US Recognizes Al-Qaeda War Criminals As Libya's Official Government

Unbelievable, though not unexpected, departure from reality.
by Tony Cartalucci

Bangkok, Thailand July 15, 2011 - Associated Press reports that, "U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton says the Obama administration has decided to formally recognize Libya’s main opposition group as the country’s legitimate government. The move gives foes of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi a major financial and credibility boost."

In an act of utter desperation as the brutal, though entirely ineffective Libyan rebels flounder in their NATO-backed offensives against Libya's ruling government in Tripoli, the US has now recognized the Libyan rebels as the country's "legitimate government" allowing the US to directly fund, arm, and support with US troops, the Al-Qaeda tied war criminals operating out of Benghazi. The recent farcical move indicates that France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppé has failed in his threats and posturing to get Libya's Qaddafi to stand down, and that the NATO-backed war of aggression is about to reach new heights of brutality most likely including the involvement of US, UK, and French troops on the ground.

Libyan Rebels are Al-Qaeda - On Record

Operating out of the Libyan cities of Benghazi, Darna, and Tobruk, Libyan rebels themselves have admitted that many of their members are drawn from Al Qaeda. The London Telegraph has reported that Libyan rebel leader Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi had admitted many of his fighters had just returned from fighting US forces in Iraq. The Telegraph also reported that Hasidi himself had "earlier fought against "the foreign invasion" in Afghanistan, before being captured in 2002 in Peshwar, in Pakistan. He was later handed over to the US, and then held in Libya before being released in 2008." A United States Army West Point report confirms indeed that fighters drawn from the Libyan cities of Benghazi, Darna, and Tobruk were second only to Saudi Arabia in contributing forces to fight US troops in Iraq.

Photo: According to US-educated Mahmoud Jibril, "prime minister" of the contrived “Libyan Transitional National Council,” in a May 12, 2011 talk before the Brookings Institution, “what’s taking place is a natural product of the globalizational process that started in the mid-80′s.” He most recently confirmed allegations reported by HRW regarding rebel atrocities but claimed they represent only a "few incidents" and that those responsible would be "brought to justice."

....

This illustrates the absurdity of both the "War on Terror" and the current NATO-backed operations unfolding in Libya, where the same known terrorists are used both as an excuse for global intervention and continued foreign occupation while concurrently provided arms, air cover, legitimacy, and now direct funding while participating in global intervention. On full display for the world to see is how the global corporatocracy manipulates and exploits all sides of any given conflict for their own nefarious self-serving ends. One must wonder what races through the minds of US and UK pilots as they provide air support for the very men they strafed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Libyan Rebels are Documented War Criminals

In an April 2011 New York Times article titled, "Inferior Arms Hobble Rebels in Libya War," a weepy narrative is told of under-armed, outclassed rebels who have been compelled by their circumstances to commit horrific atrocities and war crimes. The New York Times describes a "tolerance for at least a small number of child soldiers," and blamed a lack of command-and-control for "instances of abusive or outright brutal conduct" rather than a lack of ethical principles or their foreign-funded, illegitimate cause.

The New York Times article describes the rebels' use of Grad rockets often described as indiscriminate war weapons and whose use by Qaddafi's forces have been cited as a contributing factor for NATO's intervention. The article also makes mention of the rebels' use of landmines - also a contributing factor cited by the warmongering criminals of NATO for their intervention in North Africa.

More recently, the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch released a report indicating that civilians were being abused (including having their feet shot off by victorious rebels) and their property looted and destroyed by Libya's rebels upon taking over towns from "suspected Qaddafi supporters." While the report, and a torrent of corporate-owned media outlets attempt to play-down and spin the allegations confirmed by defacto rebel "prime minister" Mahmoud Jibril, they represent evidence indicating that Libya's violence is not divided along political aspirations for "liberal democracy" and support for Qaddafi, but rather along predictable, long standing ethnic divisions. These confirmed reports of rebel war crimes also provide evidence that NATO's involvement in Libya is justified by selective enforcement of an already illegitimate UN Security Council resolution for the sole purpose of removing Qaddafi - clearly not protecting Libyan civilians.

Libyan Intervention One of Imperialism, not Humanitarianism

Stated quite clearly in the corporate-funded, corporate-serving Brookings Institution's piece titled, "Libya's Test of the New International Order," the intervention in Libya "is a test that the international community has to pass. Failure would shake further the faith of the people's region in the emerging international order and the primacy of international law." Indeed this intervention is about asserting international law above national sovereignty and upholding an "international order" described by globalist degenerate Robert Kagan, a chief proponent of the current war in Libya, as serving "the needs of the United States and its allies, which constructed it."

