Netflix Bridgerton is an American TV series, produced by Shonda Rhimes, narrating a pretentious historical romance, tasty and extravagant story. It is filled with banal secrets and flirts while depicting the upper-crust British society, packed with debutantes willing to marry well in Regency London.
Nothing less than you would expect from a Jane Austen Novel, except that history is re-written, placing blacks in a position of power in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England. Well, historical accuracy shouldn’t have to matter in fantasy, but when are we told that it is not a historical drama? And how naive teen watchers are going to know that? It is like a novel by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, a dreamy sprawling multiracial ensemble party.

Justin Urquhart Stewart, the co-founder of Regionally, Britain’s leading regional investment platform, said: “[Chinese] are rewriting history, so they have their version of it. They will not say they are doing it. They will […] say their history needs to be corrected because we, the West, are the people that wrote it. So, in their view, Tibet was always Chinese. It was ten years ago that the Mongols were faced with the question, -If you are not Chinese you must be Russian.- And the Mongols were put in a rather difficult position because they did not want to be either. You are, I’m afraid, going to see more of this.”
Nantes’s museum “Château des ducs de Bretagne” put its Genghis Khan Exhibition on hold after China pressures: “We decided to stop this production in the name of the human, scientific, and ethical values that we defend,” said Bertrand Guillet, the director of the history museum.
The “censorship of the initial project,” he claimed, was marked by “biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favor of a new national narrative,” such as the attempt to change the exhibition’s title from “Sun of the Sky and the Steppes: Genghis Khan and the Birth of the Mongolian Empire“ to “Chinese Steppe Culture of the World.”(1)

 

Bart D. Ehrman participates in the New Revised Standard Version translation committee and has to address problems involving the use of inclusive language. “But at Princeton Seminary, when I arrived, it was already a hot issue. There I learned that there were people who did not think that the term “men” referred to “men and women” but to “adult males,” that “man” did not refer to the human race but only half of it, that the pronoun “he” did not refer to someone without male genitalia.”
And he goes forward: “It is because language masks power. If we privilege males in our language, it is both the result of male dominance in our social world and the means of perpetuating that dominance. That’s a long story. But the short version of it is this: it’s not an accident that males have dominated our historical, political, cultural, and social landscapes *and* that they have dominated our linguistic usage. Historically speaking, there is simply no *way* that “woman” would ever be taken inclusively to refer to both females and males. It was only “man” that had any chance of doing that. If we believe that men and women are equal, that one is not superior to the other, we need to let our language reflect that belief. Again, it’s a long story.”
It’s a long story, not good History.
Now theologically, and sociologically it might have a meaning to translate man into a human being but has nothing to do with History since at that time meant “man.” A repressive patriarchal society cannot go over its boundaries. Over imposing our modern meaning and sensitivity can help to revive and actualize the message of the Bible, but it re-writes History, making those people modern, as they are not. (2)

Xi Jinping, Bart Ehrman, and Shonda Rhimes walk into a bar. And it’s not a joke.

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