'To Europe—Yes, but Together With Our Dead'

January 28, 2014 6:30 AM

What happens to a nation that's suffered a great crime? What happens when the wrong can't be made right?
posted by Brandon Blatcher (32 comments total)

Great thoughts as usual from TNC. The clear-eyed recollection of history is becoming and should remain a weapon to battle nationalism and reactionary jingoism.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:00 AM on January 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's Raining Florence Henderson put it best on the topic of justice.
posted by lalochezia at 7:04 AM on January 28, 2014 [6 favorites]

Very interesting article.

But Howard taught me that accepting the nationalism of my younger years reduced history to jingoism and thus accepted the premises of white supremacy, leaving its roots unscathed.

This reminds me of an article from The Flight From Science and Reason.

An Egyptologist at Howard wrote about his students who had fallen in love with the then-trendy afrocentrist takes on Ancient Egypt. These intelligent, energetic African-American students had fallen in love with the idea that Ancient Egypt was the Greatest Civilization of All Time, that Ancient Egyptians had invented flying machines, that Ancient Egyptians looked exactly like them, and so on and so forth.

This was problematic for him, for several reasons. One, concepts like "race" (let alone "black") didn't exist back then. In this way, the afrocentrist love for Ancient Egypt inadvertently cemented the idea of race and blackness as fixed, eternal categories. (He had a quote along the lines of, "if it makes you feel any better, an Ancient Egyptian would have been denied a seat at a whites-only restaurant.") Two, lionizing Ancient Egypt excluded the other great African civilizations and empires, as well as demeaned all those other cultures which did not boast of grand physical structures. In this way, the afrocentrist love for Ancient Egypt inadvertently cemented the white idea of which civilizations were important, which were not, and why. Three, afrocentrist history itself was almost always bad history. This is not just bad in and of itself - it was also bad that these students apparently needed to lean on bad history in order to feel pride in themselves. In this way, the afrocentrist love for Ancient Egypt inadvertently cemented the idea that black people would need to run away from history in order to stand strong in the world.

On a lighter note, I enjoyed the professor's quip to a student who had claimed that the Ancient Egyptians had invented flying machines.

"Look at this drawing! It's a flying machine!"
"That's a bird."
"But it has the perfect proportions for flight!"
"Yes. Because it's a bird."
posted by Sticherbeast at 7:25 AM on January 28, 2014 [17 favorites]

One day in the early 90s, Cornel West was giving a talk at UCLA and kept being interrupted by an enthusiastic Afrocentric student. His response-- "I'm not convinced that the Pyramids were built with voluntary labor"-- got us back on track with the things that matter. Hats off, I thought.
posted by homerica at 7:49 AM on January 28, 2014 [10 favorites]

i'm surprise this hasn't already come with a "controversy" sideline, since he's stepping squarely into "holocaust exceptionalism" territory re: the poles in WWII.

the Polish Institute of National Memory estimates that there were some 5.5 million wartime deaths in the country, of which about 3 million were Jews...

A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933.

The problem is that 90% of Polish Jews were killed, with the willing collaboration of the rest of the Poles. So, do they count as weights on the Polish psyche or not?

Coates kind of completely misleadingly quotes Janion here:

The Polish literary critic Maria Janion said of Poland’s accession to the European Union: “to Europe, yes, but with our dead.”

see:

In her book To Europe - Yes, but Together with our Dead, a collection of sketches and interviews, Maria Janion, the author of numerous works about Polish Romantic culture, concentrates on the decline of our present cultural paradigm. Janion reveals the dark side of the Polish heritage astutely and uncompromisingly. The courage of asking the most unpleasant questions about today's Polish identity explains why the book has been the subject of broad discussion and is seen as one of the most important intellectual contributions to Polish literature in recent years.

