156. Kinship Is Mythical: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

156. Kinship Is Mythical: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

Kinship Is Mythical 

   Aryans, said Maine, were not overly sentimental about children. They maintained the  right to kill or sell their children and carried this custom with them as they spread over  the earth, almost up to the outskirts of modern Beijing. These Great Ones had an  intensely practical streak, tending to extract from every association its maximum payoff. 

      This pragmatism led them to extend privileges of kinship to every association in which a  good chance of profit might lurk. This casual disregard of blood ties led to powerful  alliances much more adaptable to local circumstance than any pure blood-allegiance  system could be, such as the one the Japanese practice. In other words, Anglo-Saxons  were prepared to call anyone "family" for a price. Similarly, Anglo-Saxon ties to priests  and gods were mostly ceremonial. All rules, ethics, and morals were kept flexible,  relative to the needs of the moment. This lack of commitment to much of anything except  possessions allowed Aryans to overturn local ways in which people held to principles and  to local faith.  

     Pragmatism was an impressive and effective technological advance in politics, if not in  morality. In the science of society, the leadership reserved the right to lie, cheat, deceive,  be generally faithless wherever advantage presented itself, and not only to do these things  to the enemy but to one's own people if need be — a moral code well suited to a fast-  moving warrior people. But a price had to be paid. Over time, the idea of real kinship  became more and more fictitious, family life characterized as much by ritual and  ceremony as love. And in many places, said Maine, kinship, owing to mass adoption of  children from conquered peoples, became mythical for whole clans. Nobody was who  they said they were or thought themselves to be.  

     It is surely one of the grim ironies of history that the root identity of American elites was  crystalizing at the turn of the century around blood relationships to a warrior people so  indifferent to blood relationships, they often had no idea who they really were. With  Anglo-Saxons, the abstract principle always counted for more than flesh and blood. 

      Once the character of the Aryans was known, there remained only the exciting task of  establishing the homeland, the ancient forge of these virile conquerors. The behavioral  ideals they willed their descendants — to impose upon lesser peoples — were written     clearly enough on the chalkboards of the new schooling. Total submission led the list.  But giving the Aryans a birthplace (assuming it was the right one) would complete the  circle of triumph. To the elite mind, that job was over by 1880. The ancient ancestor  could now be fixed by common agreement somewhere in the cold North around the  Baltic Sea. Some said Scandinavia. Some said North-Central Germany. But the chief  detectives holding the Anglo/ American franchise on truth homed in on that zone between  the Elbe and the Oder Rivers, to the lands comprising the regions of modern Prussia!