Thread by @0xAlaric

INDIA & THE HOTEP ARMS RACE

I've talked a lot about hatred for Western history, which has been dominant in academia for decades.

But now that "white man bad" is accepted dogma, the second-order effects are... interesting.

1/

After decades of "deconstructing" Western history, the tide has shifted in academic and popular history.

With Europeans disfavored in the historical record, an academic race has begun to "claim" human history.

And India has gone all-in.

With a vacuum in the historiographical narrative, historians from various nations have begun writing screeds against Western history that instead promote their own ethnocentric framings.

That's a heavy sentence, for a simple concept.

"Europeans never did anything important..." was already accepted.

All they're adding is "...it was actually us."

Hoteps have been doing this for Afrocentrism since at least the 1960s, and thus have a head start.

But their scholarship is weak, to say the least.

It gains some acceptance in the "indigenous ways of knowing" sphere, but in the mainstream only gains traction in Facebook groups.

However, India has recently entered the game in force, taking advantage of Western unfamiliarity with Indian history and ethnic self-conception.

Their rhetoric usually centers around being the "oldest and first" in everything, from human evolution to martial arts to science.

If you think this is ridiculous, it's even funnier in practice.

Consider @CKRaju14, an Indian "professor" of history.

His claim to fame is saying that the Greeks didn't invent any geometric concepts... and of course, that Indians did.

Under any close scrutiny, this falls apart (obviously)

Anons have done some excellent work proving just how flimsy this idea is. It relies on mistranslations, omissions, and blatant lies.

Here's a great takedown:

And another on the Antikythera mechanism, attacked by the same "professor":

The problem with this sort of thing is that Western readers don't really have any sort of insulation against it.

They've been conditioned into ethnic self-hatred, and foreign historians use this expertly to push their own ethnonarcissism - destroying real history in the process.

So, American and European academics platform this ridiculous research, ignoring that it's less rigorous than an average 7th-grade book report.

All an ethnocentric historian has to do is throw out a "white man bad" screed, and anything after will be taken as gospel.

My only question is... who will win the Hotep Arms Race?

Entrenched Afrocentrists saying Yakub invented science, or Indian nationalists claiming all of humanity owes its intelligence to ancient gurus?

Or, can we successfully get rid of this entire farce, and address history as a real thing rather than a vehicle for activism?

Because that's what this is: pure activism.

And historians are allowing ethnocentrists to destroy it as "reparations".

I'd like to see a historiography that doesn't destroy itself out of shame.

Something based in fact and a strong philosophical worldview, that actively uproots the propaganda we've been subjected to for decades.

We have a response!

This is some of the funniest shit I’ve seen