What’s the big deal about making history palliative rather than factual, if, as Collin Flaherty would have said, it makes the black kids less angry? ~ilana

A known quantity in the faking department is Rev. Al Sharpton. In a video that gets considerable play on TV, Sharpton informs a rapt audience that “white folks” were cave dwellers when blacks were building empires and pyramids; teaching philosophy, astrology and mathematics. “Socrates and them Greek homos” were mere copycats, aping black civilization.

As revealed in “Helping The Sharpton and Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black,'” this mythistory has a presence in America’s schools, tertiary and secondary.

By now we know that mass media and government under both national parties routinely generate fake news to achieve political ends. That our progressive pedagogues propagandize the youth: That’s well-known and passively accepted, too. Less known is the extent to which fabricated history has been incorporated into curricula.

In “Black Athena,” Martin Gardiner Bernal of Cambridge, England, suggested that “Ancient Greece” had been “fabricated,” and that chroniclers of “classical civilization” had concealed its “Afroasiatic roots.”

Ditto historian George G. M. James, whose “Stolen Legacy: The Egyptian Origins of Western Philosophy” claims that a rather large chunk of ancient civilization is fraudulent. The Greeks stole it from the Egyptians. The Egyptians were as black as Al Sharpton and Idi Amin.

The school tracts known as the “Portland African-American Baseline Essays” are another counterfactual abomination to have percolated into America’s anti-intellectual schooling system. The Science Baseline Essay, in particular, claims that thousands of years ago, Egyptians-cum-blacks “flew in electroplated gold gliders, knew accurately the distance to the sun, and discovered the Theory of Evolution.”

According to Afrocentric academic Cheikh Anta Diop—a Senegalese with considerable celebrity in the US—Africans invented everything from Judaism, to engineering, to astronomy, including dialectical materialism (apparently Marxism is cause for inventor’s pride).

It’s easy to dismiss this mythistory as too ridiculous to swallow. However, mythical thinking thrives in a culture that eschews objective truth: ours. Where once there was an understanding that a reality independent of the human observer exists; students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—of persons or groups in society.

Casting fact and objective truth as no more than a perspective is a handy bit of intellectual egalitarianism: If nothing is immutably true, then all positions are but a matter of preference and can claim equal validity. This vortex is the scaffolding for Afrocentric pseudohistory; the American academy its perfect foil.

When all is said and done, what are a few curricular concessions if they increase self-esteem among young Africans? What’s the big deal about making history palliative rather than factual, if, as Collin Flaherty would have said, it makes the black kids less angry?

For this reason—and unlike the equally nonsensical Holocaust denial, which immediately raises establishment and media ire—remedial historical revisionism for blacks meets with little objection.

Refuting Afrocentric pseudohistory has fallen largely to Mary Lefkowitz, a brilliant Greek classicist. In “Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History,” she asks: “If the Greeks had learned their philosophy from a large theoretical literature produced by Egyptian writers, surely some trace of that literature would have remained in Egypt?”

Alas, there’s no point searching for logic where there is only African chauvinism. Nor should one look for methodological coherence in the tracts mentioned. For scholars whose mission it is to promote a view of African superiority, Afrocentrists have done a poor job.

Their methodology consists in neglecting chronology, treating myths as history, and using citations fraudulently to support the crux of their argument. In Afrocentric works, hypothesis morphs into fact, authorities that don’t bolster a thesis are recruited in its service, and the absence of proof becomes evidence of conspiracy.

One example among many of a jarring deception is a reference to the “Egyptian Mystery System” whence the Greeks allegedly stole their philosophy. The reference comes not from an authentic historical text, but from eighteenth-century French fiction and Freemasonry.

As amusing is that the city of Alexandria was founded only after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, and the library from which Aristotle allegedly pilfered his genius was founded after the philosopher’s death. Accompanying the dogged repetition of the lies are the vicious ad hominem attacks leveled at scholars like Lefkowitz, who has dared to confront the evidence.

Of course, entire civilizations are not typically the kleptomaniac’s item of choice. Afrocentrists, moreover, look especially dimwitted in their incongruous claims, considering that, on the one hand, they blame the Great White and his wicked, linear thinking for practically every reprehensible event in history. On the other hand, they lay claim to his civilization.

