Will Fitzhugh:

Some people say that when offenses are old enough, they should be allowed to lie undisturbed, and while the Crow may feel that way about the Sioux, and the Croatians about the Magyars, and the Rus about the Huns, and the Parthians about the Romans, we Saxons should never forget what the Normans did to our people.

Eurocentric history teachers portray the Battle of Hastings as a great victory for civilization in 1066, but they seldom note that while the Norman invaders had a nice dinner with their wives and families before their easy crossing of the Channel, we Saxons had to fight a bloody battle with the Danes in York and then had to march all the way down to Hastings, just arriving in time to form a battle array of our Carls, having had no sleep and almost nothing to eat. This clearly discriminatory ethnic imbalance in the battle conditions is rarely emphasized in the history books.

As might have been predicted, after an exhausting day of battle, the Normans “conquered,” to use that odious expression. And that was just the beginning of our oppression. The Normans immediately took over the administration, the courts, the army, the navy, and all the good jobs. The glass ceiling for Saxons was about 100 feet thick. In every walk of life Saxons were treated like second-class citizens. Even to hear the word “Saxon” pronounced in the Medieval French of the invaders did a number on our self-esteem.

Of course, some argued we should go along to get along, and learn the Continental ways of our oppressors. And most of us did, eventually. It is very hard to find anyone now, just 949 years later, who identifies herself primarily as a Saxon. The Celtics and the Huns are remembered, as are the Apaches and the Aryans, but who ever thinks about the plight of the Saxons, demoralized and defeated so long ago?

Some argue that it is too late to do anything about it, that the Normans are too deeply entrenched and too oblivious to their guilt to be affected by anything we Saxons might say or do.

Nevertheless, the true leaders of the Saxon community have asserted that it is never too late to address a grievance, thus: “Dear Grievance, think of all the good you can now do for us, even though we have neglected to press your claims for so long?”

It may be impracticable to try to arrest all the Norman descendants and deport them back to France, or better, back to Norway, but it is not too late to identify them and expose them publicly. The Domesday Book gives a place to start, and many Normans have foolishly taken pride in tracing their own ancestry back to the Battle of Hastings itself.

These people can be contacted and presented with our claims for restitution. They will try to defend themselves of course. They will cite the thousands of historical examples of peoples who have been overrun and enslaved by other people, and over the due course of some centuries, have gone about the daily business of making something of their own lives anyway.

Nevertheless, if we approach it right and time it well, it is not too much to hope that we might press for an apology for the intolerable oppression of the Saxon people from 1066 to the present, and once we have that apology in hand, we can push on to the real practical business of significant cash compensation. It is difficult to estimate how many Norman descendants are now in positions of power and wealth, but it seems likely that many CEOs, Senators, Consultants, Movie Stars and others have more than a trace of Norman blood and can be shown their obligations to Saxon survivors.

In spite of the example history has put before us of the horrific battles among the Ruthenians, Greeks, Slovenians, Montenegrans, Bulgarians, Bosnians, Albanians, Serbians, Macedonians, Turks, Roumanians, Croatians, and others in the Balkans during their ethnic battles of the 20th century, which might have suggested to us that we follow John Kennedy’s advice to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” now is Saxon time, while identity politics is still the name of the blame game in the United States. We must press on, against the claims of Navajos, Ukrainians, Cambodians, Iroquois, Jamaicans, Arabs, Cubans, Hungarians, Comanche, and other Americans, lest we be left out in the spoils of U.S. balkanization…

[Next—Dravidian Reparations from the Aryans]