Medievalism and Racism: The Pendragons

"When a reporter asked under what authority they planned to arrest the mayor, one of the Pendragons cited the Magna Carta." #medievaltwitter https://t.co/2iYrmZvD1e

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 14, 2018

A bunch of London racists tried to arrest the Mayor of London. The Mayor, Sadiq Khan, is Muslim. The racists brought a noose and accused him of treachery under the "Magna Carta." Here's the story from WaPo:

But the Pendragons didn’t want to wait outside.

A small, mostly curious crowd formed around the men as they lingered by the auditorium wall, accusing Khan of subverting British law, without ever explaining how. When a reporter asked under what authority they planned to arrest the mayor, one of the Pendragons cited the Magna Carta.

Police had still not arrived after 10 minutes or so. One of the Pendragons walked up to Khan’s table and showed him an American flag, which he was holding backward.

“Mr. Khan,” the man said, “there’s millions of British people supporting Donald Trump.”

Two interesting points:

1) The idea that the Magna Carta as the sole great document of liberty empowering the people to overthrow tyrants is an American idea, not typically a British one (see the work of Peter Linebaugh).

2)  Note, of course, that the whole dispute is framed around Trump's welcome/status in the UK. He's a force for global fracture.

AltCrusade17

Last week various historians came to D.C. to talk about the alt-right and their use of crusade iconography.  Eventually, various alt right social media accounts became aware of the event and its hashtag, #altcrusade17, and started tweeting violent memes out. Thus proving the point.

The Frankish Racists are ... Anglo-Saxons???

UPDATED with the French and clarifications.

Marine Le Pen made an interesting claim for those of us tracking the use of history to bolster European racism:

France’s presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has told a far-right conference “2016 was the year the Anglo Saxon world woke up”.
The Front National leader was among anti-immigration and populist parties who gathered at a conference dubbed the “European counter-summit” in Koblenz in Germany.

If Le Pen is going to claim heritage with an early modern Germanic tribe, shouldn't it be the Franks? She might just mean the US and the UK though (which has it's own WASPy problems).

I haven't tracked the use of "Anglo-Saxon" to mean "white," but it's a real problem for racists that "white" is a flexible modern concept with no real grounding in history. They address that problem with their own take on medieval history.

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Update: I'm told that using Anglo-Saxon to refer to UK/US is common in France, as a way to distinguish it culturally. Here, thanks to a friend, is the quote in French:

Avec les succès surprise du Brexit et de Donald Trump aux Etats-Unis, "2016 a été l’année où le monde anglo-saxon s’est réveillé. 2017 sera, j’en suis sûre, l’année du réveil des peuples de l’Europe continentale", a déclaré Marine Le Pen à la tribune.

It's clear here she means US/UK. Note - the US/UK is NOT Anglo-Saxon. And whatever happened to the Norman conquest?

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Will keep an eye on this usage. Matt Gabriele, a medievalist colleague, and  have decided to coin this kind of framing, "nostalgic medievalism." More to come, alas.