This has absolutely nothing to do with democracy, human rights, or even the rule of law, international or otherwise. The same warmongering degenerate Robert Kagan who brazenly admits the "international order" serves American, not international interests, recently signed a letter to US House Republicans imploring them to disregard both the American people's will as well as UN Security Council r.1973 in order to commit to full intervention in Libya on behalf of rebels admittedly members of Al-Qaeda who are committing a myriad of war crimes in support of this neo-imperial campaign. Kagan's willingness to disregard even the contrived legalities authorizing NATO's involvement in Libya in the first place illustrates the unchecked, arbitrary nature of this emerging "international order," an order that feels it needs answer to no one.

It is imperative that people understand the true nature not only behind this intervention in Libya, but the "international order's" involvement, meddling, and intervention throughout the world. Any thorough examination of the United States government, the unelected corporate-funded think tanks that produce its policy, the corporate-owned media outfits that promote their agendas, and the immense global network of foreign-funded NGOs, foundations, and organizations carrying the agenda out, reveals a self-serving oligarchy merely using attractive ideals to sell their otherwise unpalatable agenda. As the Romans and the British had foisted upon millions during the construction of their despotic world spanning empires, the United States and their global allies are now using the facade of "civil society," "human rights," "democracy," and "freedom" to construct a new oligarchical global empire.

Thomas Sankara's speech on Africa's "debt" at the Organisation of African Unity

Thomas Sankara was the former president of Burkina Faso, former French colony and one of the poorest countries in Africa. In his famous speech at the Organisation of African Unity, July 1987, related to historical origin of African debt, he expressed strong opposition to repayment of Africa's debt and interests that still oppresses freedom and development of African countries.

He clearly identified former African colonizers as today's debt enslavers of Africa.

Here's one part of the transcript of Sankara's speech at the Organisation of African Unity:

"We think that debt has to be seen from the standpoint of its origins. Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us money are those who had colonized us before. They are those who used to manage our states and economies.
Colonizers are those who indebted Africa through their brothers and cousins who were the lenders. We had no connections with this debt. Therefore we cannot pay for it. Debt is neo-colonialism, in which colonizers transformed themselves into “technical assistants”. We should better say “technical assassins”.

They present us with financing, with financial backers. As if someone’s back could create development. We have been advised to go to these lenders. We have been proposed with nice financial set-ups. We have been indebted for fifty, sixty years and even more. That means we have been led to compromise our people for fifty years and more.

Under its current form, that is imperialism controlled, debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa, aiming at subjugating its growth and development through foreign rules. Thus, each one of us becomes the financial slave, which is to say a true slave, of those who had been treacherous enough to put money in our countries with obligations for us to repay. We are told to repay, but it is not a moral issue. It is not about this so-called honour of repaying or not.

Mister President, we have been listening and applauding Norway’s prime minister when she spoke right here. She is European but she said that the whole debt cannot be repaid. Debt cannot be repaid, first because if we don’t repay, lenders will not die. That is fore sure. But if we repay, we are going to die.
That is also for sure.

Those who led us to indebting had gambled as if in a casino. As long as they had gains, there was no debate. But now that they suffer losses, they demand repayment. And we talk about crisis. No, Mr President, they played, they lost, that’s the rule of the game, and life goes on. We cannot repay because we don’t have any means to do so. We cannot pay because we are not responsible for this debt. We cannot repay but the others owe us what the greatest wealth could never repay, that is blood debt. Our blood had flowed.

We hear about the Marshall plan that rebuilt Europe’s economy. But we never hear about the African plan which allowed Europe to face Hitlerian hoardes when their economies and their stability were at stake.
Who saved Europe? Africa. One rarely mentions it, to such a point that we cannot be the accomplices of that thankless silence. If others cannot sing our praises, at least we must say that our fathers had been courageous and that our troops had saved Europe and set the world free from Nazism.

Debt is also the result of confrontation.

