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goodvibesatpeace · 6 years ago

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Theories: Darwinism and Our Extraterrestrial DNA

If you fancy a bit of light reading 😀

The mysteries of ancient history, such as how the great pyramid was built and by whom and why, have been well established over the past four decades. Similar archaeological enigmas litter the landscape around the planet and they raise many difficult questions about the origin of human civilisation.

Erik Von Daniken’s series of books, which began with Chariots of the Gods, presented archeological evidence while recounting many mythological traditions that have “gods” arriving on Earth from a distant world and bringing technology and the arts of civilised life to primitive human tribes.

Many writers followed Von Daniken’s lead and an entire school of alternative historical thought called the “ancient astronaut” theory emerged over the years. This school must be distinguished from another branch largely defined by such writers as Graham Hancock, which we can sum up as the “lost civilisation” school.

The latter does not figure into this discussion nor is it covered in the book The Genesis Race because it never really addresses the issue of the ultimate origins of Man or civilisation. Even if you accept the idea ancient Egypt and Sumer had their origins in Atlantis, who created that civilisation and from what precursors?

The essential questions the author has been studying over the past three decades are:

1) how did life originate and evolve on Earth?, and

2) how did civilisation suddenly emerge from mankind’s primitive roots?

To my mind it seemed the ancient astronaut theory could be defeated if Darwin’s theory proved to be correct, which “official science” claims it has been. That premise can be justified using several valid arguments.

The “ancient astronaut” theory generally includes the idea summed up in the first chapter of Genesis, which indicates the “gods” genetically engineered a proto-human race. The actual verse reads, “Let us make man in our image.” If Darwinism is accurate then this assertion would be untrue and the notion of cosmic intervention by an advanced race would fall apart.

The second reason is Darwin’s theory has not only been applied to biology, it is also used to explain the emergence and development of human civilisation by a process referred to as cultural evolution.

At its core Darwinism is based on a simple concept: life evolves slowly via a process of incremental adaptations to a wide variety of external stimulus. He applied it to biology and anthropologists, archaeologists and historians applied the same principles to culture and human history. If this is correct then we should not find any abrupt transformations in human “evolution” either biological or historical.

I reason that if Darwinism is accurate then there may not be any valid scientific basis for the “ancient astronaut” theory, which posited intervention and rapid-fire metamorphosis in both the biological and historical spheres. The results of this research proved surprising.

Darwinism is not only unproven – it has been shown by scientists to be fatally flawed.

This is where the book, The Genesis Race, begins…

Chapters two and three clearly show the flaws in the theory of evolution. It has failed exactly where Darwin feared it might – in the fossil record. Here we find – instead of widespread confirmation – a large number of missing links.

The general public is given to believe the only “missing link” in the fossil record exists between apes and man. This is not true. The fossil record contains hundreds of gaps between ancient and modern plant and animal species.

Darwin referred to the gap separating the primitive non-flowering plants (gymnosperms) and flowering plants (angiosperms) as the “abominable problem.” Why? Because the gymnosperms, like ferns, existed for billions of years and they still exist today.

The angiosperms, like roses, appeared on the scene about 150 million years ago and they exist today. Where is the evidence showing the fern evolved through a series of slow, incremental changes into a rose?

According to Darwinism the angiosperms evolved from the gymnosperms. If this is true then where are the intermediate forms linking the two very different types of plants? They have not been found in the fossil record and none exist today. This seems impossible and it is if you accept the principles of Darwinism.

There is no scientific explanation for the lack of intermediate plants linking the ancient and modern types. In fact, there should be millions of such fossils since they would have been evolving for hundreds of millions of years, far longer than flowering plants.

Scientists also have no explanation why gymnosperms and angiosperms exist side by side. Somehow all the intermediate plants they say connect the two kingdoms mysteriously vanished from the fossil record and became extinct. Logic would dictate that the older, ancient plants (non-flowering) should have been the ones to go the way of extinction.

This is actually enough evidence to kill Darwinism. Official science would have us believe the only dissenters against Darwinism are Creationists that come from the ranks of the Religious Right.

However, I present numerous references to bona fide scientists that slam the door on Darwin’s theory of natural evolution.

What is, or should be, of great interest to anyone interested in the pursuit of science – as it applies to getting to the truth of human origins and the emergence of civilisation – are the works of Francis Crick and Fred Hoyle.

While Von Daniken’s books were becoming popular in mainstream culture, these two eminent scientists wrote books about the origins of life on Earth. Both were highly critical of Darwinism and posited that life did not originate on Earth. They said the seeds of the biosphere originated in the cosmos.