"Our dead" of the title refer mainly to Jews. Janion's book engenders an atmosphere unusual in a work of literary history. It is an attempt to initiate the grieving for the Jewish contribution to Polish culture which has been lost. In the author's opinion, this is something which can no longer be postponed.

posted by ennui.bz at 7:56 AM on January 28, 2014 [5 favorites]

(i should note that Coates is quoting Timothy Snyder re: Janion, but the point still stands... the bare quote from Snyder is borderline anti-semitic without context and Snyder is controversial with regards to Bloodlands )

((personally, I hate shallow charges of anti-semitism so I'm hesitant to put it out there, but Coates is on really tricky terrain wrt nationalism, race and WWII.)
posted by ennui.bz at 8:03 AM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

I have relatives involved with the cause for Reparations to African-American Descendants of Slaves. It's not an easy subject when an entire continent is enslaved, colonized and dispossessed for 500+ years.
The oppression of Africa by outsiders, and corrupt rulers is an ongoing problem.
The last hunter-gatherer groups are being denied any places they can hunt and gather.
Africa has the best animals, and even the animals aren't safe.
Africa has resources, coltan, which is essential for smart-phones. I am not innocent, I own an iPod. I can't do without it. Most of the people I know have mobile devices.
I don't know a woman who isn't desperately poor who never had a diamond ring.
People who own something like that, whether Black or White are in on it, whether we like it or not.
I would like to see something that brought real help and real reparations.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 8:14 AM on January 28, 2014

Saying that non-jewish folks suffered and died in the Holocaust does not seem to me to be an inherently antisemitic thing to say, though it may frequently be said in the service of antisemitic conclusions. In this case, his conclusion does not seem at all antisemitic. Snyder's might be; I haven't read anything past the pullquotes here.

Trite, but not antisemitic. It's good to remember our dead, and to be reminded to do so, but it's not groundbreaking.
posted by contrarian at 8:18 AM on January 28, 2014

The problem is that 90% of Polish Jews were killed, with the willing collaboration of the rest of the Poles.

"The rest of the Poles" is a pretty fucking problematic construction, and certainly not true . I would also suggest that before you begin to hint at anti-semitism on the part of Ta-Nehisi Coates you read his other writing on Europe.
posted by oneirodynia at 8:42 AM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

" A 20-percent casualty rate is why art exists"

Not entirely following along with that particular observation.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:58 AM on January 28, 2014 [1 favorite]

"The rest of the Poles" is a pretty fucking problematic construction.

Just to be clear, I am in no way calling out Coates as anti-semitic... it's just an area where "trite" doesn't quite cut it. What's problematic about the construction is whether all of those dead Jews in Poland were Polish or not... Snyder's argument is essentially that there were a rash of nationalist mass-murders in eastern europe due to the destruction of the czarist government:

When I asked Snyder why he is so intent on putting Holocaust history in an Eastern European context, he said, “It relativizes. When you read Jan’s book about the Jews being burned in the barn [in Jedwabne], it’s a horrible thing, but when you know that there were a couple of thousand instances like that, most of them not involving Jews, it relativizes it. We see it more as a question of what humans can do to humans.” In 1943-44 there was a war between Ukrainian nationalists and their Polish counterparts. Ukrainians tortured Poles and burned them alive, men, women, and children; and Poles responded in kind, with violence just as gruesome. Those who ask how Poles and Ukrainians could have done what they did to Jews overlook the fact that they did the same terrible things to each other. After the war, in Poland, “Jews were not substantially more at risk of losing their lives than Ukrainians and Germans, or Polish oppositionists, for that matter,” Snyder explained. You wouldn’t know that from Gross’ Fear, which describes the epidemic of lynchings that terrorized Jewish survivors who returned to Poland in 1945 (nearly all of them left; many, ironically, for the safety of DP camps in Germany).

But now you are assuming that "Jewish" is a nationality i.e. the polish jews weren't polish. The question is: who's dead are they really? Coates is tallying the polish jews under polish, but I'm not sure the Poles saw it that way. The great irony of the Jewish Holocaust was that Germany was (arguably) the least anti-semitic society in Europe, the society where Jews were the most integrated. The difference in the level of anti-semitism in Poland and Russia is hard to convey... but is more akin to position of blacks during the height of the KKK.

"Nationalisms" is a truly a difficult topic... I think this essay brings up some interesting things, but is on the border of some dangerous opinions and it's not clear to me how aware Coates is...
posted by ennui.bz at 9:12 AM on January 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

It’s hard for me to read past any instance of "grok".
posted by bongo_x at 9:19 AM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

The problem is that 90% of Polish Jews were killed, with the willing collaboration of the rest of the Poles. So, do they count as weights on the Polish psyche or not?