When we are told about economic crisis, nobody says that this crisis didn’t come about suddenly. The crisis had always been there but it got worse each time that popular masses become more and more conscious of their rights against exploiters.
We are in a crisis today because masses refuse wealth to be concentrated into a few individual’s hands.
We are in crisis because some people are saving huge sums of money on foreign bank accounts that would be enough to develop Africa. We are in a crisis because we are facing this private wealth that we cannot name.
Popular masses don’t want to live in ghettos and slums. We are in a crisis because everywhere people refuse to repeat the problems of Soweto and Johannesburg.
There is a struggle, and its amplification worry those with the financial power. Now we are asked to be accomplices for a balancing. A balance favouring those with the financial power. A balancing against popular masses.
No! We cannot be accomplices. No! We cannot go with those who suck our people’s blood and live on our people’s sweat. We cannot go with them in their murdering methods.

Mr President, we hear about clubs - club of Rome, club of Paris, club everywhere. We hear about Group of Five, Group of Seven, Group of Ten, and maybe Group of A Hundred. And what else? It is normal that we too have our own club and our own group. Let’s Addis Adeba becoming from now the centre from which will come a new breath. A club of Addis Adeba.
It is our duty to create an Addis Adeba’s unified front against debt. That is the only way to assert that refusing to repay is not an aggressive move on our part, but a fraternal move to speak the truth.

Furthermore, popular masses of Europe are not opposed to popular masses of Africa. Those who want to exploit Africa are those who exploit Europe, too. We have a common enemy. So our club of Addis Adeba will have to explain to each and all that debt shall not be repaid. And by saying that, we are not against morals, dignity and keeping one’s word. We think we don’t have the same morality as others…".

"Either we resist collectively and refuse categorically to repay the debt, or we are not able to do this, one by one, isolated, we will suffer death," warned Sankara.

RACISM, HISTORY AND LIES

RACISM, HISTORY AND LIES

Max Dashu

Some doctrines of racial supremacy as classically taught
in Euro/American institutions, textbooks and media:


PHYSICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: In which white anthropologists treat people as racial specimens, measuring "cephalic indices" and attempting to prove superiority of the "white" brain. Ugly racist terminology: "prognathism," "platyrhiny," "steatopygous," "sub-Egyptian." Mug-shot lineups of "the Veddan female," "Arapaho male, "Negroid type," "Mongoloid specimen" characterize this approach. Out of favor in the mid-20th-century, it has enjoyed a revisionist comeback with sociobiology and works claiming racial differentials in intelligence, such as "The Bell Curve."

TECHNOLOGICAL CALIBRATION DOCTRINE: Insists on forcing archaeological finds as well as living cultures into a grid of "development" based on whether tools, materials and techniques valued by "Western" scholars were in use. Example: "They were a stone age civilization who never discovered the wheel!" This model forces cultures into a progressional paradigm: Old and New Stone Ages, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Revolution, Space Age. This classification ignores the complexity of culture, and the fact that metallurgic technology and military might are not the ultimate measure of advanced culture.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT DOCTRINE: The assumption that "primitive" cultures represent lower "stages" in historical evolution, and have yet to attain advanced forms of culture. One English scholar referred to "the child-races of Africa." Usually, social hierarchy, militarization and industrialization are taken as prime measures of "advanced" civilization. In the 19th century, scholars openly used the terms "savage," "barbarian," "civilized." Though these offensive words have (mostly) been dropped, the underlying assumptions are still quite influential. (For a good discussion of how the insistence on talking about "tribes" distorts African history, seehttp://www.africaaction.org/bp/ethall.htm. )

SPREAD OF CIVILIZATION DOCTRINE: Credits all achievements to conquering empires, assuming their superiority in science, technology, and government. Adherents are usually incapable of perceiving advanced earth-friendly systems of land management, agronomy, medicine, collective social welfare networks, healing, astronomical knowledge, or profound philosophical traditions among peoples considered "primitive" by dominant "Western" standards.

PASSING OF THE TORCH DOCTRINE: Claims a chain of cultural transmission from Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece to Rome to western Europe to the USA, leaving vast gaps where the history of the rest of the world should be. (And the discussion never returns to Egypt or Iraq to consider what happened there after the fall of their ancient empires.) Most of the planet's cultures are discussed only in relation to the European conquest, if mentioned at all. As a result, few people have any idea of the history of Sumatra, Honduras, Niger, Ecuador, Mozambique, Ohio, Hokkaido, Samoa, or even European countries such as Lithuania or Bosnia.

