Alaric The Barbarian Profile picture
Aug 19, 2023 15 tweets 5 min read Read on X
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.

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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. Image
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. Image
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." Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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. Image
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?
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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". Image
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

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More from @0xAlaric

Apr 26
When young white men take themselves seriously, the cultural Left has a conniption. If they have fun, the Right loses its mind.

For the former: political engagement, fitness, scholarly interest. For the latter: watching sports, drinking, music.

The intersection is fraternities Image
Examples of point A:

- Derision & mocking of politically-active young white men, especially on the Right (but really anywhere)
- Extreme distaste for bodybuilding
- Freakouts about "extremist interest in the Classics" or other academic topics
- Mockery of any earnest emotion
Examples of point B:

- "This energy should be directed elsewhere" in response to any video of recreation or fun; old-type whining about danger or foolishness
- Pointless yelling about the evils of "sportsball"
- Reflexive hatred of popular music subcultures, bars, etc.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 22
This is true, but I don’t think it goes far enough. Global military dominance by the West was largely due to drill & discipline, standardization, engineering, and immense feats of logistics & infrastructure.

Technics and organization are spurned today as “soulless” but they are what built the modern world.
This isn’t to say that warrior cultures in the West were built upon nerd-ism or technics alone; I would be the last person to ever say that.

But global dominance does not come from guts & vril alone, or else Gurkhas or some other military people would have conquered the world
But in the desire to reignite thumos among Westerners today, many disregard the fact that we built our culture with incredible feats of technics.

I see this as merely a subset of the same thing; excess energy thrown into creativity, optimization, commitment to improvement
Read 4 tweets
Apr 16
All very old martial arts have a sort of oddness to them, a disorienting underlying philosophy of movement that throws off a modern revivalist because it’s just so *odd*

It’s near-impossible to cut through centuries of unwritten, unspoken ways of movement. Then the natural esotericism of things like kata or manuals make it even harder.

But if these arts (often the only athletic tradition surviving from their time, perhaps aside from dances) can be decoded… broken into phonemes and morphemes, like ancient unwritten languages… much could be learned about their respective cultures

Perhaps about mankind’s development overall, too — the same intangible “flavor” of systematized motion runs through many of these long-lost systemsImage
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The key would be reverse-engineering the physical assumptions & surrounding habitus of each one, then drawing connections or distinctions; by way of comparison one could find “lineages” of underlying assumptions about combat & motion, a vast unrecorded network of silent languages Image
Low-hanging fruit:

Almost universally, every fighting system more than ~200 years old includes *much* lower stances.

Athleticism difference from modernity, different philosophy, or a carryover from weapon-based fighting into empty hand? Image
Read 4 tweets
Apr 13
Really look at all these people. They’re the exact kind of people that would set up a group picture flipping off the camera to “dunk” on a Twitter anon for wrongthink

Imagine the conversation that led to this. None of them are even attractive! What were they expecting?
Let’s go one by one
Not as fat as the others, but with a weirdly primitive face. Almost a normal BMI — congrats!

Definitely has an inferiority complex about sorority girls, or some similar abstraction of normal people. Image
Read 12 tweets
Apr 12
The Navy today is facing the same problems that the Navy faced in the interwar period — really the same problems faced by any peacetime naval force throughout history.

The good news is that it’s fixable. The bad news is that it takes a lot for the Navy to fix anything.

1/
Compared to every other element of warfare doctrine, naval doctrine moves at a snail’s pace.

It is the most rigid, traditional, and slowly-evolving theater.

This applies to grand strategy — note that Mahan is still relevant — down to specific tactics & technology. Image
The best parallel to our situation today is the US submarine force prior to WWII.

Most who studied the war know that our submarine effort was a huge factor in the Pacific.

But it wasn’t that way at the outset of the war, and it took *many* hard lessons to reach effectiveness. Image
Read 14 tweets
Apr 9
Haiti is poised to form yet another "transitional" government to wrest control back from gang leaders like Barbecue.

Port-au-Prince is a disaster, gangs run the streets, cargo ships with food aid face hijackings, and the country is yet again failing.

How did it get here?

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Since its independence from France, Haiti has been an unmitigated failure.

It has never developed to any meaningful extent, does not maintain meaningful international relationships, and its people generally live in squalor.

Trump was right. It is a veritable "shithole." Image
But this is not a new occurrence, nor a result of "exploitative French reparations." Haiti paid off its debt in 1947, and since then has not improved.

In reality, the problem is far more structural, and goes back much further. Image
Read 10 tweets

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