I don't see any shred of a hint in TNC's piece that he's trying to minimize the crimes that were perpetrated against the Jews during WWII.

I think one of the inevitable, but somewhat frustrating, answers to the questions in the article ("What happens to a nation that's suffered a great crime? What happens when the wrong can't be made right?") is that it becomes impossible to speak about these crimes without in some way putting oneself in the wrong. To speak about any atrocity is to lay oneself open to charges of moral blindness from somebody: either the charge that you are paying too exclusive attention to that atrocity at the expense of others, equally grave. Or that you are failing to pay sufficient attention to the incommensurable particularities of that atrocity by lumping it in with others.
posted by yoink at 9:22 AM on January 28, 2014 [10 favorites]

If history shows us anything it's that the strong will inevitably prey upon the weak, for land, for resources, for labor. The strong will cast the weak as other, based on race, religion, nationality, political persuasion, to make a case for rape, murder, theft, slavery. The wheel of time turns and in all likelihood all will feel the bootheel of oppression sooner or later.

So bring your dead, to be laid alongside the honored dead of history's long cycles, and hope that the shear mass of them someday weighs heavy enough to convince peoples, nations, creeds to treat others as they themselves would be treated.
posted by OHenryPacey at 9:26 AM on January 28, 2014

It’s hard for me to read past any instance of "grok".

I don't know why; it’s a perfectly cromulent word.
posted by The Tensor at 9:45 AM on January 28, 2014 [8 favorites]

"I'm not convinced that the Pyramids were built with voluntary labor"

Egyptologists have since moved on.

As eventually we all must.
posted by IndigoJones at 10:18 AM on January 28, 2014

Here, if it will de-Godwin the thread a little, how about the Belgian massacre of the Congolese? I think we can all agree that was a bad thing, and that's before we get to the issue of the severed hands.
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 11:26 AM on January 28, 2014

©Sticherbeast: This was problematic for him, for several reasons. One, concepts like "race" (let alone "black") didn't exist back then. In this way, the afrocentrist love for Ancient Egypt inadvertently cemented the idea of race and blackness as fixed, eternal categories. (He had a quote along the lines of, "if it makes you feel any better, an Ancient Egyptian would have been denied a seat at a whites-only restaurant.")

I'm currently reading The Histories by Herodotus and this fact really stands out. The Histories is, despite its name, not just a history book, but also a tour around the known world. He dedicates one entire book (out of nine) to describe the history and customs of the Egyptians, and other sections contains long descriptions of Persians, Babylonians, Indians, the people of Asia Minor (modern day mainland Turkey) and many other peoples.

He almost never speaks of skin color, and never of race. At one point when describing another people (the Colchians) he mentions off-hand that the Egypians have curly hair and that their skin is "melanchroes" (the translation is controversial, it either means "black" or simply "more dark-skinned than Greeks"). The point being, he doesn't care. He describes the most mundane things and customs in great detail, but it never occurs to him to talk about skin color, or to divide the world into distinct races based on skin color. To a modern reader this absence is quite remarkable.

It's not the most unique insight ever, but reading this book has made it really hit home with me the total artificiality of any notion of "race" when it comes to humans.
posted by gkhan at 12:18 PM on January 28, 2014 [3 favorites]

> i'm surprise this hasn't already come with a "controversy" sideline, since he's stepping squarely into "holocaust exceptionalism" territory re: the poles in WWII.

No he's not, and your entire line of argument is tendentious and small-minded. Try reading his essay without your blinders on. It's amazing to me that anyone could read that and come away thinking "Gosh, his take on Polish Jews is problematic and borders on anti-Semitism... not that I'm calling him anti-Semitic!"

Great essay; thanks for posting it.
posted by languagehat at 12:46 PM on January 28, 2014 [2 favorites]

The problem is that 90% of Polish Jews were killed, with the willing collaboration of the rest of the Poles.

Such a formulation, which plainly states that the 'rest of the Poles' were willing collaborators in the Holocaust, without any qualification, is of course nothing short of a calumny and a lie. Particularly galling when made by someone who is intent on policing TNC for possibly unintentional anti-Semitism.

