"In the most compelling part of Black Athena, Bernal goes on to show how with the growth of European, and in particular German, nationalism, the original mixed portrait of Attic Greece that obtained into the eighteenth century was gradually expunged of all its non-Aryan elements, just as many years later the Nazis decided to burn all books and ban all authors who were considered non-German, non-Aryan. So from being the product of an invasion from the South (i.e., Africa), as in reality it really was, classical Greece was progressively transformed into the product of an invasion from the Aryan North. Purged of its troublesome non-European elements, Greece thereafter has stood in the Western self-definition—an expedient one, to be sure—as its fons et origo, its source of sweetness and light. The principle underlined by Bernal is the extent to which pedigrees, dynasties, lineages, predecessors are changed to suit the political needs of a later time. Of the unfortunate results this produced in the case of a self-created white Aryan European civilization none of us here need to be convinced."