In his book Life Itself, Crick – a Nobel prize-winner and the co-founder of the shape of the DNA molecule – claimed an advanced civilisation transported the seeds of life to Earth in a spacecraft.

Hoyle, an astronomer who gave the world the steady state theory of the Universe, proposed that life came from the stars borne on comets or riding on the currents of light waves.

The unfortunate thing is these rigorous scientific arguments were largely dismissed or completely ignored by “official science”, and also overlooked by the same folks embracing Von Daniken’s relatively unscientific, yet popular approach. (Erik did make people question and think.)

I want to clarify what I mean by that statement. Von Daniken claimed he was presenting a theory yet the title of his first book ended with a question mark.

A new theory is normally offered by presenting arguments against the currently accepted theory, as Crick and Hoyle did, and it is presented assertively with equal measures of humility and confidence that do not end in a question mark.

His somewhat insecure and uncritical approach has characterised much of the “ancient astronaut” literature, which official science finds easy to debunk.

That is why The Genesis Race begins with a serious critique of Darwinism. That is followed by several chapters re-examining the account of human genesis and the early history found in the Bible. A revolutionary analysis of the first three chapters clearly shows there were two creation events of life (and mankind) on Earth.

It also shows the history given in the Bible agrees with the findings of paleontology and anthropology. In the first chapter we find that an early proto-human race was created and lived in the wilderness, like other animals, as hunter-gatherers. They were given “every green thing to eat” by the gods and Genesis 1 ends with that covenant.

However, in the second chapter we are told Adam is created to be a gardener and Eve is taken from Adam’s rib and the “gods” give them clothing and self-awareness. The chronological account of Creation in the second chapter is entirely different than that of the first chapter of Genesis.

This is a critical point. Not only do the two accounts differ completely, we find Adam is not to live in the wilderness as an animal but is intended to be a caretaker and farmer. If the two accounts are compared side by side the difference is obvious:

Adam and Eve are not equivalent to the race created in Genesis 1; and Genesis 2 and 3 are not a detailed elucidation of the events described in the first chapter, which is normally implied or taught in church Bible classes.

What the first three chapters of Genesis actually describe are:

1) the creation of a proto-human race, the pre-Neanderthals and Neanderthals who live as hunter-gatherers in an innocent state as described in chapter 1, followed by,

2) the genesis of modern Homosapiens (Adam) fit for the agricultural revolution.

That is exactly the history given in Genesis and it agrees with everything modern science establishes about the chronology of human pre-history.

This is a radical revision giving much stronger support to the Biblical version of human genesis and how and why the agricultural revolution took place.

It also clarifies who the “us” refers to when God is abruptly referred to as ‘a plurality’ that intervenes and genetically alters life on Earth, the Genesis Race; and it sets the stage for a presentation of the enigmatic archaeological and additional evidence that further supports the theory of intervention by a technologically advanced extraterrestrial race.

Archaeology has never even addressed all the questions raised by the sudden emergence of agriculture and highly advanced civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 3rd millennium BCE, let alone answered the most critical ones.

From the perspective of conventional archeological and anthropological thinking, the origins of humankind and the emergence of civilisation from the Stone Age remain enigmatic. We have incontrovertible proof our ancestors could not have built the Great Pyramid with the tools and methods they possessed.

Yet official science simply ignores or tries to explain away many serious questions and issues such as how the Great Pyramid – the world’s largest precision-engineered stone structure – was constructed using only hammer-stones, ropes, manpower and sledges.

However, there are other issues that need to be addressed and today’s genetic research is shedding new light on this field. The implications of several important recent findings seem to have escaped the attention of many independent investigators.

Established archaeologists and anthropologists have either ignored or railed against the findings of these controversial DNA studies. I am referring to genetic studies into the origin of the domesticated dog and into the diet of our Paleolithic and early Neolithic ancestors.

You may ask what do the dog and Stone Age dietary habits have to do with solving the enigmas of mankind’s ancient past? The answer is everything.

Until recently it was believed dogs (Canis familiaris) came from a variety of wild canines such as wolves, coyotes, dingos, jackals, etc. But the latest DNA research shows that the wolf alone is the ancestral race of all dogs.

This poses a set of very difficult problems. The first dog would have been a mutant wolf. However, wolves are extremely sensitive to the genetic fitness and strength of each member of the pack. They are constantly testing and establishing a stringent social pecking order and only the alphas reproduce.

So how would a mutant ever have survived and reproduced given the rigours of pack behaviour? No wolves in captivity have produced viable mutants and geneticists tell us mutants are normally unfit and do not survive.

