Thursday, February 02, 2023



Blackwashing

Just a side issue to something Malcolm Smith mentions below: The "Greek" heroes in Homer were repeatedly described as blond or having golden hair: ξανθῆς δὲ κόμης ἕλε Πηλεΐωνα …. That is very rare in modern Greece. Modern Greeks are usually swarthy with black hair

Felice Vinci has solved that puzzle by pointing out that the events recorded by Homer probably took place in the Baltic many years before Homer was recorded. The attack on Troy was the work not of Greeks as we know them but of proto-Vikings. It was decribed by a Greek but that was not where the action originally took place

A further instance of the distortions that Malcom mentions can be found here, where a British historian claims that there was an African population in Britain during the Roman empire. Also see here



Over the last few years, I've noticed a peculiar trend in Australian TV ads. They are constantly featuring African Americans. The trouble is, despite the flood of non-white immigration, sub-Saharan Africans - negroes - remain the rarest of racial groups in this country. There are more full blooded Aborigines in Australia than negroes. There are more South Sea Islanders. There are more of every race with the exception of Eskimos and Amerindians. At first it seemed the ads were of big cosmopolitan brands, and were made in the US, but now I see them more and more in ads for Australian companies. I don't know where they get the actors. They are clearly not African Australians.

There are two reasons I say this. The first is the simple rarity of potential actors. The second is that they don't look like African Australians. A high proportion of those who actually are here are refugees from the Southern Sudan, and these belong to the Nilotic branch of the Negroid race: very tall, very slim, and very dark. They are as remarkable as they are impossible to overlook, and none of them appear on Australian TV ads.

Of course, in Africa they have the reverse problem. The Nigerian Government got tired of the airwaves being dominated by American company ads full of white faces, that they passed a law requiring television ads to have only black faces. I wonder what would happen if we took a similar attitude.

Now, before we go further, I now have to make a point which shouldn't need to be made. Some ignorant people are bound to take umbrage at the use of a single, honourable word, "negro" instead of triple word term like "Sub-Saharan African". Promoted in the antebellum years of the US by abolitionists and freed slaves as a substitute for "nigger", it remained the standard polite term for the race for all and sundry. Martin Luther King called himself a negro.

Back in 1974 the residential college where I was staying contained a large number of student teachers from all over the Commonwealth. I shall always remember a Uganda commenting jocularly to one of his compatriots, "You're not supposed to say 'negro' any more, but 'black'."

At that point, my friend, Rachel, who was as black as the Ace of Spades, objected. "I am not a black!" she asserted. "I am a negro!" Whether she is now reconciled to the use of "African American" I don't know. I suppose you could say that Guyana, which is where she came from, is American.

Now, back to the subject. These advertisements are a sign of a peculiar new phenomenon: "blackwashing", the insertion of black people into places such as movies, literature, and history where they don't or didn't exist, usually by displacing white people. In Australia it is not easy to pull off, but in the rest of the world it is going full swing.

Certain people get upset by "whitewashing" i.e. using a white actor to play a character which was non-white in the original story. But they don't seem to have any problem with the reverse.

Thus, the 2022 movie, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris was a really delightful experience, but it made a few changes to Paul Gallico's 1958 novel. For a start, Mrs Harris' best friend was a black woman. In 1957 London this was theoretically possible, but unlikely, and not in accordance with the book. Even more egregious was the black Dior models. Not only did they not exist at the time, but they could not. Dresses must co-ordinate with the wearer's complexion. What looks stunning on a dark skinned model would be pedestrian against pale skin, and vice versa. (I noticed none of the prospective buyers where dark.)

The British 2022 remake of All Creatures Great and Small doesn't actually have black people in major roles, but you see them move across stage as if they were part of the background. In a pre-war Yorkshire village? I don't think so.

And whatever was the management of Disney thinking when they cast a black woman as the lead in their 2023 live action version of The Little Mermaid? Now, I am sure that Africa has its own legends of humanoid sea creatures. However, this is a Danish fairy story, based on Northern European legends, and over there mermaids are always depicted as white. Also this was a remake of Disney's 1989 cartoon of the same name, and in that film, the mermaid was white. The change of colour must have been deliberate, yet they have the hide to accuse us of racism! This is gaslighting.

What about the 2018 BBC/Netflix series, Troy: Fall of a City, in which Achilles is black? He was a Greek, for heaven's sake! And according to Homer, he was blond. [In Greek either xanthē or khrusos]

Currently in the UK there is a stage production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in which all four Pevensey children are black. Remember, these were English children evacuated to the countryside during the Blitz. Right now the BBC is producing a remake of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in which the lawyer is black and a couple of other characters chosen from other racial minorities, all of which were exceptionally rare in England at the time.

