Revisionist History

Posthumous Knighthoods were being demanded by web poll for two dead football managers, by supporters of Liverpool, and Glasgow Celtic, football clubs. 

 

Victorian Generals - All Should Lose Their Honours?

 

Obviously the supporters of Everton and Glasgow Rangers, will now demand knighthoods for one of their ex managers in order to keep the tribal balance. 

 

Will supporters of other football clubs now demand the same, Bill Nicholson (Tottenham Hotspur), Brian Clough (Nottingham Forest), and Herbert Chapman (Arsenal) spring to mind, and others no doubt are lurking in the past. (The requests were declined by No 10 by the way, because there was no precedent for non living knighthoods).

 

On a Historical note, why stop at footballers? How about stripping knighthoods posthumously for anyone the "PC Left" don't like e.g. All those Victorian generals who the "Left" consider as "Colonialists." Or, awarding honours to anyone that 21st century PC revisionism now decrees is a hero?… maybe every African who raised a gun against whites in the “anti colonial” struggles … Arise “Sir” Chaka Zulu?

So what is going on with this revisionist trend, and cancel culture, do the so called historians not see the dangers in this?

All of this made me think about other attempts to rewrite history. The recent campaign to declare that, all soldiers shot for cowardice by the British Army in WW1, were not cowards, has succeeded, so they are all heroes (or victims) now, .... apparently.

The most recent international attempts in Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, or Turkmenistan under President Turkmenbashi, were really rather small beer personality cults, and didn’t really change the past, except for the personal histories of the participants e.g. That Saddam took a major role in an earlier failed coup, when in reality he ran away. Some similarities with "Uncle Joes" dubious past as a Tsarist informer.

However, we have had some real and serious efforts to rewrite history in the recent past, that deserve the PC award for historical revisionism. One must remember that “History is written by the victors” … well until the PC left wing get their hands on it, in which case its up for grabs.

So in my personal order of merit for serious PC history rewrites are:

1. Stalin: Many a loyal party member was air brushed, literally, out of history by Stalin. His forced famines in the Ukraine, became a class war, and as he once said “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is merely a statistic”, so a mere 6 million statistics died in that purge alone. With that kind of mindset, you are up and running on rewriting history to suit your needs.
2. Pol Pot: In second place, for the sheer nerve required to declare history as "stopped", and that it would start again from “Year Zero” … he also shared Stalin’s view on statistics, so was obviously willing to learn from the master.
3. Adolf Hitler: He was a bit more subtle about history, in that he wanted to set the future (well, at least a good "1000 yrs" of it), however under his stewardship, the Germans found that instead of a being a bunch of uncivilised savages, who destroyed the Western Roman Empire, and set us up with the "Dark Ages", they were really descended from “Mythical” Aryan heroes, who had defended the “Volk” (From those bathing Romans?), and kept Aryan “civilisation” alive. Hitler too, had a statistical turn of mind, and the Germans showed how "civilised Aryans" could be, by killing millions.
4. Mao Tse Tung: In sheer "statistical" terms he should be “Numero Uno”, but as this is still a "Non Subject" in China, the full scale of his efforts is only estimated at between 40 and 60 million “statistics”. He made some attempt at rewriting the past, but largely as an excuse for "Statistical" pogroms. E.g. The "Landlords" etc were class enemies. There was also some serious personality cult revisionism about Mao’s past. But a slight practical nationalist streak meant that Confucius survived as a socialist “hero” in some odd way.
5. Honourable mentions:

• Japan’s ongoing historical revisionism, that ensures that the 2nd world war, and Japan’s part in it, including killing millions in China and Korea, was really 'an accident', best forgotten by everyone, especially the Chinese and Koreans. The accident, was apparently that they lost.
• Hollywood: For whom the maxim “Why let facts get in the way of a good story”, is alive and well. John Wayne certainly never let facts ruin the “Green Berets” (he let the acting do it): "Brave Heart" was not too hot on facts, with its nice blend of characters actually separated by a century or so: Errol Flynn’s conquest of Burma on behalf of the US who were not in that theatre of war, was an especially notable re-write of history.
• The Arabs, for claiming that it was their science that kept the world moving in the 10th century. Actually a large part of it was taken from Greek, Roman, and Indian books that they had “conquered”…. But hey, Arab culture and the truth, are not necessarily tied together, as we see today. Fairs fair, they did have some good scientists back then, but have not had any since, because now everything has to tie in with the Quran, or it’s a mob with a burning effigy for you mate ... unless its making Nuclear Weapons, which are Islamic somehow!
• Turkeys claims that they are fully “European”, whilst denying the Armenian massacres, or that the state sponsored attacks on the Greeks of Constantinople in the late 1950’s, ever happened. They happily revise their history, but say that they will comply with northern European norms in education … get over it lads, we all have a few dodgy bits in our past, and its just easier to acknowledge them e.g. US and the Native American treaties, France and Algeria, Britain and the Indian mutiny, Australia and the Aborigines, Spain and the Native Americans, to name but a few.
• The Left Wing Historians: This group deserves a special mention, because in an effort to get a book published (See the history man for the red brick type of lecturer), they will happily take the knife to historical facts, and remove anything that disagrees with trendy Marxist / PC/ Woke/ Cancel Cultures thoughts. They can be spotted by the way that they often “promote” women, or ethnic minorities to a historical prominence they didn’t in fact hold, in order to make book more publishable. This "promotion" usually means the real protagonists, such as white males disappear.
• And finally the *Black Revisionist Historians: These are a special sub genre all of their own, led by Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" and its leading of the Afro-centrist movement. This book claimed that the Greeks civilisation was largely stolen from the "Africans" (assuming Egypt is the sort of African that most of them want i.e. Black African ... and based upon one dodgy quote from Herodotus and a fanciful misunderstanding of Egyptian culture by the early church until hieroglyphics were translated). There are also claims that Cleopatra was black (despite that she was an inbred Macedonian Greek); Of course the Pharaohs were all black as well (again a half truth turned into a fact, Upper Egypt was conquered by the Nubian's (Sudanese) of Meroe and held for a hundred yrs or so, and for the 50 yrs that they actually ruled all Egypt, the rulers called themselves Pharaoh); Socrates it is claimed was black or "African" by some Afro-American studies (mainly because we can't prove he never had black parents .. a particularly stupid argument, I can't prove my great great grandparents weren't black either): Beethoven was also Black (because he had been described as "Dark", much like some Irish are described as "Black Irish"); I once came across a web site that insisted that Greater Zimbabwe in the first century AD, had aeroplanes as well as the standard, "such and such was black" claims (unfortunately this wonderful site has gone, such is the ephemeral nature of the web); and of course the old favourite "Slavery" was purely a "racist act" perpetrated solely by whites on blacks.
  

