Wez Waz Historians. from The Birth of Classical Europe (History)
submitted by AloisH to History 3.8 years ago
2 comments
TLDR: Blacks stealing our history probably has it roots in communism.
A passage from The Birth of Classical Europe:
Black Athena The most influential and controversial account in recent times of the relations between the Greek world and its nonGreek neighbours is the mammoth work by Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (published in three volumes between 1987 and 2006). In this work, Bernal proposed two major theses: first, that the origins of Greek civilization are to be sought in Africa, specifically in Egypt; and second, that since the eighteenth century this fact has been systematically and deliberately concealed by western scholars, whether through Eurocentrism or downright racism. Reactions to Bernal’s work have been passionate, ill-tempered and, at times, breathtakingly arrogant: one critic has suggested that ‘Bernal’s argument … can safely be ignored because Bernal is an expert in Chinese politics, not a trained classicist’. There is certainly much to disagree with in Black Athena, not least Bernal’s oddly single-minded focus on Egypt as the fountainhead of Greek culture, to the near-total exclusion of the Near East. Nor has Bernal helped his cause by his eager endorsement of such crude and muddled rants as George James’s Stolen Legacy: The Greeks were Not the Authors of Greek Philosophy, But the People of North Africa, Commonly Called the Egyptians (1954). To be fair, Bernal has never gone so far as to argue, as James and others have done, that Cleopatra or Socrates was black, or that Aristotle stole his philosophical ideas from the Egyptians by ransacking the library at Alexandria (founded several decades after Aristotle’s death). Bernal’s own position is better represented by his passing reference, in the first volume of Black Athena, to ‘Pharoahs whom one can usefully call black’. Bernal justifies this criterion of ‘usefulness’ as follows: ‘There is no doubt that the concept of “race” is of overwhelming importance today. Thus, I believe that both my emphasis on the African nature of Egyptian civilisation and the presence of people “whom one can usefully call black” among its rulers are important to contemporary readers. This is to counter the cultural debilitation to peoples of African descent brought about by implicit assumptions or explicit statements that there has never been a great “African” culture which has contributed to world civilisation as a whole and that “Blacks” have always been servile.’ That seems to us to be decent, fair-minded, and well argued; whether or not it is the right way to go about writing history, we leave to the reader to decide.
