Wednesday, September 20, 2017

... correcting an Afro-American on History, Geography and Morals - And Learning Some Too!


This video is a speech. It involves some examples of Africans not succeeding and White Men succeeding, and while the general sentiment has some truth in it, the pastor bungles historic detail, and he also, which is worse, gets morals wrong.

Africans Have Never Built a Major Enduring City in 3,000 Years
ATLAHWorldwide | Ajoutée le / added 8 oct. 2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZkE3xB8o8A


1:57 "most people were of the mindset that the Earth was flat, and if you sailed too far" [you would fall off the edge, right?]

Excuse me, one little moment, where do you get that fact from?

We know St Thomas Aquinas did not think so. Where did he say ignorant people thought so anyway?

We know St Albert the Great didn't think so. Where did he say ignorant people thought so?

You may be thinking of certain writers a little further to the edge of Europe. On Iceland, people were, even as Christians, eagerly studying the epics and also myths of Pagan times, and one of them seems to indicate an Earth which is flat with a vault of Heaven that has the basic shape of a cheese bell (made of a giant's skull, held up in four corners by the dwarfs North, South, East and West, above that disc). But even on Iceland, perhaps you were not really believing these myths after Christianity, so it is a moot point whether Icelanders believed in a Flat Earth. What is not moot is that Iceland had a very different mentality from the rest of Europe.

[The following after he gets in St Petersburg along with Oxbridge:]

2:32 Peter the Great was however:

  • quite a few centuries after 11th and 12th centuries
  • two centuries after Portuguese had conquered lots of Africa
  • since around 1700 he and Charles XII of Sweden were fighting the Great Nordic War.
  • AND he was a kind of Antichrist, a man changing laws and (if he had dared, probably even) seasons.


Now, Charles XII was perhaps even more of an Antichrist, if he didn't ruin Sweden it was partly due to being off to war so much.

2:54 Was it England, wasn't it Holland he visited?

The problem is, he didn't only bring back ship building. He also brought back and forcefully foisted on Russian Church the 66 book canon. And forcing men to shave their beards (which Holland didn't, they were shaving voluntarily).

3:13 Black Sea and St Petersburg are two distinct things.

Black Sea would be the city Azov, which he started taking from the Turks.

St Petersburg is on terrain he conquered from us Swedes. It is in a deep bay, the corner furthest in, 42 islands in all, and it has two coasts going West from there, the North coast of the bay belongs to Finland, which Sweden kept despite him, but Russia conquered later, the South coast of the bay is on Estonia, which he conquered from Sweden.

3:35 Leningrad was not so named by Lenin:

"On January 26, 1924, five days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad."

Thank you, wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Petersburg#Revolution_and_Soviet_Era_.281917.E2.80.931941.29

3:48 No, it was not just after the death of Lenin that Leningrad was changed back to St Petersburg. It was decades later.

"Nach einer Volksabstimmung, in der sich am 12. Juni 1991 54 Prozent der Bevölkerung für die Rückkehr zum historischen Namen ausgesprochen hatten, nahm die Stadt am 6. September 1991 wieder den Namen Sankt Petersburg an. Die umgebende Verwaltungseinheit blieb aber ebenfalls nach einer Volksabstimmung weiterhin als Leningrader Gebiet (Oblast Leningrad) bestehen."

I mean 6 of Sept 1991 (my 23:rd birthday) is some decades after 1924, when Lenin died!

Danke, die Wikipädie!

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sankt_Petersburg#Russische_F.C3.B6deration.2C_Sankt_Petersburg

4:17 He was Russia's Benjamin Franklin ... you got that one correct.

Enlightenment probably has as one of its roots admiration for Peter the Great - and Benjamin Franklin lived some decades after him. Peter the Great died 8 February [Old Style 28 January] 1725 and Benjamin Franklin was born January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705 - i e, English new year would have been on March 25 a few months later]. Their lives overlapped by 20 years only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Thank you, wikipedians!

4:30 Sure, white men hadn't set foot in Black Africa when Oxford University was built, but they certainly had when Benjamin Franklin brought a black slave to France, some decades after Peter the Great had died, and made sure he spoke no French, because, in French colonies like Louisiana, you could have a slave (usually black), but in France itself, if a slave claimed his freedom, he legally got it.

So, you can't claim St Petersburg for the period when no white man had set foot in subsaharan Africa.

5:54 You said Columbus convinced men you would "not fall off"?

Sorry!

That is wrong. People were telling Columbus he could not go West to China, and they were in the immediate right, there is America in between.

And what a luck for him there was America in between, because he had miscalculated the circumference of Earth, his critics were much better on geography, and said, no, you have too few leagues, you will run out of food and fresh water before you reach China. Some also may have thought there was a belt on the West were winds were so stormy no ship could sail through, but this had been somewhat debunked since the days when Portuguese in the 1400's had proven you could go past the equator without burning to death from heat. But Columbus brought so little food and fresh water, if he hadn't come to America, to Hispaniola (now called Cuba, I think ... no, it may have been San Salvador or one of the others in that archipelago*)

* obviously : thank you, wikipedia! Here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#First_voyage

"Columbus called the island (in what is now The Bahamas) San Salvador; the natives called it Guanahani. Exactly which island in the Bahamas this corresponds to is unresolved."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanahani

Since you mentioned Columbus convincing everyone you did not fall off, do you get your view of history from Washington Irving? He wrote a historic novel about that, but he was not writing a history book with good documentation for the claim, nor is there any! Disney has had Goofy star as Columbus in a comic book taking up the theme. But Disney also is not a very excellent historian!

