By Andrea Widburg
History, which is the story of humanity, the mighty and the small, is the greatest novel ever written. It’s also a classroom about everything. If you want to know a little bit about a lot of things and, perhaps, pick up wisdom along the way, history is the vehicle. That is if you’re not a leftist. For leftists, history must be folded, spindled, and mutilated to force the past to conform to their current values. So it is that, in England, historians insist that a Roman emperor was transgender and that the mid-14th century bubonic plague was racist and sexist in its effect.
The first rewrite concerns Emperor Elagabalus, who came to the throne in 218 AD when he was 14 and was assassinated only four years later, aged 18.
Within months, according to surviving Roman records, Elagabalus went from being a minor priest to the most powerful man in the world. Think of your average know-nothing teen who goes from nobody to being a rock icon or movie star. Unless that person has a solid moral foundation and adults around him who guide him with wisdom, he almost instantly collapses into a morass of irresponsibility, arrogance, debauchery, and worse. So it was, allegedly, with Elagabalus.
Roman records state that Elagabalus forced all people within Rome, no matter their faith, to worship a meteorite. He was also sexually debauched and promiscuous, even by Roman standards, which is an impressive accomplishment. His sexuality was decidedly homosexual.
Homosexuality, while not banned in Rome, was viewed with disdain. Unlike the “effeminate” Greeks, whom the Romans both admired and disliked, Rome was an aggressively masculine culture. If one was going to engage in homosexual sex, one had to be the masculine, dominant player in that role. According to historical records, Elagabalus wanted to be a bottom, begging doctors to create a surgical vagina for him. Additionally, when it came to Roman culture, Elagabalus wasn’t that fond of it, preferring to appear dressed up as an Eastern potentate in public, a decidedly feminine look.
Eventually, we’re told that Elagabalus’s debauchery, flamboyance, and hostility to Roman values, when combined with the unstable state of the throne during the Roman empire’s declining years, resulted in the inevitable: His own troops assassinated him, and Severus Alexander took over as Emperor.
The problem with this narrative is that it came from Severus Alexander’s courtiers, who undoubtedly engaged in two practices tyrants love: (1) removing all contemporaneous records of a former ruler (damnatio memoriae) and (2) rewriting the historical record to blacken a predecessor’s reputation. (Think of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Shakespeare wrote for Elizabeth I, whose grandfather had usurped Richard’s throne.)
What’s most likely is that Elagabalus was a perfectly ordinary teen, perhaps homosexual, but not necessarily so, who, like Lady Jane Grey, found himself thrust on the throne thanks to ambitious relatives and was then executed.
A real historian would know this and handle these nuances. The leftist activists masquerading as historians at the North Hertfordshire Museum in England, however, have announced that, henceforth, Elagabalus “will be treated as a transgender woman and referred to as she.” This is political correctness run amok. While the ancients fully understood homosexuality, transvestitism, fetishes, and sad people who wished they could have been born as the opposite sex, they completely accepted the biological gender binary and knew that those who opposed it were, at best, mentally ill.
Not only is the notion of “transgenderism” in Rome laughable, these historians are falling into one of two embarrassing ways of thinking: Either they’re credulously accepting the word of Elagabalus’s assassins, which means they’re fools, or they’re claiming as their own, as a hero of the modern era, a despised, utterly inept ruler. It’s almost as crazy as elevating to sainthood a former felon who died from ingesting illegal drugs while committing a crime. Oh, well, never mind…
The other assault on history comes from a different group of so-called “historians” who have announced that, during the Black Death in mid-14th century England, “structural racism” killed black women. Now, before you say, “There were no black women in mid-14th century England,” they did, in fact, live there, although not in any significant numbers.
Going back to Roman times, the British dealt with Africa, and people from Africa lived in medieval England. One graveyard in London dating back to the plague held the bodies of 634 people, three of whom were probably African women (0.5%). They were present in England, but they were statistically insignificant compared to the whole population.
Nevertheless, the BBC proudly has announced that, when 145 people’s bones were dug up from emergency plague cemeteries in London, they discovered that those whom they think might be of female, Black African descent, were apparently more likely to die, although how they can determine what constitutes “more like” when 1/3 to 1/2 of the population died, is ludicrous. Obviously, systemic racism and sexism were at work:
“As with the recent Covid-19 pandemic, social and economic environment played a significant role in people’s health and this is most likely why we find more people of colour and those of black African descent in plague burials.”
This is historical madness, which relentlessly squeezes the past into the Marxist religious doctrine of today. As even the BBC concedes, there are “no population figures for black women in London [that] have been recorded…” This is pure fantasy based upon speculative guesswork and imaginary data, all backed by ideological fervor.
For a brief window of time, beginning with the Enlightenment, history meant turning up actual evidence and trying to make sense of the past according to its own terms. Before then, history was the purview of monarchs who cherry-picked information to support their right to rule. Under leftist academic aegis, we have reverted to that pre-modern, despotic time.
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