European Tribalism

What makes it different?

You might want to start with the first post about this:

European Tribalism is Different

As I concluded the previous essay on tribalism I made the case that European tribalism was different and here we’ll expand on that but one critical point needs to be made clear.

Most people orientated their understanding of tribalism from brown or the Jewish minority in our societies. Not all people do this of course but a fair number do. What that means is their attitudes and understanding of tribalism is warped. This is because the tribalism displayed by Jews or Sikhs in our societies is that of a parasite within a host. Our nations are the host nations. The tribal behaviors that some admire are in fact only permissible because they live in host societies. This kind of nepotism in particular we see in the tech sector really works best for them because they are the organized minority. At a civilizational level this kind of behavior and custom are in fact incredibly destructive. India is a good example of this. We don’t want to aspire to become like India based on adopting the wrong patterns of behavior from parasitical minorities in our midst.

The Jewish model is similar. It is about blood and the elevation of blood above all else. They have orientated around this almost exclusively. This thinking is not limited to the Jews it also crops up in the Arabs as well. They are true race worshipers if blood is all that matters. Europeans though have been different throughout history. We have aspired towards something higher. It is not to say blood does not matter or is not important but that it only gets you in the door. Simply put in Europe biological reality of race was a critical factor BUT it was not the sole factor as it was in the Middle East and other parts of the world. How does this shake out in the history of Europe?

Greece.

Sparta is of course a bit of an oddity but it highlights these lessons well. Of course there was a Lacedaemonian race of individuals but to become an actual Spartan man. A proper member of the tribe you had to undergo the schooling and the rituals to make you one. Blood wasn’t enough, it was just the starting point. Sparta might stand as the most obvious examples of this but even the Athenian’s weren’t running around handing out citizenship willy nilly to anyone. The actual number of Athenian citizens in Athens was relatively small and indeed others could live in Athens but they were not citizens. We can understand that biological importance was critical in what it meant to be an Athenian from their laws. Indeed at one point they made a change that stated an Athenian had to have both parents be Athenians whereas before it was just the father. Yet that was not the end of the matter.

In the trial of Euxitheos who had his Athenian citizenship taken away he makes two lines of argument. The first is of course to argue that his father and mother were actually Athenians with a line of descent that is backed up by witnesses. The second part is to argue about his participation in the religious life of Athens:

Euxitheos claims that although his father was born before the re-enactment of the law on citizen status and therefore only needed one parent of citizen birth to be a citizen himself (29-30), nonetheless his father was in fact an Athenian of citizen descent on both sides (23). The same holds true for his mother. Witnesses are produced to testify to all family relations on both sides (17-54).

The other strand of evidence consists of showing that he himself, his parents and other relatives all participated in the group activities typical of Athenian citizens, namely the cults and religious rituals marking Athenian kinship. The two strands are tightly woven together, because participation in such rituals was a sign of being a born Athenian, i.e. citizen status. By going through all of these group activities, so familiar to his audience, the impression is reinforced that because Euxitheos parents and he himself had always participated without anyone protesting, every one of them and he, Euxitheos, too, must have been truly qualified to do so.

Source: Citizenship in Classic Athens by Josine Blok

As you can see if this were the mere matter of blood the issue would be settled in the first part but we understand that it is important to him and his peers that he demonstrate his actual position in society and being part of the cults and religious rituals. That can’t be underestimated as this section goes on:

Crucial in demonstrating his status are the solemn giving-in-marriage of the women according to the law (54), the sacrifices with the phrateres (polis subgroup supervising legitimacy), sacrifice with his kin to Apollo Patroios (protector of patrimony) and Zeus Herkeios (protector of the oikos fence), and sharing ancestral tombs (patroia mnemata) with them (54). He had passed the scrutiny of of Athenian birth for offices (46). In other words, there had never been and could not be any doubt that Euxitheos was born an Athenian citizen.

This religious part is worth teasing out. The Greeks as a whole, as an ethnos or race, had the same pantheon of Gods but it was the individual cults that alongside elements of blood placed them into what we think of as tribal groupings. To be an Athenian was not just to be born of Athenian parents it was to continue to engage in the local cults and religious rituals.

Ancient Greece is one thing but what of a very different society? Take Iceland during the Saga era.

This from William Ian Miller’s book “Bloodtaking and Peacemaking. Feud, law, and Society in Saga Iceland”

Of all the overlapping solidarities to which a 12th and 13th Icelandic man or woman belonged - kin group, household, neighborhood, Thing attendance grouping - for the great majority of the household had the most immediate significance. Kinship was not far behind and is intimately connected to householding patterns, since co-residents and the class of potential co-residents, as one might expect, were often related by blood or marriage.

