Tag: history

The trend is bigger than the man

As I’ve observed, pointed out, and argued repeatedly, the trends are much, much bigger than individual men or even individual movements:

He must have known what was coming. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, a pillar of the cowardly GOP Establishment, announced he would not be running for re-election on Tuesday [Republican Sen. Corker announces he won’t seek re-election, by Richard Lardner and Erik Schelzig, Associated Press, September 26, 2017]. Corker’s departure is widely being interpreted as a sign of the Establishment’s inability to control the GOP base, as the election of President Trump, the rise of nationalism and the emergence of alternative media outlets (such as Breitbart and VDARE.com) make it harder for cuckservatives to Republican primary voters in line [Sen. Bob Corker’s retirement is notable for when it’s happening, by Amber Phillips, Washington Post, September 26, 2017]

And now, we have the ultimate proof in Alabama. Judge Roy Moore, one of the most persistent targets of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is now the Republican nominee for the Senate. And he defeated incumbent Senator Luther Strange despite Strange being endorsed by President Donald J. Trump himself…. Even before Trump’s inauguration, when there were troubling signs the new President was surrounding himself with the Republican Establishment, it was clear that the President’s supporters would need to rise against Trump in his own name. The victory of Roy Moore is the best example so far of how this insurgency will play out.

And most importantly, it shows how the populist and nationalist movement is larger than Trump himself.

Trump’s advisors seem to know this. In the Fox News interview referenced above, Dr. Gorka claimed “no one voted for Trump, we voted for his agenda.” And during his speech in support of Moore, Bannon referenced Jeff Sessions, not Trump, as the “spiritual father of the populist and nationalist movement.”

But does Trump himself know this? Already, the Main Stream Media is trying to present this as a devastating defeat for the president personally. The New York Times kvetched about Moore’s social views and sneered that his victory “demonstrated in stark terms the limits of Mr. Trump’s clout” [Roy Moore Wins Senate G.O.P. Runoff in Alabama, by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, September 26, 2017]. Jason Le Miere at Newsweek suggested Trump had suffered his first major political defeat at the ballot box and hinted his political weakness could trigger his impeachment. [How Alabama Senate Election Results Could Trigger Trump’s Impeachment, September 26, 2017]

This wildly overstates the case. Trump had hedged his bets, suggesting at one point he made a “mistake” in endorsing Strange [Trump supports Strange, but says it may be “mistake,” Washington Post, September 25, 2017]. He also said he would “campaign like hell” for Moore if Moore won [Roy Moore: ‘I can’t wait’ for Trump to ‘campaign like hell’ for me, by Sean Langille, Washington Examiner, September 25, 2017].

It’s hardly a devastating defeat for President Trump when his supposed enemies are fanatically loyal to him and his “allies” can’t wait to stab him in the back.

People get caught up in the heat of the moment. It’s easy to forget that the battles of last week, last year, and last month were, at the time, seemingly every big as important as whatever the battle du jour happens to be.

You can only ride the trends, you can’t reasonable hope to control them. This is why it is foolish and futile to attempt to brand and spin and otherwise attempt to control a trend as narrative, because that is a category error. The main reason Alt⭐️Hero is going to be successful is not due to the quality of the storylines, the artwork, or the characters, but because it is in line with the winds of the zeitgeist at a time when Marvel and DC Comics are trying to fly directly against them.

If Trump is wise, he will not only recognize that he is not bigger than the movement, but that the movement is not bigger than the trend.

Nazi = anti-white

One of the great ironies of the Alt-Reich is that they claim to be National Socialists, some “ironically”, some not so much, while also claiming that “saving the white race” is their primary goal. However, this is akin to ants claiming that dressing up as anteaters and eating other ants is the way to save the ant species.

First, Hitler thought more highly of both the Asians and the Arabs than he did of most non-German whites. Second, the National Socialists actually planned to murder a statistically significant percentage of the white race, around 20 percent of it.

Generalplan Ost was the name of the project, which was intended to slaughter white people. Specifically, about 60 percent of all the Russians, Estonians, Latvians, Czechs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, and Lithuanians were to be killed or “deported” to Western Siberia. The Nazis literally planned to murder tens of millions of white people, but were prevented from doing so by losing the war to the untermensch Russians and the mischling Americans.

The National Socialists planned to eliminate the Czechs. Like her.

From Infogalactic:

The Generalplan Ost, abbreviated GPO, was the Nazi German government’s plan for the genocide and ethnic cleansing on a vast scale, and colonization of Central and Eastern Europe by Germans. It was to be undertaken in territories occupied by Germany during World War II. The plan was partially realized during the war, resulting indirectly and directly in a very large number of deaths, but its full implementation was not considered practicable during the major military operations, and was prevented by Germany’s defeat.

