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THE USA - WHERE MYTHS ARE TAUGHT AS HISTORY!
NewsTime
April 12 2010
South Africa
Every country tends to have its history written to its own advantage,
and school history textbooks are approved by politicians. The recent
upset about the Turkish official history incorrectly reflecting the
Armenian genocide as by the Armenians, and not by the Turks, is an
example of this. For the half- century of Belgium rule of the Congo
that followed King Leopold's death, school textbooks praised Leopold
and his works as lavishly as Soviet textbooks praised Lenin. Belgium
archives for that period were inaccessible when Jules Marchal, the
retired Belgium diplomat, wrote his history of the Congo exposing
the myth. In 1944 the victorious General De Gaulle gave a version
of contemporary history that flattered his fellow citizens, and
left out the complicity of the Vichy French with the Nazis in the
extermination of the Jews. The French archives for that period were
only opened in 1979.
However the United States of America has taken this to the absurd
degree of teaching total myths as history, even at university level.
Here are some of the words of Mary Lefkowitz, American Classical
Historian, about this mythology as detailed in her book "Not Out
of Africa":
"Although I had been completely unaware of it, there was in existence a
whole literature that denied that the ancient Greeks were the inventors
of democracy, philosophy, and science. There were books in circulation
that claimed that Socrates and Cleopatra were of African descent,
and that Greek philosophy had actually been stolen from Egypt. Not
only were these books being read and widely distributed; some of these
ideas were being taught in schools and even in universities..........no
one seemed to think it was appropriate to ask for evidence......
...in February 1993,...Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan was invited to
give Wellesley's Martin Luther King,Jr. memorial lecture. Posters
described Dr. ben-Jochannan as a 'distinguished Egyptologist'
and indeed that was how he was introduced by the then president of
Wellesley College.
But I knew from my research in Afrocentric literature that he was
not what scholars would ordinarily describe as an Egyptologist, that
is a scholar of Egyptian language and civilization. Rather he was
an extreme Afrocentrist, author of many books describing how Greek
civilization was stolen from Africa, how Aristotle robbed the library
of Alexandria, and how the true Jews are Africans like himself.
After Dr. ben-Jochannan made these same assertions once again
in his lecture, I asked him during the question time why he said
that Aristotle had come to Egypt with Alexander, and had stolen his
philosophy from the library at Alexandria, when that Library had only
been built after his death. Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the
question, and said that he resented the tone of the question. Several
students came up to me after the lecture and accused me of racism,
suggesting that I had been brainwashed by white historians....Aristotle
never went to Egypt, and while the date of the Library of Alexandria is
not known precisely, it was certainly built some years after the city
was founded, which was after both Aristotle's and Alexander's deaths.
A lecture at which serious questions could not be asked, and in fact
were greeted with hostility - the occasion seemed more like a political
rally than an academic event. And if that was not disturbing enough
in itself, there was also the strange silence on the part of many
of my faculty colleagues. Several of these were well aware that what
Dr. ben-Johannan was saying was factually wrong...Were they afraid of
being called racists?...Didn't we as educators owe it to our students,
all our students, to see that they got the best education they could
possibly get? And that clearly was what they were not getting in
a lecture where they were being told myths disguised as history,
and where discussion and analysis had apparently been forbidden.
Good as the myths they were hearing may have made these students
feel....they were being systematically deprived of the most important
features of a university education. They were not learning how to
question themselves and others, they were not learning to distinguish
facts from fiction, nor in fact were they learning how to think for
themselves. Their instructors had forgotten that children do not come
to universities to be indoctrinated - at least in a free society.
I first learned the notion that Socrates was black several years ago,
from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato's "Apology",
his account of Socrates' trial and conviction. Throughout the entire
semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year
or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had
been concealing the truth about Socrates' origins. In a course
in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black,
and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be
a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had
warned her about....Socrates was ethnically no different from other
Athenians....In Socrates day, they did not allow Greeks from other
city states to become naturalized Athenian citizens, and they were
even more careful about the non-Greeks or barbaroi.......If he had
been a foreigner, one of his enemies, or one of the comic poets,
would have been sure to point it out...
The question of race matters only insofar as it is necessary to show
that no classicists or ancient historians have tried to conceal the
truth about the origins of the Greek people or the ancestry of certain
ancient figures.
Perhaps the most influential Afrocentrist text is "Stolen Legacy", a
work which has been in wide circulation since its publication in 1954.
Its author, George G. M. James, writes that "The term Greek philosophy,
to begin with is a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in
existence....(they)...did not possess the native ability essential
to the development of philosophy"...It is not hard to understand
why James wishes to give credit for the Greek achievements to the
Egyptians....Like the other nationalistic myths, the story of the
"Stolen Legacy" both offers an explanation for past suffering, and
provides a source of ethnic pride.
