White Americans: the last 15,000 years

Fri Sep 21st 2012 by abagond

Nordic Bronze Age some 2,600 years ago: plough and oxen (upper left), ships (bottom)

This is an experiment at writing White American history counter to the Pass-the-Torch trope of Mesopotamia/Egypt/Greece/Rome/England/Pilgrims. Instead of following a civilization back in time, it follows a language and when the words for things entered it.

12,000s BC: Can count up to at least five. The oldest words in English. Stone age.
11,000s BC:
10,000s BC:
9000s BC: ice age ends
8000s BC:
7000s BC:
6000s BC:
5000s BC:
4000s BC: Proto-Indo-European culture, in or near Ukraine. A land of apple trees, eagles, snow and rabbits. Live in forts on hills. Very patriarchal. Raise cows, pigs, goats, sheep, horses. Millstone for wheat. Honey, salt. Drink mead. Spinning, weaving, sewing. The words for mouse and louse rhyme. Worship the high god Dyeupater. Hero-and-dragon stories. The River Styx (the Greek name). Metrical poetry. King-priests. Horse sacrifice. Can count up to at least 100. Use copper, maybe bronze. Sell prisoners of war as slaves. New: Wheel, ox cart.
3000s BC: Moving west.
2000s BC: Central Europe. Plough. Grow wheat, barley, rye. Work copper, bronze, gold. Beer. Beaker culture.
1000s BC: Nordic Bronze Age. Denmark and nearby. Ships, sails, kings, swords, shields, helmets, chariots.
1000-1 BC: iron
AD 1:
- 000s: The Ingaevones of Pliny and Tacitus.
- 100s:
- 200s:
- 300s: saddle, chickens, cheese, pepper, wine, street, dish, cupboard, merchant, Roman units (inch, mile, pound), grey.
- 400s: Anglo-Saxons. Start settling eastern Roman Britain. Writing (runes).
- 500s: Taught Christianity and ABCs by missionaries. Grammar schools, paper.
- 600s:
- 700s: purple
- 800s: Danish rule. AD, BC. Trial by jury.
- 900s:
AD 1000:
- 1000s: Norman French rule. Bottom of society – 10% are slaves.
- 1100s: Common law. Knights. Slave trade outlawed!
- 1200s: cake, sugar, peaches, rice. Chess.
- 1300s: pie, opium, clocks, compass, scissors, moat, dungeon, university, geometry, philosophy, alchemy, humours.
- 1400s: printing, gunpowder, playing cards, pocket, pump, screw.
- 1500s: Protestant, Negro, Indian. Tea, tobacco, turkey, potatoes. The colour orange. The letters U, J, W.
- 1600s: Settle east coast of North America. Puritanism. Wipe out natives, enslave Africans (till 1800s). Racism, white identity, American exceptionalism. Oligarchical democracy, coffee, newspapers. Science, machine, zero. Maize, tomatoes, chocolate.
- 1700s: Americans. Overthrow British rule. Presidents. Front line of settlement reaches Appalachia. Become part German, Dutch, Scottish and Ulster Scots. Gregorian calendar. Capitalist philosophy. Slave patrols. Blackface. Pink. Caucasian race. Human rights for rich, white men. Freedom of the press and religion. Constitution. Baseball, golf. Magazines. Mother Goose. Rubber, chemistry. Gin.
- 1800s: Industrial Age. Front line of settlement reaches Pacific, taking Indian and Mexican land. Slave trade outlawed (again). Railroads, telegraph, electricity. Biology, germ theory. Soap in common use. Public education. Blue jeans. Chinese food. Photography. Coca-Cola, cocaine, heroin. Basketball, tennis, ice hockey, American football. Vote extended to poor white men, some black men. Minstrel shows, lynching, Jim Crow. Social Darwinism. Banana republicanism.
- 1900s: cars, planes, bombs, radio, plastic, Hollywood, jazz, telephones, air conditioning, race riots, atom bombs, plastic surgery, pizza, television, computers, country music, rock music, moon landing, anorexic beauty, metric system, hip hop, crack, Internet. Become part Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, etc. Feminism. Women, people of colour can vote.
AD 2000:
- 2000s: same-sex marriage.