We are faced with a real conundrum. If we pose that early human tribes intervened and bred wolves into dogs we are faced with an equally impossible scenario. How could primitive humans have known it was possible to selectively breed a wild animal into one possessing only those traits beneficial to them?

We take the characteristics of dogs for granted, however, they present us with a profound mystery. A dog is the embodiment of only those wolf traits that people find useful, attractive and safe. How did genetically illiterate Stone Age humans achieve this feat of genetic engineering?

This problem is compounded when we are confronted by evidence from our earliest civilisations showing that salukis, sighthounds and the pharaoh’s hound, had already been bred in ancient Sumeria and Egypt.

How is it possible our ancestors, recently emerged from the Stone Age, could have successfully engineered purebred lines at the onset of civilisation? In addition, dogs are not only temperamentally different than their wild progenitors, they differ physiologically as well.

A wild alpha male and female only breed once a year, whereas dogs can breed any time. Wolves shed their winter coats, dogs do not. These diverging physiological characteristics take time to develop, in fact, many generations. Again, how did our ancestors at the onset of civilisation accomplish this?

This mystery is underscored by the fact most of the modern dog breeds originated thousands of years ago. Science has not even addressed most of these issues let alone have the experts satisfactorily explained how wolves became dogs – 100,000 years ago – nor have they shown the step-by-step transitions.

Purebred dogs just suddenly appear in the archeological record as if by magic. This is also true of agriculture and our key cereal and legume crops. Wheat, corn, beans and rice pose a second set of genetic enigmas.

Research into the dietary habits of Stone Age tribes around the globe show our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors subsisted on leafy plants and lean muscle meats. This makes perfect sense because these foods were readily available, took little or no processing, and wild game could be cooked over an open fire.

The problem with our grain crops, and they are the basis of civilisation, is wild grass seeds are so miniscule the cost/benefit of harvesting them was not in favour of it. They also require harvesting, threshing and cooking technology since they have to be boiled extensively. This was technology Stone Age Man lacked.

The reason grains have to be cooked is that the human gut is not adapted to digest wild grains. This makes it very clear the use of wild grass seeds as a primary food source is of recent origin. Our Paleolithic ancestors did not subsist on them.

Once again, this poses a set of formidable problems that need to be studied rigorously. If our ancestors did not harvest and eat wild grains, how could they have domesticated and bred the wild species so quickly?

Without many generations of trial and error experimentation – culminating in a vast body of agronomic knowledge and agricultural practices that would have included genetics and breeding – it is all but impossible to understand how the agricultural revolution was brought about.

Official science tries to explain the evolution of nomadic hunter-gatherers into sedentary, crop-growing farmers by claiming they discovered crops quite by accident. We are told it happened when a primitive villager tossed a seed bearing plant into the trash pile and noticed that it sprouted.

But that trite tale can hardly explain how they selected the best wild species to use as the basis for the agricultural revolution. There are thousands and thousands of potential wild plants that could be turned into agricultural crops.

How is it people with very little experience with wild grasses were able to pick the best varieties to breed? This represents a quantum leap. What we are asked to believe is that our ancestors, without much experience at the seminal stage of civilisation, were able to select and breed the very best varieties of wild grass species.

How do we know this is true? Because we still grow the very crops they supposedly selected even after 5,000 years of continuous technological and agricultural development.

We are asked to suspend disbelief and accept they also constructed the largest precision-engineered stone building the world has ever seen – the Great Pyramid of Giza – using only primitive hand tools and backbreaking labor. Something is obviously wrong with this picture.

Is it logical to assume our Earthly ancestors could (or would) have thrown together the agricultural revolution and then the entire civilisations of Sumer and Egypt out of whole cloth? No it is not; and neither do these suppositions represent sound science.

For those of us in the alternative history camp, one of the most fundamental questions we must impress upon the public and upon ‘official science’ is to ask where are the antecedents and precedents?

Show us the slow Darwinian stages of development that official history presupposes. How can you explain the sudden appearance of genetically altered food crops and advanced engineering techniques at the onset of human civilisation?

We need step-by-step documentation and incontrovertible evidence and it ought to be copious and devoid of missing links since we are supposedly talking about events that occurred thousands and not tens or hundreds of millions of years ago, as is the case with biological evolution.

Where did our Paleolithic ancestors acquire the knowledge and skills to breed wild plants into food crops while also constructing planned cities? How did they achieve an exacting command of the principles of civil engineering as exhibited in Sumeria and the Harrappan civilisation of the Indus Valley?