There is no question that there existed anti-Semitism in Poland before, during and after WWII... as it did in the rest of Europe. One can discuss the degree compared to other countries, and for that, see below.

Instances of collaboration by Poles existed, but were a small minority even compared to most other countries in Europe during WWII. Poles certainly didn't establish a puppet regime a la Vichy, a regime that went to great lengths to ferret out Jews and ship them to death camps - and yet, you'd get pretty strong pushback from those who remember the Resistance, if you said, as you did about Poles, that "French Jews were killed with the willing collaboration of the rest of the French", without qualifying that it applied only to a minority. And yet, what the Vichy did in collaborating is orders of magnitude greater than anything the Poles did.

And what about Hungary, which already was passing anti-Jewish laws before WWII, and during the war established a collaborationist regime that was fully Nazi-fascist in character - and which enthusiastically rounded up and deported Jews to their deaths, wherever they could find them. That collaboration exceeds by orders of magnitude the collaboration of Poles during WWII. The same is true of Romania - again, a collaborationist regime. Slovakia - again, a collaborationist regime. Croatia - collaborationist regime. And those were countries which had some, however tiny degree of self-governance during WWII.

There was organized collaboration by volunteer forces in countries which had no degree of independence during WWII - see Ukrainian or Baltic states military and paramilitary adjunct forces which assisted the Nazis in the conduct of both the war and the extermination of the Jews themselves (which is why you found so many f.ex. Ukrainian guards at death camps in Poland), assisted and often initiated massacres of Jews on a huge scale. Poland never produced any such adjunct forces collaborating with either the German war effort or Holocaust, yet we don't talk about "the willing collaboration of the rest of the Ukrainians and Baltic people" without qualification. By this metric too, the collaboration by Poles, pales in comparison.

Yes, there were collaborators among Poles, particularly, though by no means exclusively, among the ethnic Germans of Polish citizenship who claimed the privileges of being Volksdeutsche and whose primary loyalty was to Germany - this was also true in other countries (notably the Sudeten Germans whose existance sparked the excuse for Germany to attack Czechoslovakia). However, historical accuracy demands that we put up the numbers before making claims and comparisons. By percentage of population, number of Jewish victims or pretty much any metric, there would be few nations that collaborated less with the Nazis during WWII (see: Denmark) than the Poles.

To see how absurd such broad unqualified statements are, using your standards you could just as well say: "The problem is that 90% of Polish Jews were killed, with the willing collaboration of the rest of the JEWS". How? Because after all, among those guards at Nazi death camps there were not just Ukrainians but Jewish kapos and for that matter, the Jewish Judenrat in Jewish ghettos. Both were and are controversial for their role in the Holocaust, because the question exists about willingness under duress:

"Also called "prisoner self-administration", the prisoner functionary system minimized costs by allowing camps to function with fewer SS personnel. The system was also designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos."

and for Judenrat:

"In a number of cases, such as the Minsk ghetto and the Łachwa ghetto, Judenräte cooperated with the resistance movement. In other cases, Judenräte cooperated with the Nazis."

were the Jews collaborators? Judenrat:

"The role of the Judenräte in the Holocaust[edit]

Hannah Arendt stated in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem that without the assistance of the Judenräte, the registration of the Jews, their concentration in ghettos and, later, their active assistance in the Jews' deportation to extermination camps, many fewer Jews would have perished because the Germans would have encountered considerable difficulties in drawing up lists of Jews. In occupied Europe, the Nazis entrusted Jewish officials with the task of making such lists of Jews along with information about the property they owned. The Judenräte also directed the Jewish police to assist the Germans in catching Jews and loading them onto transport trains leaving for concentration camps.

In her book, Arendt wrote that: "To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story."
Arendt's view has been challenged by other historians of the Holocaust, including Isaiah Trunk in his book Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (1972). Summarising Trunk's research, Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum has written: "In the final analysis, the Judenräte had no influence on the frightful outcome of the Holocaust; the Nazi extermination machine was alone responsible for the tragedy, and the Jews in the occupied territories, most especially Poland, were far too powerless to prevent it."[5]"


And with that last sentence we come upon a particularly pernicious aspect of your lie regarding the "willingness" of Poles to collaborate with the Nazis. The Nazis established uniquely harsh penalties against Poles for sheltering Jews - essentially execution, together with one's family. Such harshness of penalties for sheltering Jews, did not exist in France, or Germany or Belgium, or Holland etc.. Poles had a unique burden in helping Jews during WWII.