IF IT WAS GREAT, IT MUST HAVE BEEN WHITE: If advanced science, art, or architecture is found in Africa or South America, then Phoenecians, Greeks, Celts, Vikings (or, in the extreme case, space aliens) must be invoked to explain their presence. (Here, whiteness often functions as a relative concept, as "lighter than.") This bias gives rise to a pronounced tendency to date American or African cultures later than warranted, and as a result dating for these regions is constantly having to be revised further back into the past as evidence of greater antiquity piles up.

Corollary: IF IT WAS WHITE, IT MUST HAVE BEEN GREAT. Thus, the conqueror Charlemagne was a great man, in spite of his genocidal campaign against the Saxons, but the Asian conquerors Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan were simply evil. Stereotypes of head-hunters picture Africans (in the absence of any evidence for such a practice there) but never Celtic head-hunters in France and Britain -- much less Lord Kitchener making off with the Mahdi's skull in Sudan, or U.S. settlers taking scalps and body parts of Indian people. This doctrine also underlies the common assumption that European conquest must have improved life for subject peoples.



A 19th century French engraving
imagines the conquest of Algeria as a
showering of the benefits of superior civilization on abject, genuflecting
North Africans.


IF IT WAS NOT WHITE, AND ITS GREATNESS IS UNDENIABLE, THEN IT MUST BE DEPRECATED IN SOME WAY: Example:The Epic of Man, published in the '60s by Time/Life Books, says of the advanced civilization of ancient Pakistan: "It is known that a static and sterile quality pervaded Indus society." It used to be the academic fashion to call ancient Egypt a "moribund" civilization which "stifled creativity." Similar writings dismissed the "Incas" (Quechua) as "totalitarian," or the Chinese as "isolated" and "resistant to change," ignoring their interchange with steppe societies as well as Southeast Asian cultures.

The AFRICAN GAP DOCTRINE: After examining the first humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, this historical approach completely skips over most of the African archaeological record. It discusses ancient Egypt but ascribes its civilization to "the Middle East," denying its African identity and archaeological connections with Saharan and southern Nilotic civilizations. Saharan civilization, Ile-Ife or Mwanamutapa are not discussed at all. Africa is simply dropped from historical consideration until the era of European slaving and colonization, when it is portrayed as culturally and technologically deficient. The existence of female spheres of power in Africa is ignored.

The BERING STRAIT DOCTRINE insists that all indigenous American peoples came across a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, filtering down through Central America into South America. Problem: numerous archaeological sites in the Americas predate any possible Bering Strait migration by many thousands of years. Access from Alaska to the rest of North America was blocked for millennia by two great ice sheets that covered Canada. An narrow opening that might have allowed passage appeared much too late (about 13,500 years ago) to explain the growing evidence that people were living in both North and South America much earlier than these "first" migrations.

By 1997-98, the tide of opinion began to turn: several scientific conclaves declared that a majority of attending scholars rejected the Bering Strait theory as a full explanation of how the Americas were peopled.The long-doctrinal hypothesis of Clovis hunters as the first immigrants is crumbling before the new dating, as hundreds of pre-Clovis sites pile up: Cactus Hill, Virginia (13,500 BP); Meadowcroft Rock Shelter in Pennsylvania (14,000 - 17,000 Before Present); Monte Verde (13,500 BP); Pedra-Furada, Brazil (15,000 BP, and possibly as old as 32,000 BP).

Bering Strait diehards discount the oral histories of indigenous Americans. In spite of the huge diversity among the American peoples and differences between most Americans and east Asians, all are declared to be of "Mongoloid racial origin." After the initial press stampede declaring "Kennewick Man" to be "white," study of the genetic evidence shows something entirely different. Instead, it appears that there have been several waves of migration: from central China, from the ancient Jomon culture of Japan, from south Asia or the Pacific islands. And "Luzia," an 11,500-year-old female skeleton in Brazil "appeared to be more Negroid in its cranial features than Mongoloid," in the stodgy anthropological terminology of the New York Times (Nov 9, 1999). (Actually she most closely resembles aborignal Australians.) But there is also a uniquely North American X-haploid group of mitochondrial DNA, which has yet to be explained.



THE POWER OF NAMING

STEREOTYPING entire peoples as mad, uncontrollable threats: "Wild Indians," "Yellow Hordes" or "the Yellow Peril." As inferior nonhumans: "primitives," "savages," "gooks," "niggers" -- this last term used not only against African-Americans, but also by 18th-century English colonizers of Egypt and India. Even the word "natives," which originally meant simply the people born in a country and by extension the aboriginal inhabitants, took on heavy racist coloration as an inferior Other.

