Taking advantage of cultural bias isn't a new idea.

Von Däniken just wrote books and created a media empire instead of a new religion.

The scam is the same.

Most people today are unaware of the devastating plagues that decimated the Indigenous population of North America after the first decades of European contact. Imagine aliens coming to Earth and finding whole cities depopulated and you've got the picture. There were few people left that could tell their stories...and for a long time, they weren't listened to.

You'd have to be pretty gullible to believe that ancient ruins were evidence that *YOUR* ancestors had come to America long before you did...but hold on, people have done this before. They weren’t gullible. Just biased.


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https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/aug/18/great-zimbabwe-medieval-lost-city-racism-ruins-plundering

In the 19th century, European visitors to this abandoned medieval city refused to believe that indigenous Africans could have built such an extensive network of monuments. Such ignorance was disastrous for the remains of Great Zimbabwe


In the early 16th century, rumours of a mysterious fortress with gargantuan walls, abandoned in the African jungle, spread around Europe. Surrounded by goldmines and sitting on a 900-metre-high hill, the city was thought to represent the summit of a unique African civilisation which had traded with distant Asian countries, including China and Persia.

It was said that Great Zimbabwe was an African replica of the Queen of Sheba’s palace in Jerusalem. The idea was promoted by the German explorer Karl Mauch, who visited in 1871 and refused to believe that indigenous Africans could have built such an extensive network of monuments.

“I do not think that I am far wrong if I suppose that the ruin on the hill is a copy of Solomon’s Temple on Mount Moriah,” Mauch declared, “and the building in the plain a copy of the palace where the Queen of Sheba lived during her visit to Solomon.” He further stated that only a “civilised nation must once have lived there” – his racist implication unmistakeable.

Other European writers, also believing that Africans did not have the capacity to build anything of the significance of Great Zimbabwe, suggested it was built by Portuguese travellers, Arabs, Chinese or Persians. Another theory was that the site could have been the work of a southern African tribe of ancient Jewish heritage, the Lemba.

To be fair, I think JS was trying for a media hit with the BoM, and founding a religion was something he stumbled into as a Plan B, when the BoM did not turn out to be a best-seller.

Smith was a charlatan and an opportunist, but he was persistent.
As Rooster George taught us. If'n your first plan doesn't work, you gets yourself another plan."

Joseph didn't set out to be a rooster in the henhouse, it just kind of happened.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/12/2024 03:55PM by bradley.

We've learned a great deal from First Nations peoples in Canada (now that they are finally being listened to).

What? You mean they had a nation, a culture, a unique, creative, precious way of life before we "civilized" them? Shocking!

My sarcasm doesn't begin, of course, to acknowledge the harm visited upon the original inhabitants when foreigners invaded their lands and exerted their overwhelming power to the great detriment of those who were unjustly conquered.

I know I've related this here before but I met a Métis woman who was serving at a booth during a summer street fair near my home. During the course of our brief conversation-in-passing she said that they were there "to show people we're human". Her comment stabbed me in the heart and my eyes teared up. Think about living through a situation where you'd have to say "hey, we're human too". Still - in this era. It's beyond appalling. And heartbreaking. Fortunately, some recognition is present now, from government and people in general.

History: It's a subject worth looking into, if you want to be informed. I did know at quite a young age about the epidemics foreigners caused in North America due to indigenous inhabitants having no immunity to the pestilences from abroad. That was just the start of the harm that was caused, with reverberations to this very day.