People are still on this kick that Beethoven was black. Do the people saying that not recognize that making that claim in the face of all the evidence comes off as an admission that black people haven’t produced any great classical works? Is this the road they want to go down? Seriously, dear activists, that’s the way it looks: because there’s no significant body of black classical work, you have to claim a white classical composer was a black man. We see a similar claim about William Shakespeare. Here, the claim is that Shakespeare was a black woman.
It’s not as if historians don’t know Beethoven and Shakespeare’s biographies. And not just historians. In Beethoven’s case, we even have hair samples. Researchers checked his DNA. The man is 99 percent white European. So much for “race is a social construct.” If the claim were that Beethoven was a woman, we’d debunk that, too. The problem for the left is that race and gender are scientific realities. Beethoven and Shakespeare were objectively white Europeans.
This isn’t a trivial matter. Consider how Muhammad and his followers wrenched the figures of the Judeo-Christian tradition from their historical context and made them all appear Muslim, furthermore claiming that Jews and Christians fabricated the Old and New Testaments to erase the “fact” that Moses was a Muslim from history. A book written centuries after those books were written claims, without any independent evidence, that the Qur’an is true and the Bible is a forgery.
In the places controlled by Muslims, the people under Islam’s thumb actually believe they’re the People of the Book—that Abraham, Mary, and Jesus were Muslim. Muslims erase Jews and Christians from history—except where they function as the enemy. They cast adherents to the Abrahamic faith as disbelievers, which is a warrant for enslavement and slaughter.
The problem of historical revisionism—which is happening in the West, with woke progressives rewriting our history to make white Europeans appear as exclusively and uniformly evil—easily becomes a justification for colonization, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. One may wish to believe this could never happen, but since it has, it can. In fact, it’s happening as I write these words. The antisemites will deny the Judeocide. To the extent that bad things did happen to the Jews in Europe, the Jews deserved it.
In the West, the honest man admits that history is ugly; he doesn’t revise it for ideological purposes. Remember the historian Howard Zinn, who said historians should be ideologues? Some of my younger readers might remember lessons derived from his work from high school. I have criticized him on this platform. His work is propaganda. Not all historians are dishonest, ideological, and sloppy. They take care to present history truthfully.
I could dwell on the black activist attempt to revise history to make whites appear to have appropriated black art, music, and technology by claiming their authors were white men. However, nothing brings home the danger of ideological reconstruction of history like the Muslim attempt to rewrite history. Muslims claim that lands formerly belonging to Jews and Christians were always Muslim. They revise history to justify the enslavement, rape, and slaughter of Jews, Christians, and other religious and ethnic groups. Don’t think other groups won’t do the same. When activists tell us Beethoven and Shakespeare were black, there’s something dangerous lurking behind it.
Imagine a world where the conqueror makes the great achievements of Western Civilization appear not as something stolen or toppled, but as the achievements of the conqueror, those whose culture objectively makes such achievements impossible. If this were believed to be true, then those who stole those achievements and made them appear European must be the worst possible people. This would justify anything done to them.
Those revising history to rationalize their backwardness would do well to remember that this logic cuts both ways. Not that I would advocate such a thing, but that doesn’t change the peril that lies down the road of anti-Western and anti-white hatred and loathing. History records that telling big lies has consequences.