POLARIZATION: "Scientific thought" vs. "primitive belief"; "undeveloped" vs "civilized"; or "the world's great religions" vs. "tribal superstitions," "cults," "idolatry" or "devil-worship." Depending on where it was created, a sculpture could either be a "masterpiece of religious art" or an "idol," "fetish," or "devil." Few people realize that "Western" scientists did not match the accuracy of ancient Maya calculations of the length of the solar year until the mid-20th century.

Indians who resist colonization and land theft are commonly portrayed as evil in popular media, which applies negative labels such as "Renegades." Here indigenous people are Other; the intruders in their country are The Good Guys. The white hero is named after the Texas Rangers, systematic killers of Indian families. His Indian sidekick's name, Tonto, means "fool, stupid person" in Spanish.



RENAMING: Dutch colonists called the Khoi-khoi people "Hottentots" (stutterers). Russians called the northwest Siberian Nentsy "Samoyed" (cannibals). These are blatant examples, but many nationalities are still called by unflattering names given by their enemies: "Sioux" (Lakota); "Miao" (Hmong); "Lapps" (Saami); "Basques" (Euskadi); "Eskimos" (Inuit). European names have replaced the originals in many places: Nigeria, Australia, New Caledonia, New Britain, etc. (But "Rhodesia" bit the dust, after a revolution.)

DEGRADATION OF MEANINGS: "Mumbo jumbo" has become a cliché signifying meaningless superstitions, but it comes from a Mandinke word --mama dyambo -- for a ritual staff bearing the image of a female ancestor. (Look it up in any good dictionary.) "Fetish" now connotes an obsessive sexual fixation, but originated as a Portuguese interpretation of sacred West African images as "sorcery" (feitição). The holy city of Islam is often appropriated in phrases like "a Mecca for shoppers."

DOUBLE-THINK: Conquest becomes "unification," "pacification,""opening up," and conquered regions are dubbed "protectorates." The convention is to use Europe as the standard, writing texts from the viewpoint of the conquerors / colonizers. Thus, a Rajasthani rebellion against English rule was termed the "Indian Mutiny." A peculiarity of this thinking is the tendency to refer to times of bloody invasions and enslavement with respectful nostalgia, as in "The Golden Age of Greece" and "The Glory That Was Rome," or "How the West Was Won." British subjugation of southern Nigeria is recast as The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

A contributor to Men Become Civilized, edited by Trevor Cairns, explains it all to children:

"When the king of one city conquered others, he would have to make sure that all the people in all the cities knew what to do. He would have to see that they all had rules to follow, so that they would live peacefully together."

Double-think finds ways to recast genocide as regrettable but necessary, due to failings of the people being killed, who are somehow unable to "adapt." Distancing the agent is key here, obscuring the violence with the idea that some kind of natural process is at work: "vanishing races," "by that time the Indians had disappeared."



THE POWER OF IMAGES

Hollywood tomtoms beat as fake Indians jump up and down, uttering brainless cries and grunts. There's the "squaw" complex in literature and cinema, the faithful Indian sidekick, and Robinson Crusoe's "Man Friday." John Wayne as the Western movie hero, saying: "There's humans and then there's Comanches." Or in real life, the actor tried to justify the settler theft of Indian countries: "There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves."







This picture appeared in an insurance ad. Advertising is an important transmitter of historical misrepresentation. It draws on colonial mythologies such as the notion that the Dutch "bought" Manhattan for the equivalent of $24 in trade goods --in spite of the fact that the Indians did not think of land as something that could be sold. The role of violence is completely obliterated. Even history books do not go into the massacres of Native people. On Staten Island settlers slaughtered the people they called "Wappingers," and afterward played football with their severed heads.


Tarzan goes up against witch doctors and eye-rolling African chiefs. The Caribbean is shown as full of fearful, superstitious natives and zombies, Arabs who have nothing to do all day but loll around in harems, or cheat the white hero. Seductive Suzie Wongs, thieving Mexicans, and shiftless and sexually insatiable African-Americans. Movies commonly depict the Chinese as obsequious and deceitful, Arabs as treacherous, Africans as ignorant and barbaric.

COUNTERPOINT

The Mande were farming millet and other crops in West Africa in 6500-5000 BCE.

Temples in Peru and Sudan are much older than the Parthenon.