The plan entailed the enslavement, expulsion, and mass murder of most Slavic peoples in Europe along with planned destruction of their nations, whom the ‘Aryan’ Nazis viewed as racially inferior.The programme operational guidelines were based on the policy of Lebensraum designed by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in fulfilment of the Drang nach Osten ideology of German expansionism. As such, it was intended to be a part of the New Order in Europe.

The Generalplan Ost proposal offered various percentages of the conquered or colonized people who were targeted for removal and physical destruction; the net effect of which would be to ensure that the conquered territories would become German. In ten years’ time, the plan effectively called for the extermination, expulsion, Germanization or enslavement of most or all East and West Slavs living behind the front lines of East-Central Europe. The “Small Plan” was to be put into practice as the Germans conquered the areas to the east of their pre-war borders. In this way the plan for Poland was drawn up at the end of November 1939 and is probably responsible for much of the World War II expulsion of Poles by Germany (first to colonial district of the General Government and, from 1942 also to Polenlager).

There is nothing “pro-white” about National Socialism of any kind. Indeed, in light of the results of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, it is clear that Communism, for all its tremendous flaws, is in practice more objectively pro-white than National Socialism.

Which is why anyone who claims to be a Nazi is intrinsically and always anti-white. The German National Socialist Worker’s Party was German supremacist imperialism, and as such, should be opposed by anyone who agrees with the ideas laid out in the 16 Points of the Alternative Right. I know there are a number of young men who don’t know much about history, who are rightly concerned about the future of their people, but they need to learn their history, learn their culture, and realize that running around playing Fake Right Clown Nazi bantzing for the lulz will accomplish less than nothing in that regard.

Work out. Dress better. Get a job. Talk to a pretty girl. Read the Bible. Get married. Have children. Any one of those acts would be more genuinely revolutionary, and accomplish more towards saving the white race, than spending the next ten years Swastika Panty-larping.

Removing racist statues

It’s about time humanity stopped honoring that horrific racist, Gandhi:

Ghana has said it will remove a statue of Mahatma Gandhi from a university campus in the nation’s capital where it had sparked protests over the leader’s allegedly racist attitudes.
The statue, which was unveiled by Indian President Pranab Mukherjee during his visit to Ghana in June, was meant to symbolize friendship between the two countries, according to Ghana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But professors and students at the University of Ghana called the statue “a slap in the face” because of Gandhi’s “racist identity.” They started an online petition calling for the statue’s removal.
The petition, which had more than 1,700 supporters on Thursday, cited letters Gandhi wrote during his time in South Africa as evidence that he advocated for the superiority of Indians over black Africans. It also took issue with his use of the derogatory term kaffir to refer to native Africans and criticized the lack of statues of African heroes and heroines on campus.

Any criticism of the Ghanaian action would, of course, be racist. Also, colonialism. Needless to say, all statues of Martin Luther King need to come down at once, since he was a communist and an adulterer.
Hey, wrecking history is fun!

The economic socialism of Nazi Germany

These observations – they can really only be considered “arguments” by the ignorant – are not new, but date back to the 1940 publication of Human Action, when Ludwig von Mises not only acknowledged the differences between Russian socialism and German socialism, both of which predated Hitler and the Nazi Party, but explicates them with his customary attention to relevant detail.
It’s particularly informative in light of the fact that Mises identified German socialism with Hindenberg, not Hitler. And it’s somewhat remarkable that the defenders of the false and ahistorical notion that the National Socialists were of the Right attempt to dismiss the whole subject as mere “economics”, when economics is merely the more scientific-sounding title for “political economy”, and the entire foundation for all socialisms is, and has always been, economic in nature.

There are two patterns for the realization of socialism.
The first pattern (we may call it the Lenin or the Russian pattern) is purely bureaucratic. All plants, shops, and farms are formally nationalized (verstaatlicht); they are departments of the government operated by civil servants. Every unit of the apparatus of production stands in the same relation to the superior central organization as does a local post office to the office of the postmaster general.
The second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers (Betriebsführer in the terminology of the Nazi legislation). These shop managers are seemingly instrumental in the conduct of the enterprises entrusted to them; they buy and sell, hire and discharge workers and remunerate their services, contract debts and pay interest and amortization. But in all their activities they are bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management.
This office (The Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages. It decrees to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. Market exchange is merely a sham. All the wages, prices, and interest rates are fixed by the government; they are wages, prices, and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the government’s orders determining each citizen’s job, income, consumption, and standard of living. The government directs all production activities. The shop managers are subject to the government, not the consumers’ demand and the market’s price structure. This is socialism under the outward guise of the terminology of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.

