White supremacist site claims Nordic invaders gave rise to Classical Greece

“National Vanguard” is a white supremacist organization that is an offshoot of the “National Alliance,” whom the SPLC once called “the most dangerous and best organized” Neo-Nazi group in America. An article on NationalVanguard.org claims that when “Nordic” invaders arrived in Greece, “an older civilization”—described throughout as “Mediterranean aborigines“—”who had begun to succumb to racial mixing and decadence, was overwhelmed by a more vigorous and racially healthier one.” The article then turns to the “lethal” and “catastrophic mixing of blood” that, it claims, led to the decline of both Sparta and Athens, arguing that “the passing of the Hellenes must be regarded as one of the greatest tragedies of our race.” The article is part of a series celebrating the “heritage” of the “white race” and warning white people about the need to preserve racial purity in order to assure “the survival of the white race.”

Unlike a similar post documented recently by Pharos, which “proves” the northern-European origin of these invaders by citing references to blonde hair in ancient literature (as well as a 1911 encyclopedia), this article does not attempt to demonstrate that origin, arguing only that these “Nordic”invaders “lived in a manner remarkably like that of northern Europe’s feudal lords more than 20 centuries later.” According to the post, the racial purity of these invaders, the Aeolians, Ionians, Achaeans, and especially Dorians, “prepared the way for a rise of a new civilization which would greatly surpass the old one.” It holds up the mythical heroes Odysseus and Achilles, the scientist Archimedes, and the mathematician Euclid as examples of the “adventurous, ever-questing Faustian spirit which has always been the preeminent trait of the Nordic peoples.”

The article claims that that Athens "passed from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries."

The National Vanguard article is interested not only in the rise of the Dorians but in the decline of Classical Greece due to a loss of racial purity. For example, it says that Athens “pass[ed] from Nordic genius and glory to mongrelized squalor in a few centuries.” The racism of the site is laid bare in its interpretation of this “fact” for a contemporary audience: “Just think for a moment of the racial transformation of America which has taken place in a single century. And imagine … when Whites are a minority, outnumbered by both Blacks and Chicanos. America’s technology and industry may coast along for a century or two … as Athens’ culture did, but the American people — the real Americans — will have passed from the pages of history.” As to modern Greece, “the race-soul which first envisioned the symmetry of the Doric temple and pondered the mysteries of existence as none before it has become inextricably mingled with one concerned, first and foremost, with personal advantage and disadvantage, profit and loss.”

This article was written by William L. Pierce, one of the most influential white supremacists of the late 20th century. Pierce’s organization was, according to the SPLC, “explicitly genocidal in [its] ideology.” That genocidal imperative is evident in the article’s interpretation of Greek history, which argues that the “Nordic” Hellenes should have regarded “the Mediterranean natives…as a biological menace to be eliminated” and should have “eliminat[ed] the entire indigenous population, either through expulsion or extermination, from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled.” It laments that “intraracial conflicts…overshadowed…[the] feeling of racial unity [that]…the Hellenes always possessed.”

Sparta

Like other white supremacists that Pharos has previously documented, the National Vanguard article shows a special admiration for ancient Sparta. It praises Sparta for its hierarchical social structure that placed those “of pure Dorian blood at the top” (which here means “Nordic blood”). It also claims that Spartans “focused nearly all their creative energies on the military sphere” and had “the only full-time professional army in the Aegean world.”

The article draws a moral distinction between the Dorian invaders and those they conquered: “It is easy to imagine the Spartiates, upon their arrival in Laconia, surveying the moral decadence and the racemixing which had made the Achaeans such an easy conquest for the Dorians, and then instituting a carefully designed program to safeguard themselves from a similar fate.” Against arguments that Sparta’s militarism served to maintain power over the enslaved helots and politically subordinate perioeci, the article argues that Sparta’s policies were driven more by “racial rather than imperialistic motives” and “a desire to avoid social and racial decadence.”

The article is dismissive of non-Spartan Greeks because they "did succumb to race mixing" and "suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination."

It claims the training of Spartan men “gave an emphasis to racial fitness which went far beyond the needs of a strong and efficient army” and praises the Spartan practice of eugenics, which “placed a premium on physical beauty,” as can be seen in the Spartan women who “were a far cry from the muscle-bound behemoths one sees on Soviet women’s Olympic teams” but were “judged by other Greeks to be among the most beautiful and graceful, as well as the fairest, of Hellenic women.” This program, it claims, “not only eliminated the uncomely, the weak, and the deformed through a carefully supervised program of infanticide, but it went to considerable lengths to increase the number of offspring of the best men and women.” It also calls the “Crypteia,” when Spartan youths were supposedly given impunity to kill helots, an “admirable institution.” On Spartan eugenics there is a citation of an article available on Counter Currents, another white supremacist site that Pharos has documented.

