The most important ploy that nineteenth-century European scholars devised to avoid acknowledging that the roots of civilization are Afroasiatic was t… - Clifford D. Conner

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The most important ploy that nineteenth-century European scholars devised to avoid acknowledging that the roots of civilization are Afroasiatic was to minimize the importance of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Semitic contributions and to focus instead almost entirely on the Greeks. According to this idea, the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Semites established rather static and uninteresting cultures, while the really worthwhile developments in the rise of civilization were the work of the dynamic and sophisticated Greeks, who were considered to be of Aryan stock because their language is part of the Indo-European family. ...It was claimed that the Greeks developed their culture all on their own, with virtually no contribution from the earlier civilizations.

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About Clifford D. Conner

Clifford (Cliff) D. Conner (born 1941) is an American historian of science, author, and faculty member at the School for Professional Studies of the City University of New York Graduate Center. Born in New Jersey, Conner grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. He received his BA at the Georgia Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center.

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Most significant of all was the success of Robespierre and the central Montagnard leadership to turn the revered memory of their fallen comrade to a potent weapon in the Jacobin triumph over the Gironde, who thereafter could convincingly be portrayed as destabilizers or fomenters of civil war for their role in the assassination of a great patriot.

Modern science will continue to be blindly destructive as long as its operations are determined by the anarchism of market economic forces. The problem to be solved is whether science, technology, and industry can be brought under genuinely democratic control in the context of a global planned economy, so that all of us can collectively put our hard-won scientific knowledge to mutually beneficial use. I am confident it can be accomplished, but will it? If so, there is reason for optimism. If not... well, to paraphrase Keynes, "in the not-so-long run we're all dead."

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In the nineteenth century C.E., a small but influential group of German scholars led by Karl Otfried Müller decided that the ancient Greek authors did not know what they were talking about—that their traditions of external influences were simply "myths." …They were convinced that the principle of historical explanation was race, and they believed they had discovered the "scientific laws of race." …only the white race ...had the natural ability to create advanced civilizations. ...This "racial science" …served as a useful ideology to explain the "natural right" of white Europeans to dominate the darker peoples of the world.

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