Lysenkosim is the New Black: The History of the World Edition (volume I)

Milo has recently penned a new book, Middle Rages: Why the Battle for Medieval Studies Matters to America

I recommend this title and I will have a lot more to say about it in another post.

It also jarred my memory about something I wrote up a while back at my old place.

REPOST

It is well known that academics who were too stupid to make it in the soft sciences, (let alone the kind of sciences that have math in them,) took to creating their own bullshit departments and calling them Something-Studies. Woman and Gender Studies was a favorite but ethnic studies departments had no trouble inventing their own fake majors, (Black Studies, Native American Studies, Latino Studies and so on.

But we shouldn’t forget. SJWs are busily crapping up other more formal disciplines as well. In point of fact they have already done so.

Today we shall be taking a brief look at an article by the Smithsonian Magazine.  This piece is on the Griffin Warrior, who was in life a Mycenaean noble 3500 years ago.  Now the Griffin Warrior is a significant find as his burial shaft is in unusually good condition.  His burial site was remote enough that the tomb raiders never found him.

I have redacted the article for the usual reasons.

Before I begin I suppose a little background might be in order.  The Mycenaeans were a proto-Greek, proto-civilization based in the Achaean peninsula of what we would call Greece today.

They were basically the Vikings of the 3500BC.  The Achaean peninsula makes for a hard life especially with bronze age technology and bronze was luxury item.  You can grow grapes and olives but the land doesn’t lend itself to much else.

So if you want protein you either herd goats or learn to fish.  Once your fishing technology creates boats of a certain size, other options for making your way in the world become viable.  Trading when needed and raiding when possible.

The Mycenaeans, the Vikings (and come to that my beloved United States Marine Corps) have a  shared secret. The reason that they became great warriors was that they were good sailors.  Individual bravery, hardihood and strength won’t take you all that far on the battlefield. What takes any military organization to the next level is trust and team work on the small unit level.  Every move you would make on an unstable, round bottomed forty man boat would be a team effort. Either waking or sleeping every man around you had to instinctively know what you would do when you move and react to it quicker than thought to keep the boat stable. This makes for a very tight combat team when the boots hit the beach.

The  Mycenaean civilization “exploded overnight,” which isn’t a surprise since they were mostly borrowing whatever they came across while trading and raiding.  It isn’t really a matter of them being cruel barbarians it was just a matter of survival more than anything else. The Vikings weren’t really any different.  They both tended to borrow from more advanced cultures. And it should be noted that the more advanced cultures never borrowed from them. Put a pin in that one, we’re coming back to it.

The Mycenaeans had two neighbors that they famously didn’t get along with.  The city of Troy and the Island of Crete, home of the more advanced Minoan civilization.  

The Mycenaean loathing for both was passed down to the Greeks in their stories and legends.  Best known examples: the Iliad and the Minotaur.

The sack of Troy was so thorough and so complete that it became, literally the stuff of legends.  But that began as a contest between more or less equals

Crete was a  different problem for them entirely.

King Minos of Crete was a powerful man, feared by the rulers of the lands around him. When he demanded goods or men for his great armies, they felt they had to agree. When he demanded they send tributes to honour him, they sent them without question. It was the only way they could stop him going to war with them. But his demands on Athens became too much for them to bear.

King Minos had a great palace built for himself. Inside this palace, Minos had built a giant maze, a Labyrinth, and, at the centre of the maze, he kept a terrifying creature, – the Minotaur. Now this was no ordinary animal; it was a monster, half man and half bull.

It was powerful, and savage and it loved to eat the flesh of the humans who had been shut into the labyrinth by King Minos. They would wander through the maze, completely lost, until at last they came face to face with the Minotaur. Not a great way to die really.

As for Athens, Minos demanded that every year the King send him seven young men and seven young women. “Why do we send these young people to Crete every year?” Theseus asked his father, the King of Athens. “And why is it that none of them ever return?”

“Because if we did not send them, Minos would wage war on us and it is a war that we would not win,” said King Aegeus. “And they do not return because they do not go to Crete as slaves. They go as food for the Minotaur.”

This is clearly and obviously a hostile relationship between a big power and a little power. The big power can do whatever it likes to the little power and has clearly done so whenever it felt like it

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this indicates a fairly negative relationship between Minoan Crete and the Mycenaeans.  However modern Archeologists on the other hand…

This has led Davis and Stocker to favor the idea that the two cultures became entwined at a very early stage. It’s a conclusion that fits recent suggestions that regime change on Crete around the time the mainland palaces went up, which traditionally corresponds to the decline of Minoan civilization, may not have resulted from the aggressive invasion that historians have assumed. The later period on Knossos might represent something more like “an EU in the Aegean,” says Bennet, of the British School at Athens.

Oh my fucking what?

This is easily the stupidest and most propagantastic thing I’ve ever read in the Smithsonian.  An EU in the Aegean?!?!?!?