See also:

White American culture – a different view of the same thing
The white racist guide to writing history – especially the Passing the Torch Doctrine. I wrote this post as an exercise in avoiding that trope – but still fell into technocentric history
The white inventor argument – also makes the point that white inventors are not most of history
The Eleven Nations
The post is a part of this series:

Posted in stuff | 40 Comments

40 Responses

on Thu Sep 27th 2012 at 22:02:11 brothawolf

Highly informative.

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on Thu Sep 27th 2012 at 22:20:10 truthbetold

@ Bulanik

“I never really thought about it like that before. That’s probably because white Americans appear to credit themselves with the inventions of various individuals from a number of European nations and then associate these things with their own “whiteness”.”

And they pirate inventions from Africans and Natives, put a white face on it and claim it as their own.

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on Thu Sep 27th 2012 at 23:50:47 Herneith

That picture of that funny looking doll at the bottom says it all;back to 12,000 B.C.!

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 02:31:52 aspergum

Abagond, are you saying “same-sex marriage” like it’s a bad thing?

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 03:04:43 dave

so in 12000 bc if there were more then five rocks to count they were f’ed. Doesn’t sound right to me.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 05:02:22 Ames

Wow, nice list. How do colors fit into the list, ie purple, orange?

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 06:26:05 dave

I’ll give you one better……..went from can’t count to five to land on moon. in only 12000 years. exceptional fast evolution those white americans. How’d they do it? those Neanderthal cave dwellers with tails……….lol.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 06:37:31 dave

This song has to do with nothing……just a song I enjoy from time to time.

But I will say this because it’s something I never hear in the inventor argument. “Blacks invented rock n roll right” …… but guess what if it wasn’t for Les Paul Inventing the electric guitar there would be no Chuck Berry.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 06:43:51 dave

My point is things go in cycles and trends. You need the chicken before the egg.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 06:57:01 dave

And here’s one for all you dumb white americans out there in la la land. “Mine as well JUMP”

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 11:15:37 Mira

What the… Most of these things were not White Americans… They sure didn’t exist 12 000 years ago. I usually understand your sense of irony and the way you present things to get your point across, but this post makes no sense whatsoever.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 11:36:38 abagond

@ Bulanik

“Yet, as I found out little bit by little bit, it did strike me that so much contribution was hidden if it was of non-white origin.”

Yup.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 11:46:17 abagond

@ Peanut

“why do you have jazz and country music up there? Jazz wasn’t white people, country music even has its roots in african-american culture as well, but that one I guess can stay…but Jazz come on, you know that has it’s roots in black culture, even if whites later participated and u had people like bennie goodman.”

They did not invent jazz but it did become part of their culture. MOST of the things on this list are like that. They did not come up with streets or planting potatoes or constitutional government either, but they became part of their culture.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 12:14:16 abagond

Ames

“Wow, nice list. How do colors fit into the list, ie purple, orange?”

Because there were no words for those colours before those dates. Like before the 1700s, pink was just “light red”. Purple was once just a shade of red, as in “red” wine.

Maybe in a hundred years there will be a commonly used word for school-bus yellow, which is in between classic yellow (lemons) and classic orange (oranges). I have used “school-bus yellow” repeatedly. Also “black, dark grey, grey, light grey, white” is a completely pathetic grey scale.

The human eye can tell apart tons of different colours. So paint companies, Crayola crayons and web designers have words for many of them, but the words are not standardized and not in common use.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 12:50:14 abagond

@ Mira

“What the… Most of these things were not White Americans… They sure didn’t exist 12 000 years ago. I usually understand your sense of irony and the way you present things to get your point across, but this post makes no sense whatsoever.”

I was so intent on packing in as many things on the list as possible that I cut back on the introduction. Judging from some of the comments, apparently I cut it back too far.