But although the myth may encourage and even perhaps "empower"
African-Americans, its use has a destructive side, which cannot and
should not be overlooked. First of all, it offers them a "story"
instead of history. It also suggests that African-Americans need
to learn only what they choose to believe about the past. But in so
doing, the Afrocentric myth seeks to shelter them from learning what
all other ethnic groups must learn, and indeed, face up to, namely
the full scope of their history."
Mary Leifkowitz, in my opinion, seriously understates the problem this
fake mythical history has caused, not only in the USA, but globally.
Eleven years after the publication of "Stolen Legacy", this is how
Pallo Jordan's mother, Phyllis Ntantala, describes the race riots on
campus in her book "A Life's Mosaic":
"In 1966 the University of Wisconsin embarked on an all-out campaign
to recruit blacks....... By 1967 black students in the Northern
universities were clamouring for Black Studies programmes, complaining
that what they were being taught was irrelevant to their lives...They
could find no folk heros or heroines in the characters of Literature,
History, Art or Music. But for all that the students were not certain
what they meant by Black Studies....
The demand for Black studies reached a climax in the late sixties and
early seventies........in 1969, for five days in a row, the students
rampaged through the campus and State Street, smashing and destroying
property. They smashed almost to rubble the all-glass Maths building
on campus. At a faculty meeting in the midst of this destruction,
the University of Wisconsin faculty decided to accept the students'
demand for a Black Studies programme, even though none of them had
any idea of what it was going to be like....It seemed "blackness"
was the major qualification, irrespective of the area of expertise..."
In other words, Black American's did not like History, and demanded
that it be re-written. And so it was - as Kwanza and African
Renaissance theories.
Almost all literature written in the black Diaspora is filled with this
African Renaissance or Kwanza mythology, and explains, in my opinion,
some of the ideas of Thabo Mbeki and others educated in exile who
returned with the ANC. How much damage this myth has done to parts
of Africa where whites are a minority, not a majority as in the USA,
is uncalculatable.
And who knows what damage the myth that "real Jews are black" has
done to Israeli / Palestinian relations?
Until the USA can sort this problem out - I side with China on the
question of historical information being edited on Internet search
engines.
NewsTime
April 12 2010
South Africa
Every country tends to have its history written to its own advantage,
and school history textbooks are approved by politicians. The recent
upset about the Turkish official history incorrectly reflecting the
Armenian genocide as by the Armenians, and not by the Turks, is an
example of this. For the half- century of Belgium rule of the Congo
that followed King Leopold's death, school textbooks praised Leopold
and his works as lavishly as Soviet textbooks praised Lenin. Belgium
archives for that period were inaccessible when Jules Marchal, the
retired Belgium diplomat, wrote his history of the Congo exposing
the myth. In 1944 the victorious General De Gaulle gave a version
of contemporary history that flattered his fellow citizens, and
left out the complicity of the Vichy French with the Nazis in the
extermination of the Jews. The French archives for that period were
only opened in 1979.
However the United States of America has taken this to the absurd
degree of teaching total myths as history, even at university level.
Here are some of the words of Mary Lefkowitz, American Classical
Historian, about this mythology as detailed in her book "Not Out
of Africa":
"Although I had been completely unaware of it, there was in existence a
whole literature that denied that the ancient Greeks were the inventors
of democracy, philosophy, and science. There were books in circulation
that claimed that Socrates and Cleopatra were of African descent,
and that Greek philosophy had actually been stolen from Egypt. Not
only were these books being read and widely distributed; some of these
ideas were being taught in schools and even in universities..........no
one seemed to think it was appropriate to ask for evidence......
...in February 1993,...Dr. Yosef A. A. ben-Jochannan was invited to
give Wellesley's Martin Luther King,Jr. memorial lecture. Posters
described Dr. ben-Jochannan as a 'distinguished Egyptologist'
and indeed that was how he was introduced by the then president of
Wellesley College.
But I knew from my research in Afrocentric literature that he was
not what scholars would ordinarily describe as an Egyptologist, that
is a scholar of Egyptian language and civilization. Rather he was
an extreme Afrocentrist, author of many books describing how Greek
civilization was stolen from Africa, how Aristotle robbed the library
of Alexandria, and how the true Jews are Africans like himself.
After Dr. ben-Jochannan made these same assertions once again
in his lecture, I asked him during the question time why he said
that Aristotle had come to Egypt with Alexander, and had stolen his
philosophy from the library at Alexandria, when that Library had only
been built after his death. Dr. ben-Jochannan was unable to answer the
question, and said that he resented the tone of the question. Several
students came up to me after the lecture and accused me of racism,
suggesting that I had been brainwashed by white historians....Aristotle
never went to Egypt, and while the date of the Library of Alexandria is
not known precisely, it was certainly built some years after the city
was founded, which was after both Aristotle's and Alexander's deaths.