So when Thera erupted and devastated Crete, the Mycenaean reaction wasn’t the more understandable.  “Hmm, our biggest local enemy is now weak. Let’s go fuck him up, so bad he will never be strong again.”  

No apparently these sea going barbarians were moved to compassionate tears by the plight of their once powerful foe.  And so singing the Linear B equivalent of Kumbya that launched a humanitarian relief effort that destroyed the borders between these two cultures and they lived in multi-cultural harmony ever after.

Minoans and Mycenaean Greeks would surely have spoken each other’s languages, may have intermarried and likely adopted and refashioned one another’s customs. And they may not have seen themselves with the rigid identities we moderns have tended to impose on them.

Where are you getting any of this?

Languages maybe but there is zero evidence for them intermarrying, unless you call raping a captured slave girl marriage.  There is also no indication whatsoever that the Minoans tried to imitate Mycenae culture. Advanced cultures do NOT imitate barbarous ones. It would be like the Byzantines suddenly deciding to take up speaking Norsk and praying to Oden instead of Jesus.

In other words, it isn’t the Mycenaeans or the Minoans to whom we can trace our cultural heritage since 1450 B.C., but rather a blending of the two.

This is ridiculous bullshit!

The Griffin Warrior had some Minoan religious artifacts on him at the time of his burial. All that really indicates is that he was on Crete at some time in his life.  And I grant quite possibly prayed to their gods. This is but one man and he was clearly on the outs with his community or he would have been interred in the tholos at Pylos.

Keep reading the delusions get more elaborate.

The fruits of that intermingling may have shaped the culture of classical Greece and beyond.

Note that the author is no longer even trying to present a hypothesis . In the best of SJW scientific tradition he has declared the science “settled” and is now expanding on this now rock solid fact that didn’t exist a paragraph ago.

In Greek mythology, for example, the legendary birthplace of Zeus is said to be a cave in the Dicte mountains on Crete, which may derive from a story about a local deity worshiped at Knossos.

“May?” The Great Sphynx “may” predate dynastic Egypt but you don’t go mentioning that one in a science magazine if you want to hang on to your professional reputation.  This is speculation masquerading as proven fact.

And several scholars have argued that the very notion of a Mycenaean king, known as a wanax, was inherited from Crete.

I know and it’s a stupid thing to argue. The Mycenae had their own clan structure.

Whereas the Near East featured autocratic kings—the Egyptian pharaoh, for example, whose supposed divine nature set him apart from earthly citizens—the wanax, says Davis, was the “highest-ranking member of a ranked society,” and different regions were served by different leaders. It’s possible, Davis proposes, that the transfer to Greek culture of this more diffuse, egalitarian model of authority was of fundamental importance for the development of representative government in Athens a thousand years later. “Way back in the Bronze Age,” he says, “maybe we’re already seeing the seeds of a system which ultimately allows for the emergence of democracies.”

No we aren’t.

The Mycenaean got crushed by the Dorians. There wasn’t much left of them after that but folk tales the Dorian Greeks adopted for themselves.

The revelation is compelling for anyone with an interest in how great civilizations are born—and what makes them “great.” And with rising nationalism and xenophobia in parts of Europe and the United States, Davis and others suggest that the grave contains a more urgent lesson. Greek culture, Davis says, “is not something that has been genetically transmitted from generation to generation since the dawn of time.” From the very earliest moments of Western civilization, he says, Mycenaeans “were capable of embracing many different traditions.”

AND HERE IT IS!!!

The point and purpose of this entire bullshit article.

Borders are bad according to SJW politics and their SJW science will now prove that a world without them was nothing short of planet full of rainbow farting unicorns.

Except course for that bit about the Dorians. The Mycenaeans sure as hell wished they had had effective borders when those fuckers came along.

“I think we should all care about that,” says Shelmerdine. “It resonates today, when you have factions that want to throw everybody out [of their countries]. I don’t think the Mycenaeans would have gotten anywhere if they hadn’t been able to reach beyond their shores.”

They were barbarians!  The only reason they reached beyond their shores was to steal someone else’s property.

Again take a look at the Vikings. They collected all the bits of technology they found useful which was usually swords and the like but the people they took them from didn’t drop their local monarchies in favor of the All-Thing.

Another example would be the Romans. The less advanced people they conquered, the Iberians and the Celts adopted Roman language and started following Roman customs and fashions. But when the Romans conquered more advanced cultures, the Romans stationed there adopted their ways and were assimilated by them.

Alexander the Great’s generals didn’t make the world Macedonian. They were all but unrecognizable to their cousins back home in a generation. It took that short a time to assimilate them.

In summary this article took a well known phenomenon and based on nothing but wishful thinking stood it on it’s head in the name of Progressive politics.

Trofim Lysenko would be so proud of his intellectual off spring.

If the facts don’t agree with Progressivism then the facts have clearly got it wrong.

Okay, I’m done here.