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Antonio Gramsci
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By Niccoló Graffio
“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” – Antonio Gramsci: Letter from Prison (December 19th, 1929)
Prior to the epiphany that launched me on my journey down the road of ethnic consciousness, I, like so many others, had been inculcated by the American public and private school systems (as well as the mass media) into believing that almost everything great that had ever been done under the sun was done by people with light hair, eyes and skin. Beginning in kindergarten, a long procession of these people from Christopher Columbus to Neil Armstrong and from George Washington to George S. Patton, Jr, was paraded before me. Great minds from the likes of Isaac Newton to Carl Friedrich Gauss and from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson were, as well.
Even back then I wondered what, if anything, people from my area of the world, the Mediterranean, had done to compare with the accomplishments of these people. Though Columbus was originally from Genoa my educators were quick to point out his ancestors had come from farther north in Europe. In fact, the people who wrote my textbooks in school (and directed the movies I watched) would have had me believing all the greats of the ancient Mediterranean world bore a striking resemblance to Northern Europeans. Who reading this, for example, hasn’t seen a Hollywood epic showing ancient Greeks and Romans with British looks and accents (at least among the upper classes, anyway)?
To this day the mighty Alexander the Great of Macedon is portrayed with blond hair and blue eyes, in spite of the fact the earliest painting of him still extant shows a man with decidedly different features. For centuries painters have portrayed the great Jesus Christ as a man with unmistakably Nordic features, though most modern historical scholars would have a serious problem with that one.
Perhaps the height of ludicrousness occurs in the realm of physical anthropology. Throughout the 20th century physical anthropologists like Giuseppe Sergi and Carleton S. Coon taxonomically categorized most of those who lived around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea as members of the Mediterranean race (or sub-race, in the case of Coon). Beginning in the later part of the 20th century, however, a movement began (“Race is a social construct!”) to do away with such typologies, in spite of the growing genetic evidence to the contrary.
Thus, while in the minds of many if not most we are not “White”, we also do not merit a classification of our own, even though critics of the concept of a Mediterranean sub-race continue to admit to the existence of distinctive features of Mediterranean populations. In a sick sort of way, we do not exist!
Armed with the knowledge I have accrued in my lifetime, it has become apparent to me why this is so. Once I began my saunter down the long road which led to the awakening of ethnic awareness within me, I soon began to realize just how worthless those textbooks and movies really were in terms of their historical value.
A good part of that journey was in discovering and documenting the existence of members of our ethnos who could rightfully be considered great. One question, though, I must answer before I continue: how do you define “great” or “greatness”? This is important because these words can mean many things to many people. Continue reading
