Keanu Reeves joins a program promoting racist ideologies... hopefully without realizing it

Another season of Ancient Apocalypse is about to vomit foul pseudohistory all over us again

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I’m going to be charitable and assume that Keanu Reeves was either unfamiliar with pseudoarchaeologist Graham Hancock or his fake history show Ancient Apocalypse, or if he was, that he was unaware of the deeply racist roots of the conjectures Hancock promotes.

Netflix has announced that Keanu Reeves (right) will join Season 2 of Ancient Apocalypse.

Hancock’s basic conjecture is that ancient people of color would have been unable to create many of their great works, so they must have had help from Atlanteans — who were tall, white, blond-haired, and beautiful — in fact, Aryan. He has no problem with structures like the Greek Parthenon, a far older and more precise building than many of the megalithic structures he claims couldn’t have been built by the people of color by themselves.

It’s fair to point out that Hancock has spent much of his career disputing there’s anything racist about his alternative history — he’s just doing science and going wherever the evidence leads him. And none of these conjectures are original with him, he’s just one of today’s leading celebrities promoting them; by the time Hancock would have first read about them and embraced them, libraries were full of scholarly criticism. He knew full well that many of these alternate histories were originally conceived for explicitly racist purposes, but he went with them anyway.

One example can be found in his book America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization in which he posits that the Native American Mound Builder cultures were taught how to make them by an advanced white civilization, an idea Hancock credits to Ignatius Donnelly, who conceived them during the genocidal Indian Wars as propaganda to slur the Native Americans. Author Jason Colavito paints a detailed picture of this in his essay Whitewashing American Prehistory.

The Nazis, as a matter of official policy, also bought into the ancient Aryan civilization being responsible for things indigenous cultures had actually done for themselves. Himmler even set up a “science” division called the Ahnenerbe to learn more about this mystical race.

And just look at how science writers respond to Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse:

ABC Australia: “Netflix's Ancient Apocalypse series uses 'racist ideologies' to rewrite Indo-Pacific history, experts say” — Theories about who built Nan Madol strip Indigenous peoples of their rich histories and can be traced back to "racist philosophies" and "white supremacist ideologies" of the 19th century. According to these theories, "It's simply not possible for people who were not Europeans to have built such incredible structures", [archaeologist Patrick Nunn] says. “As soon as you start to take it seriously, then you are engaging with nonsense and demeaning, racist-informed agendas."

The Guardian: “Lost city of Atlantis rises again to fuel a dangerous myth” — [Archaeologist Flint Dibble] states such claims reinforce white supremacist ideas. “They strip indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead give credit to aliens or white people.” In short, the series promotes ideas of “race science” that are outdated and long since debunked.

If Hancock’s ancient race of Aryan Atlanteans were so advanced, what became of them? The title of the show, Ancient Apocalypse, gives a hint. Hancock is of the “ancient cataclysm” school, a pseudoscientific idea that something wiped out an ancient advanced civilization. Many of this school point to the mythical Noah’s mythical Great Flood. Hancock is among those who believe a mighty bombardment of comets devastated the planet at the end of the last Ice Age, an idea that has essentially zero academic support. It is, in fact, demonstrably false.

Keanu Reeves is one whom the celebrity gods have blessed with “cool awesome dude” status. A lot of people really love him, onscreen and off. For him to hitch his wagon to this sewage line of false history and racist ideas is disastrous, both for him and for his fans. Some of his fans will start to believe this shite based on his endorsement; others will turn from him in horror over it.

Please, Keanu, jump off this train while you still can.