A Long Post About a Stupid Map

In which I get mad online

A couple of weeks ago the Twitter account @whatifalthist shared the following post:

Keen-eyed viewers will notice immediately that this map is stupid, and also bad. More on that later. First, let me explain why you should care about this:

You shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, however, I care about it, because this account keeps showing up on my feeds and it annoys me, so I am going to write about it. Ordinarily I don’t let things like this bother me, but the man behind this account, Rudyard Lynch, has 600k subscribers on YouTube and 50k followers on Twitter and has transferred his minor internet fame into a lucrative right-wing grift.

Lynch began his channel as a place to explore “alternate history'“, which seems harmless enough, but it has transformed into a home for bizarre alt-right doomer conspiracies. Recent videos have titles like “Was the Unabomber Right” [no] and “The Coming Incel Revolution” [yikes]. There are multiple videos about an upcoming civil war, or speculating about World War 3. Unpleasant stuff!

Of course, part of the reason why this guy annoys me so much is because we operate in the same cultural space, and he is massively more popular than I am. I don’t think that necessarily says anything about the quality of my content or his, but it does mean that if I expect anyone to take me seriously as some guy on the internet who writes/makes videos about history, then I have to take Lynch seriously too.

OK, so back to that map. Here’s a bigger version of it:

The most striking issue with this map is that it is, obviously, extremely racist. Lynch has just sort of arbitrarily decided that most of Africa and a huge portion of South America do not belong to any kind of civilization. Very dumb! I am not going to list all of the major cities and developed nations that exist in those black spots, though amusingly, Lynch has also blacked out the Northern Territory of Australia, which includes the city of Darwin and it’s population of over 100k people.

Lynch also doesn’t explain what criteria he’s using for “civilization”, not that any criteria worth using would yield this result, and whatever metric he’s following has lumped Morocco in with Somalia and Kazakhstan, which seems so broad as to be useless. “Highland” and “lowland” Buddhist is also an incomprehensible category, and making “India” its own civilization feels kinda tacked on. All in all this map is about as well thought out as J.K. Rowling’s map of wizarding schools, and equally grounded in an understanding of real cultures (which is to say not at all).

One small and particularly silly part of this map is that Lynch has lumped Korea and China together into the same civilization (I imagine most Koreans would take some issue with that). This little detail is important, however, because it helped me realize that not only is this map stupid and racist, but it’s also plagiarized! Here’s a map from Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a very dumb book about how the West is destined to go to war with Islam or something.

Wow, look at that! Almost exactly the same thing, but Huntington at least tried to keep his turbo racism aimed at Muslim countries. This book was very popular among the Bush crowd, and the way it divides civilizations up is only marginally better than Lynch’s. To his credit, it takes real effort to plagiarize something this egregiously and simultaneously make it worse!

After posting his very stupid map, Lynch’s Tweet broke containment and the broader Twitter community started dunking on it, which was richly deserved. After a couple of days of mockery, Lynch made a follow-up post:

Claiming to have read every single book on the topic of “civilization” is a shocking level of delusion, as is posting a bookshelf this size as if its representative of that body of work.

I didn’t go through every book on the bookshelf but they’re mostly large generalist surveys with a scattering of conservative paeans to the west thrown in for good measure. There’s also a bunch of books on the subject of Africa, which I can only assume he didn’t read, given the way his map ended up. Also there’s this:

I am unclear if Lynch is counting George R.R. Martin’s history of House Targaryen as part of his research, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Anyway, none of this matters, except that a not-insignificant number of people think that this racist moron is someone to be listened to on matters of history and politics and I find that deeply irritating.

Thanks for reading.