Posted on 08/01/2002 12:54:22 PM PDT by robowombat
The Dwindling Light of Hellenism
If the light by which we are guided is ever
extinguished it will dwindle by degrees
and expire by itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Ra-hotep gazed with admiration at the pyramids under construction and the intricate interlaced irrigation systems which brought life to the crops that fed his happy nation. How proud he was of the wonders wrought by his intelligent brown-skinned people.
He was at the controls of a wood and papyrus glider which had been flung into the sky by a catapult designed by his ingenious engineers. His scientists had also built his cunningly constructed craft, with its reverse dihedral wing configuration and superb landing apparatus .
Ra-hotep loved nothing more than to survey his domain from the sky. Today, however, he had to hurry back to join his uncle, Ta-minsheshak, at his country estate near the holy city of Raminafu. A group of Greeks was due to arrive soon from Europe for their regular lessons in philosophy, literature, and mathematics. The Greeks were a pale, crude, and primitive people, with a rudimentary understanding of the arts and sciences. But they were coming in peace, and Ra-hotep sensed in them a child-like desire to learn.
Today, he would teach them about astronomy and how the comets had created the Nile. He would also patiently tutor them on the mysteries of precognition and psycho-kinesis. With these thoughts in mind, Ra-hotep turned his glider toward the landing strip.
Such is the fantasizing nonsense being spoon-fed to our children. As ridiculous as the above may seem, this little bit of invidious double-speak could easily be extracted from the African-American Baseline Essays, now being widely used in educational curricula around the country.
These essays, produced by the Portland Public Schools, declare in their "science" section that from circa 2500 B.C. to circa 1500 B.C. the "Egyptians used their early planes for travel, expeditions, and recreation." They also tell us that the African people were "the well-spring of creativity and knowledge on which the foundation of all science, technology, and engineering rests."
In circulation since 1987, these essays are growing in popularity within our "educational" establishment. Why? Well maybe because our "educators" are either impotent through fear or intimidation, or are themselves willing promoters of this poison through self-interest, and so do not oppose the self-serving propaganda that the politically correct fascists, militant feminists, multicultural tyrants, and the so-called "protected minorities" (which now, by the way, comprise two-thirds of our population) have crammed down our throats.
To try to explain how this abomination found its way into our classrooms would simply be another exposition of how a determined and vociferous minority--incapable of reasoned dialogue and immune to the "infection" of civilized behavior-- has once again bullied its skewed agenda down the craw of a passive and "tolerant" majority. More than that, it has done so while meeting little or no resistance from our credentialed academics, who ostensibly hold their exalted positions in order to pass on those immutable Truths upon which Western Civilization is based to the next generation.
Such persons are the ideological cousins of the "intellectuals" who ranted and raved in the 1920s and onward about how the inevitable political, social, and economic course of the world had been set out in minutest detail in a book, Das Kapital, written in the mid-nineteenth century by an obscure Jewish "scholar," Karl Marx.
Oh, how they yammered on and on about "progress" and "equality," just as today's "useful idiots" (as Lenin would refer to such fools) are yowling away, while trying to lead the masses --who, you can be sure, they hold in complete contempt--toward an outcome-based utopia where the truth is an inconvenience to be altered at will.
Just such "equality" was visited in the "progressive 1980s" upon Greece (where, since at least the 8th century B.C., there has existed a literary tradition extolling the sanctity of the bonds that tie men and women together) when we had the great good fortune to have American feminism come to teach our women how to "assert" themselves. The fruit of such "progress" was made manifest in all its glory at the prostitutes' strike of 1991. This glorious event took place because the Athenian ladies of the night were fed up with trying to compete with "14 and 15 year-olds who give it away for an ice-cream cone," as one of the demonstrators screamed into her bull-horn. The fact that these girls might simply be "asserting" themselves was obviously something that did not impress these irate practitioners of the oldest profession.
But let us not stray. Elsewhere, in the African-American Baseline Essays, one Joyce Braden Harris, co-founder of Portland's Black Educational Center, sets forth a list of African authors which includes Pushkin,
Alexander Dumas, and Aesop (whose name she says "was derived from the Greek word 'Ethiop,' which meant 'sunburned face'."). She also claims Beethoven was black.
Another paradigm of distortion, Beatrice Pumpkin, uses this logic to explain why mathematics is an African invention: "[S]ince Africa is widely believed to be the birthplace of the human race, it follows that Africa was the birthplace of mathematics and science." Thus do such "educators" expose the non-sequitur reasoning upon which Afrocentrism is based.
John Henrik Clarke, professor emeritus of African World History, tells us that "The Greeks...benefitted religiously and intellectually from their sojourn in Africa. What they learned there would influence all of their future history." He also declares that Cleopatra was Greek and African, and, were she alive today, "would probably be living in one of the black communities of the United States."
At Stanford University, that once-great bastion of Western Culture, after the incessant agitation of its minority and multicultural "intellectuals," who, with feverish brains and slavering tongues, came gushing forth from within those ivy-covered halls to demonstrate like hoodlums, while being led by that great American patriot in the $3000.00 suits, Jesse Jackson, shouting, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture's got to go," a new program was instituted which changed the traditional Great Books curriculum. Among the many "improvements" were these in the Philosophy department: A course on the Indian chief Seattle, to be taught alongside Aristotle and Plato, and a requirement that Australian "Aboriginal Philosophy" be read with the Greek philosophers. An example of "Aboriginal Philosophy" includes the concept of "dream-time"-a circular and anti-rational view of cause and effect-which includes the belief that women become pregnant by crossing spiritually magic places in the forest. Thus does the irrationality of the savage take equal pride of place with the rationality of western thought.
No less a luminary than the great scholar and classicist, Mary Lefkowitz, The Andrew W. Mellon professor of Humanities at Wellesley College, has described Afrocentrism as "a perversion of the historiography of antiquity, and a degradation of academic standards for political ends." And the world-renowned classical scholar, Bernard Knox, former director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, comes to the defense of Hellenism, arguing forcibly and irrefutably against the current multicultural, deconstructionist craze in his book, The Oldest Dead White European Males.
One could name other non-Greek scholars who have taken up the gauntlet in defense of the light, but space constrains. We will simply take note of the general absence of Hellenes in that glorious line-up of real scholars and leave it at that.
Oh, how we love to talk, talk, talk. But when it comes to submerging our egos and ambitions for a greater cause, our knees buckle, we throw down the shield, run for cover, and begin to compose heart-rending poetry and prose about this or that bit of newly-lost Hellenism. We neo-Hellenes are great on declamation but fall short on actions. But as the old song goes:
Moupes yia chores makrines
kai yia tin Ispania
ma then irthes na me thees
stin Nea Ionia.
Or, even more appropriate, we translate thusly an old peasant saying:
The world is burning
and the pudendum combs
its hair.
We can only hope that such water-bucket carriers for their New World Order bosses will, when the knot finally reaches the comb, be forcibly brought down from their galactic orbits and punished by an outraged citizenry demanding that its children stop being corrupted and misguided. Our wish is that when that day arrives, we Hellenes and Philhellenes will have played a major role in making it happen.
Copyright © l996 A. Frangos
Actually, she was Greek and Egyptian.
According to something I read recently, she would protray herself as one or the other depending on who she was dealing with. Sounds like a real politician!
"precognition"
I guess the precog wasn't on the ball the day before the Greeks took over Egypt, eh?
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