Friday, June 24, 2005

Greek Quackery


/ conspiratorialism / local /
A wikipedia article presenting (at last) the true glory of modern Greek pseudohistorical quackery, and their contrived mythologies that put to shame anything the Anglosaxon religious and nonreligious conspiracy theorists might have come up with. This is truly funny until you realize that far too great a number of people (if book sales are any measure) actually believe in this sort of nonsense.
To give you an idea of the scope of this (and related national mysticist) lunacy, I heard an author of some of the classics of this pseudohistorical literature claim on his TV show, that "10,000 years ago, America was densely populated by Greeks". That's ten thousand years ago. Densely. This is the absurd end of a spectrum of irrational/ahistorical/antiscientific beliefs that are far too common among the population at large (i.e. the extent of Ancient Greek scientific knowledge and technology, the ultimate indigeneity of the Greeks and the idea that the Greek language is the mother of all languages - or even the idea that Greeks today are somehow the target of some sort of international persecution/conspiracy due to their uniqueness and talent).

The fact that this sort of thing has an (unnervingly large) audience, could be the result of a twisted Zeitgeist, a declining educational system and/or too much bad TV programming eroding the higher brain functions of a significant part of the viewership.

Via Till the blog (in Greek), a skepticist blog, run by Manolis, bullshit-slayer par excellance.

1 comment:

DoDo said...

My pessimism tells me that the audience always existed, only the rat-catchers were kept under the wraps.

There are similar hilarious natinalist myths elsewhere. Here in Hungary, many of the far-right believe that Sumerians were Hungarians, and - via Abraham - so was Jesus! Some of these people (including the onetime chief prosecutor of the capital) also believe that there is something special about the geomagnetism/"Earth radiation" of the Hungarian Basin, and that Hungarians lived here for 7000 years (rather than arriving 1100 years ago).

The Romanian myth of the Daco-Roman continuity (state dogma under Ceaucescu) also has versions as extreme as the previous, with the Dacians as Europe's Übermenschen.

Oh, and speaking of an America densely populated by Greeks, what about the Mormons...