How did humans go from mud huts and collecting leafy plants to building ziggurats, flush toilets, public bathhouses (Mohenjo Daro), making bread in ovens, and inventing process metallurgy seemingly overnight? In plain language, where is the proof – the missing links – demonstrating your (official science) theories are confirmed in the archaeological record and meet simple standards of logic and commonsense?

Turning to what our ancestors in Sumer, Mexico, Egypt and Peru have to say about the origins of agriculture and civilisation we find a very different story. According to the ancient records, written and oral traditions, none of the earliest civilisations claimed they invented it. What is of profound interest is they are in unanimous accord in claiming they were given the arts of civilisation by the ‘gods’.

It is very unlike human nature to give credit to anyone else for anything we have invented or achieved. The ancient Egyptians left copious records of every aspect of their culture in a huge collection of artwork, hieroglyphics and texts.

Yet, we find no reference in their 3,000 year history as to how or why ‘they’ built the pyramids. What a curious lapse of documentation for such a communicative race assuming they did indeed built the pyramids. Would they have omitted any reference to their most important monuments?

That seems a preposterous supposition and yet Egyptologists gloss over it as they do the lack of mummies in the alleged ‘pyramids-as-tombs’ scenario they embrace without blushing.

These are all clues, pieces of a vast planetary puzzle, telling the story of the Genesis Race. The references to these ‘gods’ that arrived on Earth to uplift man are described in the Bible and other ancient texts and traditions. Their megalithic calling cards are found in Egypt, Mexico, Peru and China.

The Darwinian-based theories of ‘official science’, concerning the origin of Man and human civilisation, lead to a series of intellectual dead ends.

If we closely examine the record we find civilisation was founded upon five primary inventions:

1) Agriculture,

2) Urbanisation,

3) Writing,

4) The Wheel, and

5) Process metallurgy.

Now, what happens when we try to uncover the origins of these key inventions in the archaeological and historical record? We find anthropologists and historians positing that agriculture was probably discovered by accident when our primitive ancestors tossed plants into the garbage heap and noticed the seeds produced new plants.

Of course that does not explain what motivated them to plant and harvest wild grass seeds (they almost never ate) and how they learned to selectively breed and domesticate (alter) these plants genetically.

Well, they brush aside these queries with the same logic. This, too, was probably a serendipitous process that moved forward by a series of benign and happy coincidences. We are given to imagine the first domesticated animal, an example of perfect selective breeding, also took place when Paleolithic tribesman – via unknown techniques – domesticated a line of mutant wolves.

Then we learn that process metallurgy, too, was the result of an accident, when someone dropped a piece of malachite into a campfire and observantly noticed that as it melted it produced copper.

In short, the fundamental paradigm ‘official science’ has formulated on how human life originated and how we created civilisation rests on a series of ‘miraculous’ accidents and impossible knowledge and skills!

Egyptologists would have us believe the primitive tribes living along the Nile in oval huts who used mud-bricks to build mastabas for millennia were suddenly capable of advanced quarry operations, stonemasonry, architecture and corporate engineering.

Of course, they cannot explain how these primitive peoples built a massive, precision-engineered pyramid using only round hammerstones, wooden sledges and human labor.

The Egyptian’s could not have built it, did not build it, and never claimed they were the pyramid’s creators

It is simply not possible to quarry, lift, drag and transport 70-ton blocks of granite 500 miles from the Aswan quarry to Giza and up 150 vertical feet and precisely position them in the King’s Chamber as Egyptologists claim was done.

I have repeatedly challenged Egyptologists, and their irrational, unscientific fellow travelers to demonstrate how the blocks of granite in the King’s Chamber can be quarried and lifted out of the quarry-bed and transported using the primitive tools and methods they claim were used. It cannot be done!

Furthermore, this author claims he can show that any academics – mathematicians, anthropologists and/or engineering professors – who believe and teach these absurdities to students are lunatics running the asylums – our scientific institutions and universities.

This is certainly a serious, bold indictment and yet it must be made because it is true and it is high time to expose the intellectual chicanery and fraud perpetrated upon generations.

I am not making these claims to create a controversy but to resolve a long-standing debate that has profound ramifications since it involves eliminating falsehoods and getting to the historical facts.

How can I make such strong accusations with complete confidence?

First, the author has studied the engineering problems intensively and extensively comparing the building of modern-day monuments using state-of-the-art technology to the construction of the Great Pyramid using primitive tools and methods.

