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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 systems
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
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?
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?
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.