https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/dangers-politicized-history-bruce-thornton/
The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” a “woke” racialist rewrite of American history, is just the latest in the decades-long track record of leftist distortions of history. Like everything else corrupting our culture, its roots lie in Cultural Marxism and its assault on social institutions, especially education, as the means for achieving the Marxist paradise that the proletariat had betrayed by not rising up against their capitalist taskmasters and collectivizing the means of production.
The universities, of course, have been the seed-bed of such propaganda. A seemingly silly spasm of outrage over Israeli movie actress Gal Gadot (pictured above) being cast as Cleopatra illustrates how fake history and “cancel culture”––their roots in an academic fashion from decades earlier that at the time was dismissed as the typical hijinks of egghead professors––have infected people’s minds with patent nonsense.
The “woke” mob are put out with Gadot and her director, Patty Jenkins, because Gadot is a “bland” and “too pretty” white woman, whereas Cleopatra was Egyptian and hence presumably swarthy and more “exotic” looking. More noxious to critics is that Gadot is an Israeli. Journalist Sameera Khan on Twitter huffed, “shame on you, Gal Gadot. Your country steals Arab land & you’re stealing their movie roles.” The sheer ignorance of this observation is staggering. Christian Egypt didn’t become an Arab nation until 645 A.D. with the Muslim conquest. Today’s Arab Egyptians, then, with the exception of the minority Christian Copts, are the descendants of conquerors, occupiers, and colonizers. So who has a much longer record of “stealing” land?
But assuming Cleopatra was ethnic Egyptian is another historical solecism. She was a Macedonian Greek, descended from Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s general who in 305 B.C. seized the rich territory of Egypt during the “game of thrones” over Alexander’s conquests after his death. The Ptolemies, as the dynasty is called, adopted much of the ceremony and iconography of the pharaohs in order to make their rule over a culturally, ethnically, religiously, and linguistically different peoples more manageable. But ethnically they were Macedonians, who tended to be fairer even than the southern Greeks, let alone Semites.
