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Notes -
"Ancient Apocalypse" on Netflix has been a break out hit. Some of the reactions have been... interesting.
The Guardian declared it the most dangerous show on Netflix.
Boingboing says Archaeologists reveal the white supremacist nonsense behind Netflix's "Ancient Apocalypse"
So what's behind this?
Hitler famously cherry picked some ideas from archeology / anthropology to push his agenda. Post WW2 academics found that it was easy to push out rivals by claiming their ideas could result in a new Hitler.
As a result anthropology is filled with people who think that they have a vital role as guardians of society.
This mostly results in making historical narratives more dishonest and less cool. The Bell Beaker culture is often referred to as the Corded Ware culture. They claim it was spread as a peaceful diffusion of culture. Genetic testing that showed that as the culture expanded neighbouring Y-DNA haplogroups disappeared. This is dismissed as one of those great mysteries.
When a body is found carrying a spear and multiple hand axes, they are ceremonial trade goods instead of weapons. The arrows in the back of the body were presumably his change from the trading. That joke was stolen from an academic I can't track down.
Ancient Apocalypse is really just fun and harmless, but the reactions point to a deeper problem.
Well, I read the linked Guardian article expecting to find what you claimed: accusations of white supremacism and fake history being pushed in its place.
That's not what I found. The show is hosted by Graham Hancock, so yeah: we're Discovery Channel Tomb of Jesus or History Channel All Hitler All The Time levels here.
Fun rubbish popcorn for the brain? Sure. But anything more serious than that, no. I've read some of his books from the 90s and he's been at this a long time. It's the Erich von Daniken version of prehistory, the Theosophist Ancient Lemuria and Mu Ascended Masters version. Cherry-picked narratives are indeed the problem here.
Most people won't take it as anything other than light entertainment. Some people may believe it's true, however. And I guess some of those might believe in some ur-Aryan white master race nonsense, but I can't be bothered to get het-up about that.
The danger is fake history, and yeah, it's on all sides of the divide today. Which is why it's better not to get your history from Graham Hancock, fun as it might be.
I'm reminded of when Paradox Interactive, a Swedish gaming studio who does historical strategy games like Crusader Kings (about the dynasties of the middle-ages) and the Victorian eras, started getting tarred for having too many white supremacist fans.
I have long been convinced that such complainers miss a rather critical point. If you believe someone is a awful white supremacist, what would you expect them to be doing if they weren't dumping hundreds to thousands of hours into video games?
You're thinking with consequentialist ethics, the complainers are thinking with virtue ethics.
The most extreme case of that I recall seeing was about 15 years ago, when Ron Paul was given $500 by some white supremacist, and Paul infuriated people by saying he didn't plan to return it. I would never have imagined you could get that many ostensibly liberal people to agree that giving money to fucking Stormfront was a moral imperative. But if you think one level up, the obvious "evil people wasting their time and money is good" might get outweighed by "what if they aren't wasting their time and money, what does that say about the supposedly non-evil people they're fans of". ... and then if you think two levels up you have to wonder "really, how high are the odds that the evil bigots are actually making a brilliant Machiavellian maneuver", and trying to thwart them by giving their money back seems foolish again, but for a minute there it made sense.
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