Note that the Reichswirtschaftsministerium, originally Reichswirtschaftsamt, was the German Government’s Ministry of National Economy, and was established in 1917, two years prior to the creation of the German Worker’s Party, the predecessor of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party. The ministry was abolished in 1945.
What will likely strike the reader as ominous about this is the fact that the digitalization and bureaucratization of American corporatism is increasingly reminiscent of this German pattern of socialism that was adopted by the National Socialists in lieu of the Russian model. It’s also worth noting that just as the German political battle of the 1930s was fought between the Russian and German socialisms, the Chinese civil war of the 1940s was fought between Chinese and German socialisms. National socialism was a different socialism than the international socialism of the Marxists, but it was a competing socialism that was neither conceived nor defined by Adolf Hitler.
But since Mises is seldom read by anyone today, being much too difficult for the average individual, his observations are often forgotten. Which, no doubt, is why George Reisman attempted to spell the concept out more slowly for the benefit of those incapable of deciphering Mises’s words 12 years ago.

My purpose today is to make just two main points: (1) To show why Nazi Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And (2) to show why socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship.
The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.
When one remembers that the word “Nazi” was an abbreviation for “der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party — Mises’s identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with “socialist” in its name to be but socialism?
Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed….
De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.
But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation.
The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale.
Shortages, in turn, result in economic chaos. It’s not only that consumers who show up in stores early in the day are in a position to buy up all the stocks of goods and leave customers who arrive later, with nothing — a situation to which governments typically respond by imposing rationing. Shortages result in chaos throughout the economic system. They introduce randomness in the distribution of supplies between geographical areas, in the allocation of a factor of production among its different products, in the allocation of labor and capital among the different branches of the economic system.
In the face of the combination of price controls and shortages, the effect of a decrease in the supply of an item is not, as it would be in a free market, to raise its price and increase its profitability, thereby operating to stop the decrease in supply, or reverse it if it has gone too far. Price control prohibits the rise in price and thus the increase in profitability. At the same time, the shortages caused by price controls prevent increases in supply from reducing price and profitability. When there is a shortage, the effect of an increase in supply is merely a reduction in the severity of the shortage. Only when the shortage is totally eliminated does an increase in supply necessitate a decrease in price and bring about a decrease in profitability.
As a result, the combination of price controls and shortages makes possible random movements of supply without any effect on price and profitability. In this situation, the production of the most trivial and unimportant goods, even pet rocks, can be expanded at the expense of the production of the most urgently needed and important goods, such as life-saving medicines, with no effect on the price or profitability of either good. Price controls would prevent the production of the medicines from becoming more profitable as their supply decreased, while a shortage even of pet rocks prevented their production from becoming less profitable as their supply increased.
As Mises showed, to cope with such unintended effects of its price controls, the government must either abolish the price controls or add further measures, namely, precisely the control over what is produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it is distributed, which I referred to earlier. The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.
This was the socialism instituted by the Nazis. And Mises calls it socialism on the German or Nazi pattern, in contrast to the more obvious socialism of the Soviets, which he calls socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.
Of course, socialism does not end the chaos caused by the destruction of the price system. It perpetuates it. And if it is introduced without the prior existence of price controls, its effect is to inaugurate that very chaos. This is because socialism is not actually a positive economic system. It is merely the negation of capitalism and its price system. As such, the essential nature of socialism is one and the same as the economic chaos resulting from the destruction of the price system by price and wage controls. (I want to point out that Bolshevik-style socialism’s imposition of a system of production quotas, with incentives everywhere to exceed the quotas, is a sure formula for universal shortages, just as exist under all around price and wage controls.)
At most, socialism merely changes the direction of the chaos. The government’s control over production may make possible a greater production of some goods of special importance to itself, but it does so only at the expense of wreaking havoc throughout the rest of the economic system. This is because the government has no way of knowing the effects on the rest of the economic system of its securing the production of the goods to which it attaches special importance.
The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.

