Yesterday, I watched Michael Wood's excellent 1981 documentary on Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred ("the Unready"; 966-1016); which crystallized a (more-than-) analogy between the imposition of "the Norman Yoke" on England from 1066.
Ethelred was a disastrously bad king. His posthumous and punning epithet "unready" actually translates to something like badly-counseled, with connotations of one who made many foolish, or even wicked, decisions; one of which was to simultaneously impoverish England and strengthen the Danish pirates, by truly enormous payments of Danegeld over many years (rather than organize, and fight the invaders)*.
Ethelred had inherited from illustrious ancestors, such as Alfred and Athelstan, an English Empire (i.e. of the Saxon Kingdoms such as Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria), which Wood describes as the wealthiest and most prestigious Kingship in Europe.
By Ethelred's death, the English nation had been substantially disunited and demoralized by decades of helpless rapine under rule of a spiteful, moody, feckless and cowardly king; and made vulnerable to the Norman conquest a couple of generations later.
Something I did not fully appreciate until relatively recently, was the way in which the Normans not only tyrannized England; but killed a very large proportion of its people (directly and indirectly), and destroyed its wealth. After William I; it took centuries before England was again wealthy, prosperous, and with her own high culture.
As I have written before; the Normans were motivated by an elitist disdain of the Anglo-Saxons, who were treated as pressed soldiers, servants and slaves at best; but were exiled, starved and killed in such numbers as severely to weaken the country.
Much of the North was reduced to depopulated desert, and the rich agricultural lands of the South was converted to semi-wild Forests; exclusively dedicated to the hunting-related recreations of the Norman Masters.
In this respect, as well as in ancestry, the Norman rule resembled the rapacious and destructive piracy of the worst of their Viking ancestors. And resembled too the attitudes and behaviours of the modern alien-cosmopolitan Establishment (many of whom have, and are overweeningly proud of, Norman ancestry).
When these alien pirates became England's kings and aristocrats; their twin priorities were absolute power on the one hand - with a network of garrisoned castles as the symbol; and on the other hand a short-termist, selfish, and pleasure-seeking attitude to the country and its people - which they regarded as booty of war.
Their Norman's 'problem', as usually happens with successful pirates, was squabbling over the loot. So that the country was rapidly and repeatedly riven by civil wars; motivated by the selfish power-seeking of the outsider-Lords; and which kept on killing people and dissipating England's innate economic advantages for generation after generation - for no better reason than the choice of whether to be oppressed by Norman de Tweedledum or Norman de Tweedledee...
The Great-Reset intends a strikingly-analogous economic destruction, depopulation - and conversion of the world (or, as much as possible) to wasteland and recreational territory intended for their exclusive use.
The modern excuses for this evil, selfish and net-destructive power/ pleasure grab are different and dishonest compared with the past: the Normans did not need or bother to justify their deliberate and strategic destruction of farming and industry, with agriculture repurposing to exclusively-accessed wilderness and forests in huge estates which the Establishment own, by anything equivalent to the modern elite's pseudo-environmentalism.
The Normans killed and starved the peasantry because they wanted-to and could, and because they regarded Saxons as inferior beings.
But our modern-Norman's pretend to be promoting 'global' public health, defending 'democracy', and preventing 'climate change' by doing so.
As in Norman times, the problem - but now over most of the world - is an alien and evil-motivated elite; who care nothing for the nations or the people they rule and administer; which they manipulate and torment.
Indeed the modern-Normans loathe all nations and peoples, as obstacles blocking them from their proximate and insatiable desire for ever-more power and loot.
Yet our modern, alien elites are far worse even than the Normans of England - not just in their scale and wealth; but because they are more advanced in their evil - and desire destruction for its own sake, rather than as a means to the ends of power and loot.
Our modern-Normans would make chaos everywhere, and pull-down the whole civilized world around themselves - even if it makes their own lives less pleasurable, and breaks their own structures of power.
But merely in order to demonstrate to themselves their own superiority; to enjoy their own callously-sadistic indifference to the planet and all creatures and plants on it.
Because the modern-Normans do not any more serve their own appetites; but serve a master who is of-spirit and not dependent on the material for survival; and who loathes all of God's creation - including, of course, his gullible and blinkered Norman servants.
*Note: Indeed; it is the many tens of thousands of silver coins with which the Danegeld was paid, time and again; that provides perhaps the most direct evidence of the pre-existing wealth of Etheldred's England.
