Martin Bernal and Melville Herskowits: The Jews who created Afrocentrism

Afrocentrism - or the claim that (sub-Saharan) Africans were central to the creation of civilization as we know it (both historically and currently) - is one of several major quack historical theories out there that hasn't been subjected to intense intellectual scrutiny, because it is protected by political defenders who throw just about everything they can think of in terms of abuse at their detractors. (1)

Whatever you may think of Afrocentrism as a theory: it is undeniable however that the jews have played a disproportionate role in creating it in its modern form. This jewish influence dates right back to the beginnings of Afrocentrism with the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in which jews - most notably Henry Moscowitz - played a highly conspicuous role in organizing and funding. (2)

W.E.B. Du Bois was already by this point promoting the bare bones of an Afrocentric view of history that was heavily derived from the controversies between the British Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Wallis Budge (the former was promoting a European origin of Egyptian civilization while the latter was promoting an 'Afro-Asiatic' origin).

At around this time pieces of Freemasonic influence came into Afrocentrism particularly with the increasing idea of the 'Greek debt' to Egypt (derived from Freemasonry's pseudo-historical self-descriptions of its 'Egyptian' origins), (3) which saw its first full expression in George James' 'Stolen Legacy' that was based almost entirely on Freemasonic works and ideas derived from them. (4)

This was also the time of the rise of jewish cultural anthropologists under the tutelage of a jewish Marxist crank named Franz Boas: (5) one of which was a jewish anthropologist named Melville Herskowits. (6) Herskowits is not a name well-known today outside of anthropological circles, but he was a key figure in providing the intellectual framework and evidential padding for Afrocentrism by stressing the importance of African 'civilizations' and denigrating European civilization. (7)

Without Herskowits' involvement - as well as that of his Boasian cultural anthropological fellow travellers - it is unlikely that Afrocentrism as a theory would have got off the ground in an intellectual sense and would - in my opinion - have continued being the preferred fantasy of a small group of the more intellectual black nationalists. This is especially true if the kind of woeful offerings still offered by 'black scholars' in their supposedly 'peer-reviewed' publications are anything to go by. (8)

However the contribution of Herskowits pales into obscurity compared to that made by Martin Bernal. Bernal - often wrongly assumed to be black by readers of his works - is the author of the infamous three volume series 'Black Athena' where-in he claims to 'debunk' the 'Eurocentric' arguments of the entire of classical scholarship in regards to Egypt, Greece and to an extent Rome.

In the preface to the first volume of 'Black Athena': Bernal informs us that his personal jewishness is uppermost in his thoughts in writing 'Black Athena' because he feels concerned about 'virulent anti-Semitism' - especially the ‘Holocaust' and the Nuremberg Laws - and that it is to take on this 'Aryan view' of history (which he claims is championed by orthodox classical scholarship [which isn't actually true]) that is a threat to his ancestry that he has felt the urge to put pen to paper. (9)

Indeed Bernal believed that those he primarily attacked in 'Black Athena' - both classical scholars (10) and the Greeks themselves - (11) were inherently racist and anti-Semitic. Bernal himself identified the ancient Egyptians as a black semitic people and thus conformed to the ideas of Wallis Budge that W.E.B. Du Bois had originally championed for much the same reason: as a way of justifying the 'aggrieved nature' of a minority in order to turn a revised version of history into an intellectual weapon against the European oppressors (12) who Bernal frequently styled in terms of proto-Nazism. (13)

Like Boas and Herskowits: Bernal was a 'popular front' Marxist being the son of the jewish scientist John Desmond Bernal (who - unlike many long-time Marxists - slavishly apologized for Stalin long after the latter's death) and like his father: Martin Bernal was a devoted communist, but one who had a shift in intellectual interests to his jewish and broadly-speaking 'minority' heritage in 1975 (when Maoism - Bernal's own philosophy and that which he studied as a Sinologist - was imploding due to the sustained failure of the cultural revolution for a decade or so).

That shift was the result of an evolving fashion on the left for a form of Gramscian (i.e., 'popular front') Marxism called Eurocommunism (which was based on the re-reading of Marx as a 'philosopher of liberation' by Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser), (14) which argued that the revolutionary class was not the urban workers (as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky believed), the peasants (as Castro, Guevara and Mao believed) but rather students and 'liberation' movements (for example homosexuals, blacks, feminists and so forth) were.

One of the ways that Eurocommunism worked - and still works - is to 're-write' (or revise) the perceived self-description (or 'autobiography' as it is oft-referred to) of those it perceived/perceives to be 'reactionaries'/'counter-revolutionaries' (the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [or WASP] being the most common target). (15)

This was a rather nice fit for Bernal's need for a new intellectual raison d'etre in that he would re-write the 'origin myth' of Western civilization to be a non-European affair. It fulfilled a fundamental need in Bernal to discredit the 'racist historical narrative' that - in his view - belittled jews and other minority groups in the West as being barely civilized barbarians and argue by way of intellectual revenge that the Europeans were really little more than barbarous half-educated savages who simply stole the legacies of minority groups; especially jews and blacks, and claimed them as their own creation after the fact.

