"We will take That First Step Into A Thousand Years Of Darkness.”
“I intend to work for @cindyhydesmith as if the fate of America depended on her single election,” Gov. Phil Bryant tweeted on January 2. “If Mike Espy and the liberal Democrats gain the Senate, we will take that first step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Excerpts from “IRONY”:
Chapter 6: A Pariah
“To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”
Ayn Rand
Before I began my research on Haiti, I was inclined to believe everything negative told to me about that nation; anything I read in newspaper columns or coming over the airwaves via television or radio. I viewed the Haitians as malingers and the society culturally regressive. A people who, for centuries, seem to lack the capacity to move their country forward – in tandem - with European society, since their birth as an independent Republic in 1804. After I completed my research, I had to disabuse myself from the grip of my ignorance.
To understand Haiti’s demise, I had to journey back to Spain before the Moors arrived (711), view the period of the Moorish Caliphate (711 – 1492), then comprehend what these Africans had accomplished in Spain. After I had done this, I understood – better – what James Burke meant when he wrote, “The intellectual community which the northern scholars found in Spain was so far superior to what they had at home that it left a lasting jealousy of Arab culture, which was to color Western opinions for centuries" (Burke, 1985, p. 41). And it is still being done today. The Berbers had managed Spain well. Knowledgeable Europeans were not about to let this happen in Haiti. Other cultures (non-European) were to be brought underfoot. “Caliphate” became a word, used with derision and meant to instill fear.
Note:
In 2008 after the first African American, Barack Obama, was elected President of the United States of America, Senate Opposition Majority leader Mitch McConnell convened a meeting of Republican leaders and a vote was taken to impede the President’s agenda; the President’s election by the people and their reasons for electing him, notwithstanding . Their goal was to ensure that this African American will not have a successful Presidency, to keep alive a false narrative that Africans are inferior and incompetent.
The Moors (Muslims) ruled Spain for almost 800 years (711-1492), which is not a blip in the history of the world. Consider the historic life of America (1776-2016) next to Rome 27 BC – 395 AD, (undivided) approximately.
In Dr. Ivan Van Sertima’s book, The Golden Age of the Moors, he wrote about the debt Europe owes to the Moors and the significant contributions of the African Muslim on the Iberian Peninsula and to the Renaissance in European society. This is well researched and can be found in libraries, book stores and on the internet.
When the Moors entered Spain in 711, they did not arrive as destroyers but instead came as consensus builders. The Jews and the Moors worked together and in some instances the Jews were viewed as collaborators with the Muslims. In Moorish Spain “thousands of Jews and Christians lived in peace.” The Moors may have carried into Spain, some of the lessons learned from Rome’s occupation in North Africa 100 AD.
In another of James Burke's works titled "Connections," he describes how the Moors thawed out Europe from the Dark Ages. "But the event that must have done more for the intellectual and scientific revival of Europe was the fall of Toledo in Spain to the Christians, in 1105." In Toledo the Arabs had huge libraries containing the lost (to Christian Europe) works of the Greeks and Romans along with Arab philosophy and mathematics. "The Spanish libraries were opened, revealing a store of classics and Arab works that staggered Christian Europeans." (Burke, 1978, p. 123)
The intellectual plunder of Toledo brought the scholars of northern Europe like moths to a candle. The Christians set up a giant translating program in Toledo. Using the Jews as interpreters, they translated the Arabic books into Latin (Latin was the language spoken by the learned people at that time). These books included "most of the major works of Greek science and philosophy... along with many original Arab works of scholarship." (Digest, p. 622) "The intellectual community which the northern scholars found in Spain was so far superior to what they had at home that it left a lasting jealousy of Arab culture, which was to color Western opinions for centuries" (Burke, 1985, p. 41).
My chapters on Haiti (A Pariah – chapter 7 and The Slave Codes -chapter 11) may help to reveal some of this dark sentiment to the reader.
Thomas Jefferson (one of the founding fathers of the United States of America), a man in constant search of ways to increase his knowledge, must have believed that the Moors were on to something because included in his library of books was a copy of the Koran.
https://www.amazon.com/IRONY-Theophilus-Nicholson/dp/1520964846