Second, I have examined the recent record of tests conducted by Egyptologists and others trying to prove they could quarry, move and lift blocks of stone using nothing but ancient tools and techniques. Both studies yielded the same results: the Great Pyramid could not have been built with hammerstones, sledges and ramps.

One test filmed by Nova was organised by Egyptologist Mark Lehner and involved leading experts in a variety of fields. The team set out to quarry, move and lift a 35-ton obelisk into place. They failed miserably at every step.

The master stonemason could not quarry the block using the primitive tools he was given. A Cat was called in to quarry the block and lift it onto a flatbed truck; sensing defeat they never even tried to transport it using a wooden sledge. The block was half the weight of one those used in the King’s Chamber.

A Nissan funded Japanese team conducted another serious test in 1978. They set out to build a small-scale duplicate of the Great Pyramid also using the primitive tools and techniques Egyptologists claim the ancients employed.

This group was confident they could demonstrate how it was done. However, when they tried to quarry the blocks they found the hammerstones were not equal to the task. They called in pneumatic jackhammers. When they tried to ferry the blocks across the river on a primitive barge, they sank. They called in a modern tugboat for help.

Then they loaded a block onto a sledge only to find that it stubbornly sank into the sand when they tried to drag it to the site. They called for trucks and loaders. The final coup d’grace was delivered when they were forced to call in helicopters to lift and position the blocks into place.

Even using modern technology the Japanese team found, to their utter embarrassment, they could not bring the apex of their tiny 60 feet tall replica together. They suffered a bitter and quite humbling defeat in the unforgiving Egyptian desert. Their replica of the Great Pyramid turned out to be a joke.

We are supposed to believe men using tools marginally better than Stone Age equipment, quarried, lifted and hauled millions of blocks of stone to form a precision-engineered 4-million ton tomb. Stuff of nonsense!

The conventional scenario is not just an absurd proposition that can only be maintained using intellectual smoke and mirrors, it is downright silly. The real question is, how could anyone with any commonsense have ever believed it?

There are, of course, many other problems with the primitive tools and methods scenario and the Great Pyramid. To begin with Mark Lehner commissioned an engineering firm to study the site.

They found that the 13-acre base had been leveled with an accuracy equal to that achieved by modern day lasers. Are we to believe a 13-acre limestone bench was planed with that degree of precision using rounded hammerstones to grind down the rock until it was almost perfectly flat?

Furthermore, the Descending Passage was actually the next phase of this massive construction project. It too had to be dug out of solid bedrock. The problems with this phase of the project are manifold.

The passageway was only about 3 by 4 feet, just large enough to accommodate one worker at a time. It was dug 150 feet underground maintaining a precise angle of 26 degrees and a negligible deviation from side to side and bottom to top throughout its length. Then it was opened up into several rooms and another passageway. How?

Why would the ancients dig a straight tunnel under a 4-million ton tomb and how was the passageway kept straight and true? Egyptian ‘engineers’ had no more than ropes in their toolkits.

The author can also prove these two phases alone – leveling the base and digging the Descending Passageway – would have required half the time Egyptologists have allotted to the entire construction project. They, in fact, never even include these two phases in their calculations.

But we have other important fish to fry. During decades of research the author noted some curious similarities between Sumer, Egypt and the Indus Valley – the sites of our earliest civilisations – that do not add up. As we all know now, the ruins of Sumer are located in modern day Iraq.

Our history and anthropology books routinely tell us that agriculture and civilisation were given birth in benign and highly fertile river valleys. But when we stop and closely examine these locations we find they are some of the hottest, driest and most inhospitable places on the planet.

The temperatures in these locations for 6 months out of the year are typically between 35-48 degrees Celsius (95-118ºF). It is true the alluvial flood plains of the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates and ancient Indus rivers were fertile.

But it takes considerable agronomic and hydrological knowledge to know this and to convert the marshes and control the floods to turn these wetlands into productive farmland. The question is how did our ancient ancestors, so recently emerged from the hunter-gatherer way of life, so quickly acquire this knowledge and develop these skills?

When we peer out from the ziggurats of ancient Sumer, the sandblasted pyramids of Egypt or the ruined cities of the Indus Valley, we do not see fruited-plains but vast, blistering, desert expanses.

Is it not difficult to envision our primitive ancestors rolling out their blueprints for civilisation while squinting into the sun and deciding this is where the first cities and great monuments would be built and the first real cropland cultivated?

The scenario jars the mind and makes hash out of the comfortable fantasies painted by ‘official science’. Is something starting to smelly funny or is the author’s nose just too sensitive?