People in Mississippi, Illinois and Mexico traded with each other and exchanged ideas and symbols, as the the sea-faring Ecuadorians did with Costa Rica and western Mexico.

A small-statured Black people built the oldest civilization in southeast Asia, leaving megalithic temples and statuary in south India, Cambodia, Sumatra and other Indonesian islands.

Archaeology shows that the earliest formative influences on ancient Egypt came from Sudan and the Sahara, not the "Middle East."

The oldest megalithic calendar in the world has recently been discovered in the Egyptian Sahara, dating back to 7000 years ago. European megaliths may have an African origin.

Polynesian mariners had begun navigating by the stars and settling the vast ocean expanses of the Pacific islands before the time of Moses.


WHAT GETS DEFINED AS HISTORY?

In the last half century, the boundaries of "acceptable" history have been expanded by a multidisciplinary approach, including sources previously dismissed: orature (oral tradition), linguistics, anthropology, social history, art, music and other cultural sources. More recently, the social locations of historians have come under consideration as a factor shaping their perspectives, along with a sense that there is no absolutely "objective" view of history. Past claims of objectivity have biases clearly visible today, notably in siding with European settlers and slavers against non-christian cultures, and the almost total eclipse of female acts and experience from historical accounts.

A reader who might react negatively to a blatant expression of racism often misses perceiving one cloaked in scholarly language, in assumptions, judgments and misinformation most people have not been educated to catch. It does not occur to many people to question a pronounced overemphasis on Europe, the smallest continent (actually, a subcontinent of Asia.) If a chapter or two on African and Asian history is inserted in a textbook, publishers go ahead and call it a world history. Typically, media depictions of history have not caught up with information now available in specialized academic sources, and continue to present the old stereotypes and distortions as fact.

More on Racism, History and Lies

BARBARIANS AT THE GATES

In the early '90s a hue and cry was raised in the national media against "multiculturalism." It threatened the very foundations of Western Civilization, explained an outpouring of magazine articles and newspaper columns which shed much heat but little light. A Newsweek cover blared: "THOUGHT POLICE: There's a 'Politically Correct' Way to Talk About Race, Sex and Ideas. Is This the New Enlightenment -- Or the New McCarthyism?" As if this wasn't heavy-handed enough, it adds a warning, "Watch What You Say." (December 24, 1990)

"In U.S. classrooms, battles are flaring over values that are almost a reverse image of the American mainstream. As a result, a new intolerance is on the rise." William A. Henry III, "Upside Down in the Groves of Academe", Time Magazine, April 1, 1991

"'It used to be thought that ideas transcend race, gender and class, that there are such things as truth, reason, morality and artistic excellence, which can be understood and aspired to by everyone, of whatever race, gender or class.' Now we have democracy in the syllabus, affirmative action in the classroom. 'No one believes in greatness.' Bate says mournfully. 'That's gone.'" Gertrude Himmelfarb, Op-Ed in New York Times Magazine, June 5, 1991

"If there is insufficient authentic African culture to meet the demands of self-esteem, then culture must be borrowed from ancient Egypt. No black pharaohs? A few must be invented. Not enough first-rate women poets? Let second-raters be taught instead." --James Kilpatrick, "Poisoning the Groves of Academe," San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1991

The assumption that were are no great women poets, no black pharaohs, no other greatness than the usual diet of "Western Civilization" is so ingrained that it is regarded as incontrovertible. Protesting the monochrome, all-male landscape of classic pedagogy becomes "intolerance." But what then are we to call the refusal to open up media and educational horizons to the full spectrum of human achievement?


A response to John Baines' review (August 11, 1991) of Cheikh Anta Diop'sCivilization or Barbarism and Martin Bernal's Black Athena:


To the Editor, New York Times Book Review:

Mr. Baines' review of Diop and Bernal express alarm that their books "attack modern conceptions of the origins of Western Civilization" by showing the anteriority of African (especially Egyptian) achievements. It seems to me that he would like to deny the context of the whole discussion, which has been centuries of exalting the Greeks as the fount of Western Civilization and denying the role of Africa in the ancient world. Egypt is treated as part of the "Middle East," and her relations with the rest of Africa ignored. In this context, to demand an "intellectual contribution that will stand without reference to issues of race" is to perpetuate an injurious status quo.