In an earlier post where I wrote about how to write history like a white racist, I talked about the “Passing the Torch Doctrine”:

“Passing of the Torch Doctrine – do not write about the history of a given piece of land or a given people, from beginning to end. Instead write about the History of Civilization: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, western Europe, America. Like that.”

This post is in answer to that. Instead of running the film of white history backwards into English, Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Mesopotamian history – the Pass-the-Torch history you always see – I ran it backwards according to the history of their language: English, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Indo-European. Then I looked at when certain words entered that thread.

The language that White Americans speak is called English. But that language has been spoken in an unbroken chain that goes back at least to the 4000s BC (Proto-Indo-European). It probably goes back way further, but it is hard to know anything about it beyond 12,000 BC.

There were no White Americans in 12,000 BC or even in 1500 AD, but the culture that they came from did not fall from the sky. It has been there all along. A culture mostly of herders and farmers that goes back thousands of years. It was NOT the culture of Rome or Ancient Egypt, even though it was affected by them. Just as Igbo culture in Nigeria is NOT English or Western, even if it has been affected by those cultures.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 12:59:36 abagond

@ dave

“so in 12000 bc if there were more then five rocks to count they were f’ed. Doesn’t sound right to me.”

I said AT LEAST five. But it is possible that is as far as their language took them: five = the fingers on one hand and there are human societies that lack a word even for three. There may have been no need to count more than five rocks.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 13:59:29 truthbetold

@ Legion

The very internet you are using was a black invention. The cell phone was a black invention. The elevator was a black invention…I could go on and on. But these genius men and women never get the credit or recognition for it.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 16:47:20 Mira

Abagond,

I respect you, you know I do, but… no. Just, no.

First of all, it’s bad. I know this isn’t how you mean it, but this sort of linking to the past stuff that can’t be linked – without clear labeling that it’s sarcastic/a mind experiment – is dangerous. The stuff of this sorts is what was in the hearth of all those people who influenced Hitler, such as Kossinna. Not to mention it’s also one of the main arguments for the shit that had escalated in my part of the world.

Second of all, you can go back in time like this for as far or near as you want. You can go back to Paleolithic Eve. (Is that the point?)

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 17:22:36 Tyrone

@Truth

You forgot to mention the traffic-light, combustible-engine, air-conditioners, and the cell-phone as well. Black people have created and still are creating a better way of life for all of humanity…Ditto!

Tyrone

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 18:32:04 truthbetold

@ SW6

Phillip Emeagwali created the internet. A black man.

Henry T. Sampson created the cell phone. A black man.

SW6, may I say respectfully, that Europeans suckled at the teat of Africans/Natives with language, the alphabet, the number “0”, which gave birth to the Dewey Decimal System, medicines aka “bush tea”, geology, astronomy, architecture, farming, “barbeque” aka outside cookery, animal skins aka “winter clothes” and basically life survival skills.

Since I have learned the very difficult and life-long task of un-brainwashing myself from this prison, I’ve learned that “sources” given to us by Europeans are worthless…as is their education, vernacular and views on life itself.

I know that you and I have never seen eye to eye on many things, especially my views on whites and what they ultimately stand for, but…from one black woman to another:

Whatever the European claims is a lie.
Lies are not fact.
Lies are myths.
They make a living on pirating other people’s cultures, inventions, actions, words and basically everything that make life “life.”

Just the other day, a good friend opened my eyes to another lie. Zeus, the greek God was used as a template to draw the white Jesus. Study Greek and Roman history. You’ll find lots of answers. Dr. Afrika was correct, “Study Europeans once and you’ll never have to study them again because they don’t change their tactics. They just get more sophisticated.”

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 19:20:12 resjan

@truthbetold

People erroneously confuse commercialisation of things with inventions, e.g., Americans often say Edison invented the light bulb only because he was the first to commercialise it.

Britons credit Tim Berners-Lee with the invention of the internet because he supposedly made the first connection between a http client and a server, even though such connection was only made possible b/c of the work of Emeagwali (and others). Berners-Lee’s connection is not the internet itself, it is just a commercial means of communicating with servers.

