Varanasi, India

Source: Bigstock

But, Reich wants us to comprehend, no race is wholly unmixed if you look enough millennia back into the past:

…the ancient DNA revolution has shown that today’s classifications do not reflect fundamental “pure” units of biology. Instead, today’s divisions are recent phenomena, with their origin in repeating mixtures and migrations.

Reich ends a chapter by sermonizing:

Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred.

So you should just lie back and think of England, like the girls in Rotherham and Telford.

But thinking of what “mixture” did to the inhabitants of England who were forced to embrace it 4,500 years ago is horrifying.

Before about 2500 BC, ancient Albion was inhabited largely by farmers tracing back to the Fertile Crescent. Suddenly, steppe barbarians, bearing the Bell Beaker culture, arrived, and almost immediately most of the old Britons died off.

Since then, 90 percent of subsequent skeletons in England reflect the DNA of the steppe invaders.

What happened to most of England’s earlier inhabitants? One of the less violent scenarios is that the steppe migrants introduced bubonic plague.

In general, “migration” and “mixture” tend in Reich’s book to serve as euphemisms for genocide of the native males and rape of the native females. Reich lists numerous examples from around the world where genetic data show that newcomers enslaved or murdered the local men and turned their women into concubines.

Fortunately, for the past 4,500 years, “ancient Britons harbored a blend of ancestries very similar to that of present-day Britons.” The Roman conquest didn’t leave much of a genetic mark, and the later Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman invaders were genetically similar enough to earlier Britons that geneticists have only recently begun to disentangle them.

After 1066, the island race enjoyed a long halcyon era without new invaders raping and pillaging. But all good things evidently have to come to an end. As Benjamin Schwarz has pointed out, “In fact, Britain today receives more immigrants in a single year than it did in the entire period from 1066 to 1950.”

Reich is upset that his genetic discoveries have more or less upheld the old German archaeologist Gustaf Koussina’s theory that Germans were descended from Aryans:

…he argued that because the Corded Ware culture included the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and western Russia of his day, it gave Germans the moral birthright to claim those regions as their own.

Reich asserts that his theory has different political implications from Koussina’s because the Yamnaya steppe barbarians didn’t start in Germany, they started in what are now Slavic lands.

If only Hitler had known, you see, that the Aryans came from the east, he would have been ashamed to invade Poland.

Realistically, Hitler would likely have seen any theory as justifying his invading Poland. Hitler just liked invading. Indeed, the Nazis might have preferred Reich’s theory to Koussina’s on the grounds that it could justify Germans conquering their ancient homeland all the way to the Urals and beyond.

A better argument against Hitler than Reich’s is this:

Invasion is wrong.

Unlike in the days of barbaric nomads, we now have territorial states with internationally recognized borders, countries that are the joint property of their citizens and thus are not the property of noncitizens.

Therefore, German chancellors should neither invade other peoples’ countries nor invite other peoples to invade Germany.

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