Civil War 2.0

Whose side are you on, asks Pat Buchanan:

First in his class at West Point, hero of the Mexican War, Lee was the man to whom President Lincoln turned to lead his army. But when Virginia seceded, Lee would not lift up his sword against his own people and chose to defend his home state rather than wage war upon her.
This veneration of Lee, wrote Richard Weaver, “appears in the saying attributed to a Confederate soldier, ‘The rest of us may have … descended from monkeys, but it took a God to make Marse Robert.’”
Growing up after World War II, this was accepted history.
Yet, on the militant left today, the name Lee evokes raw hatred and howls of “racist and traitor.” A clamor has arisen to have all statues of him and all Confederate soldiers and statesmen pulled down from their pedestals and put in museums or tossed onto trash piles.
What has changed since 1965?
It is not history. There have been no great new discoveries about Lee.
What has changed is America herself. She is not the same country. We have passed through a great social, cultural and moral revolution that has left us irretrievably divided on separate shores.
And the politicians are in panic….
While easy for Republicans to wash their hands of such odious elements as Nazis in Charlottesville, will they take up the defense of the monuments and statues that have defined our history, or capitulate to the icon-smashers?
In this Second American Civil War, whose side are you on?

This is why the Fake News is so desperate to draw a mythical line between Nazi vs Not-Nazi, rather than Nationalist Right vs Globalist Left, as the situation actually requires, because they know they fall on the weaker side that is actively opposed to American heritage and history and tradition.
And it is also why they are desperate to hide the obvious link between the coming civil war and post-1965 immigration. History clearly shows that there are only two ways to stop this war. One is to proactively break up the United States and implement population transfers, the other is to restore the pre-1965 population demographics through mass repatriations.
Neither solution is likely. Man seldom takes the opportunity to avoid war. That’s why he is doomed to fight them. The citizens of the USA are not exceptional in this regard.

From the Nazi’s mouth

A number of historically ignorant defenders of national socialism have tried to claim that it is not a left-wing socialist ideology. This is utterly and absolutely false, and can be easily and conclusively proven to be false in a number of ways, including by reading a number of direct quotes from Mr. Hitler himself. Note, in particular, that the ultimate goal is “international socialism”.

  • It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialism. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it…. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.
  • We National Socialists wish precisely to attract all socialists, even the Communists; we wish to win them over from their international camp to the national one.
  • I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.
  • After all, that’s exactly why we call ourselves National Socialists! We want to start by implementing socialism in our nation among our Volk! It is not until the individual nations are socialist that they can address themselves to international socialism.
  • The Revolution we have made is not a national revolution, but a National-Socialist Revolution. We would even underline this last word, “Socialist.”
  • There is a difference between the theoretical knowledge of socialism and the practical life of socialism. People are not born socialists, but must first be taught how to become them.
  • I, on the other hand, have tried for two decades to build a new socialist order in Germany, with a minimum of interference and without harming our productive capacity.
As you can see, no adherent to this ideology has any place on the Right, nor can he reasonably describe himself as being Alt-Right. I direct your attention to the very first point of the Alt-Right:
  1. The Alt Right is of the political right in both the American and the European sense of the term. Socialists are not Alt Right. Progressives are not Alt Right. Liberals are not Alt Right. Communists, Marxists, Marxians, cultural Marxists, and neocons are not Alt Right.
Being socialists, national socialists of any stripe can never legitimately claim to be Alt Right.
UPDATE: I will be debating Greg Johnson about that contention. Tara McCarthy will host. More info about when it will be broadcast tomorrow.

A battered woman, still whining

Instead of simply admitting that she was wrong when she erroneously claimed that a BBC propaganda piece aimed at children was “pretty accurate”, UK “historian” Mary Beard is continuing to cry, and her supporters are continuing to move the goalposts as they attempt to salvage her tattered reputation.
Mary Beard@wmarybeard
It’sreally hard. & I am more battered than I seem.Just think I haven’t been paid to research Rome for 40 yrs to sit and let this crap go by!
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
Then you should stop acting as a BBC-owned diversity propagandist. You are already a laughingstock outside the UK.

History and the limits of SJW dishonesty

Don’t bother looking for the limits of SJW stupidity or dishonesty. You will not find them. In an astonishingly inept attempt to defend the BBC and “historian” Mary Beard, one English SJW actually put forward the following defense, accompanied by a screenshot.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
I answered your question. Even though it was a straw man. No one ever said mixed race families were typical (majority) of Roman Britain.
Dave Tooke‏ @burstdrum
The BBC cartoon did not say “typical”. It merely suggested one such family as possible. Which it was.
This was the screenshot attached to the second tweet.

In fairness, the SJW was undermined by the dishonesty of the BBC, which is the more significant aspect of this little story. You see, this was how the video was described 5 days ago, before BBC “historian” Mary Beard tried to school Paul Joseph Watson and was caught bullshitting by NN Taleb. Emphasis added.
Original BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain is shown through the eyes of a typical family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while the son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion, food and entertainment.

