HISTORY IS BUNK | 2008-02-23
You can't begin to understand history if you don't get a belly laugh out of looking at the Federal Capitol Building and 49 of the 50 state ones.
Looking at them, I imagine an American showing these edifices to a person from Classical Times. He says, "You see? We build our buildings just like YOU did. This is a Classical Style Building."
I can see the person from Ancient Rome backing away from this lunatic, "What in the Hell is this nut talking about? Is he physically dangerous?"
The "Classical"Â buildings and sculptures come from a time when we dug up ancient statues that had had all the coloring rubbed off of them. They were gray stone. When you see a movie made in Rome the place looks like Spanish Harlem on a bad day. All the old buildings are gray stone.
We have LONG since found the traces of marble and coloring that made ancient Rome bright with color. But we will never correct any of this.
Historians talk endlessly about the Fall of the Roman Empire. The Romans would find that a curious notion. Nothing fell. The capitol was moved. If Congress decided to move the seat of government from Washington to a more central location, we wouldn't consider it The Fall of America. The Emperor in Rome moved to Byzantium. He would be surprised to be told that his government had fallen.
But the problems here are simply practical. Can anybody imagine congress deciding to paint the Capitol Building? That "Classical"Â style would be totally alien to the actual Romans, but it is absolutely essential to US.
Another practical problem. If we were burn all the books that trace everything to the Middle East, what would we replace them WITH? Our version of history is already a belly laugh and gets sillier every day. But it is OUR version of history. Tens of billions of dollars are invested in it.
Another practical problem. How would you feel if you invested your entire life in studying ancient history and then discovered it didn't exist?
This is not just a difficulty for regular history. Marxism as developed in the mid-nineteenth century and it is as firmly grounded in this mythical version as is any conservative version. Read the Introduction to the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and you will find that it begins by saying that all class distinctions are artificial. When that was written, it was ASSUMED that only man had upper and lower classes.
Since then we have found that every other societal animal has a class system that makes Victorian England look egalitarian. Anyone talking about that in a Marxist society would have bought himself a one-way ticket to the Gulag.
As technology and findings advance, our already belly-laugh idea of history becomes sillier every day.