6:37 Did you say Cecil Rhodes was one of the first white men coming to South Africa, when there was war between Zulus and Afrikaners?

You are aware, I hope, Afrikaners are also called Cape Dutch! They came from Holland or Netherlands to Cape Town well before Cecil Rhodes, even before St Petersburg was built!

6:50 Cecil Rhodes became even wealthier in South Africa. You can say that again!

He was certainly doing the rich man's stuff, if you ever read about the rich man and Lazarus in the Bible.

6:59 Rhodesia, I mean Zimbabwe, is encircled by South Africa?

Here is wiki:

"Zimbabwe (/zɪmˈbɑːbweɪ/), officially the Republic of Zimbabwe, is a landlocked country located in southern Africa, between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers. It is bordered by South Africa to the south, Botswana to the west and southwest, Zambia to the northwest, and Mozambique to the east and northeast. Although it does not border Namibia, less than 200 metres of the Zambezi River separates it from that country. The capital and largest city is Harare. A country of roughly 16 million people, Zimbabwe has 16 official languages, with English, Shona, and Ndebele the most commonly used."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimbabwe

Thank you, wikipedians!

If you really want a small country encircled by South Africa, perhaps you mean ...

"Lesotho (/lɪˈsuːtuː/ (About this sound listen); li-SOO-too), officially the Kingdom of Lesotho (Sotho: 'Muso oa Lesotho), is an enclaved, landlocked country in southern Africa completely surrounded by South Africa. It is just over 30,000 km2 (11,583 sq mi) in size and has a population of around 2 million[1]. Its capital and largest city is Maseru."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesotho

Thank you again, wikipedians. And Lesotho is not far from where Tolkien was born, in Bloemfontein! Fitting reference for Tolkien week!

7:41 You are right there was a king who foolishly signed a paper:

"Rhodes had already tried and failed to get a mining concession from Lobengula, king of the Ndebele of Matabeleland. In 1888 he tried again. He sent John Moffat, son of the missionary Robert Moffat, who was trusted by Lobengula, to persuade the latter to sign a treaty of friendship with Britain, and to look favourably on Rhodes' proposals. His associate Charles Rudd, together with Francis Thompson and Rochfort Maguire, assured Lobengula that no more than ten white men would mine in Matabeleland. This limitation was left out of the document, known as the Rudd Concession, which Lobengula signed. Furthermore, it stated that the mining companies could do anything necessary to their operations. When Lobengula discovered later the true effects of the concession, he tried to renounce it, but the British Government ignored him."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Rhodes#Treaties.2C_concessions_and_charters

Matabeleland is not all of Rhodesia or Zimbabwe, though, just the West somewhat to the South.

8:48 "The King or African people had no idea of their value."

Of their value among white people, because they had another culture, of course!

9:34 Don't be too sad over black Africans building no cities that last.

You know who built the first city, which may have lasted to the Deluge, or perhaps to some wars before it?

Cain, naming it after his son Henoch, built the first city in the history of mankind in Nod, East of Eden.

And Babel, the first post-Flood city, was built with, not under initiative, but under later leadership of a relative of yours. Nimrod also was a son of Kush. Now, Babel, probably Göbekli Tepe, did not last. But it is the second major city of sin mentioned in the Bible.

Don't be too sad about not being city builders. Perhaps some ancestors of yours were taking the fate of Nimrod as a bad omen.

10:04 They bombed it back to the stone age?

I don't think so. The stone age was partly a period between Flood and Babel, and partly an area (like Amazonas or Kalahari now, but back then including Europe) before the Flood.

I don't think people in Coventry learned to make flint knives just because they were bombed. Did Churchill at least warn them, so they could be evacuated rather than die?

Here is wiki:

"An estimated 568 people were killed in the raid (the exact figure was never precisely confirmed), with another 863 badly injured and 393 sustaining lesser injuries. Given the intensity of the raid, casualties were limited by the fact that a large number of Coventrians "trekked" out of the city at night to sleep in nearby towns or villages following the earlier air raids. Also, people who took to air raid shelters suffered very little death or injury. Out of 79 public air raid shelters holding 33,000 people, very few had been destroyed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Blitz

A good decision? No, if Churchill could have saved Coventry that november day in 1940, he should have. 568 people whose prime minister he was, whose king George VI was, were standing before God, some of them going to Hell, because they weren't Catholics, and telling Him, they died because Churchill betrayed them, so he could pretend not to have broken a code.

12:54 I am not sure who has sent you, I don't think it is God.

And if black men had not known how to do "nothing", how do you figure your ancestors survived before white men built cities in Africa?

This is not from my video comments, but added here:

Lilongwe in Malawi was in deed made into a town by the British. But it is after independence that Lilongwe grew. While Malawi has high infant mortality and low life expectancy it is also doing sth to improve the lives of its citizens. The boy who reinvented wind driven electric power generators (already in use in the West of US, but he hadn't heard of that) was fairly sponsored by Lilongwe after that. As to the life expectancy, it is for both sexes 58.3 years.

Taken at face value, this is like Medieval and later Royalty in Europe (not counting child mortality).

But since a high child mortality is involved in the short spans, this means that if you survive to 21 in Malawi, you can at least count on living to 64 or sth - the Medieval non-royal figure. Or perhaps, if infant mortality is even more important in low figure, even higher.

Hope they learn fidelity and get rid of AIDS, some time soon!/HGL

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