Simon Webb, a vlogger who has picked up a number of these absurdities, has pointed out that, although there are far more people from the Indian sub-continent in Britain than negroes, they seldom get a look-in. However, Jules Verne's 1872 novel, Around the World in Eighty Days concerns the adventures of Phineas Fogg, an Englishman, and his French servant, Passepartout as Fogg attempts to win a bet circling the world in the said eighty days. On the way, they save an Indian widow from being burnt on her husband's pyre and take her with them. In the end, Fogg marries her. Here's a good interracial marriage we can all admire. But in the latest television incarnation of the story, the Indian woman is dispensed with, to be replaced by a black British reporter, who could never have existed in 1872, who accompanies them all the way.

Blackwashing has reached a point where the authors clearly have complete contempt for their audience. The 2021 Netflix production of Vikings: Valhalla presents us with a black queen of a small Viking kingdom. Do they really think we don't know how preposterous this is? The backstory they tried to palm off to us was that her Viking grandfather met his royal African bride on a trading expedition to Alexandria, Egypt. Egypt is not black. The chances of a black princess from the south turning up in Alexandria is close to zero, and the chances of a white Viking leader falling in love with one even closer.

It gets even worse when historical figures are involved. Take Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I. In 2021 the UK's Channel 5 decided to have her played by a woman who is not just olive skinned, or even slightly swarthy, but completely, unadulterated, full-blooded black. Do they think we are complete idiots to accept this? Once more, they tried to gaslight us by insisting that the resulting outrage was "racist".

Another story doing the rounds is that Queen Caroline, the wife of George III of England, was, despite all the official portraits to the contrary, "black". The argument is that one of her ancestors 15 generations removed, was a Moorish concubine of a Portuguese king (maybe). Talk about the "one drop" rule! 15 generations means diluting the bloodline more than 30,000 times, assuming no inbreeding. Besides which, the historian who made this "discovery" apparently doesn't know the difference between a Moor and a Blackamoor. The Moors of the Iberian peninsula were Berbers and Arabs from Morocco and related parts of North Africa, and these people were, and remain, white - olive skinned, like the Portuguese themselves, but white nevertheless.

Netflix has now come up with another blackwashing series, Bridgerton, set in upper class Regency England, commencing 1813. Here again Queen Charlotte is shown as black, or at least one quarter negro, but they also did a lot of "colour-blind casting", which is code for blackwashing, for arbitrarily portraying lords and ladies as black. Again they gaslight us as racists for criticizing the "historical inaccuracy", which they put in scare quotes as if it weren't real.

This time, however, a historian did attempt to justify it. True, she admits, there were no black lords and ladies, but there were a lot of others lower down the chain. There were "thousands" of slaves brought over by their masters from the West Indies, and "thousands" of black Loyalist soldiers from the failed American Revolutionary War, who then settled in England.

This would have come as a surprise to A.B.C. Merriman-Labor, an educated black man from Sierra Leone who, in 1909, wrote an amusing book, Britons through Negro Spectacles (there's that word again!), in which he declared that there were only about 100 negroes in London. Not all of these would have been residents; many would have been visiting sailors etc. Photographs of crowds during late Victorian and Edwardian times reveal that England was racially homogenous at the time. Coloured immigration really only took off after World War II, and even then was more of a trickle than a flood until the 1980s.

Here we have a clue to the motives of the (mostly white) people responsible for blackwashing. In one of the episodes of "Dr Who" the Doctor went back to Victorian England and his (coloured) companion commented on the unexpected number of black people in London. The Doctor said they had been "whitewashed" out of history. No! They were being blackwashed into it. One of the writers, in a rare moment of candour, admitted that they were falsifying history, but they were showing history as it ought to have been.

In the U.S. there is a tendency among the politically correct to try to place various minorities in every venue available, no matter how inappropriate it might be. In the U.K. their motives are worse: knowing that many Britons resent the way their country has been transformed without their consent, they are trying to indoctrinate the younger generation with the lie that the U.K. has always been multi-racial. Now, if only I could divine the motives of the Australian ad-men.

No doubt certain elements will denounce me as "racist" for this article. People with such a mentality are immune to logic, but it would be helpful if they told us what their expanded definition of "racism" might be, and why it is a bad thing.

I have had African friends in the past. I have nothing against Africans in their place. And what is their place? Simply the places where they live, and use to live, in the correct proportions. Is that too much to ask? Stop colonising our advertisements, literature, and history.