Of the decline of Sparta, the article mentions  demographic problems resulting from their exclusive citizenship requirements, but places more emphasis on the “despicable vice” and “disease” of “homosexuality” as the cause of Sparta’s collapse. Nevertheless, it praises the Spartans because they “never succumbed to race mixing” and wishes, with “the advantage hindsight gives us,” that Sparta had “eliminat[ed] the helots of the Peloponnesus and the Mediterranean population of Crete altogether…to establish a purely Dorian peasant class in those areas,” which, in combination with “a successful eugenics program,” would have produced a “stable population.”

Athens

The article is dismissive of “The other Hellenic tribes” because they “did succumb to race mixing” and “suffered a decline in racial quality which resulted in their extermination.”

In the case of Athens, it claims that “The earliest Athenians were, like the other Hellenes, predominantly Nordic in blood and culture,” noting that the early aristocratic family of that city was called the “Eupatrids,” which it translates as “those who are well-sired.”The article admires periods in Athens’ history when “citizenship was still a racial matter” and condemns the early democratic reforms of Solon’s constitution for “shifting the ultimate criterion of fitness to rule from blood to gold.”  It then calls Cleisthenes’ democratic reforms “a program of gerrymandering which laid the basis for changing citizenship from a racial to a geographic affair.  From this point it was downhill all the way for Athens, racially speaking.”

According to the article, "every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship...much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British ’nobility’ by the score in recent decades."

According to the article Pericles’ law restricting citizenship to those whose mother and father were both citizens marked “a temporary halt to the pollution of the Athenian citizenry by the offspring of aliens,” but by the fourth century, “every variety of Levantine mongrel was claiming Athenian citizenship.” This anti-Semitic point is then supported with a modern comparison: according to the article, “The banking industry of Athens was entirely in the hands of Semites, who had taken Greek names and were awarded citizenship for ‘service to the state,’ much in the way Jews and Negroes have been elevated to the British ‘nobility’ by the score in recent decades.”

Homophobia

As noted above, the article attributes the decline of Sparta primarily to “the infection of the Dorians” with the “despicable vice” of “homosexuality.” Against overwhelming evidence for the significance of male/male erotic relationships in ancient Greece the article claims that “it would be rash to attribute a special weakness for homosexuality to the Greeks” and attributes that significance to a “moral decline” that goes “hand in hand” with “racial decline.” Its proof is “our experience in America,” where, it claims, “certain weaknesses in the social structure have come about and public tolerance of depravity has set in,” allowing homosexuality to “spread like wildfire.”

The article makes the following homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic claims about ancient sexuality:

• “As best we can judge from Homer’s epics, this vice was not a problem in the Heroic Age. All the heroes of the Iliad seem motivated by normal sexual drives.”
• “Even when homosexuality was most widespread, there were a great many Hellenes who remained untouched by it, still as healthy in their sexual attitudes as their Nordic forebears had been when they first arrived in the Mediterranean world.”
• “The ancient Hebrews, for example, practiced mass ritual masturbation and priestly buggery,” which it cites as evidence that homosexuality was not something the “Nordic” invaders brought with them but was “endemic” among the “native populations of the Mediterranean.”

These arguments appear in the 10th essay of a 26-part series, “Who We Are: A Series of Articles On the History of the White Race,” that were originally written by William L Pierce and that National Vanguard has reproduced on its site. The series begins with “the primordial atom” (arguing that black and white people should be considered separate species and that “miscegenation stifles evolutionary progress”) and ends with “The Jews’ Annihilation of Hitler’s Germany.” According to Pierce, “The record of the rise and fall of pure races constitutes the primary history of mankind, and the rise and fall of civilizations occupy a place of secondary importance.” The ultimate purpose of the series is to exhort readers to the “task” of preserving the white race in the face of a “radical dispossession of White Americans carried out in the name of ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’” which was “planned…and direct[ed by]…the Jews” in the “Multiracial Pseudo-nation” that America has, in the view of many white supremacists, become.

We have linked above to archived versions of National Vanguard posts to avoid generating traffic for the site. Their article about the Dorians itself can be read here.