Apparently some of our Jewish community were highly offended by my observations in a recent column that the Waffen SS must be considered as patriots. If they were genuinely upset, the problem is not with my use of the word patriot, but their understanding of it.
That SS men were prepared to die so willingly for their country or countries - 200,000 of them, of many different nationalities, were killed in action during the war - necessarily defines them as patriots: the serious question must be the meaningless of the concept of patriotism, if unalloyed or unallied with other and nobler qualities. For what is patriotism other than a loyalty to current perceptions of one's country? And are not those perceptions as fatuous and vapid as any other modes and moods which regularly take hold of humankind?
The Nazis, and fascists everywhere, would say the answer lies in the connection between blood and soil: and they would be right, but hardly in the manner they speak of. The soil of the Cheddar Gorge in the west of England holds one of the central truths of the peoples of these islands, a truth reinforced by the blood of 98 per cent of the people of Connacht.
Genetic make-up
For in the Cheddar Gorge, 97 years ago, were found the remains of a man who died there 6,000 years before Christ, when what we now call Britain was still joined to the continent. A recent analysis of the genetic make-up of the population of the village of Cheddar shows that one man (at least) has almost identical mitochondrial DNA to that of Cheddar's earliest known inhabitant.
A similarly sobering finding - as our science correspondent, Dick Ahlstrom, reported on Thursday - has been made by the Department of Genetics at TCD. It analysed the hgl genetic markers, which are transmitted through the male line, in the Irish population. The hgl was common amongst the aboriginal populations of western Europe, but its presence was diluted across much of the continent with the arrival of later migrants from the east who did not possess this vital marker.
In France, for example, 50 per cent of the population has the marker; in northern Italy, the figure is only 33 per cent. But in Connacht, it is over 98 per cent, confirming what other evidence has suggested over the years: that tribes are less manufactured by mass-movements of peoples than by cultural domination and by myth.
In many ways even more interesting than the Connacht figure is that of Ulster, which, despite the huge 17th century population movements is over 80 per cent. What planter and Gael have in common is that they are in reality of preplanter, pre-Gaelic, aboriginal stock. Gael and Norman, Anglo-Saxon and Scot, repeatedly infiltrated and permeated and finally dominated aboriginal societies, and with their tales and their myths and their tongues, bound the natives into freshly created rival groups, no doubt displacing pre-existing rivalries which would have been every bit as historically baseless as those which succeeded them.
Same stock
In other words, we are largely Firbolgs still, of the same stock and seed, of the unchanging hgl and DNA, as the creatures of the Neolithic, sitting around their fires in forest clearings, hewing elk-antler with fresh-minted flint, and creating myths about their imagined ancestors. To revere one or other tribe of subsequent conquerors as ethnically superior to their predecessors or their successors is patent idiocy.
Yet that patent idiocy is the key to the tribe; and the reverence for the tribe is the key to patriotism. It was why men and women slew their neighbours in the streets of Dublin in 1916 in the name of Cuchullain rather than, say, the Firbolg king he replaced in legend.
It is an odd way for adults to carry on: yet it is what we do, in Bosnia and Belfast, Herzogovina and Harryville alike. We have a name for this disorder, this strange ancestor-worshipping business of people choosing one set of mythical forebears above another set, and binding themselves together in common reverence towards those forebears: it is patriotism.
Common ancestors
What is different about the country of the Falls Road man and the Shankill Road man? How is their patriotism different? It is not a question of land - for that they share, if uneasily. They worship the same fields, they love the same glens. And their ancestors were Firbolgs alike, just as the ancestors of Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat were the same Slavic nomads who settled in the same place and were then, over the course of quite a brief history, both united and divided by myths of recent coinage.
We have a Department of Foreign Affairs of urbane and mannered sophisticates who in the coming months will employ all their intelligence to enact the bidding of their tribal gods, even in the same breath as they deny they are moved by such primitive ancestor-worship; as will their comparably clever counterparts in the British Foreign Office; as will the various peoples of the North. What actually binds them all is both their common stone-age Firbolg stock on these islands, and the very denial of that commonality. Human beings everywhere prefer the false and divisive gods of the tribe to the ancient and binding truths expounded by scientists. We have made a virtue of out division and tribal pride; and we call that division "patriotism".