Big Fish Ink

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special. The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
— An advisor to Mitt Romney on Romney’s relationship with Great Britain, as quoted by the Daily Telegraph (UK), July 24, 2012.

“[I]t is worth pointing out that the whole idea of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ England is a myth. Historical geneticist Bryan Sykes has found in his Saxons, Vikings and Celts that the genetic mix in England is not for the most part different from that in Wales and Scotland and Ireland. There are, here and there, signs of Norse or German (Angles and Saxons) settlement, but they are minor and have to be looked for and are mainly in the y chromosome markers, i.e. on the male side of inheritance. The women are virtually all ‘Celts.’
“But even ‘Celts’ are a historical construct as a matter of ‘race.’ In his Seven Daughters of Eve, Sykes had found that almost all Europeans are descended from only seven women who lived sometime in the past 45,000 years, one of them from the Middle East. These seven haplotypes or genetic patterns show up in all European populations, including the Basque (in the mitochondria, the power plant of the cell, which is passed on through females and does not change in each generation).
“There simply are no distinctive ‘races’ in Europe.”
— Juan Cole, “Romney, and Aryan Racial Theory As Basis for Foreign Policy,” Informed Consent, July 26, 2012.