Destroying the Past

by Dr. William L. Pierce

FEBRUARY HAS BEEN decreed “Black History Month,” and so a recent February issue of the Washington Post contained a feature article titled “Ancient African Heroines.” The two principal heroines treated were Hatshepsut, an Egyptian queen of the XVIIIth Dynasty, and Cleopatra, who reigned over the same land 14 centuries later. The clear implication of the article is that the former queen was a Negress, and that the latter may have been. Actually, both were White women, and nothing that is known about either suggests the least Negro taint to her blood.

The Washington Post article begins with the not-so-subtle insinuation that the words “African” and “Negro” are synonymous: “Women of African descent – whether called Creole, Afro-American, black or even ‘colored’ – are typically depicted as women without a history… Unfortunately, works on the development and influence of African civilizations usually have been overlooked and relegated to near obscurity in the stacks, the achievements of ancient black women with them.”

The article then introduces Hatshepsut, but in case any reader has so far failed to make the desired assumption that the great queen was a “woman of color” (the term used later in the article in referring to Cleopatra), there is a portrait. It is supposedly an artist’s rendering based on a photograph taken in Hatshepsut’s tomb, but one can only suspect that the Washington Post’s artist used Aunt Jemima as his model, rather than anything photographed in an Egyptian tomb.

The lie is given to the Washington Post by Hatshepsut’s life-size portrait statue, found in her temple at Deir el-Bahri, near Thebes, and now residing in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Numerous portrait statues of Hatshepsut’s close relatives are also extant, and they all show distinctly Europid features. Her nephew, the renowned Pharaoh Thutmose III, regarded as ancient Egypt’s greatest ruler, could pass easily as a Swede or an Englishman.

Hatshepsut’s mummy has not been identified with certainty, but the only reasonable candidate, found in the tomb of her grandson Amenhotep II, has long, slightly wavy, brown-blond hair. Blondness was not an uncommon trait among the Egyptian nobility of Hatshepsut’s time.

Two other XVIIIth Dynasty mummies, both of which have been identified positively, are those of Yuya and Thuya, the maternal grandfather and grandmother, respectively, of Amenhotep IV, the famous Akhenaton. They are also the paternal grandparents of Akhenaton’s cousin-wife, the beautiful Nefertiti. The mummies of both Yuya and Thuya have well-preserved, long, reddish-blond hair.

As for Cleopatra, though she was a queen of Egypt in the first century B.C., she was of pure Macedonian descent, ruling one of the many lands conquered by her great countryman Alexander three centuries earlier. On the matter of her race there is not the slightest doubt; her ancestry can be traced back to Alexander’s marshal Ptolemy.

That does not stop the Washington Post from attempting to paint Cleopatra as a mulatta, citing William Shakespeare, of all people, as an authority, because he describes her as “tawny” in a play. (His Antony and Cleopatra opens with one of Mark Antony’s friends complaining about Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra: “… His goodly eyes … now turn the office and devotion of their view upon a tawny front …”) “Tawny,” says the Washington Post, “often has been used, throughout history, for mulatto or mixed blood personages ….”

The Washington Post goes from Cleopatra to “black Queen Tiy of Nubia noted as the mother of King Tut.” Tiy was not Black, and she was not a Nubian; she was the daughter of Thuya and Yuya. Furthermore, she was not King Tutankhamon’s mother, although she was related to him in a roundabout way; Tiy’s daughter Nefertiti was the wife of Tutankhamon’s father, Amenhotep, IV, but one of the latter’s harem concubines was almost certainly Tutankhamon’s mother, since Tut himself does show strong signs of a Negroid taint. Negro blood was introduced into more than one Egyptian royal family via harem slaves.

The article concludes with a boost for a “Great Kings of Africa” series of paintings which, among other things, portrays Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, as a coal-black Negro. Reproductions of the paintings have been distributed free — “as a public service” — to schools all over America to promote “Black History Month.”

Why did the Washington Post do it? Ignorance is not a plausible excuse for the nation’s second most prestigious newspaper, with the enormous files of reference material at its disposal. Its editor refused even to acknowledge a detailed letter from NATIONAL VANGUARD Editor William Pierce pointing out the errors and misrepresentations in its article. Malice and greed, however, are plausible.

Thirty-five years ago the English writer George Orwell noted with irony in his novel 1984 that those who control the past also control the future. In his dark vision of our present era he saw government thought controllers continuously rewriting history to suit the political and social needs of the moment, changing the citizens’ image of the past and, thereby, their attitudes toward the present and their expectations for the future.

Alas, grim reality has already outstripped Orwell’s fancy. But it is not the government which has undertaken the task of revising Americans’ understanding of the past — at least, not the elected government in Washington, as bad as it is, but instead the self-appointed shadow government which stands behind it: the Sanhedrin of the masters of the controlled media. High, indeed, in the Sanhedrin sits Katherine Meyer Graham, owner of the Washington Post; and important, indeed, is the role of her newspaper in the Sanhedrin’s program of falsifying history in order to bring it into line with the needs of the moment.

One of the foremost of those needs is the undermining of the White man’s racial consciousness. For those who sit in the Sanhedrin belong to the most racially conscious of all peoples, and they realize that in their consciousness lies their strength. Their rule can only be secure, however, so long as the majority race among whom they live as a parasitic minority does not regain its own self-consciousness.

Racial self-consciousness demands a consciousness of the history of one’s people; if a people can be robbed of its history, then there will be no soil in which the roots of its racial consciousness can grow. That is the ultimate motive behind every aspect of the Sanhedrin’s history-rewriting program.

(March, 1983)