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Democrats’ Spending Threatens American Standard of Living

The average American home is almost 2,200 square feet. An average home in the United Kingdom is a minuscule 818 square feet, in Finland 880 square feet and in Germany less than 1,200 square feet. Cramped.

Americans have bigger houses and a higher material standard of living — more appliances, clothing and cars — largely because they can keep more of what they earn. The U.S. is a low-tax nation — for now.

Europeans, in comparison, have to fork over much more of their earnings to the government. They enjoy paid maternity leave, free health care, nearly free college and many other government benefits. But they settle for a lower standard of living.

Are Americans willing to settle for less, too? As Washington politicians fight over the debt ceiling and whether to limit government spending, the real issue is whether Americans are ready to pay more taxes and have less spending money in order to finance European-style government benefits.

In America, two-thirds of the nation’s gross domestic product is spent on things people want for themselves — cars, computers, housing, furniture, vacations, you name it. In Europe, only 50 percent goes for these things. Government sucks up the other half.

Workers in Europe spend half the workday toiling to prop up their government’s socialistic programs.

Advocates for a liberal welfare state slam our materialistic lifestyles — our giant refrigerators with built-in ice machines, and in-sink garbage disposals.

Bloomberg columnist Allison Schrager deplores Americans’ “overconsumption” and argues we should learn to live like Europeans. That’s her opinion.

Americans who disagree, and don’t want to trade their take-home pay for cradle-to-grave benefits, need to speak up.

Democratic politicians won’t admit there’s a trade-off. They want you to believe taxing “the rich” will pay for big government programs without taking a dollar out of your pocket.

President Biden told Steamfitters Local 602 last week: “As long as I’m president, no one making less than $400,000 will have a single penny of their taxes raised. Period.”

That’s the Democrats’ script. They’re hawking magic. There aren’t enough rich people to pay for all the programs Biden Democrats are pushing.

Manhattan Institute economist Brian Riedl added up all the extra revenue that would be produced by Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent tax on income over $10 million, plus Senator Warren’s proposed corporate tax rate hikes and payroll tax hikes, and Senator Sanders’ wealth and estate tax measures.

Together, these soak-the-rich proposals can’t close the current budget deficit, much less finance the Biden nanny state agenda.

Paying for that agenda would actually require draining the middle class. “If America wants to spend like Europe, it must tax like Europe — and that means large payroll and value-added taxes on the middle class,” says Mr. Riedl.

That brings us to the drama in Washington, D.C., over House Republican demands that any debt ceiling hike be linked to future limits on government spending. Senator Schumer opposes any conditions, bashing Republicans for “hostage-taking.”

Mr. Schumer’s out of touch. A staggering 86 percent of registered voters polled say Democrats should agree to negotiate, including 44 percent from Mr. Schumer’s party.

Fifty-eight percent of voters say the Biden administration has been “reckless and loose” with people’s money, including 44 percent of Democrats, according to the same Harvard/Harris poll.

Treasury Secretary Yellen claims raising the debt ceiling should be automatic: “This is something you can't negotiate or bargain about.” That’s B.S.

History proves that the expiration of the debt ceiling, which happens every year or two, is the biggest opportunity to rein in Washington spendaholics.

Over the last 25 years, Congress has hammered out eight laws to control spending. All eight were tied to debt ceiling hikes.

At stake in this current debt ceiling struggle is preserving what sets the United States apart from Europe.

In the United States, working people get to keep most of what they earn and decide how to spend it.

Don’t let the Washington pols treat your paycheck as if it belongs to them.

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Bibi makes a strangely compelling case for his own necessity

Benjamin Netanyahu remains the king of Israeli politics and the critical figure in the Middle East.

In a truly masterful hour-long interview with CNN, the Israeli Prime Minister revealed, without quite explicitly using these words, that Israel has undertaken a series of drone attacks against Iranian weapons facilities.

These attacks are designed both to serve Israel’s interests and to hinder Iran’s ability to supply drones and other weapons to Russia for its use against Ukraine.

Israel faces a period of intensified violence in the Palestinian territories, along with some dangerous internal polarisation, but Netanyahu looks like a politician in the box seat who has faced all these problems before and knows what he’s doing.

CNN’s worldview is left liberal and it’s not remotely sympathetic to Israel, but the condition of the interview was obviously that Netanyahu be allowed a reasonable chance to finish his answers and that the dialogue be polite. TV networks should try this style with subjects they don’t view sympathetically more often.