Again we see that blood is critical and important but not the only measure of how people orientated and organized. Part of the organization of this society was the existence of housecarls and contract servants.

Everyone not him or herself a householder had to be attached formally to a household. Men over sixteen and single women over twenty were allowed to make their own lodging arrangements…the arrangement was a matter of contract, with uniform year long terms beginning and ending during the Moving Days (fardagar) in late May, during which new arrangements were made for the coming year.

We see from this then that young men often left their kin and move to new households to serve as a housecarl or another kind of servant. This shows evidence of again how the household as a grouping was in part a voluntary association and these men as non servile members of a household owed a loyalty to that household as well as to the kin. Indeed the feuds between households often involved people not solely aligned by kin. It was seemingly not uncommon for even sons of existing householders to serve time away:

Sturlung Saga on occassion shows the sons of householders as homemen in other bœndr’s households, that is as life-cycle servants, biding time until their fathers died or decided to share or cede authority in the management of the family farm.

Miller goes on to note that some of these housecarls even had surprising degrees of freedom afforded to them and went on to buy their own farms and establish their own households. It would be remiss not to note that evidence does suggest that for a lot of households there was a more permanent servant class that were kin based. The wealthy having a responsibility to their poorer kin to effectively employ them. All this goes to show that blood was always a factor but it was never the sole determining factor. The households of Saga Iceland and that society afforded exchange of peoples between them with certain obligations and choices meant. Becoming part of a household was possible, as was leaving it.

One other interesting excerpt from Miller’s book regards the nature of adoptive kin.

We’ll return again to Miller and the Icelanders in the next section on standards as well.

The Notion of Standards

This again may be where some object but I would argue that European tribalism has always had an element of standards a man is held to. It is why exile has been a feature. To cast out the outlaw is to remove their claim to the tribe and that claim is clearly not just contingent upon blood. The tribe was more than just blood relations and connections for the European. To put a rather fine point on this we know that the Jews will assist child molesters who flee to Israel and then refuse extradition. Is this the kind of behavior to ape and imitate? Europeans have much more of an interest in some kind of objective standards that people could and should be held to.

Even in Icelandic society with its strong emphasis on kinship it seems there were limits to it based on behavior or other loyalty. Returning again to Miller and the Sagas.

The fictive kinship achieved by sponsoring someone's primesigning, baptism, or confirmation, brought the marriage prohibitions into play (Grágás Ib 31, Il 158). They also disqualified that man from judging or serving on a panel of neighbors in a legal action involving the person sponsored (Ia 47, 62, Il 318). The sagas take little interest in this relationship. But one account set prior to the conversion of Iceland tells of two men meeting in battle, one of whom (Ozur) had sprinkled the other (Helgi) with water when he was newly born.

The heathen ceremony, like baptism, signaled the acceptance of the newborn child into the family and indicated that the child would not be exposed (Steffensen 1967-68, 109-12). Helgi told Ozur he would not attack him "because you sprinkled me with water." Ozur, too, was reluctant to attack Helgi and had not been actively involved in the fighting. But when Ozur had to choose between defending his chieftain and attacking Helgi, it took him no more than a few seconds to make up his mind: he preferred spearing his "god-child" to sparing him (Drop. 10: 164).

What of criminal elements within the kin? It seems here as well there was a degree of standards that someone could cross that would warrant being dealt with.

Nevertheless, kinsmen would deal with their unwanted members in a variety of ways that in effect removed them from the kin group for various periods of time. Unruly men were often encouraged to go abroad to take out their excesses on people too far away to contemplate reprisal e.g., Lax. 38: 111). One saga case actually shows a man counseling and agreeing to the killing of his brutal and unruly nephew (Vatn.19: 53). There is also the Grágás provision noted earlier (p. 153), which allowed a person to send burdensome kin abroad.

There clearly need to be a mechanism for dealing with such people but even then some were tolerated above what we would consider normal through our modern eyes:

What is remarkable is how many pretty awful people were tolerated and not disowned by their kin in during their lifetimes. Take the case of Mar Bergthorosson. Among his several dubious achievements were the brutal beating of his amiable foster-father, the unprovoked killings of two decent men, and an attempted rape. Yet after each of these deeds he was taken in by his prominent and respected fathers brother, Haflidi Masson, the same Haflidi who headed the commission in 1117 charged with drafting a written law code (see p. 224). Hafildi registered strong disapproval, saying one time that Mar was “a shame to his kin” (Hafl 5-6: 18-19). The Icelandic literally means that Mar by his actions had "emphatically declared himself to be outside his kin group," but in context has a softer extended meaning more on the order of "in his actions he showed himself to be unlike his kin." The idiom suggests literally a formal renunciation or repudiation ritual, but this sense, if original, had long since become a figure of speech by the time it occurs in the saga. Similarly, the term frændaskomm is linked with repudiation.

