Thursday 31 October 2024

CVD is Ruining Wales

 
See here for essential background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2024/10/dont-call-it-wales.html.
For several years I have been a member of numerous Welsh history and culture Facebook groups and I've just decided to leave them all. This is because they are all infected with a very toxic mindset that they regurgitate and over and over again. I've also decided to write a follow-up article following the above one and particularly focus on the community council in Gwynedd who want qualification for a council house to be limited to those who speak the Welsh language. These people need to get over themselves! They're not supermen or gods; they just speak a language. I know how they will justify it; they "just want to keep the language going!" Exactly what scenario would have to take place in their minds for Welsh not to be kept going? According to the census of 2021, 538,000 people in Wales can speak Welsh. There is a lot of misinformation by those who believe in the CVD- Celtic Victimhood Delusion because, for them, over half a million is considered to be the language at death's door, as it has been in several periods of the past. There are also numerous Welsh speakers abroad; about 200,000 in England (including me although I'm pretty rusty following my long banishment), 5000 in Argentina, 30,000 in Chile, 5000 in the United States, about 1,700 in Australia and 3,800 in Canada. This means Welsh qualifies under the conditions of UNESCO as not endangered. Welsh probably has more speakers now than it ever has before during its entire fifteen hundred year history. It's about as likely to die out as Swedish or Portuguese. So why all this paranoia? I think because a sense of victimhood is very addictive. I've noticed the same thing with wokies and feminists. For some people, being hard-done-by is central to their identity and even, in a strange way, their self-esteem. It is an extremely destructive emotion, partly because it can lead to the narcissism practiced by the Botwnnog council. It can justify all kinds of cruel, antisocial and discriminatory behaviour that would be unthinkable to other people. Also it has caused the Welsh people to lower the drawbridge to Brussels, as I explain in the background publications. According to popular Welsh history, schoolchildren who spoke Welsh in class a hundred or so years ago were punished by having a "Welsh-not" put on them as a form of humiliation, like a dunce's hat. This was a wooden letter W hung round their necks as a pendant. According to John Davies, one of Wales most celebrated historians, this penalty was not practiced as often as many CVD cultists would have you believe. Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2903800.

Today we have a very real "English not", and this manifests clearly in the entitlement of those council members who actually believe it's okay for them to dictate public housing policy in order to exclude human beings they consider unworthy. This is essentially forcing people to learn Welsh, not encouraging them through positive incentives. Some are monoglot Anglophones who are born in Wales and have lived there their whole lives and who suddenly find themselves being told "you're not really Welsh!" because they can't speak the language. Now they might even be denied a home to live in. It feels like my speculative novel Evan's Land is coming true, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2021/02/evans-land-audio-book.html. The basis of the CVD is a denial of what Neil Oliver calls "malinformation". This is information that it true, but everybody has to pretend it's not true because its absence serves some psycho-political agenda. Source: https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/neil-oliver-words-matter-the-truth. The basis of the CVD is a very widely held belief, virtually a truism, that the Welsh people, along with the Scots, Cornish and Irish, are the direct and sole descendants of the Celts, the name given to the population of the British Isles at the beginning of history. Of course, everybody knows they have languages descended from Celtic, but it goes deeper than that; they have also inherited the exclusive legacy of the Celts, racially and culturally. The English are all descended from the Anglo-Saxons who invaded Britain in the early middle ages. They drove inland like Orcs, slashing and burning their way brutally through the peaceful Hobbit-like Celtic lands. From that moment onwards, both the Welsh and English have practiced a stringent anti-miscegenation policy, refusing to marry those of the other side, so that in today's world the English are a totally different race of people and England has no cultural influence at all from the Celtic world. No Englishman has the right to call himself a Celt and no Welshman has a single drop of English blood... Everything I have just written above is utter nonsense. In the background links I provide full details, but it is this nonsense that so many of us think it true and it is ruining our country. This phantom menace has weakened us against very real hostile forces. Frankly speaking, we need a kick up the arse before it's too late!
See here for more background: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2019/10/brexit-portal.html.

6 comments:

Gravity Mirror said...

I like this article and agree with it. I wonder if Gwynedd County Council plan to test people to see if they are Welsh speakers. I've tried learning the language in the past. The end result is that I know a few words and phrases but the orthography (which is what rattles most English people) has stuck with me so I can read a passage in Welsh, pronouncing it correctly without necessarily understanding it.

Whatever test they were to devise I could probably relearn the language well enough to pass their test, especially it it was written rather than spoken (another cushy job for a Welsh speaker administering the test). There is an abundance of online resources enabling anyone from anywhere to do this, another reason why the language is never likely to become endangered again.

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Thanks, GM. As languages go it's fairly easy to learn. The perceived difficulty of Welsh is unfair in my view. The writing system is very regular. It looks a bit weird to the Anglophone, with W's in the middle of sentences etc, but once you learn the rules of Welsh spelling, it's almost impossible to make a mistake. Very diffrunt to Inglish! Welsh also has a logical and regular grammar. Verb tenses change via endings in a way that reminds me of French. This is something they probably both inherited from their common ancestor, Italo-Celtic. English is the complex illogical language! 250 plus irregular verbs, more tense forms than any other language, an array of subtle synonyms: "Smell" has synonyms, but "scent" can only be a nice smell and "odour" or "stench" can only be unpleasant. We even have a word specifically to describe the smell of food: "aroma". It surprises me how English is taught more as a second language than any other. But, as you say, Welsh must be a close second there!

Anonymous said...

Yes, many English people are repelled by the sound of Welsh as well as the appearance of the written language. I'm the opposite, I was always drawn to it, even as a kid, and thought it sounded magical. Maybe I was Welsh in a past life. One of my grandmothers was Welsh so I am nominally 25% although, for reasons you have given in the article my English ancestors also probably have a few Brythoneg Celts in their lineage. We are taught to revere the "Venerable" Bede as the first Anglo-Saxon scholar but in reality his Chronicles are a work of fiction and Hengist & Horsa were mythical figures, otherwise there would be archaeological evidence and other sources to corroborate his accounts of mass killing and ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxons.

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

Hi Anon. Welsh has unusual phonetics that makes people think it must be a hard language to learn, but actually when your tongue gets used to it, it's not so bad. Dutch is the same, hence the phrase "double-Dutch"; however Dutch is actually closely related to German and is, if anything, simpler and easier. As for your racial background. If both your grandparents were born in this country then you are probably 95% plus the same racial group as most other English, Welsh and Scots. We all, more or less, have "Celts" and "Anglo-Saxons" in our lineage. I put those words in quotes because racially they are the same people. Have you seen Britain BC and Britain AD? Fascinating documentaries. The DNA in early AS graves shows a native ancestry, not a recent one from the continent. The AS' were a linguistic and cultural shift, NOT an invasion.

GravityMirror said...

Sorry Ben, the last "anonymous" comment was me, forgot to change it from the default Anonymous setting. Cultural and linguistic shift yes, and it's not hard to see why. The decline of Rome saw a shift in trade from mostly the Gallo-Roman South to the Germanic East. Not hard to imagine it became 'cool' to speak a Germanic language in place of one associated with decline.

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

No probs, GM. I thought it might be you. That's an interesting idea. Didn't know that. English is a Western Germanic language, but according to the Britain BC and Ad docus, it has features indicating that it was originally a second language spoken by Celtic-speakers.