Doing Justice to the Classics
This page collects examples of articles on prominent white supremacist websites that invoke the ancient city states of Athens and Sparta in support of hateful politics. In connection with the recommendations on our “How to use Pharos in the Classroom” page and our recommended discussion questions, they are intended to spark discussion and further research about […]
Thanks especially to the work of Sarah Bond and Myke Cole, the general public is increasingly familiar with white supremacists’ fetishization of Classical Sparta as a supposedly racially pure, hyper-masculine, hyper-militarized model for the totalitarian ethnostate they seek to bring about. Sparta is the ancient touchstone for hate groups that Pharos documents most frequently. What […]
The “Oath Keepers” is an anti-government and anti-immigration militia group in the United States that attempts to convince police officers, members of the U.S. military, and veterans to oppose any government policy they regard as “unconstitutional.” Although they formally disavow racism and white nationalism, their members’ and leadership’s actions indicate otherwise: their anti-government philosophy is similar […]
Provoked by the University’s cancellation of a speech by Milo Yiannopoulos, a group of right wing demonstrators held a rally in Berkeley, CA on April 15th, 2017. The stated goal was to protest what they perceived to be the infringement of free speech, but it wasn’t hard to see something much more abhorrent fueling the […]
As Pharos documented previously, Spartan helmets were among the symbols displayed by white nationalist, homophobic, anti-immigrant, and misogynisitc marchers in the April 2017 Berkeley protests. [Update: Read our response essay]
As reported by Mother Jones‘ Shane Bauer and at We Hunted the Mammoth, one group of “alt right” marchers at the April, 2017 Berkeley Protests waved a flag featuring a Spartan hoplite helmet, and another protester wore a replica of one. These protesters were on the same side as the leader of white supremacist group […]
Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people. Please read more. Nothing defines online communication in the twenty-first century like the meme. Perhaps surprisingly for a hypermodern medium, many memes incorporate images, myths, and themes from Greco-Roman antiquity; even the […]
Land Acknowledgement: Pharos is researched, written, and published online at Vassar College, an institution situated in the homeland of the Munsee Lenape people, who lived here for thousands of years before the arrival of European colonists and continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and […]
This article is a collaboration between Pharos and Professor Katherine Blouin, who first documented this material. She is one of the editors of Everyday Orientalism, a publication that “reflect[s] on how history and power shape the way in which human societies define themselves through the ‘Other’”. The “freedom convoy” was a Canadian protest that took […]
White Date is an all-white dating website that “invite[s] descendants of Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Finno-Ugric, Baltic, and Italic folks worldwide [to] find a traditionally minded partner online.” Talia Lavin has written an extensive exposé about this site in her book Culture Warlords: My Journey into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, but even a glance […]