I do seem to detect the subtle aroma of too many skeletons and enigmas – having been shoved hurriedly into too many closets and musty catacombs – wafting up from ancient stones and bones…

We have to examine several other items that do not pass the smell test. Sumer, Egypt and the Indus Valley share some other critical features in common which make them unlikely places for primitive peoples to have developed our first civilisations.

We should expect to find civilisations evolving where people had immediate access to a wide variety of resources. The most logical scenario would be in river valleys near forested, mineral rich mountains.

This is a logical expectation since people needed water, fuel (wood) for fires, tool handles and building materials as well as copper, gold and silver to make jewellery and tools and so on.

We would expect to find this association not just to establish they had immediate access to these necessary resources, but also that they had been engaged in a prolonged period of extracting, processing and working with these resources.

Unfortunately, Sumer, the birthplace of civilisation, was completely lacking in forests, minerals and even stones. This is a curious, illogical fact. How did this strange tribe, speaking an odd tongue and calling themselves ‘the black-headed people’, invent civilisation in the middle of a barren desert wasteland?

Egypt was also bereft of forests, as was the Indus Valley. The point is not that civilisation was or is impossible in these areas, but that it is supposed to have originated in these harsh, desert environs lacking many basic resources.

Yet we find the Sumerians ingeniously mining copper and tin and creating the first alloy, bronze, in kilns around 3000 BCE. In rapid-fire succession they invented the wheel, the chariot, the sailboat, writing, cities, labor specialisation, civil engineering and on and on. Ostensibly, the tribes of the Indus Valley and the Nile would soon follow.

They did all this while most of the world’s tribes were still living as hunter-gatherers, another fact that demolishes the theories of cultural Darwinists. You cannot explain the radical departure from the human norm by several tribes without invoking some form of racism or inexplicable genetic deviations.

The other curious features we find in common among Earth’s ‘first’ civilisations are that none of them claimed they invented agriculture, laws, morality or the other prime tools of civilisation.

The Sumerians claimed they owed everything to the ‘gods’ (Anunnaki) that had descended from the heavens to Earth to create and teach mankind the arts of civilised life. The ancient Egyptians referred to the Nefertu who ruled over them during the Zep Tepi (First Time) for thousands of years until they handed over the reigns to the human pharaohs.

Our real human history as handed down by our ancestors is far more exciting and incredible than the pabulum ‘official’ science has been force feeding us for many generations.

Mankind is indeed on the threshold of a re-awakening to a new dawn; the time of profound revelations about the truth of our astonishing origins and history is at hand.

Be Open Minded and Question Everything... Love and Light to all 💓💓💓💓

#theory #conspiracy #dna #darwinism #et #archaeology #anthropology #astronomy

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khalilhumam · 5 years ago

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The importance of ‘unlearning’ the past: Interview with Balkans expert Keith Brown

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-importance-of-unlearning-the-past-interview-with-balkans-expert-keith-brown/

The importance of ‘unlearning’ the past: Interview with Balkans expert Keith Brown

‘Critical thinking demands, as an early step, recognition of one’s own blinkers, prejudices and areas of ignorance’

Prof. Keith Brown, Arizona State University. Photo used with his permission.

This story was originally published by Meta.mk. An edited version is republished here via a content-sharing agreement between Global Voices and Metamorphosis Foundation. All links displayed in the interviewee's quotes were added by Meta.mk. Keith Brown is a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies. He is also director of The Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian & Eastern European Studies. With a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Chicago, Brown works primarily in the domain of culture, politics, and identity, focused on the Balkans. Part of his extensive research on ethnonationalism and the role of national history in the region has been available to the public in North Macedonia via the translations of his books “The past in question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation” (2003) and “Loyal unto Death, Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia” (2013). In an interview with portal CriThink.mk, Brown explains the importance of critical thinking when learning history. CriThink: How important is the application of critical thinking to history and anthropology?

Keith Brown (KB): Critical thinking is very important in both history and anthropology. Skeptics and naysayers sometimes dismiss our methods as “soft” or trot out tired clichés like “history is written by the winners.” But evaluating and comparing sources, and weighing how cultural and social factors impact individual decisions, are essential components of both disciplines. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, historians and anthropologists recognize that meanings and horizons shift over time and across space. This is especially important in the study of nationalism—a mode of political organization and identity formation that contributed to the break-up of multiconfessional empires in the 19th century, and which often seeks legitimacy by claiming ancient roots. What makes it more complicated is that most nation-states place a high premium on communicating to their citizens a strong sense of shared history that distinguishes them from others. Often, it is easier for people to see the inconsistencies and distortions in their neighbors’ versions of the past, than to question or closely scrutinize the history that they think holds their own society together. Critical thinking demands, as an early step, recognition of one’s own blinkers, prejudices and areas of ignorance. It also benefits from dialogue in which participants check their egos and agendas at the door, and measure success not by the points they score, but by the new ways of seeing they have helped generate for themselves or others.

