create enthusiasm for spending via a negative interest rate. It is at least more honest than expansion.
The present, expansionary system is designed to prevent price discovery, the most basic requirement of a functioning capitalist economy. With a constantly shifting, rising money supply, only people with access to proprietary information and calculation tools can get any accurate measure of how realistic a price is. As a result, you get a command economy for those with access to the AI tools and capital — this is the opposite of capitalism. It is corporate communism.
I got off track here. Stability is the only real requirement and it doesn’t really matter how you get it. Whenever the accounting practices become too complicated and opaque, the system is unstable and this problem still hasn’t been fixed. That is why I think a reset to 1999 is required.
The amount of capital access of an individual determines how extended his or her influence might become. This extension carries risks, but it also creates the illusion of power and influence. It is worth asking how much AI tools have expanded the potential reach of an individual and if this is a good thing. I think that it just builds more fragility into the system and allows the world to be operated by a small group that might have bunker-dwelling tendencies — the opposite of the leadership we want.
There are bigger issues involving shaping the minds of the next generation and a hostage experience would traumatize a lot of kids, although it would also serve as a mental detox after a childhood spent staring at ipads. Managing that transition would take some skill.
Part of an invasion might involve a demonstration of what an EMP pulse does to an advanced nation, and Germany would be a likely test case. Paralyzing the automated harbors would be a logical first step and it would break most people’s computers, leaving only radio transmissions for many cities. How do you cook with no electricity? Propane? People would be fine for a week, but after two weeks, pre-packed uncooked foodstuffs, water filtration, cholera avoidance become important. I’d rather not be here for that part, although I think that if the progress of a hostage convoy was rapid enough, things could all work out just fine. Rapid surrender would be key so that resupply of broken chips and computers could be carried out quickly. The longer people delayed or resisted, the worse it would be. Having the chip/computer resupply organized in advance would also be a good idea. If the timing of the invasion is in the winter, it could be deadly, but in the summer, people might endure it with a reasonable amount of fortitude. Actually, this EMP scenario could happen without the hostages, but it has a higher risk of escalating. In fact, the young hostage scenario would not require an EMP if enough coordination and cooperation was set up in advance. Heck, the EMP scenario could play out this summer (or winter!), if they decided that. I hope that is not the case. I actually have no sense of the timing or timescale of these things. All I know is that Ukraine is being used as a threat of what could happen to Poland and Germany if they do not acquiesce to demands about missiles and gas. Dealing with science nazis is an unspoken issue, but I imagine that they are using it to motivate their soldiers.
Would such invaders risk retaliation with EMP strikes against their own cities? I imagine that Russian cities are less dependent on chips to operate and that they would deal with it rather well. This would be a strike against a faction of their own country — the tech people who have grown unmanageable — many of whom are criminals. Although it might be a good idea to avoid it, since they might do the same thing to US cities and that would be destructive of global supply chains in a big way — unless the US wants to deliver a hit to Silicon Valley to help them clear out some of the worst elements or take over control of several systems that have fallen into the wrong hands. There is no – sending a message warfare or escalation – allowed. That ship has sailed. If escalation is chosen, China would use this opening to take Taiwan and I imagine that they would succeed. They might even take over San Francisco by showing up to take care of the people who were affected by a disaster. Things have been very dry there and could burn again. In return for de-escalation, the US gets to keep its wonderful navy — which can be used for good things in cooperation with other countries. Human trafficking is very bad — much more important than cold war objectives.
I imagine conflicts like this as carefully planned out in advance to achieve a number of goals.
I just hope that people understand who is really responsible for this invasion: the science nazis. They do so much more than merely restrict the release of certain technologies. They’ve been damaging the brains of anyone with any degree of intelligence in an effort to *slow the approach of the end of the world*. They are like cult members who believe in an idiotic simulation that none of them actually understands. It is a cult in which stupid people destroy smart people in order to hold on to their delusions and control enclaves of scientists who develop dangerous weapons for them. You can’t see them because the media can’t report on them, but every time, you see a once promising young person who has lost his mind, you should suspect their involvement. Back in the nineties, it wasn’t Mad Cow disease killing those British kids who accidentally sat in the wrong classrooms, it was the science nazis.
Whew. That was an exercise in some creative thinking and I hope that free speech is actually still allowed and that I wouldn’t get accused of treason for thinking outside of the box and searching for a scenario that doesn’t involve a global war that ends civilization. I love the US and I love all parts of the world. I love Teutones and Gutones. They have something to teach each other and keep one another in balance.
These are crazy times and I know that this post is absolutely bonkers, but sometimes, crazy people are the only ones to see a new way out of an old problem.
My heart is with the people of Ukraine and I wish for a lasting peace for everyone who lives there, regardless of how they structure their government. May warlords of all stripes leave your boundaries and never return.
…
The image in the header is of Lagertha from a television show called Vikings that I haven’t seen, but I will one day when I start watching shows again. I have a backlog of things I should watch dating to around 5 years ago, maybe more. I don’t know why I can’t stand to watch movies or shows anymore. Is it the speed or depth of content? That is one flaw in recent books I’ve been reading. Don’t you love that feeling of exhilarating confusion that you get by reading something that you only almost understand? I’m always searching for that and only find it in rather old books.
Kirsten Hacker 