If Eurocentric culture is so horrible, why would these fake historians want to claim it as their own? By coveting it, aren’t Afrocentrists providing the ultimate validation of Western Civilization?

****
Part I is “Helping The Sharpton and Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black.'”

©2017 ILANA Mercer
The Daily Caller, The Unz Review, Constitution.com,
The Libertarian Alliance, The Liberty Conservative
January 14

The post Faking History To Make The Black Kids Feel Good (Part II*) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

In Afrocentric mythistory, even the Sphinx had negroid features. That is until it became the target of one of the first documented, racially motivated acts of vandalism. The facial crater borne so stoically by the Sphinx comes—don’t you know?—from being socked on the nose by Napoleon’s racist troops ~ilana

Boy, have whites done hard time under Barack Hussein Obama! To deliver his inauguration benediction, eight accursed years back, Obama commissioned one Rev. Joseph Lowery.

Lowery is to poetry what Beyoncé is to music. Both were greatly elevated by the outgoing, déclassé first couple. Lowery’s anti-white inaugural jingle beseeched the Lord to finally make “white embrace what is right,” allow “brown to stick around,” “yellow to be mellow,” and “the red man to get ahead.”

High art.

TWO PIMPS IN A POD

Indeed, on day one, Obama and his bitter and twisted better half hammered home that to be white in their America was never to be right. To be black was to have an eternal claim against whites, for no other reason than that they’re white.

Although America is the land of quotas, set-asides and affirmative action—a country that privileges minorities—the majority is, nevertheless, subjected to non-stop, relentless propaganda. Enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, this agitprop has led white Americans, most of whom harbor no racial animus, to believe racism saturates their society. So, whites say nothing when they’re roped into a Sisyphean struggle to appease the unappeasable.

Unappeasable is the job description of Rev. Al Sharpton, with whom Obama had made common cause. (Later, Black Lives Matter stole Sharpton’s thunder.)

With the election of Donald Trump, white America has essentially told these race pimps to talk to the hand (‘cause the face ain’t listening). They’ve had enough of the pigment burden. Besides, as a pragmatist and a doer, Trump is constitutionally indifferent to the racial-grievance industry.

So march Sharpton must.

Ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration, Sharpton’s “We Shall Not be Moved March” will take place on January 14. The reverend and his foot soldiers at CNN will meander to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. There, they will say stuff as memorable and meaningful as the ectoplasm that tumbled from Obama’s mouth, during his farewell address.

Let us hope that President-elect Trump “shall not be moved,” and that Al’s presence in the People’s House will be greatly reduced under a Trump administration. For as of June 2016, the White House Visitor Records logged 57 Obama-Sharpton love-ins.

Before he fades to black, in the memorable words of a Metallica ballad, an aspect of Sharpton’s lying persona should be exposed. It has been omitted from the tit-for-tat that goes for debate between Republicans and Democrats. (By which I mean the perennial, “No, Democrats are the real sexists, we love women. No, Democrats are the real racists; we’re the party of Lincoln.”)

BEWARE OF ACADEMIC AFROCENTRISM

When radio and TV talkers play a 1994 Al Sharpton harangue, delivered from Keane College, New Jersey, they typically call Sharpton a homophobe and a racist and leave it at that. They fail to explain the substance of the nonsense with which the reverend riles-up the receptive audience. Roars Sharpton (1.11 minutes in):

“White folks was [sic] in the caves while we was [sic] building empires. We never admired them, but they knew to admire us. We built pyramids before Donald Trump even knew what architecture was. We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”

The mythistory Sharpton peddles on this tape, frequently played by the heroic Sean Hannity, is called Afrocentrism. It’s promoted by a number of undistinguished African academics and imparted in some schools across North America, from grade school through to the university level, and, naturally, in the African Studies department.

I don’t know how else to break it to you, but the white man stole the black man’s accomplishments. According to the Sharpton abracadabra, Africans have an ineffable claim against Europeans. For how does one put a price on the mugging of a civilization?