A lecture at which serious questions could not be asked, and in fact
were greeted with hostility - the occasion seemed more like a political
rally than an academic event. And if that was not disturbing enough
in itself, there was also the strange silence on the part of many
of my faculty colleagues. Several of these were well aware that what
Dr. ben-Johannan was saying was factually wrong...Were they afraid of
being called racists?...Didn't we as educators owe it to our students,
all our students, to see that they got the best education they could
possibly get? And that clearly was what they were not getting in
a lecture where they were being told myths disguised as history,
and where discussion and analysis had apparently been forbidden.
Good as the myths they were hearing may have made these students
feel....they were being systematically deprived of the most important
features of a university education. They were not learning how to
question themselves and others, they were not learning to distinguish
facts from fiction, nor in fact were they learning how to think for
themselves. Their instructors had forgotten that children do not come
to universities to be indoctrinated - at least in a free society.
I first learned the notion that Socrates was black several years ago,
from a student in my second-year Greek course on Plato's "Apology",
his account of Socrates' trial and conviction. Throughout the entire
semester the student had regarded me with sullen hostility. A year
or so later she apologized. She explained that she thought I had
been concealing the truth about Socrates' origins. In a course
in Afro-American studies she had been told that he was black,
and my silence about his African ancestry seemed to her to be
a confirmation of the Eurocentric arrogance her instructor had
warned her about....Socrates was ethnically no different from other
Athenians....In Socrates day, they did not allow Greeks from other
city states to become naturalized Athenian citizens, and they were
even more careful about the non-Greeks or barbaroi.......If he had
been a foreigner, one of his enemies, or one of the comic poets,
would have been sure to point it out...
The question of race matters only insofar as it is necessary to show
that no classicists or ancient historians have tried to conceal the
truth about the origins of the Greek people or the ancestry of certain
ancient figures.
Perhaps the most influential Afrocentrist text is "Stolen Legacy", a
work which has been in wide circulation since its publication in 1954.
Its author, George G. M. James, writes that "The term Greek philosophy,
to begin with is a misnomer, for there is no such philosophy in
existence....(they)...did not possess the native ability essential
to the development of philosophy"...It is not hard to understand
why James wishes to give credit for the Greek achievements to the
Egyptians....Like the other nationalistic myths, the story of the
"Stolen Legacy" both offers an explanation for past suffering, and
provides a source of ethnic pride.
But although the myth may encourage and even perhaps "empower"
African-Americans, its use has a destructive side, which cannot and
should not be overlooked. First of all, it offers them a "story"
instead of history. It also suggests that African-Americans need
to learn only what they choose to believe about the past. But in so
doing, the Afrocentric myth seeks to shelter them from learning what
all other ethnic groups must learn, and indeed, face up to, namely
the full scope of their history."
Mary Leifkowitz, in my opinion, seriously understates the problem this
fake mythical history has caused, not only in the USA, but globally.
Eleven years after the publication of "Stolen Legacy", this is how
Pallo Jordan's mother, Phyllis Ntantala, describes the race riots on
campus in her book "A Life's Mosaic":
"In 1966 the University of Wisconsin embarked on an all-out campaign
to recruit blacks....... By 1967 black students in the Northern
universities were clamouring for Black Studies programmes, complaining
that what they were being taught was irrelevant to their lives...They
could find no folk heros or heroines in the characters of Literature,
History, Art or Music. But for all that the students were not certain
what they meant by Black Studies....
The demand for Black studies reached a climax in the late sixties and
early seventies........in 1969, for five days in a row, the students
rampaged through the campus and State Street, smashing and destroying
property. They smashed almost to rubble the all-glass Maths building
on campus. At a faculty meeting in the midst of this destruction,
the University of Wisconsin faculty decided to accept the students'
demand for a Black Studies programme, even though none of them had
any idea of what it was going to be like....It seemed "blackness"
was the major qualification, irrespective of the area of expertise..."
In other words, Black American's did not like History, and demanded
that it be re-written. And so it was - as Kwanza and African
Renaissance theories.
Almost all literature written in the black Diaspora is filled with this
African Renaissance or Kwanza mythology, and explains, in my opinion,
some of the ideas of Thabo Mbeki and others educated in exile who
returned with the ANC. How much damage this myth has done to parts
of Africa where whites are a minority, not a majority as in the USA,
is uncalculatable.
And who knows what damage the myth that "real Jews are black" has
done to Israeli / Palestinian relations?
Until the USA can sort this problem out - I side with China on the
question of historical information being edited on Internet search
engines.