GEOLOGICAL DISINFORMATION
by Professor Revilo P. Oliver
August 1986
A friend has sent me a page from the March 1986 issue of a periodical called
"Retirement Life". I hope -- I most earnestly hope that what is said
in the article is not true, but I am so pessimistic about the present state of
our demoralized and decaying civilization that I have misgivings.
According to the article, "Dr. Daniel J. Stanley and Harrison Sheng of
the National Museum in a report to the Geological Society of America" said
that "there is scientific evidence that what is related in
"Exodus" [i.e., the tale in the Jew Book] did indeed happen." The
article does not tell us what was done by the members of the Geological Society
when they heard the report, so I cannot tell you whether they laughed
uproariously or staggered out to the bar for a double Scotch to make sure they
were sober.
The "scientific evidence," according to the journalist, is an event
that occurred around 1475 B.C. and has interested archaeologists, especially
since 1967, when S. Marinatos began publishing reports of his excavations on the
island that was known as Thera in Classical times and is now called Santorin.
(The reports, written in respectable Modern Greek, appeared in an annual
publication of which I translate the title as "Proceedings of the Athenian
Archaeological Society.") Marinatos dug his way through fifty feet of
solidified lava and uncovered the remarkable, archaeologically sensational,
remains of a once prosperous city, which had elegant private homes of three-storeys,
their walls adorned with frescoes of considerable artistic merit, and large and
well-built public buildings -- a city that was overwhelmed by a volcanic
eruption c. 1475 B.C. I shall not digress to a discussion of that city's place
in the history of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, particularly since the last
work by Marinatos that I have read is the second edition of his "Kreta,
Thera und das mykenische Hellas" (Munchen, Hirmer, 1973) and I have not
found time to read the numerous later studies.
The buildings of the city were largely preserved by the volcanic ash and lava
that covered and protected them before the island was blown apart by one of the
most violent seismic explosions in historical times. More than half of the
island was pulverized by the final, explosive eruption, which Rhys Carpenter, in
his "Discontinuity in Greek Civilisation" (Cambridge Press, 1966)
estimates as at least twice as great as the famous explosion of Krakatoa in
1883. The explosion undoubtedly shook the island of Crete, some seventy miles
away, ruining at least some buildings, and darkening the skies with volcanic
dust, which, if the wind was northerly, may have fallen so thickly as to destroy
harvests and produce a general dislocation of society. So violent an explosion
was probably felt in Egypt, and, if the prevailing winds were right, may have
obscured the sun and the heavens for days. And, as Carpenter proved, the great
eruption and the destruction of the city on Thera was the primary source of the
legend of Atlantis.
All this is a matter of common knowledge. What "Retirement Life"
imputes to Dr. Stanley and his colleague -- I hope libellously -- is a claim
that "the volcanic eruption...on Santorin...set a tidal wave in motion that
could have caused a parting of the waters so that the Hebrew people could
continue unharmed...toward the Promised Land"! Now anyone who has ever seen
a map of the world knows that no tidal wave in the Mediterranean could have
reached the gulf between Egypt and Arabia without rolling right over Egypt and
totally obliterating its inhabitants. And no volcanic shock at Thera could have
so greatly disturbed the waters of the Sinus Arabicus as to produce tidal waves
of the size supposed in the nonsense I have just quoted. Let us be charitable
and assume that what Dr. Stanley told the journalist was that the shock of the
volcanic explosion on Thera could have set off in or near the Arabian Gulf a
sub-pelagian earthquake or other seismic movement sufficient to produce tidal
waves of the kind now called a tsunami. That is a bare possibility and would
save Dr. Stanley from being thought to have spouted incoherent drivel. But even
that concession will not save the proposition from absurdity.
As everyone knows, the tale in the part of the Jew Book called
"Exodus" (which, in all probability, was composed in its present form
around 440 B.C. or later) says that when a horde of Kikes fled from Egypt with
their load of stolen goods, their accomplice up in the clouds facilitated their
escape from the Egyptian owners of the property by parting the waters between
Egypt and Arabia to permit his bandits to walk over the bottom of the sea, and
then released the waters from his magic spell to drown the pursuing Egyptians
and teach the world what happens to people who don't like to be plundered by the
parasites with which it pleased old Yahweh to afflict civilized mankind. (The
body of water in question must, of course, be what was known in Antiquity as the
Sinus Arabicus, now the Arabian Gulf, but the Christians who concocted the tall
tales in the "New Testament" were so ignorant that they called it (in
Greek) "The Red Sea," and in Mediaeval times and later, when Europeans
still imagined that the story-book was historical, that term was used in
geography with the meaning the Christian scribblers had given it. In Antiquity,
Mare Erythraeum ("Red Sea") was the designation of the upper part of
what is now the Indian Ocean, and while it is true that the Arabian Gulf is an
arm of that ocean, just as the Gulf of California is an arm of the Pacific
Ocean, no one would say, except as a joke, that by going from Sonora to Baja
California he had crossed the Pacific.)
A tsunami in the comparatively shallow waters of a narrow gulf is extremely
unlikely and I cannot recall having ever heard of one, but assuming that one did
occur and that it exposed the floor of the sea, that would not have helped the
Sheenies in the story, who were trying to escape from Egypt with their loot. In
the first place, their feet and the feet of their pack animals would have been
bogged down in the mire of the freshly exposed sea bottom. And in the second
place, if the waters did recede and expose the bottom, a tidal wave of equal
force would have returned long before the marauders could have traveled the
distance from one side of the gulf to the other, even on dry land. The returning
wave would have overwhelmed the fleeing Yids and would have delivered the world
from a terrible affliction.
In short, the phenomenon postulated by the attempt to make the foolish tale
in "Exodus" seem plausible is a geological impossibility, as everyone
who has even a smattering of geology well knows. The "scientific
evidence" mentioned by the journalist is just a crude hoax. Its purpose is
obvious: to help the holy men in their confidence game by pretending that
"the scientific world is divided" over something about which there can
be no rational doubt.
We are told, furthermore, that some dervishes reject the so-called
"scientists'" explanation of the "miracle" and insist old
Yahweh did it all by himself, just as he gave his pet bandits time to kill more
Semites by ordering the Sun to stop his chariot over a town in Palestine. Other
shamans favor a compromise between their religion and "Science": they
say that the vicious old Jew up in the clouds made the volcano on Thera erupt
and destroy thousands of civilized men just to help his pack of thieves escape
from Egypt. What has happened is that archaeological evidence has been
unscrupulously used to concoct a hoax that will help the salvation-peddlers by
distracting their victims' attention from the one obvious and indubitable fact:
the tale in the Jew Book is sheer poppycock and nothing of that sort ever
happened or could have happened. Jews may find in the tale some symbolical value
that pleases their racial psyche, but to a rational Aryan it is just a
repellently immoral and ugly myth.