As to Zeus being the template for white Jesus, Zeus is a copy of the African god Amun…

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 19:57:20 truthbetold

@ resjan

Thank you for the great response. I was trying to explain, (perhaps I should’ve been clearer…sorry) that whites pirate other people’s inventions, folklore, etc… including Jesus, for whom Zeus was a template, for their own purposes.

Dr. Afrika speaks of Amun Ra, Set, Isis, etc…and how Europeans fashioned their version of “God” after our ancestors but with a whitewashed, Nordic face. When I began to search for my roots, the real one…not the one taught in a white educational system, I was startled at how ignorant I was.

I literally had to go back to the beginning and learn the African alphabet and symbols to “catch-up” on all I’ve been lead to believe. Now, all I do is read, read, read…and I’m still ignorant!

Everything the European has, I’ve learned, is a copy of an African/Native creation.

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on Fri Sep 28th 2012 at 21:11:10 resjan

@truthbetold

Thank you for that as well.

I think we’re all ignorant when it comes to African history, b/c none of us in the West were taught anything positive of Africa or Africans in primary school when our belief systems were being formed–with the exception of “Egypt,” which we were taught was not African.

You are absolutely right that Western civilization has its roots in Africa. The concept of the deities you mentioned are often taken for granted by most people, but they represent tens of thousands of years of astronomical and biological observations, calculations and cultural traditions–and much of Europe was under ice prior to 9,000s BC, as mentioned by Abagond.

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on Sat Sep 29th 2012 at 00:22:23 Oyan (@Oy_aN)

I am not a fan of country music, at all, and avoid the country music channel at all costs/times. Imagine my surprise, one day, when accidentally stumbling on the country channel, and seeing a 2 1/2 hour documentary on country musics’, black American roots. I was shocked, as I did not know this, never heard about it.
I view the country music channel as the ‘confederate music channel’, so was shocked to learn this, and see it on the country channel.

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on Sat Sep 29th 2012 at 05:37:30 dave

@Legion I’ll admit most people(even my white friends) don’t dig the ledo shuffle. I hear you on that. But the vid he did delete is probably the most skilled and greatest rock song of all time Van Halen’s “jump”. If you listen to the lyrics of the song I thought there was a message that relates. Why don’t you tell me your favorite and I’ll critique you on how “Gay” it is. Point being on “stealing” culture, the point was as you go through the history of rock music it got better in my opinion, and peaked with bands like Van Halen, they weren’t sitting there worried about how Chuck Berry or Little Richard did it. They were ground breaking in their own thing. I guess you can link them to black “inventions” from black music, but my point was you can link those artists to some white innovators like Les Paul the inventor of the electric guitar. So sharing between cultures is a good thing….. It moves us forward. Not just in music but in all factors of life. We wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for each other. White people shouldn’t take the credit for all inventions. But instead of bridging the gap, I have heard alot of people on here saying black people invented everything as well. Aren’t they just as wrong?

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on Sat Sep 29th 2012 at 06:18:36 dave

Really this shouldn’t “Prove” anything. If fact I’ll bet if you asked Les Paul he wouldn’t want “white” people taking racist credit for his innovations. I don’t personally think that black or white people should personally take that sort of credit. Just because someone in their own race that they don’t even know did something innovative…….. “We” did that , or “We” are responsible for that…. B!@#$(sounds like rich) “YOU” didn’t do anything. I don’t get why people get caught up in that. Instead of keeping score on what white or black inventors did, why don’t you do something good yourself, that you ACTUALLY can be proud of.(NOW THAT’S REAL TALK)(I always hated that saying)

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on Sat Sep 29th 2012 at 12:44:50 satanforce

Phillip Emeagwali created the internet. A black man.