Consider a source describing events c. 996:

That summer a law was enacted at the Allthing that the kin of Christians who were further than second cousins and nearer than fourth cousins should prosecute them for blasphemy. That summer Stefnir was prosecuted for being a Christian. His kinsmen brought the action against him because Christianity was then considered a shame to one's kin (frandaskomm). (Kristni saga 6: 10- II)

In pre-Christian Iceland, at least if we can trust the source, we have kin outlawing a kinsman on the grounds that he had disgraced his family by being Christian. The law obviously did not survive the conversion and what little evidence we have suggests that the formal legal means of repudiation of kin, like the legal exposure of infants, did not survive it by much either (see p. 35) Haflidi shows us that the memory lives on as metaphor available to curse an obnoxious kinsmen in the sam breath that one decides to stand by him for in the next sentence after Hafilidi says Mar had in effect renounced his kin it is reported: "But for kinship's sake Haflidi felt that he could not disassociate himself from Mar's case."

For the Heathen readers that above section I’m sure is interesting. It places importance on belonging to the faith as being critical to part of the identity, but curiously makes some limits on who can bring the prosecution in terms of relation. Not dissimilar to the Athenians we looked at before. The importance of faith alongside blood was there. It was a higher standard that a man could be held to. It’s worth highlighting this short line that highlights some of the limitations that the Icelanders imposed:

The fictive kinship achieved by sponsoring someone's primesigning, baptism, or confirmation, brought the marriage prohibitions into play (Grágás Ib 31, Il 158). They also disqualified that man from judging or serving on a panel of neighbors in a legal action involving the person sponsored (Ia 47, 62, Il 318)

Fictive kinship was exclusionary because it was understood that this person would not be impartial. This is a legal artifact we see even today. A juror will be excused if he knows the people involved in the legal action. The higher standard of the law when it was invoked was understood to triumph here and these people understood and agreed to that.

A Tribalism of Honor and Place

In the examples we have looked at there is clearly a standard that exists which overrides blood. Or as Bowden might put it

“Being white isn’t enough, being English isn’t enough. KNOW WHAT YOU ARE”

We have a standard of honor and loyalty and correct behavior. It can exist most obviously in the religious nature of a tribe or group. There are hundreds if not thousands of whites who have degenerated and abandoned their blood and their standards. Nothing can save those people, nor do I wish to share space with them. Now, could they change their position? Yes. They could abandon the anti-white behaviors and beliefs and return to the fold. People can climb into the lifeboat if they want but I’m not dragging a traitor to the folk into it just on the basis of their blood. When Bowden makes the aforementioned cry he is talking about understanding your ancestors who came before you and what they achieved. How you are only part of that glorious heritage if you rise to meet it because just being English is not enough to stand level with your ancestors. They had standards that we often fall short of. It comes down to more than blood because we are not like the rest of the world.

The importance of place is what I previously touched on. Of course today a lot of us are cut off from even shallow roots. We move for jobs or pleasure or ideology. One of the great rallying calls of the ConInc movement remains that people should abandon their Blue states and migrate to Red ones. Ironically the very opposite of (small c) conservative behavior, in fact this has been observed by many people. Eric Kaufmann in his book White Shift makes this point that often the last white holdouts are the stubborn conservative whites who remain in areas. They are averse to moving. White liberals on the other hand are the people of nowhere and so move to the next white enclave when they feel threatened. They have no roots and so no connection to that place.

Being from a place that matters, that has history, where your ancestors were is important. To move is to be cut off from that sense of history and place. To abandon relationships. Again part of our modern malaise is just this, white displacement into suburbs that no one has an attachment to. Identity wallows in such environments but tribal identity for people forms most in places we make a choice to be in. The Indian H1Bs will always cluster together in the office because they are blood worshipers and can’t think outside of it. Yes they are tribal in one degree only.

European tribalism starts with blood but it doesn’t act as a carte blanche. It’s a foot in the door. In my opinion we are Occidental men because we seek to overcome and aspire to something higher than mere materialism. We are not race worshipers like our enemies are, it is true we have been turned to be ashamed of our blood but those days will not long remain. A great filtering is happening of Europeans and I believe most are coming around to our way of life. We want our countries for ourselves so we can return towards higher standards and away from this degraded modern life. We seek to better our race not worship it as it stands in mediocrity.

The starting point for returning to tribalism for Europeans belongs rooted in the places we are and the communities that exist. It exists in religious practice and forms of kinship. The ground work is there waiting for it. The standards we have and hold are part of it as well. We know what we are. Retribalizing isn’t about attempting to ape parasitical minority groups we are currently hosting in our society through the traitorous behavior of our elites.