
George Washington: A Descendant of Odin? - samclemens
http://publicdomainreview.org/2017/02/08/george-washington-a-descendant-of-odin/
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jessaustin
TIL that George Washington had the phrase "the ends justify the means" painted
on his carriage. That's an honest if unsettling bumper sticker for a
President.

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elastic_church
Letting South Carolina join the Constituion under the condition of enshrining
slavery into it would be an example of the ends justify the means.

The conjoined colonies wouldn't have had any strategic advantage in their
plans against Britain, without the South Carolina colony.

There were probably plenty of other less timeless decisions he had to make.

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allemagne
I don't think the ends of splitting from Britain in any way justified the
decision of allowing slavery to occur.

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Spooky23
It wasn't an a or b proposition, and the notion that it was is revisionist
bunk.

Slavery was more important to the southern economy, but slavery existed in New
York as fully legal until phaseout began in 1799. It wasn't eliminated until
the 1820s.

Monied interests in most states/colonies would have have permitted the loss of
their property without compensation.

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sandworm101
Great. I cannot wait for nick cage in the thor-national treasure crossover.

I lived in new england for a while and this mythmaking culture around the
founding fathers gets old very quickly. The US just isnt old enough to have
mythical kings and gods. That went away when the US broke from the uk. These
new myths are rather weak alongside those of europe or asia.

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oh_sigh
“Of all the great national heroes and statesmen of history, Lincoln is the
only real giant. Alexander, Frederick the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone
and even Washington stand in greatness of character, in depth of feeling and
in a certain moral power far behind Lincoln. Lincoln was a man of whom a
nation has a right to be proud; he was a Christ in miniature, a saint of
humanity, whose name will live thousands of years in the legends of future
generations. We are still too near to his greatness, and so can hardly
appreciate his divine power; but after a few centuries more our posterity will
find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and
too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its
light beams directly on us.

[https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images...](https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Tolstoy_on_Lincoln.pdf)

~~~
logfromblammo
Yyyyeah... that's sweeping an awful lot of dirt under the rug.

No president [of the US] has ever been a saint, and no wartime president has
even been righteous. The civil beatification is almost certainly some
combination of propaganda and the pride we feel when our team's captain scores
the winning point in the big game. Whenever one is assassinated for political
reasons, the record is whitewashed, so as to paint the murderous opposition in
a worse light.

Lincoln may have been personally against slavery, but he was not an
abolitionist--strictly enforcing the fugitive slave act before the war. He was
also segregationist--endorsing the deportation of all black people from the
US. He may have freed [some of] the slaves, but many of those freed slaves had
already been de-emancipated months earlier by Lincoln, when he reversed Gen.
Hunter's emancipation order. Emancipation was, to him, strictly a military
maneuver, to disadvantage the enemy. Slavery was not truly abolished until the
13th Amendment was ratified, a move first advanced by Rep. Ashley of Ohio. He
may have been a skilled debater and orator, but he also raided and silenced
newspapers. He may be a symbol of freedom now, but he also suspended habeas
corpus, arrested the entire Maryland legislature, and forcibly deported a
particularly annoying member of the legislature, the leader of the
Copperheads, to the CSA.

But he also has an impressive-looking temple on the DC mall, so all that is
forgiven and forgotten.

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oh_sigh
The article I linked was written by a Russian who never set foot in America.

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logfromblammo
That also could have been written by any 8th-grade child in America, though
they would probably demonstrate less mastery of English in their essays.

Nobody--I repeat: nobody--ever taught us kids anything negative about Lincoln.

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yread
There is a lot you didn't know about Washington:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbRom1Rz8OA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbRom1Rz8OA)

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KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9
Odin? That rings a bell. Aha -- here it is, an essay defending the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicles as a genealogical record compatible with the Genesis table of
nations. It rang a bell because Odin is one of the persons in the tree.

[http://www.ldolphin.org/cooper/ch6.html](http://www.ldolphin.org/cooper/ch6.html)

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vmarsy
This reminds me of the one the myth that French are descendants of the Trojans
[1][2][3]. That one has more credibility since in both instances French and
Trojans got defeated and beat a retreat :)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francus)

[2]
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9gende_de_l%27origine_tr...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9gende_de_l%27origine_troyenne_des_Francs)
(more details but in French)

[3] [http://atlantide.univ-
nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/macmaster.pdf](http://atlantide.univ-
nantes.fr/IMG/pdf/macmaster.pdf)

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jcriddle4
I was hoping some DNA analysis would show up in the article to show a provable
family tree.

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madaxe_again
Provable is rather the key bit - like Washington, I too am apparently a
descendent of Odin, through several branches of my once-aristocratic family.

I put no stead whatsoever in it, as it both assumes no bastardy or affairs,
and that legendary genealogies are factual.

That said, it _is_ fun to watch "Vikings" and go "he's my 37th great
grandfather".

In fact, going by my DNA I have a sizeable chunk of west African in me - which
appears nowhere in the family tree.

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IndianAstronaut
This is similar to the Almighty Johnsons storyline.

