And… what? This is supposed to continue to apply through the Migration and Viking ages? You’re taking the words of a man who never actually went to Germania, from a time when tribes were only just beginning to push far enough south for Rome to care, whose argument is “they all look the same,” an opinion which he probably formulated by exposure to Germanic mercenaries in the Roman military, as evidence that they were opposed to interracial relationships? At this point most Germanic peoples were so geographically isolated that they wouldn’t even have had the opportunity. Note also that Tacitus isn’t even sure — he “accept[s]” what he thinks is more likely of two apparently debated arguments.
By the way, not that it’s important, but you left out the part where he backs up this claim by stating that Germanic peoples are incapable of prolonged physical labor:
All have fierce blue eyes, red hair, huge frames, fit only for a sudden exertion. They are less able to bear laborious work. Heat and thirst they cannot in the least endure; to cold and hunger their climate and their soil inure them.
But this paragraph was not all of the evidence Tacitus presents in favor of this claim:
The Germans themselves I should regard as aboriginal, and not mixed at all with other races through immigration or intercourse. For, in former times it was not by land but on shipboard that those who sought to emigrate would arrive; and the boundless and, so to speak, hostile ocean beyond us, is seldom entered by a sail from our world. And, beside the perils of rough and unknown seas, who would leave Asia, or Africa for Italy for Germany, with its wild country, its inclement skies, its sullen manners and aspect, unless indeed it were his home? In their ancient songs, their only way of remembering or recording the past they celebrate an earth-born god Tuisco, and his son Mannus, as the origin of their race, as their founders.
Tacitus accepts that they are unmixed because nobody would want to mix with them, in particular for the reason that their land sucks so much. He refers very specifically, even exaggeratedly, to geographical isolation as the cause — NOT a moral or cultural aversion. By his reference to land separated by an ocean it’s also clear that he’s referring to the inhabitants of Scandinavia. There is little reason to assume he means that no Germanic person has ever mixed with anyone else — he’s talking specifically about their origin; he is not looking for individual instances of intermarrying within the recent past, but looking for characteristics which permeate the Germanic peoples that are held in common with other peoples. He believed they literally had emerged out of the ground. I think it is probably safe to say that he was not likely correct.
If we’re going to accept Tacitus’ views on race (gēns) we also have to accept Roman, Celtic, Slavic, and Baltic people as different races (that is, if “white” is supposed to be a race, using Tacitus as a source goes out the window anyway). This means that as soon as the migration age hits, the “unmixed” character of the Germanic peoples that Tacitus observes gets utterly blown out of the water.
So how about you stop policing the beliefs of everyone else, and then crying oppression any time someone finds factual error in yours? You didn’t answer me last time. Your usual go-to argument for how you can justify being a miserable armchair dictator is that you’re not obligated to observe all of the customs of pre-Christian Germanic peoples, but then you cherry-pick anything that, whether by ignorance or deletion of its context, can be transplanted into your narcissistic fantasy worldview, and insist that it applies to others (while the rest of us openly acknowledge that there are elements of pre-Christian Germanic culture that should stay in the past). You’re not much more than a twisted mass of hypocrisy. You can’t indulge your uninformed impulses to dominate the ideologies of others, and then go hide under your cultural isolationism blanket at the first sign that your childish worldview doesn’t actually apply to anything outside of your own fantasies.
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