As everyone who has ever opened a book knows, the greatest scam of all time was the Trojan Horse caper, when the Greeks hid inside a giant wooden horse and left it standing in front of Troy’s gate posing as a gift from the departing Greek forces to the brave defenders after a ten-year siege.
The Trojans were no fools, but they trusted the Greeks. After all, the noblest of them, Achilles, a semi-god, had returned the body of Hector to his father, King Priam, after the duel between the two greatest competing warriors. But once inside the gates, the Greeks emerged from the horse and put Troy to the sword, killing the men and taking the women as slaves. Ever since, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” has been an aphorism mostly used by boors to illustrate a little knowledge.
It was nevertheless a great story with only one flaw: It was fiction, written—sung, rather—by a blind Greek poet named Homer more than 2,500 years ago. It was the first thing I was taught when I was learning to read and write. There was trouble at the time over trade routes between Greeks and their neighbors the Trojans, but Homer turned it into a spectacular, phantasmagoric event that still resonates today. Needless to say, my hero was Achilles—undefeated in battle, proud, extremely good-looking, and imperious, he went down by a poisoned arrow that targeted his heel, the only part of his body that was vulnerable and where his mother, the goddess Thetis, held him when she dipped him into the water that made him immortal.
“Is there a more unpardonable sin than changing historical facts in order to cast doubt about your own country?”
Great stuff. Paris, brother of Hector and a Trojan prince, had run off with Helen, wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta, something not done even back then, especially as Paris was a guest of the royal Spartan couple. When I first read it, I could not believe that someone would sink as low as to run off with the wife of not only the King of Sparta, but his host. The vulgar know-nothings of Hollywood always portrayed Helen to have left Sparta with Paris willingly. The first time I saw a movie starring Rossana Podestà as Helen, I almost walked out, despite the fact that Podestà was probably much more beautiful than Helen. My father eventually had to calm me down, informing me that it was anti-Greek sentiments due to wars that first started the rumors that Helen had left voluntarily and in love. That calmed me down a bit, but I was still Orlando Furioso when the subject came up.
I now obviously accept that the whole shebang was fiction made up by the blind poet, but as my mother was an upper-class Spartan, the idea that a Spartan queen would leave in the middle of the night with a Trojan playboy still annoys me. But it annoys me less than the second-greatest scam I can think of, the so-called 1619 Project by one Nikole Hannah-Jones, paid for by the Sulzberger gang in order to defame America. Better yet, in order to reframe American history by falsely claiming the foundation of the United States was built on slavery. One Jake Silverstein, who introduced these horrendous lies in The New York Times, perhaps should have stuck to the birth of Israel, and the mountains of dead and deracinated Palestinians its birth is responsible for.
I found the Hannah-Jones–NY Times portrait of Uncle Sam the most envenomed I’ve yet to encounter, and as true as the Trojan Horse story. With the backing of the Sulzberger gang, and as though possessing some magic amulet, this ridiculous person invented an outrageously false theory, and the media, academy, Hollywood, and the rest of the usual suspects treated it as fact and more fact and more fact. It is nothing but a scurrilous piece of fiction paid for by the Judases of The New York Times. But it suited at the time that America was down and hustlers like Biden and Kamala were on their way up.
Taki is an ex-Greek Davis Cup player as well as a former captain of the Greek national karate team. He has won the U.S. national veterans judo championship twice, and in 2008 was world veterans judo champion 70 and over. Since 1967, when he began his career with National Review, he has been a columnist for the London Spectator, the London Sunday Times, Esquire Magazine, Vanity Fair and Chronicles Magazine. In 2002 he founded The American Conservative with Pat Buchanan. He has covered the Vietnam War as well as the Yom Kippur War and the Cyprus conflict of 1974.
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