LOLWUT?

http://magazine.biafranigeriaworld.com/cezeilo/2003nov09.html
http://saharareporters.com/report/how-philip-emeagwali-lied-his-way-fame

From the second link:

Only recently, the USAfricadialogue googlegroups listserv managed by Professor Toyin Falola of the University of Texas hosted a discussion on Philip Emeagwali’s vast fraud. Participants in the discussion included Nigerian and African intellectuals, scientists, engineers, and IT professionals. Overall, the discussion reinforced and reiterated one of the worst kept secrets in the Nigerian Diaspora, especially in its online community: that none of Emeagwali’s highfalutin claims, on whose strength he has curried and continues to curry favor and recognition from gullible and hero-hungry black people, is true.

Henry T. Sampson created the cell phone. A black man.

The rocket man? Nahhh!!!!

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on Sun Sep 30th 2012 at 09:52:08 edad

I initially thought this was a valuable blog, now I see it is filled with strange afrocentrists. The guy up there claiming a black guy invented the internet and cell phone is just preposterous. You tally up the inventions from any group of people and whites will come out on top. Why that is you can speculate. To say that there is some precedent for some invention is to say very little. Nearly all cultures come from somewhere, and all innovations inspired by something. This argument would apply to Africans and natives as well, then we’re back to square one. And believe it or not, I am not a white guy.

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on Sun Sep 30th 2012 at 20:58:15 abagond

@ Dave

I restored your Van Halen video now that I understand why you posted it.

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on Sun Sep 30th 2012 at 21:17:20 abagond

@ edad

“I initially thought this was a valuable blog, now I see it is filled with strange afrocentrists. The guy up there claiming a black guy invented the internet and cell phone is just preposterous. You tally up the inventions from any group of people and whites will come out on top.”

Commenters are free to say what they want. There is no party line here. Neither is there a hive mind.

While I have never been a fan of the black inventor argument, neither am I a fan of the white inventor argument. I find it overstated, propagandistic and unbalanced. Preposterous, in fact. Sure, People Who Are White have invented some important stuff. I am not going to knock that. But “whites will come out on top” is preposterous. Whites play up the stuff they invented, take credit for stuff they only improved upon and overlook tons of stuff they had nothing to do with.

Part of the point of this post is that White Americans and the culture they directly came out of invented damn near NOTHING till the 1800s. But they write their history books in a way where they HIJACK Roman, Greek, Egyptian and Middle Eastern achievements as if it were a part of THEIR history, something they take credit for all the time. When the Romans and all them were doing their stuff, the great and wonderful Anglo-Saxons were a pack of barbarians. They had NOTHING to do with the glories of the civilizations to the south – other than to help destroy them.

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on Sun Sep 30th 2012 at 22:41:02 abagond

@ Legion

I do not remember that.

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on Sun Sep 30th 2012 at 23:00:06 abagond

@ Mira

“First of all, it’s bad. I know this isn’t how you mean it, but this sort of linking to the past stuff that can’t be linked – without clear labeling that it’s sarcastic/a mind experiment – is dangerous. The stuff of this sorts is what was in the hearth of all those people who influenced Hitler, such as Kossinna. “

I rewrote the intro to make it a little clearer what the post is about.

From what I understand I am making the opposite point that the Germans made. They saw themselves as the racially pure Aryans. I see the Aryans (Proto-Indo-Europeans) as a) a culture, not a race and b) not particularly amazing. They were herders and farmers and nothing great till they came in contact with southern civilizations that THEY did not found but merely joined and contributed to.

“Not to mention it’s also one of the main arguments for the shit that had escalated in my part of the world.”

Can you elaborate?

“Second of all, you can go back in time like this for as far or near as you want. You can go back to Paleolithic Eve. (Is that the point?)”

I agree with that, though it was not a main point.

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on Mon Oct 1st 2012 at 04:23:09 B. R.