This denial is especially ludicrous in the frequently-heard claim that because Egyptians were "ethnically mixed," they were not black. Southern African peoples are ethnically mixed, yet it would occur to no one that they are other than black. More to the point, if an ancient Egyptian were to find herself in the United States, she would fall within the range of colors we describe as "black." This business of reddish-brown-skinned men and golden-skinned women was a convention in Egyptian art (and one adopted by the Cretans, Greek vases, and Etruscans, bearing out the hypothesis of Egyptian influence). If Mr. Baine wants to take the golden women as a racial marker for light-skinned Egyptians, is he also willing to concede dark-brown-skinned Etruscan men? His claim that considering the race of the Egyptians is "unhelpful"--and the many others who declare it irrelevant--is coy and evasive.

Max Dashu, Suppressed Histories Archives

[The Times did not publish this letter.]

See Ibrahim Sundiata's excellent article, Afrocentrism: The Argument We're Really Having, for more discussion of the African-ness of the Egyptians and racialist agendas of denial.

Here is a recent example of how the pernicious ideas described in this article percolate into popular consciousness. An October 18, 2005 post to an Illinois Museum site reacted to the one of the greatest sculptures in Indian America (known as the "Birger figurine") falls back on the Technological Calibration model:

"The Cahokia Indians never made it out of the stone age, not even to the primitive level of metal working found in the Mayan, Toltec, and Inca societies further south... [If they had left a written record, we would know more] but since they never made it that far, we have to rely on their works." [from the site Indian History: Unearthed artifacts from Cahokia]

More food for thought from Peggy McIntosh, who wrote White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack (1988)

“I have met very few men who were truly distressed about systemic, unearned male advantage and conferred dominance. And so one question for me and others like me [meaning white feminists concerned with male domination] is whether we will be like them, or whether we will get truly distressed, even outraged, about unearned race advantage and conferred dominance, and, if so, what we will do to lessen them. In any case, we need to do more work in identifying how they actually affect our daily lives. Many, perhaps most, of our white students in the United States think that racism doesn’t affect them because they are not people of color; they do not see “whiteness” as a racial identity. In addition, since race and sex are not the only advantaging systems at work, we need similarly to examine the daily experience of having age advantage, or ethnic advantage, or physical ability, or advantage related to nationality, religion, or sexual orientation….

“Disapproving of the system won’t be enough to change them. I was taught to think that racism could end if white individuals changed their attitude. But a 'white skin in the United States opens many doors for whites whether or not we approve of the way dominance has been conferred on us. Individual acts can palliate but cannot end, these problems.”

Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D. from the Winter 1990 issue of Independent School

Marcus Garvey - Evolution and The Result

Evolution brings us changes that sometimes make us fail to recognize ourselves even after a lapse of centuries. When the great white race of today had no civilization of its own, when white men lived in caves and were counted as savages, this race of ours boasted of a wonderful civilization on the Banks of the Nile. It may sound good for some Negroes to say that they were born here or there, and they do not intend to go anywhere else but where they saw the light of day. But let me say to you men, the world is small and humanity in the many and various race groups, is growing larger every day. A race that was ten millions fifty years ago is today sixty millions. A race that was thirty millions fifty years ago is today ninety millions; how many will they be tomorrow and the world is not growing larger? What will happen through the multiplication of all these various race groups, of those who are in power, of those who are strong, those who have at their command the forces of nature; through which they can exploit the weak and ultimately exterminate them? What will happen to you, the weak and unprepared, when the strong becomes more numerous even though the world remains at its present size? Ah, if you will but think down the future and compare the possibilities of that future with the happenings of the past you will come to the conclusion that there is no other salvation for the Negro but through a free and independent Africa. Whilst geographically speaking the world has ever been in its natural divisions as we know it, and see it, yet, politically speaking, the world has changed, and is still changing. Yesterday we had the Roman Empire, we had the Grecian Empire, we had even before the Carthaginian, the Assyrian and the Babylonian empires. What has become of them? They have gone into the oblivion of the past, because of human progress, because of the development of certain races as against the stagnation of others; but even yesterday we also had the great German Empire; we had the Russian Empire; we had the Empire of Austria and Hungary. Where are they now? They too, are travelling toward the oblivion of the past. Today we have the great French Empire, the British Empire and other great commonwealths. Will they stand ? Ah, methinks not, because evolution and human progress bring changes, and in the changes no man can tell what will happen tomorrow as against what exists today. Therefore, I say to the four hundred million Negroes of the world, prepare yourselves for the higher life, the life of liberty, industrially, educationally, socially and politically.