February 4, 2022

Freedom In The Anglo-Saxon Tradition

An excerpt from, "Forget Multiculturalism: Restore The Anglo-Saxon Philosophy Of Liberty" By Bill Flax, Forbes, September 29, 2011:

Jefferson and company believed London violated the laws of nature and saw independence in keeping with British tradition’s historic trajectory towards liberty. Independence climaxed a long quest which commenced on the fields of Runnymede in 1215 when the Magna Carta curtailed the crown’s reach.

The Declaration meant “not to find out new principles, or new arguments” but to appeal to “ common sense.” Thomas Jefferson was particularly enamored with Anglo-Saxon culture; seeing the American Revolution as an historical step to restore liberties lost under Norman rule. He reminded King George, “America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him.”

An excerpt from, "On Saxon Liberty" By Dominic Crannis, the Mallard, August 29, 2020:

The Anglo-Saxon ethos is defined by valuing the individual, with all his creativity, eccentricity, and ambition, over the collective. As David Starkey is always keen to point out, this is why King’s College, Cambridge, has had more Nobel Prize winners than the whole of France. It was this ethos we exported to our colonies – especially to America, another wild inhospitable environment like Northern Europe, which intensified individual adventurousness and eccentricity even further (if you doubt this, just watch Tiger King). America gave the Germanic, Anglo-Saxon spirit a new name, the “American Dream”, and falsely obscured it in neoclassicism.

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England has never suffered the absolute monarchy characteristic of the continent – our kings of old were powerful, and reigned executively, but they by and large respected the rights and liberties of the common man, who for the most part loved them in turn. This is because, despite the Norman usurpation, the English monarchy’s origins are in the ancient Germanic kings, selected meritocratically due to their warrior nature, and accountable (in a spiritual rather than democratic sense) to their kinsmen. Thus while the kings of France swore service only to their crown, the kings of England swore service to their people.