Dave, you should have stuck with just moon landings, most of the instruments in the jazz world were invented for the European classical orchestra with some having origins in other places before that…it is how these incredible black American jazz musicians put their techniques and culture to these new instruments…like how they played the up right bass compared to the orchestras…nothing like that had been seen before…it was just pizzacato

Of course there are other elements on top of jazz and funk and rock, but they are a slave to the African groove ( ironicly).All our popular American music and dance owes a tremendous debt to black Americans….too bad for the dolty white people who dont want to get that or accept it…its just plain truth

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on Mon Oct 1st 2012 at 20:47:03 dave

@ B.R. I agree with you there. I think the white contributions are assumed by some white people. Which is why some of the “Well Meaning” whites put so much emphasis on the black contributors. Actually they may be doing so because they secretly look down on blacks. So it become novelty to find out how great blacks are(as all humans) “Chuck Berry was the original Innovator of the electric guitar” on some documentary I saw some time ago. I would reference it but I don’t remember what it’s called. I found out he borrowed alot from Les Paul. That was my point. Obviously Chuck influenced like every guitarist after him for like 20 years. Even though they were all playing (at least the good ones) Les Paul’s Gibson. Point being all music is shared and even though black artists were huge contributors, just don’t give them all the credit.

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on Tue Oct 2nd 2012 at 01:55:54 Fiamma

Overall, the song ‘Jump’ sucks deeply in my opinion (no offense intended), but the electric guitar work, as featured in it, is outstanding nonetheless.

To that end, rock guitarist (and part Indonesian) Eddie van Halen certainly is a credit to the white race…as is, I suppose, Slash, the half Black guitarist from Guns N’Roses. Jimi Hendrix was also part white, I hear….

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on Tue Oct 2nd 2012 at 07:02:26 dave

@Fiamma…….. let’s not forget Eddie’s mom was half Indonesian. But I guess 75% Dutch might qualify as white. I don’t know the rules there. I think his dad was the original musician in the family though. But I think Alex Van Halen on drums makes the band good as they are with not the credit as Eddie his brother get. However, there would not be a Kirk Hammett (Metallica) if there was no Eddie Van Halen……… and you can name many other guitarists in the Metal genre even though Van Halen doesn’t qualify as metal. So if he was black would he play the Chuck Berry or the Hendrix role as the main innovator of metal? Or I’ll give you one that you may like. If hard rock music was more popular in the black community would you have had a guitarist that blew them all out of the water? maybe so.

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on Tue Oct 2nd 2012 at 07:18:51 dave

a song that you will rarely see cover bands do. Because of the difficulty of the guitar and drums.

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on Tue Oct 2nd 2012 at 11:04:05 sam

@bulanik:

Finns were considered to be extremely filthy by central europeans since they lived in so called smoke huts, small log houses which were warmed by an open fire plcae covered with stones. It was actually an mix between a log hut and smoke sauna. Yes, every one was getting the black soot on them BUT the heat of the system killed off parasites ;D During the 30 year war finnish soldiers were considered to be both extremely dirty and witches since it was their habbit to run naked around the woods and bathe in rivers and ponds etc. like the wild animals did. Of course we understand that they went for swimming and propably washed themselves as much as possible, but they did it like animals in the wild, and I bet they had they own saunas too, which explains the Nudist witch conventions in the eyes of the more civilized central european commentators.

As for the Paris and France, the whole parfume industry, yes the whole of it, was created to dent the stench of Paris and the royal court. In magnificent palace of Versailles there were no lavatories at all. There were servants who carried around buckets into wich the noble people of the court did the deeds, both numer one and two, also during the fabulous royal dances. One of the Sun kings personal doctors was executed when he got tired for the health issues of the women at court. He called them all to the great dance hall of Versailles and showed them a tub full of hot water and a soap and said: this is the answer for the health problems of the ladies of the royal court. Off with his head.

The ladies suffered from wet rot in their scalps under their huge wigs, their nails were falling off because there was puss under them, they had lices and such, and the stench under their skirts was tremendous.

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on Tue Oct 2nd 2012 at 15:23:44 sam

@bulanik:
Sorry, now you can not watch The Three musketeers ever the same way.

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on Thu Feb 24th 2022 at 02:39:53 Paul Kruger

“Become part Irish, Italian, Jewish, Polish, etc.”
Those people are White ethnics, not true American Whites in an ethnic sense. Just like how British, Jewish, and Portuguese Whites in South Africa aren’t Afrikaners.

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