The gist of Afrocentric mythistory: The venerable Greeks, the founders of Western Civilization, stole their philosophical and scientific know-how from Egypt. Egypt, and not Greece, is the fount of Western tradition. And although artifacts indicate that the Egyptians were more Benetton than black; by Sharpton’s telling, the Egyptians were actually black Africans.

How did this civilizational mugging occur? Aristotle is said to have sojourned to Egypt with Alexander the Great, smuggled books out of the Alexandrian library, and slapped his name on these books, promoting them as his own. He wasn’t alone. Socrates, Pythagoras and Plato were plagiarizers in their own right.

Elizabeth Taylor The Appropriator had no business playing Cleopatra. The Macedonian of the Ptolemaic bloodline was really a long-limbed black woman. In Afrocentric mythistory, even the Sphinx had negroid features. That is until it became the target of one of the first documented, racially motivated acts of vandalism. The facial crater borne so stoically by the Sphinx comes—don’t you know?—from being socked on the nose by Napoleon’s racist troops.

Is there no end to the antics of those white bad boys?

PART II: “Faking History to Make The Black Kids Feel Good.”

©2017 ILANA Mercer
The Daily Caller, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
Constitution.com, The Libertarian Alliance,
The Liberty Conservative.
January 13

*Credit for screen-picture capture to Michelle Valentine

The post Helping The Sharpton & Obama Afrocentrism ‘Fade to Black’ (Part I) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs—is also as American as apple pie ~ilana

I see the Zionists John Hagee and Rod Parsley as belonging squarely to the tradition of a vigorous (if often misguided), fighting American Christendom ~ilana

Liberal lunatics worked hard to create a Jeremiah Wright parallel in John McCain’s political universe. Wright, dressed in flowing robes lambasting white men and Western civilization, quickly gave way to images of the rotund Pastor John Hagee laying into the Roman Catholic Church (called “the great whore”) and homosexual sin (caused the great hurricane). What really caused MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and his Obama Brigade to rise on their hind legs was Hagee’s clumsy suggestion that “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land.”

Personally, I’m disinclined to blame God for humanity’s troubles and transgressions. But very many Christians and Jews believe that, good or bad, The Almighty moves in mysterious ways and that there is a method in the madness around them. To explain events is not to excuse them. Ultimately, I’m more suspicious of “righteous gentiles” who shout louder than Abe Foxman about anti-Semitism.

At this stage of the histrionics, most hastened to acquiesce to the parallels drawn between Pastors Wright and Hagee. The browbeaten were feeling the pressure to appear as “intelligent” as the rabid barking liberals. Others veered into theological justifications. Jewish conservatives belabored their annoying, overwrought “I-am-Jew-Supporter-of-Hagee-Hear-Me-Roar” shtick.

McCain, meanwhile, was twisting his tortured frame into pretzels to denounce Hagee. This only helped legitimize the similarities the media had manufactured between Hagee and Wright vis-à-vis McCain and Hussein. Not being as stupid, Obama saw in the contretemps an opportunity for quick quid pro quo. Just as he doesn’t hold Hagee against McCain, the sanctimonious senator implied, so too should Wright not be held against him.

Obama drives a hard bargain. He also resisted public pressure to denounce his pox of a pastor. McCain, conversely, did not stand up like a man; but turned on a solid supporter—Hagee—as soon as the flaky left began to pile on the pastor. If McCain can’t stand up to unhinged talkers, how will he stand up to al-Qaida? (Mind you, McCain never fails to “stand up” to conservatives.)

Yet another evangelical supporter of McCain, Pastor Rod Parsley, had “sharply criticized Islam, calling the religion [an] inherently violent,” “anti-Christ religion,” and “the Muslim prophet Muhammad “the mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil.” To Olbermann, this was a giant “gotcha” moment: Parsley’s words were so patently damning, so deranged, that Olbermann just beamed all over the screen speechless.

