Comradeship // Freechat

I'm taking time off generally on being too "online" but this post was too good for me not to comment; very much well done and much needed. Thank you!

If we consider that

(1) Ancient Greece philosophy and science was resurrected, translated and then brought to Europe through the Islamic Golden Age - typified maybe throught the Iberian Peninsula ie Spain (tangent: I don't know if you remember a while back we had a discussion on the nature of secularism and Ibn Rushd, well the latter was an Andulusian Arab)...

(2) the bulk of the rest of Ancient Greek literature such as Odyssey here was brought to Europe through Eastern Byzantine, which you have astutley recognised has been divorced from European Heritage (ie the "jungle" seperated from their precious "garden" - the EC VP parasite Borrell)...

(3) Greek philosophy was not some sort of self-made miracle, and not an accident that it was considerably birthed off mainland Greece in Ionia which sat in the crossroads of Mesopatamia and Egypt, and furthermore the likes of Plato, Thales and Pythagoras all studied in Egypt (or at the very least there was knowledge transfer)..

... it hammers home how much of this tradition is invented - the metaphysical immutablity, and by extension its supposed supremacy, of Western Civilisation. We are all children of the South and East.

It also harkens painfully personally close to home, my own ancesteral heritage of Eastern Christian rites (with dharmic fusion) whose modern day descendants have largely decided to venerate a White Jesus (your last line reminded me of a Hari Kondabolu joke about the Western Jesus often being depicted as a swedish tennisball player!) and see their salvation in the gusanofication of our cultures, effectively bowing down to folks who massacred and stole from our ancesteral land, and in a sick twist of fate one of their descendants is now a diaspora western labour aristocrat who enjoys privileges of that ongoing imperialism.

I find parallels over and over again of what ~~Paolo Friere~~ Paulo Freire relayed in his pedagogy - the oppressed find their model of manhood in the oppressed - from Jews, to Greeks, to Indians (go look at the US and UK largest political parties), to Lebanese Maronites to Nigerian Christian Zionists to countless examples from Central to South America, (edit: there are load more examples but there are two glaring omissions worth mentioning that I forgot - Eastern Europe and Occupied Korea) it is being played out here in "both sides" of the Odyssey film here - the Hollywood production with people of colour supposedly transgressing what was apparently a lily white mythology which in fact is a vehicle to say "see our imperialism, and communist purges, are worth it see our token diversity!" - to the righter wing reaction against "wokeness".

Thanks once again, as you can see from above so much of your post resonates; hope you do more posts.

(Books for those interested - Inventing Tradition by Hobsawm, ~~Paolo Friere~~ Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Bernal's Black Athena (I have only read part of vol 1, and it is considered so controversial it is called pseudoarcheology. I would argue some schlolarly errors does not put it in the same league as aliens/atlantis/mystical forces, and if you read most of the backlash they are steeped in bigotry. However it does make the next two books important), and a couple of my list to read is Diops' African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, and Amin's: Eurocentrism). [I have found more for the reading list: Vlassopoulos' Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History Beyond Eurocentrism]