Germanic and Slavic

Given that our current leadership (which is largely driven by non-native interests; the war-hawk neoconservatives who want to conquer the world are driven more by Jewish than Anglo-Saxon American interests) is bound and determined to engage in unnecessary civilization-level warfare with Russia (and probably China, before they're done), I'm more interested than ever in the long, complicated history of Germanic and Slavic peoples, which goes all the way back to the Bronze Age. Some interpretations of the Bronze Age battle of Tollense are that it was a major clash between a kingdom or polity of the Nordic Bronze Age, a proto-proto-Germanic culture, and the Lusatan culture, which is often interpreted as proto-Slavic, or more likely proto-Balto-Slavic.

The Nordic Bronze Age may well have extended far to the east along the Baltic Coast in territory that is now associated with Baltic peoples and the northern Polish coast, but if so, it would have originally been proto-proto-Germanic. By the beginning of the Migration period, however, it seems that the proto-Germanic peoples had recently re-spread into what is now Germany from Scandinavia, over what had been Celtic previously. The proto-Balto-Slavic people had probably split, or were about to, but had retreated further north and east in the wake of Celtic, Dacian and Scythian expansions.

Much of what is now western Slavica; Bohemia, the Balkans, Poland, etc. had gone back and forth between control between Germanic and Slavic peoples, and while Western historians often focus mostly on the Germanic expansions during the Migration Period, the reality is that the Slavic peoples had a parallel expansion at the same time further to the east. Germanic tribes migrated almost entirely en masse from what is now northern Poland to be replaced by migrating Slavs. 

By the middle ages, the Germanic peoples, now firmly established in the Holy Roman Empire, the Viking kingdoms, Anglo-Saxon and later Anglo-Norman England, Francia, etc. continued to interact a lot with the Slavs. The Varangian Guard literally fought against them in many instances in eastern Europe, and they started off as Vikings, and later became largely English after the Norman Conquest. The Teutonic Knights established what later became German Prussia. The Hapsburg Austrians came to rule over much of southern Slavica. The Russian polity was formed largely by Swedish Vikings who slowly integrated and assimilated into the Slavs to become the Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians; although they were all united culturally and linguistically at the time as a single people (they split later in the wake of Mongol and Turkic incursions.)

But it wasn't just the fusion of the Vikings and eastern Slavs to form the Rus. The Vikings and Franks had intermarried a fair bit with the Wends. The Polish ethnogenesis, as well as that of the eastern Saxons included a fair bit of border country and country and went back and forth between Slavic and Germanic populations

In general, I'm pretty sympathetic to the Slavs. I don't (as far as I know) have any Slavic ancestry at all; I'm mostly Anglo-Saxon with a second big chunk of Scottish, and a third chunk of Portuguese from my great grandfather on my paternal grandmother's side. That said, I think we do both ourselves and our distant Slavic cousins a disservice when we see them as rivals or enemies; we should see each other as similar and related peoples, who have a lot in common and should work together and have friendly relations with each other. 

Sigh. Of course, that's even more true for the Russians and Ukrainians, and the fact that the Poles and some other Slavs are just as eager for NATO war with Russia as the Jewish faction of Washington and Kiev both are. (You do know that Zelensky is Jewish, right? It kind of explains his cavalier attitude towards throwing the Ukrainian people at the Russians.) Truly, wars and rumors of wars have been poured out upon the earth because we are in the last days. It's a real shame, and a source of genuine melancholy and grief on my end that peoples who should be friends are not.