So, if you are living in London and not paying taxes(to Ireland), you are not Irish? Dude, you are clearly mixing ethnicity and nationality. Plenty of Irish in UK, that does not know Gaelic - same situation in Ireland. There are in fact more Irish Gaelic speakers living in USA/Canada than in Ireland.

And Americans are claiming ethnic ancestry - not national ancestry. And many Irish migrated out of Ireland, when it was not a country - and paying taxes is irrelevant in this gatekeeping of identities.

That is your right to not claim your German ancestry, as generally it is a viable solution to just not stand out and blend in with crowd, but frankly that is also your right to claim your ancestry and seek refuge in German speaking countries, if things go south in Sweden and Caliphate is established there or some Finns invade and makes your life impossible, so generally - this is not your gate to keep, as these can be considered as an open choices. And I would think that current age of open borders that we have now might end and claiming different identity might be the only viable option to migrate somewhere else.

It seems, that people do not know that in USA there exists American ethnicity of relatively small population(for USA) - about 20 million that identifies themselves as Americans, so the quote is not correct.

However large majority of Americans have background of immigrants and they have right to claim their ancestry(though DNA companies are selling them as ancestry lineage their relatedness, which is not the same). You and other people that wants to gatekeep this have no right to decide for them what they want to identify as, just as Europeans nowadays are mixing up national identity and ethnic identity, which are not exact match even in Europe.

Not to mention that it shows an extreme ignorance of the fact that USA & Canada are not 1000's of years old. Of course people have a tie to ancestors who came here a few generations ago, and brought aspects of their culture with them.

I find that Euros dont really know anything about the USA. Im Canadian and when I travel I routinely shock Europeans by reminding them that the USA is a huge country of over 300 million people. They seem to think its about the size of Britain.

There were raids done against Saami as well, though it is right - more profitable raids were better down south. In much later times there were also slavery raids done that included Saami people, though this cross over into times that were past viking Age as well by cultures that evolved from vikings, where there are different opinions what can be defined as vikings.

Saami were sparsely populating large areas - so they did not exactly live side by side with other people. And the more people came to live where Saami were herding their reindeers, the less space they had left to herd them. Throw in to that climate change into that as well. But to the contrary to what you are claiming here, Saami did assimilate into Norwegians and Norwegians also put a lot of effort in assimilation of Saami - mainly during the times, when religion was dominant form of identity, so it was done with good intentions - like all the major crimes against humanity.

Vikings were a product of mixing people of different origins. And that is a consistent result across whole Europe. The same thing applies in Western Europe, just as in Eastern Europe. And that applies to Norwegian vikings, even if they had a chance to colonize some empty lands - they still also took wives from other places than just Norway.

They were not that much more sparse than their neighbors. They typically moved with the seasons, so maybe they needed a little more space (a summer place and a winter place at the very least), but not radically more so. After all, the Norse had summer pastures in the mountains too.

Reindeer herding is younger than people think, as I said. Until the major predators were exterminated, it wouldn't have been possible to have herds of the sizes we're used to. Land wasn't the limiting factor for herd size. Until eastern Norwegian immigrants came in the 1750s on, and settled inland - a crazy thing to do according to locals since of course you wanted to live by the sea where the fish, the money were, and it was cold inland - there wasn't much land use conflict.

There were no centrally organized assimilation efforts until von Westen at the earliest. And while he was zealous about rooting out superstition and customs which he saw as pagan, he was also protecting the language, teaching people in their own language (for a generation after Westen, Sami were said to be more educated than other northerners, and you see it in the censuses!) and certainly wasn't putting people into encomiendas or otherwise forcing them to change their material way of life.

UFO phenomenon peaked with TV and Movies of 1950s. There is no other better explanation for UFO than influence of mass media on human minds, where some of them could not distinguish reality and what they saw on screen.

I think you are very close to explanation. Ideas in human minds can be presented as facts. If you decide that you are happy by some setting - that becomes a fact to you, while in reality that is a belief. The same about depression and sadness - you can get impacted by information you did not knew and would not be impacted if you were in blissful ignorance and some people choose exactly that choice. Some people get psychosis and their mind is hallucinating that they are on fire - that is real to them as what are your experiences, though those also are not based on facts, but serve as an information delivery to your brain.

The whole issue with human minds is that it is not built to deal with scientific facts, but with socium of other people. You can't use facts when operating with society - you have to use symbols, that they will associate with. And I think that the issue is with you(as it is my experience as well) - I can guarantee, that there are people, that will explain to your family members EXACTLY the same ideas, that you are trying to explain to them... and they will agree to that person - and not to you, because you are clearly doing it wrong.

Interestingly enough, but as a teenager, I classified his stories as sci-fi. And I was absolutely into sci-fi(that was the genre I kept reading right after Fairy tales... yes, Ive read Bible in my early teens as well - nobody asked me to do so) - it made me learn English, as I have read all the ~100 sci-fi books in my language and there was nothing else to read for me.

I think, that the people that are criticizing Erich von Däniken are doing so from modern viewpoint. People in his time had very limited POV, mostly because there was not much data, compared to how it is now, but modern people also forget that science is not a religion and it can't be based on beliefs only - it requires evidence and without any such evidence all the ideas has to be thrown out. Also, if there are better explanations - old ones are thrown out as well, because that is how it is in science. Unfortunately, no matter how good and exiting his ideas were as a read, but as a science theory they simply did not pass test of time, however IMO he has earned his place as someone as an example to have wider horizons to look around.

"People in his time"?!? He only died the other day. Until last week was "his time"! And new weird religions / cults / sects like the "Ancient Aliens" one he founded are being born all the time. The world hasn't changed fundamentally since last week, so it's still "his time".

The only place he has earned is as a successful nutjob / scam artist (about on a par with L. Ron Hubbard or Eric Dubay?), as opposed to all the less successful ones.

>>>I do wonder if there was a completely normal bloke in the middle east at the relevant time who suggested it might be good to stop being complete shits to each other

There wasn't any such bloke. I mean there was such bloke, but his qualities were completely opposite(Jesus was a violent man) to what he actually was and by various redactions and fusion of stories of initially opposing factions that were fighting over the actual seat of Jesus.

Jesus was a leader of militants(his power was spread not with peaceful words, but with sword and quite violent words - just like modern terrorists do - one of such passage has been slipped through redaction and left in the Bible) of a very violent sect(which itself was lead by John the Baptist), that were terrorizing everyone else(not in open, but when blended among other people, exactly like cult of assassins in Assassin's Creed games) and his capture was a shock and possibly betrayal and apparently those militants for some reasons(Roman military might - obviously) were unable to mount a rescue mission and because of that all the magic stories and Fairy tales, that we know as Bible were invented. You can see development of same myths to failures of modern religious fanatics - the same "magical" explanations why they have failed over and over again.

PS I do not hate Christianity, but I like cold hard Truth more than sweetest and softest Lies.