“Countdown” Keith made the right call for the wrong reasons. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, conducted in 2006, “six in 10 Americans think [Islam] the religion is prone to violent extremism.” “Fifty-eight percent think there are more violent extremists within Islam than within other religions.” Views have hardened since 2001. Over the years, Americans have learned a great deal more about Islam. Increased knowledge may well correlate with unfavorable attitudes toward the Islam. At least among ordinary Americans. Indeed, the prolix Olbermann didn’t need to parse Parsley for his viewers.

Contempt for the Religious Right in contemporary America is not new. A deracinated lot, the pukka left (liberals), the crypto-left (neoconservatives), and the aspiring left (assorted libertarians) have always despised the people they regard as religion’s rube hicks.

To preface my contention that, foibles and frailties notwithstanding, Parsley and Hagee are “ours” and Wright is not, let me say this: The aforementioned mutant leftists consider America a propositional nation, a notion and an idea; not a community of flesh-and-blood people sharing a mother tongue, traditions, history and heroes. To such pseudo-sophisticates, the idea that some are part of your national family, and others not, signals a lack of worldliness. The nation’s social scientists, statists all, would go even further and diagnose proponents of the nation as diseased.

Such charges should not bother the truly worldly, especially if they’ve experienced—and don’t merely theorize about—life and the world.

Hagee’s Hebraic bond goes back to John Winthrop and the New England Puritans. Revivalism, evangelicalism, the faith of happy-clappers—this branch of Protestantism, and its beliefs—is also as American as apple pie. The First and Second Great Awakenings were epochal events in early America, instrumental in the Revolution. And later in Abolition: Although evangelical abolitionists embraced pacifism, John Brown did not. He was “one of the very few in pre-Civil War America willing both to live with black people and to die for them.” Not to mention kill for them. To avenge the savage beating of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, and as an answer to the violent pro-slavery “Redeemers,” Brown and his “free-soil activists” snatched five pro-slavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas,” and “split the captives’ skulls with broadswords, biblical retribution gone mad.”

The particularism of Afrocentrism, Wright’s creed, is as American as Idi Amin was. Both alien and idiotic is Wright’s fealty to “Black values” and the Dark Continent—where everywhere black bodies are stacked up like firewood, to paraphrase the talented Keith Richburg, a black American journalist.

The dim dhimmi will see Wright—a man of the far-left, a hater of Israel and the West, an idolater of Africa—as one of them. Although irreligious and against aggressive wars, I see the Zionists John Hagee and Rod Parsley as belonging squarely to the tradition of a vigorous (if often misguided), fighting American Christendom.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
May 30, 2008

The post Wright As American As Idi Amin appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

According to the mythistory called Afrocentrism, Africans, who had invented everything Western, have an ineffable claim against Europeans. For how does one put a price on the mugging of a civilization? ~ilana

Unlike the equally nonsensical Holocaust denial, which immediately raises establishment and media ire, Afrocentrism, which is remedial revisionism, has been met with little objection ~ilana

Casting fact and objective truth as no more than a perspective is a handy bit of egalitarianism: If nothing is immutably true, then all positions are but a matter of preference and can claim equal validity. This vortex is the scaffolding for Afrocentrism; the public school system its perfect foil ~ilana

Hollywood is usually the main peddler of historical fiction, the kind the public doesn’t hesitate to accept as Bible from Sinai. For some time now, Hollywood has been getting stiff competition from unexpected quarters. Now coming to an African Studies department near you is some startling information: The venerable Greeks, the founders of Western Civilization, stole their philosophical and scientific know-how from Egypt. Egypt, and not Greece, is the fount of Western tradition.

In an unchronicled trip, Aristotle is said to have sojourned to Egypt with Alexander the Great, smuggled books out of the Alexandrian library, and slapped his name on these books, promoting them as his own. He wasn’t alone. Socrates, Pythagoras and Plato were plagiarizers in their own right. Is there no end to the antics of those White Bad Boys?

You may never have given much thought to the skin color of the ancient Egyptians. Artifacts at least indicate that they were a diverse people, more Benetton than black. That the Egyptians were actually black Africans, then, must come as a surprise. Elizabeth Taylor had no business playing Cleopatra. The Macedonian of the Ptolemaic bloodline was really a long-limbed black woman. Even the Sphinx had negroid features. That is until it fell prey to one of the first ‘documented,’ racially motivated acts of vandalism. The facial crater the Sphinx stoically bears comes from being socked on the nose by Napoleon’s racist troops. There go those White Boys again.