CriThink: Political establishments in most Balkans states seem to insist on promoting the concept of “national history” based on selecting “positive,” and excluding “negative,” “facts” to create or maintain official narratives that are then used in public education textbooks. In the last 200 years, this dogmatic approach had often been used as justification for oppression towards “the others.” Is there another way to do history?

KB: History is an incredibly rich domain of study. In 2015, oral historian Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her work chronicling citizens’ voices from the end of the Soviet Union. Organizations like EuroClio—to which many history teachers from the Balkans and Eastern Europe belong—promote the study of global history, and encourage members and students to explore social, cultural and economic history. Courageous and open-minded historians are often leading critics of the exceptionalism on which national history is founded—including in the United States, through efforts like the 1619 project. I think that these kind of approaches have enormous potential to transform people’s understandings of the past, and prompt reflection on how the present will look from the future. I am particularly excited by the promise of microhistory, as pioneered by Carlo Ginzburg, which draws out the broader human significance from the close study of an event or community.

English language editions of Keith Brown’s books “Loyal unto Death, Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia” (2013) and “The past in question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation” (2003).

CriThink: In your book “Loyal Unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia,” you note facing challenges of unreliability or bias in available historical sources, including the correspondence of British consuls preserved as microfilms by the Museum of Macedonian Struggle in Greece; or the applications for pensions submitted to the new Macedonian state by the elderly who survived revolutions between 1948 and 1956, preserved in the State Archive of North Macedonia. How did you deal with that challenge of extracting useful information from these records?

KB: I first read many of these sources while I was a graduate student in anthropology. Conscious that the Ilinden Uprising of 1903 had been interpreted differently by scholars for whom the correct context was Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Albanian, Yugoslav, Ottoman, Balkan or Macedonian history, I wanted to get as close to the period as I could, by engaging closely with sources that, in one way or another, stood outside these frames of reference. I was struck, for example, by the fact that according to the records of the National Archive in Skopje, only a handful of scholars had sought access to the Ilinden dossier of biographies. My understanding was that these sources were discounted because, self-evidently, they were self-interested. The British, French, German and American diplomatic and consular records from Ottoman Macedonia, by contrast, are often treated as wholly dispassionate, objective and clinical accounts, as if their authors were scientifically trained medical professionals, diagnosing the ills of an empire on its death-bed. In writing “Loyal Unto Death,” I took an alternative, subversive approach toward these two sets of sources. Whether or not individual pension-seekers amplified their own roles, or edited out those elements that might weaken their case for state recognition, their accounts drew from their own or their age-mates’ experiences and understandings. No-one lied about the organizational structure of the revolutionary organization, the methods of recruitment, or the logistics of acquiring weapons or distributing information and supplies: what would be the self-interest in doing so? Thus they provide us, individually but even more so in aggregate, with a sense of the shared day-to-day experience of participation in a resistance and rebellion. British consular accounts, often read as if magisterial, reflect their individual authors’ biographies, perspectives and access to sources: Alfred Biliotti was a naturalized British citizen born in Rhodes who had worked his way up from the position of dragoman and had close ties with Ottoman and Greek authorities, whereas James McGregor knew Bulgarian and expressed the view that the Organization commanded strong support. Their accounts diverge or clash. This is not to say that all sources or accounts are equally valid or suspect. It is rather to argue that we need to get past our own cultural preconceptions, whether they tell us “peasants lie” or “diplomats are cynical careerists,” and remain alert to the ways they can surprise us.

Macedonian language editions of Keith Brown’s books “The past in question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation” (2010) and “Loyal unto Death, Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia” (2014).

CriThink: Lacking a viable time machine, it’s hard to precisely determine the “national consciousness” of historical figures, given the non-existing, censored, fabricated, or conflicting records, their interpretations, as well as changed meanings of some of the language used at the time. Which critical thinking skills need to be nurtured across the region to help resolve such issues?

