Inequality in the Confederacy “a manifestation of ancient Greece and Rome”
A post on the white supremacist site Counter Currents argues that “the Confederate States of America, and the antebellum South in general, represented a continuation of the Classical worldview that was based upon tradition, hierarchy, and ordered inequality.” “Ordered inequality” is a euphemism for state-sanctioned domination of whites over other races. The post cites Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius to sound the alarm about the removal of Confederate monuments, which the post says “should concern even the most ‘conservative’ of White Nationalists among us.”
The post describes the “Classical worldview” as a “respect for the authority of established forms over speculative ideas” that “hearkens back to the time of the ancient Greeks” and in particular to Plato, who, according to the post, argued that “there is a reality beyond our own and that we should emulate it here on the physical plane.” “The South,” “the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome,” and “Medieval Europe” were “premised upon” this distinction between the cosmic and the material, “and paid reverence to this cosmic truth through the propagation of civilizational structures that were both hierarchical in orientation and inegalitarian in nature. Like the poleis of ancient Greece or the Roman Republic, and by extension the Confederate South, they served both as living embodiments and integral components of the natural cosmic order that their peoples so revered.”
The post claims that “Confederate monuments” and “our people…are both Platonic ‘form’ and ‘receptacle’…of the timeless concept of inequality…made incarnate.” The removal of these monuments is “not only an attack on us, but an existential threat to our very racial existence, and cannot be tolerated.” In further support of this the post quotes Marcus Aurelius, “wisdom and right action are the same thing,” to argue that “the destruction of our past is a sin that we must not tolerate, and that a proportional response…is vital for the sake of our people.”
The post argues further that those who support the removal of Confederate monuments are “exemplary of the natural capriciousness and servitude that characterizes the ‘slavish mentality’ of the mass man” that Aristotle, according to the post, had in mind when he argued that “those who are held in thrall by the ‘bestial’ desires of their senses are natural slaves…individuals who have deprived themselves of a sense of agency, of the ability to exert will and manifest power.”
This is the same site that, in a different essay that Pharos has documented, claimed that “Plato and Hitler saw the sublime rays of the same glorious Sun.”
View the post about the confederacy without actually visiting Counter Currents.