Netanyahu confronts a sea of troubles. Some nine Palestinians, including one certainly innocent civilian, were killed a recent anti-terror operation in Jenin. Seven innocent Jewish worshippers were murdered in a terrorist attack outside a Jerusalem synagogue and a couple of days later a Palestinian child shot and wounded another group of Jewish Israelis.

Recently 100,000 Israelis protested at Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms. And his right-of-centre coalition certainly contains a couple of unsavoury characters.

Netanyahu dealt with all these issues convincingly and pragmatically. He has his pluses and minuses but Israel has never produced a more fluent political leader.

Israel was never more peaceful or safe, Netanyahu pointed out, than in his previous 10 years as PM. There was a marked increase in terrorist incidents in the territories under the previous Government and now something similar was happening in east Jerusalem.

Israel has formally annexed east Jerusalem but Palestinians claim it as their own territory. Most nations regard east Jerusalem’s sovereignty as contested.

Netanyahu was clear that Israeli security forces would increase counter-terrorist operations both in the territories and in east Jerusalem, but this was not, he said, to escalate conflict but to reduce violence.

The Israeli government contains a couple of politicians who can legitimately be called far-right and who have said in the past unacceptable and deeply offensive things.

Netanyahu made three points in response. A lot of people say weird things when they don’t have power but moderate when they do have power. The last Israeli coalition government, notionally of the centre-left, contained a party which owed allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood. Nobody criticised their presence in the coalition, instead it was seen as a sign of new inclusiveness. Israel’s hyper proportional representation system does make some strange coalitions.

But, Netanyahu said, he has a long record of running coalition governments effectively. He was in charge and his government would not be embracing extremist policies. In this, Netanyahu actually makes a strangely compelling case for his own necessity.

On judicial reform, Netanyahu pointed out his key change is to have governments, with a panel, appoint judges, just as they do in the Australia, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and almost every other democracy. Israel has the peculiar situation in which judges appoint their own successors. Judicial activism has become extreme in Israel and judicial power has become unaccountable. In moving Israel towards common Western practice he was not destroying democracy and he was further open to compromise on the reforms.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just visited Israel, and while he said the obligatory things about a two-state solution, his visit was one of solidarity with Israel, not opposition to it.

Netanyahu made it clear that the contemporary version of a two-state solution, which he would be prepared to negotiate, must involve Israel retaining security control over the new state. That would not be perfect sovereignty for the new state. But, and here Netanyahu’s point is incontestable, when Israel walked out of Gaza and southern Lebanon it didn’t get peace. Instead the territories became ruled by terrorist groups — Hamas and Hezbollah respectively - — which have fired tens of thousands of rockets at Israel.

His priorities in office, Netanyahu said, are: thwarting Iran’s nuclear weapons program; forging more peace treaties with Israel’s Arab neighbours; and boosting Israel’s already vibrant economy.

That’s a pretty plausible program from a pretty plausible Israeli leader.

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‘Being a controversial figure is not a crime’: Andrew Tate’s lawyer defends jailed influencer

Jailed influencers Andrew Tate and his brother are controversial but have committed no crime, their new lawyer says.

The former kickboxer and Tristan Tate are being held in a Romanian jail as part of a rape and human trafficking probe, The US Sun reports.

Tina Glandian, defending the pair, said they should be presumed innocent until proven guilty as no charges have been laid.

She said on Piers Morgan Uncensored the brothers have been subject to “huge injustice” after their arrest on December 29.

Tina, who has defended the likes of Chris Brown and pop star Kesha, told the Sky News Australia show: “This is a huge injustice as we see it, they should not be detained at this point.

“They are controversial public figures, but that is not a crime.

“At this point we have not been provided any proof of their crimes, nor have they been charged. “So I would ask that people presume them innocent as they are.”

Andrew, 36, and Tristan, 34, were arrested alongside two others in Bucharest on December 29.

As well as the human trafficking and rape probe, they were also held on suspicion of forming an organised crime group.

Piers went on to highlight an allegation made by a woman who claims Andrew Tate told her in a voice message: “I love raping you.”

Tina said allegations presented outside of a court of law must be questioned for validity.

The lawyer added: “Somebody could easily set someone up by saying they have certain fantasies.

“You can’t take a text message out of context. You have to keep all of that in mind.”

Romanian prosecutors launched their investigation last March after one of the brothers allegedly raped a trafficked woman.

The brothers are accused of recruiting their victims by seducing them and falsely claiming to want a relationship.

The victims were then allegedly taken to properties outside Bucharest where it is claimed they were forced “through physical violence, mental intimidation and coercion” to make porn.

Two Romanian women in custody, Georgiana Naghel and Alexandra Luana Radu, are suspected of having acted as the brothers’ accomplices.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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