As an addendum to the latest Cleopatra flap, I find the coverage of the "controversy" even more depressing in supposedly serious media, across the board. I have read article, after poorly written article, by journalists abysmally ignorant about history and worse not at all interested in seeking the truth. We have a country where even people coming out of the "best" schools cannot write a coherent sentence, and who are only dimly capable of distinguishing between facts and feelings. The latter is what drives things for them. How does something square with their worldview on “racism?” If inconvenient, they simply ignore the truth and go with a fictional narrative they find more congenial. What matters today is not the truth, nor the facts, but rather the spin, or “narrative” that prevails. This world of distortion permeates everything from the White House to the local news.
But when it comes to Cleopatra, we are referencing one of the most well-documented figures in history. To suggest, as many have that, well, "we just don't know," is to deliberately obscure the truth to avoid hurtfully puncturing the racial fantasies of some people. Worse, I have read some obscure "expert" (the only one sought out by an idiot reporter) claim that even if she was Greek she couldn't possibly be "white," or fair, dismissing the world's leading Egyptologist (Hawass) suggestion that she might even have been blonde, when, in fact, people in northern Greece are often blonde and tall like Alexander, so it is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Instead, when the facts ruin the fantasy, it gets ridiculously redefined, so that the original Greek authors of European civilization are no longer considered European and thus no longer “white” in this crazy worldview.
The Egyptians are incensed because of attempts to depict them as sub-Saharan Africans or as being closely related to them. They are not, and even when very briefly ruled by black people of Kush or Nubians, those rulers had more aquiline features found in northeast Africa and had little more in common with West Africans, (from whom most American blacks are descended), than they would have had with Europeans.
It is a sad commentary on the level of ignorance and credulity in contemporary society that several decades after Newsweek ran a cover with the ridiculous, and universally debunkeduestion “Was Cleopatra black?” there is even moreignorance today. It is a consequence of the self-hatred of radicalized “scholars” constantly aimed at poisoning and undermining our great western civilization, going back to its foundation in the Ancient Greek world through all subsequent periods culminating in the free world of today.
Our heritage is not just being stolen; it is being destroyed. Our culture, as well as the entire western hemisphere is an offshoot of European civilization. The more they can obscure that the less we will know of who we really are, which is what has facilitated their attempts to remake and redefine us in accordance with the phony ideological group identities they have conjured up. But this cultural suicide being forced on us will in no way uplift supposedly marginalized groups, on whose behalf it is being proffered. It will only bring all of us down. While the “Anglosphere” has gone overboard on this, fortunately most of Europe, is not buying it, nor for that matter, is the rest of the world. If we do not reverse this disastrous trajectory, our country will again, over time, come to be perceived as little more than a remote backwater populated by dimwitted people.
There is no doubt in my mind that a 19th century high school graduate was more articulate and better educated than graduates of today’s universities. From the time I was teaching five decades ago to the present we have gone from dumb to dumber. Sure, there are, as there always has been, a small number of very bright people that really drive scientific, technical and intellectual progress for everyone else. But the leveling, “equity” ideology is increasingly destroying opportunities that enable such people emerge and excel. That costs everyone and we are left only with mass mediocrity. Without cultural restoration the point of no return will soon be reached.
In that case America is over.
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