KB: In “The Past in Question,” I chose to use the language of the British consular sources rather than update or modify it, and to try to translate sources in Greek and Bulgarian into the English of that time, rather than of the early 21st century. I thus used terms like “Bulgar,” “Arnaut,” “Mijak” and “Exarchist” seeking in this way to remind readers of the very different world of the late nineteenth century; when “Greece” referred to a territory roughly half the size of modern Greece; when only a small fraction of people who would call themselves “Bulgars” owed loyalty to the Ottoman-administered “Bulgaria” with its capital in Sofia; when the Sultan sought to restrict the use of the Albanian language, and the term “Macedonia;” and when the prospect of an alliance of convenience between the ambitious nation-states of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece to carve up and nationalize Ottoman territory surely seemed absurd to most. For me, critical thinking demands, paradoxically, that we try to unlearn what actually happened since the period we are trying to understand; or at least, allow it to strike us as surprising or at least non-inevitable. This then concentrates our attention on the factors that drive outcomes. It also liberates us from the illusion that figures in the past—like Ilinden-era figures Goce Delchev, Nikola Karev, Damjan Gruev or Boris Sarafov—imagined their own identity in terms of the nationalisms of their future.

Keith Brown and the historian Irena Stefoska at the promotion of the Macedonian edition of the book The past in question: Modern Macedonia and the Uncertainties of Nation in December 2010. Photo by Vančo Džambaski, CC BY-NC-SA.

CriThink: Yet such issues seem to grow into central points of a slippery slope of international disputes, from Goce Delchev (Bulgaria-North Macedonia) to Nikola Tesla (Serbia-Croatia), Skanderbeg (Greece-Albania), Njegoš (Montenegro-Serbia) to King Marko (North Macedonia-Serbia-Bulgaria). Is there a way to resolve such issues at some higher, more objective level, rather than just between conflicting states, and based on their power?

KB: Social scientists, including historians (and I’d include myself in this assessment) don’t always keep up to date with developments in other disciplines and fields. This manifests itself in approaches rooted in the conventions of 19th century Newtonian sciences, with a focus on breaking down complex reality into experimental-size pieces, where we can test hypotheses in an “either/or” mode to determine cause and effect, the rules of energy transfer and transformation, and so on. Contemporary theoretical and experimental science, though, have moved far beyond this paradigm; into the world of quarks, bosons and quantum mechanics, where non-specialists can barely follow. Ask the average person where they stand on the wave-particle duality, and you’re probably in for a short conversation. It requires thinking in “both/and” terms that demands effort, and also a realignment of deeply held common-sense. But this lack of public understanding doesn’t prevent physicists from pursuing their work and generating new insight into the workings of the universe. Balkan history has been shaped by the territorial ambitions and disputes of the last century, and so has become a zero-sum game; it also has quasi-religious aspects, insofar as current debates reveal an implicit concern with purity and pollution underlying accusations around loyalty and betrayal. Grievances and disputes escalate; and (to pursue the game metaphor) there is no mechanism, in this case, by which both sides would agree to invest a referee with the authority to call the game fairly; the stakes are seen as too high. An alternative view would be that the dispute over Goce Delchev’s “true” identity, for example, is a classic case of the prisoner’s dilemma game; in which both sides fear that by surrendering their claim to ownership they will lose and the other side will win (Bragging rights? Prestige? The mantle of “true” nationhood?), but the consequence of their refusal to acknowledge ambiguity is that both sides are seen as intransigent or blinkered in the wider community of nations.

CriThink: Would some sort of International Scientific Tribunal need to be developed to prevent escalations, akin to tribunals used to provide closure for conflicts involving genocide and war crimes (Rwanda, Former Yugoslavia)?

KB: I don’t see value in an external tribunal offering some authoritative closure: for me, that’s not how history (or science) work. All findings are contingent and provisional: they are contributions to an ongoing exchange, the ultimate goal of which is not to set some conclusion in stone, but provide material that can open new horizons and perspectives.

CriThink: In the Balkans, contrary to the inherent role of professional journalists as promotors of democracy, the media often serve as amplifiers of the most radical and polarizing nationalistic views about history. Is there a way to embed critical thinking about history in the mainstream media sphere?

KB: My own fantasy solution is something like what a group of Macedonian youth leaders did in the second half of the 1980s with the Youth Film Forum (Mladinski filmski forum), and set up learning opportunities through engagement with film, literature and other prompts. What would happen, for example, if Bulgarian and Macedonian historians and journalists watched “Rashomon” together? Or undertook a joint project (perhaps with Albanian colleagues) on the economic, psychological and social effects of gurbet/pečalba? Or conducted a close joint study of the United States 1619 project? I believe they would emerge with a shared vocabulary to address issues of contingency, ambiguity, trauma and structural violence that are shared across the Balkan region—and beyond.

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