New school of "anti-anti-colonialism" | DEAD ENEMIES

British soldiers with objects looted from the royal palace during the military expedition to Benin City in 1897 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Wilful Amnesia? Hiding it all? Minimizing Atrocity?

You’d think that by now there would be no debate left about the misdeeds of the British Empire in the Kingdom of Benin and elsewhere. But oh no, two new books by British scholars maintain that all is fair in war and archaeology, and that Britons ought to harbor no guilt for their imperial past or present. (We'd expect that from these ANCIENT mobster monsters!)

👇On the other side of this debate is Oxford University professor, author, and Hyperallergic contributor Dan Hicks, who minces no words in his criticism of what he describes as a new school of "anti-anti-colonialism."

Beware the Rise of Anti-Anti-Colonialism

Two new books by Nigel Biggar and Adam Kuper advocate for wilful amnesia and collective repression of British colonial brutality. | Dan Hicks

Melancholy, Paul Gilroy once argued, is a common reaction to “the loss of a fantasy of omnipotence.” He made this observation in his Wellek Library Lectures, delivered at the University of California Irvine in 2002, and published in 2004 under the title Postcolonial Melancholia. The third lecture took its cue from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s 1967 book The Inability to Mourn — a psycho-historical study of West Germany’s relationship with its recent past in the aftermath of the defeat of fascism. Gilroy brought this pathology of denial, guilt, trauma, silence, and intergenerational conflict into dialogue with the theme of his talk. He was speaking about how British people might come to terms with the ideologies of “race” and supremacy that formed the master narratives of European colonialism. Before British people “can adjust to the horrors of their own modern history and start to build a new national identity from the debris of their broken narcissism,” Gilroy argued, “they will have to learn to appreciate the brutalities of colonial rule enacted in their name and to their benefit.”

In some quarters, latent melancholy is now resurfacing in the form of retaliation.

SHIT POSTING:

On social media, this strategy has become known as “shitposting’ — a word that the Oxford English Dictionary defines as:

A nonsensical, irrelevant, or deliberately provocative post on social media, esp. one that is intended to amuse an in-group, elicit a reaction, subvert a discussion, or distract from the main conversation.

WTF: In Washington, DC, Kuper claims that the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian were established as concessions to “reverberations of the culture wars.”

WTF: The “Dead Enemies” cabinet displayed human skulls, skin, hair, and teeth from Canada, the United States, Brazil, Borneo, Nigeria, Malaysia, India, Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, alongside ten examples of “shrunken heads” (tsantsas) from Ecuador and Peru made from human, sloth and monkey heads. ... At the same time, it was a kind of in-joke by the Edwardian curator, suggesting that the main rationale of this colonial museum was to display objects and human remains raided from the “dead enemies” of the British Empire.

(THE SAME CAN BE SAID OF THE MINOAN/ROMAN atrocity still ongoing. Eugenics on Steroids! Clever bastards.)

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Remains of Submerged Nabatean Temple Uncovered in Italy

Underwater altars were found off the coast of Pozzuoli near Naples.

Elaine Velie

The two altars date to the first century CE. (all photos via Nello Musumeci on Facebook)

Italian archaeologists uncovered two marble altars from the lost city of Puteoli, an Ancient Roman trade hub partially swallowed by the Gulf of Naples. Seismic activity capsized parts of the Roman outpost; a contemporary Italian city named Pozzuoli stands on the shore of the same Mediterranean cove.

Ancient Greeks founded Puteoli around 600 BCE. It became part of the Roman Empire and served as a vital trade hub for luxury goods and grain from Alexandria, Egypt. The recovered altars were part of the “Temple of the Nabataeans,” according to the Italian Ministry of Culture’s April 11 announcement. (Temple? Maybe, maybe not.) The ministry stated that archaeologists have long known the approximate location of the submerged temple, but only recently were they able to decipher its exact resting place.

The two marble altars were both part of the same temple.

The Gulf of Pozzuoli (part of the larger Gulf of Naples) submerged part of the ancient Roman city.

The Nabataeans were a powerful civilization of nomadic Arabian merchants. They built Petra in current-day Jordan around the 3rd century BCE. The group retained power in trade networks and held a permanent outpost in Puteoli. From their hub in the Roman city, the Nabateans facilitated trade between the Mediterranean Sea, the Indian Ocean, and mainland Arabia. They grew wealthy in part by controlling the delivery of aromatics such as frankincense and myrrh to Ancient Romans.

The trade partnership turned the Nabataeans and Ancient Romans into allies. Not long after the recently discovered marble altars were created, however, the Ancient Romans conquered Petra in 106 CE. Puteoli remained a trade outpost for Rome until the Empire collapsed.

Other important archaeological finds from the current-day city of Pozzuoli include a statue dedicated to Roman Emperor Domitian, a relief honoring an emperor, and a collection of engraved glass flasks thought to have been distributed as late-Roman souvenirs. The city also has a well-preserved Roman amphitheater (the third largest in Italy) (DEATH PIT) that stands safely above the Gulf of Naples.

Remember they are all the same people, differ by name only... ANCIENT EVIL, indeed.