 

'King of Kings' - Hammurabi Wrote First Slave Laws

The slavery issue prompts more revisionism than any other part of history, mainly because the "facts" keep getting in the way of the myth. Inconveniently it's a fact that the earliest written records such as the Code of Hammurabi (circa 1760 BC), show slavery was well established without a black person in sight then, and that the Romans had far more White European and Asiatic slaves, than they ever had Black. 

 

The Vikings and the Anglo Saxons both had white British and Irish slaves (recorded in the Doomsday property records 1085AD), and the Irish slaved the Saxons and Britons. There were Black tribes with Black slaves, long before the whites ever got there. It was Black slavers who provided most of the Black slaves sold to the Europeans and Arabs, who slaved for the Arabian slave markets.

Black Moors (The "BlackaMoors" of Shakesperean terminology) from North Africa regularly slave raided Europe as far as Cornwall (England) as late as the **17th century. In 1627 AD Moors kidnapped 400 men and women from Iceland. Dorset historian David Burnett reports that in 1638 AD, the Muslim corsairs even pillaged Poole and the last slave raid was 1720 AD. Today there are still slaves in the Muslim black states of Northern Africa e.g. Mali.

Making this a purely Afro-American and White slavers affair is difficult (and an insult to all those around the world who suffered slavery), when faced with these "Facts", but it won't stop the PC revisionist from trying. Eventually they will succeed because popular TV presenters will continue to be too lazy, ignorant, or PC driven, to dispute this as being "Fact".

Those who want history amended by "popular vote", should remember that anything given by popular vote can just as easily be stripped by the same method. See reality TV votes for how crass public polls can be.

All of this revisionism is the direct result of PC "Fascism" (to borrow one of their insults to disbelievers), running out of control. And where does this all end? Once you start re-writing history, you have entered the land of Orwell’s Oceania and “Big Brother”, and from then on every historical truth is at the diktat of the ruling pressure group, whether from the left or the right.

It's fascinating how like urban myths, these revisions seem to come and go. The dangerous thing is that when they finally stick, they become immovable "fact", like the myth of the black Cleopatra. In fact one can see a time when any academics who teach contrary to this 'new truth' will be sacked.

As Bowie sang, “Beware the eyes above, in 1984”

The Commissar With Stalin

The Commissar Not With Stalin

Rewriting history "Uncle Joe" style, 'The Commissar' was shot at "Joe's" orders in 1940 .... so taken out of the picture.

 A couple links:

http://www.historyplace.com/pointsofview/not-out.htm

This lady found how resistant to facts, the PC revisionist cult beliefs really are.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050527.html

This site covers a number of the "Were they Black" type of myths

http://www.originaldissent.com/forums/archive/index.php?t-523.html

(A brief History of Moorish slave raids in Europe)

Google searches will find the other well documented history re-writes.

*Not all black historians or commentators have fallen into this dead end intellectual trap. "Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks".- Thomas Sowell, a black sociologist, author and columnist

** White Slaves were imported from Western Europe to North Africa in the 15th and 16th Centuries. In all about 1.5 million Europeans were transported to the Barbary Coast. It was a period when Europe was preoccupied by sectarian wars, and north-western European navies were depleted. The trade was run by the Moors and the expeditions were captained by Europeans (Converted to Islam to escape being slaves themselves), with North African crews. They would raid coastal areas and carry away sometimes whole villages to the Moorish slave markets. It appears that women often fared better, as brides, than men. The true record of this history has not yet been fully researched, and probably never will be.