So how did the Poles respond to those penalties? By numbers and evidence, not anecdotes and suppositions: List of Righteous among the Nations by country.

"This is a partial list of some of the most prominent Righteous among the Nations per country of origin, recognized by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem. These people risked their lives or their liberty and position to help Jews during the Holocaust; some suffered death as a result.[1] By January 1, 2012 Yad Vashem recognized 24,356 Righteous Among the Nations from 47 countries.[2]"

Who is #1 in that list by the greatest number? Why, Poland. Yes, the very same Poles, who according to you were "willing collaborators" with the Nazis. You also state:

"The great irony of the Jewish Holocaust was that Germany was (arguably) the least anti-semitic society in Europe, the society where Jews were the most integrated. The difference in the level of anti-semitism in Poland and Russia is hard to convey... but is more akin to position of blacks during the height of the KKK."

I rather see a greater irony here. What did all that "least anti-Semitism in Germany" buy Jews - both in Germany and outside of Germany from the Germans? Well, we go down that list to finally come across the numbers of Germans - which include the famous Oskar Schindler - a pitiful 525, or one twelfth(!) the number of Poles. All those least anti-Semitic Germans and so few bothered to save Jews. All those vicious anti-Semitic Poles and so over-represented on that list - more than any other nation. Oh, and let's not forget to put it in perspective - this is even worse on a percentage basis, for there were far more Germans than Poles, so the numbers are even more wildly skewed. And don't forget, the penalty for Poles was extreme, much greater than for a German. Yet, who came forward to save Jews under these circumstances? Poles, the "willing collaborators", or Germans, the willing perpetrators whose country, Germany, you single out as 'perhaps the least anti-Semitic'?

Yes, there were Polish collaborators during WWII. But it is a grand historical lie and calumny to smear Poles with the broad brush of being willing collaborators of the Nazis, when the clear evidence and the numbers show the Poles as far less willing collaborators than almost any other nation in Europe at the time.

None of this excuses the anti-Semitism in Poland, including the vicious inexcusable atrocities after the war, or the anti-Semitism of Communists in Poland and the disgraceful amount of anti-Semitism still extant after the overthrow (which I saw with my own eyes when I traveled through Poland shortly thereafter - the vile anti-Semitic graffiti). The situation seems to have certainly been improving recently, with more critical self-examination by Poles, revival of Jewish culture in Poland and so on. But what we need more than anything else, is for the historical record to be respected, and lies and calumnies not to be spread, because that is what is at bottom of anti-Semitism and national hatreds. The statement which I addressed, is an example of such a disgraceful calumny.
posted by VikingSword at 12:46 PM on January 28, 2014 [18 favorites]

I admire TNC, and I have really appreciated his recent series on the Holocaust. The Holocaust and the history of anti-Semitism is a huge subject; slavery and the history of anti-Black racism in the USA is just as large. It's very, very hard to tease out points of common reference without being either trite or obscure, but TNC showed that this can be done even at a popular level.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:33 PM on January 28, 2014

A 20-percent casualty rate is why art exists

rewrite
posted by ethnomethodologist at 3:16 PM on January 28, 2014

Thanks so much for posting this beautiful piece.
posted by glasseyes at 3:22 PM on January 28, 2014

Prof Janion's book looks ripe for translation.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:39 PM on January 28, 2014

From reading TNC's other stuff on the subject, I believe what he means by "A 20-percent casualty rate is why art exists" is something like "Statistics, or even historical journalism, cannot convey the human suffering implied by a 20 percent casualty rate. Such pain can only be understood through the accretion of individual stories, and that is what art does best."
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:45 PM on January 28, 2014 [4 favorites]

> Two, lionizing Ancient Egypt excluded the other great African civilizations and empires, as well as demeaned
> all those other cultures which did not boast of grand physical structures. In this way, the afrocentrist love for
> Ancient Egypt inadvertently cemented the white idea of which civilizations were important, which were not, and why.

