It’s always the patriarchal conquerors like the Ancient Romans or the Ancient Greeks that they idolize and never the people like, say, the Picts or the Celts or the Gaul that rebelled against the brutal Roman empire. It’s never the Scottish or the Irish heroes who fought back against the British Empire that followed in Rome’s footsteps. None of them probably even know who Boudica is.

Ironically, a lot of the stuff you could call “white culture” was burnt at the stake, banned, brutalized, and literally demonized by the Empires that chuds think are so civilized. A lot of pagan culture was lost to time, or warped by Roman ‘scholars’ for propaganda purposes. If they truly cared about their ‘culture’, then "Muh Christian trad wife’ would be seen as killing the identity of pagan women, rather than an aspiration.

  • Vncredleader@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    11 months ago

    As others have alluded to here, Boudica is kind of a perfect example of why the matriarchal pagan past stuff is also bunk history largely. Fantastic video recently by J. Draper on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq5oY3Ki7X0

    The simplest way to put it is even during Roman times everything we know about her is from 2 sources both of which are different from one another and clearly aim to use her for political ends. Boudica as we know her, as she has existed in any meaningful way in society since she lived was a political propaganda piece. In fact the strong female leader element was part of it from the beginning. In the two wildly different battle speeches the Romans gave her, she speaks about being a female warrior, but it is playing to a different purpose in each. Here is a write-up from askhistorians

    The problem is that all three accounts of Boudica are extremely Roman in context. They’re written by Roman historians, and are full of Roman ideas about virtue, femininity, justice, government, etc.

    Whenever the supposedly Briton characters in these sources speak (and all speeches in all Roman histories are the work of the author, not the actual words of the historical personages) they do so for a Roman audience, referring to the Roman context. It’s laughably obvious in Dio’s history, where Boudica spends half the speech referring to legendary queens from Greek and Roman myth such as Nitocris and Semiramis, or to powerful women from recent Roman history such as Agrippina and Messalina. Dio actually puts a parenthetical “For we have learned about these from the Romans” after “Boudica” says this, because otherwise all this classical learning from a British queen might have been too much even for his audience to stomach. Even the rather fun dig Dio’s Boudica aims at Nero, “[the Romans] are slaves to a lyre-player and a poor one too,” is clearly more something a Roman historian would say rather than a British queen.

    However, even the much more subtle and believable-sounding passages in Tacitus are replete with such Roman contexts and Roman ideas about morality and justice. Where Dio’s Boudica is a brutal, masculine, Barbarian queen, and Tacitus’ Boudica in the Agricola seems quite similar to Dio’s version, his Boudica in the annales behaves and is described like a virtuous Roman matron, avenging a wrong done to her as a Roman citizen by greedy and low-born servants of a rap*cious procurator. Tacitus’ version of the rebellion is a morality tale: The greedy Romans offend against the natural order whilst the (brave, disciplined, properly Roman) governor Paulinus is away, and as a result they are punished by death and defeat at the hands of the Britons. However, the Britons aren’t satisfied with their revenge and continue their war, and are then punished by the returning governor, who restores proper law and order…

    We’ll probably never know what kind of a person Boudica actually was, or what motivated her. The sources on her life are extremely interesting, but they teach us much more about what conservative upper-class Romans thought about women, foreigners and justice than they do about the actual personality and motivations of the characters they’re ostensibly describing.

    Then centuries later she becomes popular again literally for the British empire. They change her speech to being about empire and prophesizing the British Empire. And they play up her similarities to Queen Elizabeth during her time. So the history you are talking about, the real past of Europe, is literally written by wealthy white Romans for their ends, and British imperialists doing the same. Not to sound harsh to anyone, but this is just more mythmaking. Not even replacing old European myths with new ones, but bringing back the OG Europe myths like Boudica.