Current BBC Two description
Life in Roman Britain as seen through the eyes of one family nearly 2000 years ago. The Romans bring towns to Britain, and also roads, forts, and Hadrian’s Wall, to keep out the Picts. The father is supervising the building of Hadrian’s Wall, while his son manages to lose his father’s special military scarf, or focale. This incident is used to explore Roman beliefs and religion.
You see, with SJWs, it’s Fake News and Fake History all the way down. You can NEVER trust anything they say. Because – all together now – SJWS ALWAYS LIE.

The whining continues

English “historian” Mary Beard is still whining about the pushback she received for incorrectly claiming that a multiracial Roman British family was “typical”, as portrayed in a BBC children’s cartoon.

Mary Beard has spoken about the “Twitterstorm” of abuse she received after arguing that Roman Britain was ethnically diverse.

The historian and television presenter said she received a “torrent of aggressive insults” for days after she said a BBC schools video that depicted a high-ranking solider and a father of a Roman Britain family as being black to be “pretty accurate”.

She argued that the character in the BBC cartoon was loosely based on “Quintus Lollius Urbicus, a man from what is now Algeria, who became governor of Britain.”

She spoke against the “rubbish” arguments about genetic evidence from alt-right commentators and their “desire for certainty” when it came to historical information that was not always possible to ascertain, such as the population of Britain during the Roman empire and the ethnic make-up.

“It also feels very sad to me that we cannot have a reasonable discussion on such a topic as the cultural ethnic composition of Roman Britain without resorting to unnecessary insult, abuse, misogyny and language of war not debate (and that includes one senior academic),” she wrote in the Times Literary Supplement. She was referring to comments from  Nicholas Nassim Taleb who accused her of “bullsh*tting”.

I don’t think her new book is going to help restore her reputation any time soon. Best response: “It would explain all the dead white wives.”

In the meantime, Cambridge University has doubled down and released a Faculty Statement.


Faculty statement responding to the online debate of ethnic diversity in Roman Britain

Roman Britain has long been an important part of the teaching and research in the Faculty of Classics. The question of ethnic diversity in the province has been getting unusual amounts of attention recently. Professor Mary Beard has been at the centre of some of this attention. In the Faculty we welcome and encourage public interest in, and reasoned debate about, the ancient world, such as Professor Beard has always sought to encourage. The evidence is in fact overwhelming that Roman Britain was indeed a multi-ethnic society. This was not, of course, evenly spread through the province, and it would have been infinitely more noticeable — it can be assumed — in an urban or military context than in a rural one. There are, however, still significant gaps in our understanding. New scientific evidence (including but not limited to genetic data) offers exciting ways forward, but it needs to be interpreted carefully.

UPDATE: Glorious. Mary has really become quite prolific of late. We need to send old GRR Martin a case of whatever she’s drinking.

Something is broken

Nicholas Nassim Taleb is underwhelmed with the state of the UK intellectual sphere after his encounter with “historian” Mary Beard:

The BBC did some kind of educational cartoon on Roman Britain and represented “diversity” in terms of someone looking African in the show as representative of “diversity” at the time. Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy.

What was meant to be a “typical” of Roman Britain by the BBC: flowing quotas of political correctness backward in time.

  • Representativeness heuristic. The picture was portrayed as representative (playing on the representativeness/avalability heuristic in the minds of children). Some people backtracked later by saying it is was not common but not impossible, which is where I shout “BS!”
  • Anecdotal vs Statistical. The backup is mostly anecdotal from cherry picked stories. We find nothing beyond traces of sub-Saharan genes in areas where Roman legions were located (France, Gaul, and even Spain, where most of it came much later from the Arab trade). Show the picture to a French or Italian person and tell him “this is the typical…” and watch the insults.
  • Fuzzy classification. Even the researchers who deal with physical remains miss the point that people from North Africa looked no different from Spaniards, S. Italians, and Greeks. Punics/Phoenicians we now know looked Canaanite, just like a Southern European. Berbers looked like mountain berbers today. So representing “diversity” should focus on the difference between locals and Romans, not within Romans. It would be like mixing English and Spaniards/S. Italians, which makes sense.

The reclassification “when it fits” is nothing short of fabrication.

Mary Beard, of course, fled from the obvious consequences of her own arguments when I pointed out to her that her advocacy of ethnic diversity, combined with her observation that the Roman mass rape of the Sabine Women was “a way of creating a mixed society”, amounted to an implied endorsement of the mass rapes of Rotherham.

English academics are third-rate intellects, which, sadly enough, puts them a leg up on most of their American counterparts. That being said, I still have a lot of respect for Ms Beard, whose take on history is certainly original, if nothing else.

I know I’m definitely looking forward to her first book on Carthaginian history, which promises to be truly ground-breaking in light of her discovery of considerably more ethnic diversity there than had been hitherto suspected.