This mythistory is called Afrocentrism. It’s promoted by a number of undistinguished African academics and taught to students across North America from grade school through to the university level. Accordingly, Africans have an ineffable claim against Europeans. For how does one put a price on the mugging of a civilization?

Unlike the equally nonsensical Holocaust denial, which immediately raises establishment and media ire, this remedial revisionism has been met with little objection. For the most part, rebutting this bunk has fallen to a Greek Classicist by the name of Mary Lefkowitz, in her book, “Not Out Of Africa: How ‘Afrocentrism’ Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History.”

To this end, Lefkowitz would have mined Afrocentric books such as Black Athena by Cornell’s Martin Bernal, Stolen Legacy by George G. M. James, and the school tracts known as the Portland African-American Baseline Essays. The Science Baseline Essay claims no less that thousands of years ago Egyptians-cum-blacks “flew in electroplated gold gliders, knew accurately the distance to the sun, and discovered the Theory of Evolution.” According to Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese Afrocentrist, Africans invented everything from Judaism, to engineering, to astronomy, including dialectical materialism (although Marxism is no cause for inventor’s pride).

One nagging question: Afrocentrists claim that practically every reprehensible occurrence in history is the doing of the Great White and his linear thinking. Why, if Eurocentric culture is so horrible, would they want to lay claim to it? By coveting it, aren’t Afrocentrists providing the ultimate validation of Western Civilization?

Furthermore, entire civilizations are not typically the kleptomaniac’s item of choice. As Lefkowitz points out in Not Out of Africa, “If the Greeks had learned their philosophy from a large theoretical literature produced by Egyptian writers, surely some trace of that literature would have remained in Egypt?” But there’s no point searching for congruity where there is only African chauvinism.

Nor should one search for methodological coherence. For scholars whose mission it is to promote a view of African superiority, Afrocentrists are doing a poor job. Their methodology consists in neglecting chronology, treating myths as history, and using citations fraudulently so that these don’t support the crux of their argument. In Afrocentric works, hypothesis morphs into fact, authorities that don’t bolster a thesis are recruited in its service, and absence of proof becomes evidence of conspiracy. Accompanying the dogged repetition of the lie are the vicious ad hominem attacks leveled at the few scholars who’ve dare to confront the evidence.

An example of the jarring deceptions is a reference to the Egyptian Mystery System whence the Greeks allegedly stole their philosophy: The reference comes not from an authentic historical text, but from eighteenth-century French fiction and Freemasonry. Also amusing is that the city of Alexandria was founded only after Alexander’s conquest of Egypt, and the library from which Aristotle allegedly pilfered his genius was founded after the philosopher’s death.

Such mythical thinking thrives and is nurtured in a culture that eschews objective truth. Where once there was an understanding that there exists a reality independent of the human observer, students are now taught that truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position—or lack thereof—persons or groups hold in society.

Casting fact and objective truth as no more than a perspective is a handy bit of egalitarianism: If nothing is immutably true, then all positions are but a matter of preference and can claim equal validity. This vortex is the scaffolding for Afrocentrism; the public school system its perfect foil.

Why pedagogues haven’t rejected Afrocentrism outright is because it’s seen as a means to increase self-esteem among young Africans. Self-styled victim groups, notably natives and women, have had their suppurating historical wounds similarly tended with curricular concessions. Self-esteem no less than multiculturalism is an article of faith and a project of the public school system; it is the very embodiment and instantiation of the therapeutic state. Of course, the raison detre of public schooling lends itself just as well to teaching the mythology of Holocaust denial in order to allay the guilt that plagues students of German descent.

In the words of John S. Mill, “A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another.” Imbibing politically correct victimology and its attendant myths is imperative in the scheme of things. Adapted to the public school system and its mission, history is doomed to be more palliative than factual.

©2001 Ilana Mercer
Special to LewRockwell.com
March 1

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