Guardian: "Monica Lewinsky Defends Mary Beard in Twitter Row Over Black Roman Britons"

By Steve Sailer

08/25/2017

From The Guardian, an actual headline:

Monica Lewinsky defends Mary Beard in Twitter row over black Roman Britons

Classical historian’s support for accuracy of educational video draws fire from US academic, but support from President Clinton’s former intern and other stars

The depiction of a black Roman father, in the BBC educational animation Life in Roman Britain.

by Alison Flood Monday 7 August 2017

Public figures from Monica Lewinsky to JK Rowling and Diane Abbott are lining up to support Mary Beard, after the the classical historian found herself at the centre of a storm of Twitter abuse at the weekend.

Beard came under fire after she wrote that a BBC educational video that showed a black Roman soldier was “pretty accurate”. The video, uploaded to YouTube by the BBC last December, had been criticised by some viewers as being anachronistic, but Beard wrote on Twitter that “there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain”.

What followed, according to Beard in her blogpost response on the TLS, was “a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory-tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender”. This was made worse after academic Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the bestselling book on risk, The Black Swan, joined her critics.

“The BBC was effectively applying quotas retroactively (I mean, really retroactively),” Taleb wrote on his own blog. “Any dissent from the statistical errors made by the politically correct police is treated as apostasy. Effectively, scholarship is dead in the UK.”

… Lewinsky added a graphic image of support to endorse a Beard tweet saying “the struggle goes on”.

Blacks are so sacralized today that the main debate currently going on, save for a few Taleb-like non-team players, is between those who want to topple all monuments of the past and those who want to retcon the past to look like contemporary TV commercials.

P.S., here’s an article on Mary Beard’s recent book on the Roman Empire as embodying the modern globalist inclusive virtues of invade-the-world, enlist-the-world, including this bit on the good side of the rape of the Sabine women:

“Beard notes that the mass rape is portrayed not just as evidence of Roman aggression but as a way of creating a mixed society.”

[Comment at Unz.com]

< Previous

Next >

This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.