The Use and Misuse of History

“I am heir to  the greatest civilization the world has ever known. I’d like to defend it but I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” –Alice Teller

“By 2050—earlier probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared.  The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed….shall exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.”–Orwell, 1984

Taught these days to IBM employees: “Greeks came to Africa as students to discover what Africans already knew. Writing, science, medicine, and spirituality were already a part of African civilizations.” Accompanied by a picture of a sub-Saharan black instructing Greeks.

This is being taught in your schools and colleges today. There are two very large lies here. 1) That the classical Greeks who initiated Western Civilisation got their knowledge from Egyptians, and 2) that Egyptians were black Africans. This distorts the history of the human race, not only destroying knowledge but contaminating all public discourse in our own time.

There is now a large grievance literature, apparently widely believed, that Europeans not only stole civilisation from blacks but they maliciously and deceitfully suppressed giving credit where it was due.

The simple truth (which many scholars are lavishly funded to disguise) is that black, sub-Saharan Africa was outside the European/Asian sphere of civilisations, existing in a most primitive state. Except for a few encountered by Egyptians, quickly enslaved, black people were nearly unknown and marginal to the civilized world until daring and skilled Portuguese sailors touched the west and east coasts of Southern Africa in the 1500s, while Arabs begin to extend Islam and the slave trade to East Africa.

For the classical world “Africa” meant the Southern shores of the Mediterranean inhabited by white Egyptians and Phoenicians, and from Alexander’s time on heavily inhabited by Greeks and Romans. We now have everything that is called “African” ascribed to the sub-Saharan black tribes who had little relation to North Africa.

The mass media and “educational” establishment are now busy destroying Western civilization–destroying you and me and our descendants.  We now have regular portrayals of the Egyptians (including Cleopatra) and the Phoenicians as black, as well as a Viking Queen, a Persian emperor, and Roman centurions. And according to some, Socrates drew all his wisdom at the feet of African geniuses.

The Renaissance does not escape. The great Queen Elizabeth I is now black, as are some Scottish nobles. One of the Three Musketeers is black and another is in love with a black woman.

Later on, Audubon is portrayed as black artist and scientist because he was called a ‘Creole,” the word for a white Frenchman born in the colonies. Slaves not born in Africa were called “Creole Blacks.” Blacks now inhabit portrayals of Jane Austen’s country gentry.

It seems to have entirely escaped consciousness that the African slave trade depended entirely on Africans enslaving and selling other Africans. A number of significant colonial instances in which blacks helped defeat slave revolts have been ignored.

More recent times do not escape distortions. Portrayals have black combat leaders in the then  segregated U.S. army. Very recently I saw a show in which a black ship commander with a mostly black crew was in combat with German ships. There are similar treatments of Vietnam.

I have the memoir of a World War II combat captain from Michigan. He was in action from Normandy to Germany. He writes that the worst time he had in the war was dealing with the black support soldiers encountered while he was in port waiting for return home.

In a recent film, “12 Strong”, the first Special Forces men into Afghanistan are portrayed. One is a black soldier sympathetically and prominently displayed with more attention than anyone except the team leader. Such a man does not exist.

In every European television series, even including Iceland, superior and sympathetic blacks are portrayed, whether they fit in or not–not to mention a president of Finland and Yorkshire farmers.

There are doubtless people who think they are doing good deeds with these lies perpetrated on a historically ignorant people. In other cases it may be malicious ignorance. But telling lies is never a good thing. This denies rightful credit to other people.

History in the proper sense is a Western achievement–the rational review and understanding of evidence and meaning in the past life of humanity. There will always be disagreement in interpretations, which is a good thing, but does not vindicate fabrication. Despite oppression by whites, Africans are major beneficiaries of Western civilisation.

Like so much else History as an intellectual discipline begins with the Greeks. Advanced China and Japan did not have this phase of intellect. To seek the truth of the past, as best we can, does not require disrespect or lack of sympathy and charity for any of our fellow creatures. Rather it recognises the diversity of our Creator’s work. Lying is almost never a good thing. To deliberately falsify the facts is a blow against civilisation itself. It thwarts our efforts to understand fully the history of our mysterious human species.

Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books.

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