    • Vncredleader@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      11 months ago

      More than that though, we don’t need an invented past that is clipped from the very same “history” we decry, we don’t need to invert that by imagining a past in which Pagan was a coherent set of beliefs or something anyone consciously viewed themselves as, etc. James Connolly writes about how we choose to explain archeology and how a surface level feminist approach ended up just further burying the actual Irish women of history. Here it is in its entirety

      In its issue of August 8, the Boston Pilot had a very interesting article upon the life of a typical Irish girl of ancient Ireland. The article dealt with the life of the ancient Irish as it has been reconstructed by antiquarians from a study of the gold and silver ornaments found in various bogs in Ireland, and from the allusions to the use of those ornaments made in old Irish manuscripts

      All this is interesting, especially to those who desire to have their Irish patriotism or pride of race buttressed up by historical data. And, of course, there are many such.

      I, also, was much interested in the article, but for another reason. To me it was especially interesting as illustrative of the curious effect modern property relations have upon the mind of even the most gifted amongst us. The gifted authoress of the article in question took as the imaginary subject of her sketch an ancient Irish princess and reconstructed her life in the most ingenious manner, describing her lying down and uprising, her hunting and riding and chess-playing and sweet-hearting and, in fact, all the incidents in which an Irish princess is revealed or touched upon by the old Irish manuscripts in song or story.

      In all of those pursuits she was waited upon by a slave woman, a different slave woman for each separate amusement; in all, there must have been at least a dozen different slave women waiting upon the one princess, and what appeared to my cold Socialistic mind as curious was that the writer wrote and treated of the princess as a typical ‘colleen’ of ancient Ireland, and utterly neglected to recognise in the slave women any right to be regarded as Irish types at all.

      Yet when we remember that for every princess living the life of luxury and ease sketched by the Pilot writer there must have been at least a dozen other women attending her and a hundred other Irish women working in the fields attending cattle and weaving and spinning to feed and clothe and house and ornament her, it must be conceded that any one of these hundred useful Irish women had more right to be considered ‘typical Irish colleens’ than the useless drone whose life our authoress has reconstructed with such loving fidelity and care.

      By all means tell us about the typical colleens of ancient Erin, shake up for us the dry bones of history and tell us about the wives and mothers and daughters of the producing classes of our native country, but do not ask us to believe that a princess was anything more than a type of the class to which she belonged – a predatory useless class – a class whose predatory proclivities hindered the free development of the nation and prepared the way for its subjection.

      What a history that would be which would tell us the history of the real women of Ireland – the women of the people ! What a record of ceaseless suffering, of heroism, of martyrdom! What a recital of patient toil, of uncomplaining self-sacrifice, of unending abnegation! Aye, and what a brilliant tale of things accomplished, of deeds done, of miracles achieved!

      Think of all the insurrections against British tyranny in Ireland, and as you honour the men who went out to front the armed force of the oppressors think also of the brave women who kissed them and cried over them ere they went, but bade them go for freedom’s sake.

      Think of all the slimy roll of informers in Erin, and wonder when you remember how seldom even tradition places a woman’s name upon the list.

      Think of the long and bloody history of the fight against private property in Irish land – against Irish landlordism, and when you remember how the Irish mother, the woman of the house, consented to suffer eviction and ruin rather than let her husband betray the cause of his friends and neighbours, then if you believe in a God thank Him for the spirit and courage and honour of our Irish womanhood.

      But then you will not be accepting princesses as the types of Irish life, you will be looking for types of the real womanhood of Ireland where only they can be found, among the producing classes.

      Those Irish girls who in the recent dock strike in Belfast joined their fathers and brothers and sweethearts in the streets to battle against the English troops imported in the interests of Irish capitalism are to my mind a thousand times more admirable ‘types of Irish colleens’ than the noblest bean uasal of Gaelic Erin much as I admire the latter.

      What would we think of the historian who would picture the life of the daughter of an Irish aristocrat of today, and then tell us that this was a picture of the life of a typical Irish girl of the twentieth century? We would laugh him to scorn. Yet that is the manner in which history is written.