Greek Myth and Apocalyptic European Nationalism 

This month is the fifth anniversary of the launch of Fabien Bièvre-Perrin’s Antiquipop, a website that, like Pharos, documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity in the contemporary world. But whereas the pages of Pharos are filled with regressive interpretations and distortions of the ancient past, Antiquipop celebrates the deployment and reanalysis of that past in contemporary art, film, fashion, and music. On Pharos you will find examples of Greco-Roman antiquity being used to exclude, to erase, to threaten, and to oppress. On Antiquipop you find engagements with antiquity that are intended to appeal to broad audiences, engagements that, by simultaneously invoking and questioning the prestige of the Classical past, promote a sometimes radically inclusive vision of what the Greco-Roman world might mean in the contemporary world. And so, in celebration of the fifth birthday of Antiquipop your friends at Pharos offer this documentation of some Classical references in the work of a prominent member of the French far right, as an illustration of how vital your work is to the project of rejecting the claims that hate groups make on the ancient past.

Guillaume Faye was a leading figure of the neo-Fascist “French New Right” whose writings, along with those of Alain de Benoiste, are considered required reading by many contemporary white supremacists. Faye’s work predicts that immigration by Muslims to Europe will lead to an “Ethnic Apocalypse” and a “Coming European Civil War” (the title of Faye’s last book, published in English with a foreword by the editor of a racist site Pharos has documented). Like another prominent French xenophobe, Renaud Camus, whose theory of a “Great Replacement” of white Europeans by Muslims is organized around a reading of Plato’s Cratylus, Faye makes frequent use of references to Greco-Roman antiquity in his work…

…read the rest of the article on Antiquipop in English or French.