That vast monumental architecture marks a civilization out as important is a white idea? Well, since the ancient Egyptians (not to mention the Mayas, Aztecs, and many others) could not yet have been infected by this pernicious white idea, one is left to wonder, y'know, why they built such stuff. Oh, anthropology.
posted by jfuller at 10:17 AM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

> That vast monumental architecture marks a civilization out as important is a white idea? Well, since the ancient Egyptians (not to mention the Mayas, Aztecs, and many others) could not yet have been infected by this pernicious white idea, one is left to wonder, y'know, why they built such stuff. Oh, anthropology.

What the hell are you on about? Why are some people so determined to find something to dismiss this essay for? His point is that (to quote his exact words) lionizing Ancient Egypt excluded the other great African civilizations and empires, as well as demeaned all those other cultures which did not boast of grand physical structures. He is not saying that monumental architecture does not mark a civilization out as important, he's saying it's not the only thing that does, or should do, so—that the Empire of Mali, for example, whose social structures, epic poetry, and legends remained in the memory of West Africa the way the memory of Rome remained in Europe after it fell, was as important historically as any other empire, but because it did not leave impressive pyramids it was ignored by the West, and therefore by Afrocentrists. Is that really so hard to understand?
posted by languagehat at 12:51 PM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

the great war losses in Britain and France were the first, not the second, World War, so the start of the article reads all wrong if you're British - nobody thinks we suffered heavy losses in the Second World War. The arctic convoys did, the fishermen forced to sail in seas full of mines to 'keep up morale', many fronts, the horrors of Japanese prisoner of war camps (torture) etc, but nobody thinks that it was a war with many losses. I believe the Ukraine lost the most if you include the famine, one in three.
posted by maiamaia at 1:23 PM on January 29, 2014

(sorry, i hate sloppy history, it's a good article)
posted by maiamaia at 1:23 PM on January 29, 2014

also i think CLRJames is more interesting. He argued that slavery starts with sugar cultivation, because it was the only way you could grow sugar effectively, and that it spreads with sugar consumption, including over the sea. (Modern slavery, as opposed to the 'can buy yourself out' 'part of the family' not-total kinds that have existed elsewhere - i can't argue the accuracy of that claim. But for example Romans could make their own children slaves, and marry or adopt their slaves - it wasn't a total bar.) He claimed therefore that our craving for sugar was our first inordinate appetite for which we over-rode all morality. This fits interestingly with the current debate (in the UK anyway) about whether sugar is a drug and the fad for giving it up.
posted by maiamaia at 1:31 PM on January 29, 2014

> He is not saying that monumental architecture does not mark a civilization out as important, he's saying it's not the only thing that does,
> or should do, so—that the Empire of Mali, for example, whose social structures, epic poetry, and legends remained in the memory of
> West Africa the way the memory of Rome remained in Europe after it fell, was as important historically as any other empire, but because
> it did not leave impressive pyramids it was ignored by the West, and therefore by Afrocentrists. Is that really so hard to understand?

It's not hard to understand the conclusion--as long as we can, hypothetically, as a contrafactual, swallow the bogus premise. The rememberedness (if I can be forgiven an awkward neologism--there's bound to be a German word ending in -heit that means this, but I don't think Erinnerungheit is quite it) the rememberedness of both Egypt and Rome depend on the tidal waves of written literature and records that came from each, not on the Pyramids (which, over the centuries, only a tiny handful of westerners ever saw) or the very fragmentary ruins of the Forum. Who does the remembering, after all? Scholars. And what to scholars do? Read written records. The Empire of Mali would have had a better shot at rememberedness rather than forgottenness in Europe if it had left behind not vast stone ruins but a vast written literature, rather than fragmented oral poetry like the Sundiata Keita--which didn't even start to get collected and written down until the twentieth century. If that had been true of the Iliad and the Odyssey they wouldn't have been very influential in the west either. Not a lot of westerners can recite, or even name, any Mongolian tuuli, and this is not because they are white racists.
posted by jfuller at 3:04 PM on January 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Champion Barack Obama - How Black America talks to the White House
posted by homunculus at 5:51 PM on February 1, 2014