To build such a theory from whole cloth is clearly a difficult thing to do, but Bernal did not have to perform this arduous task unaided. He could simply draw on the earlier themes and arguments of the half-baked ramblings of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and George James (hence Bernal's otherwise incomprehensible defence of Freemasonic, Kabbalistic and Hermetic traditions that were used as the basis for their arguments by these authors as being supposedly 'historical'): (16) place them inside the radical anthropological rubric of 'black suffering and exploitation' by Europeans (developed by Boas and Herskowits among others) and then use his own academic training and pure brainpower to flesh the theory out with whatever evidence he could find. (17)

This would provide Bernal with a powerful tool to discredit European 'colonial' and 'imperialist' historical narratives that he believed had their origin in the study of the classical world and informed a 'Eurocentric' worldview that was inherently racist towards jews and blacks in particular (and was responsible in his view for producing the Third Reich and the 'Holocaust'). (18)

Part of this transformation of Afrocentrism into a weapon to stigmatize, belittle and dehumanize Europeans affected by Bernal was to legitimize and institutionalize 'black suffering' as a historical fact and by so doing transform it into a political weapon to be used against the 'white racist establishment'. (19) This institutionalization of 'black suffering' was also done by Bernal - and Afrocentrists more broadly - in direct imitation of the institutionalization and sanctification of 'jewish suffering' by the Holocaust industry in the home of achieving the same results. (20)

That this is a consciously and deliberately constructed weapon is indicated by Bernal's slipshod methodology (21) and his own fanatical but intellectually insubstantial attacks on his opponents. (22) In addition to the fact that Bernal's work is almost tailor-made to appeal to those who perceive themselves 'oppressed' by a 'white racist government'. (23)

In essence Bernal - as the intellectual founder of modern Afrocentrism - is the jewish communist titan of a historical theory whose sole reason for existence is to denigrate, revile and spread hatred about Europeans as being the origin of all the evil in the world and against whom blacks must fight and who they must remove from power if they are to restore the 'glories' of their alleged past (since those of European origin are institutionally and inveterately racist against them according to Bernal and other Afrocentrists).

That Bernal created his theories - which culminated in 'Black Athena' - as an ideological weapon against the West to ensure the status and importance of minority groups (and provide a counter to the supposed 'Eurocentric' narrative of classical history) and then make them politically conscious (as 'Black Athena' is hard to see as anything else than a proverbial 'call to arms' for 'national liberation' from white people) as a group (per Marxist theory) which then in turn would act as the catalyst for revolutionary anti-racist change: thus paving the way for a communist and then a socialist state (per Bernal's Eurocommunism).

Therefore we can see that modern Afrocentrism is quite literally a jewish anti-Western conspiracy of a sort with the prototypical jewish communist Martin Bernal at the centre of the intellectual web pretending to be a harmless champion of 'anti-racism'.

References

(1) For examples see Mary Lefkowitz, 1997, 'Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History', 2nd Edition, Basic Books: New York, pp. 182-183

(2) http://rac.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=21347

(3) Lefkowitz, 'Not Out of Africa', Op. Cit., p. 10

(4) Ibid., p. 134

(5) On Boas' political agenda see Gary Bullert, 2009, 'Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientist: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology', Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 208-243; as to his being a crank see Roger Pearson, 1997, 'Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe', 2nd Edition, Scott-Townsend: Washington D.C., pp. 106-107

(6) Ibid., p. 107; Kevin MacDonald, 2002, 'The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements', 2nd Edition, 1st Books: Long Beach, p. 25

(7) http://www.nathanielturner.com/twoscholarsdiscussafrocentrism.htm

(8) See: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/ex-nihilo-nihil-fit-the-consequence

(9) Emily Vermeule, 1996, 'The World Turned Upside Down', p. 269 in Mary Lefkowitz, Guy MacLean Rogers (Eds.), 1996, 'Black Athena Revisited', 1st Edition, The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill

(10) Ibid.

(11) Ibid., p. 272

(12) John Coleman, 1996, 'Did Egypt Shape the Glory that was Greece?', p. 280 in Lefkowitz, MacLean Rogers, Op. Cit.

(13) Robert Norton, 1996, 'The Tyranny of Germany over Greece?', p. 404 in Lefkowitz, MacLean Rogers, Op. Cit.

(14) Louis Althusser, 1993, 'The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir', 1st Edition, The New Press: New York, pp. xiii-xvii ; on Althusser's relationship with the jews please see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/louis-althussers-jewish-problem

(15) Thomas Schmitz, 1999, 'Ex Africa Lux?: Black Athena and the debate about Afrocentrism in the US', Gottinger Forum fur Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. 2. pp. 38-40

(16) Ibid., pp. 22-23

(17) This is clearly indicated by the lack of sustained critique that Bernal offers his opponents and rather than argue his views: he simply makes up arguments and lies about the work of his opponents. For example see: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1996/96.04.19.html

(18) That this is utter drivel is easily understood by reading say Ian Shaw (Ed.), 2003, 'The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt', 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press: New York

(19) Clarence Walker, 2001, 'We Can't Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 117

(20) Ibid., p. 121

(21) Schmitz, Op. Cit., pp. 25-28

(22) Ibid., pp. 29-30

(23) Ibid., pp. 47-53