The key to understanding history is an old statement:
“History is not the past. It is someone else’s present.”
We look at Rome’s history the way Gibbon did in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon was the first to adapt history to the burgeoning class of people who read about Rousseau Noble Savages in the late eighteenth century. Gibbon put forward the wildly popular thesis that all of history consisted of his readers, the upper class British drawing-room crowd, similar to our YUPPIES.
He wrote for this audience.
Gibbons presented a Classical World which was exactly like the one he was writing for. In Gibbon’s Classical World the drawing house, despite orgies and regurgitation parties which gave it flavor, was a Height of Civilization where nice people like him wrote stuff for nice, literate upper income types like his readers.
And the crowd went WILD!
For Gibbon, all history was a story of the long road from his Classical YUPPIE rule to the achievement of Yuppie rule in the eighteenth century. There was the Golden Age of China, when scribes wrote endless amounts of stuff for the Literate. There was Egypt’s age when the scribes did the same. In between were dead periods of barbarian rule when nothing got invented and everybody was filthy and evil.
Meanwhile, on Planet Earth, the Rousseau’s and Marxes are always not only wrong, but childishly wrong, like today’s anti-whites.
It is IMPORTANT to realize that Egypt never invented anything. They got iron because the Hittites beat their heads in with it. They only got the wheel because the Hyksos rode over them in chariots. Pre-Egyptian writing has been discovered in Romania and other places.
Mommy Professor History is Gibbons history. Gibbons history is what every anti-white in the OV thinks is REAL history.
#1 by Dave on 03/03/2008 - 11:32 am
What just amazes me is how things do not change. People today laugh at the ignorance of arguments that the Francis Bacon era overthrew on such subjects as, “How many angels can dance on the head of pin?” Yet seriously entertain our era’s ridiculous arguments of over interest rates.
The Austrians say interest rates are the equilibrium rate established by the public’s “time preference” for present goods over future goods. The Chicagoans say interest rates embody the public’s future inflation expectations and risk aversion. The Keynesians say interest rates are simply rent for money. The Libertarians say interest rates are about the match between young people’s business needs and old people’s need to obtain a passive income. The Marxists say interest rates are a derivative of the institution of slavery.
And on and on it goes with each “interest rate school” having elaborate policy prescriptions and highly developed political and social rants.
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Yet it is only we here at BUGS who say, “None of this matters, economics is all about race.”
We truly are revolutionaries. There is not a student or professor at Yale, Harvard, Brandies, Wheaton, Stanford, Ox-Bridge, ect. that can touch us. They are on a train to nowhere. A very expensive train.
We are on the Internet.
#2 by backbaygrouch4 on 03/03/2008 - 3:15 pm
Bull’s eye on Gibbon. It is a good book. He was not much of a historian, however. Read it when I was younger and decided to repeat the exercise about 15 years ago. Shortly after starting the tome it It occurred to me that Penguin had put out translations of most of his sources since the initial trek. Also, noticed that the footnotes tended to be from one old text after another in a straight line.
Finally a light bulb when off. (Being a tad slow it took a while.) The book is nothing but a series of translations with a forced overview from the vantage point of the Enlightenment, especially the anti-Christian bias of Voltaire. If you read the original sources separately from Gibbon you can derive any conclusion desired. Or, as I think Napoleon observed, history is a lie agreed upon. Of course every generation provides a new lie for its unique consensus that exists free standing, apart from the undecipherable facts.
The concept of history has as a premise the idea that there exists an internal logic to human affairs, subject to the laws of logic, that can be discerned by superior persons in the know, i.e., academics and priests. This, miracle of miracles, allows them to see the future which at all times reflects their private interest in worldly affairs and their intellectual interest in a continuum of their theories.
History can be racking good tale, but it should be considered a form of entertainment, much like news coverage. It is a string of illustrations, hiding with varying degrees of success, an agenda. Mantra thinking exposes the disconnect and, therefore, is deemed dangerous to the establishment gatekeepers.
#3 by Prometheus on 03/04/2008 - 5:11 am
The notion that Ancient Greece acheived its greatness through democracy, liberalism and somehow this relates to our ‘greatness’ because of our ‘democracy’ is one of the most laughable and enduring morsel of nonsense from historians.
When a professor tells a crowd that an ancient civilisation was trying to do what THEY are doing, it is cheap flattery.
#4 by mderpelding on 03/04/2008 - 8:10 pm
My history is contained in a graveyard.
I have not rediscovered ancient Greece.
Nor sent men to the moon.
Colonized other countries.
Enslaved peoples.
Discovered electricity.
Electromagnetism.
Owned gladiators.
Surveyed Appalachia.
History would like to credit me with all of the above.
To my detriment.