Articles

Misogynist argues that Rape of the Sabines established “Female Privilege”

posted May 4, 2018

Purple Motes is the personal blog of a contributor to the misogynist site A Voice for Men whose work Pharos has documented previously. Perversely subtitled “a journal of whimsy and hope,” Purple Motes frequently invokes Greco-Roman antiquity in support of its particular breed of misogyny: exposing the supposed anti-male bias of the contemporary world and all the ways women enjoy special privileges. For example, a post from 2016 entitled “Sabine Women win Pyrrhic peace for Roman men argues that the Rape of the Sabine Women was beneficial for the women involved and established the foundations of discrimination against men that “Men’s Rights Activists” claim persists into the present day.

Nazi leader “re-brands” the Nazi salute as “Roman salute”

posted April 27, 2018

Jeff Schoep is the “commander” of the National Socialist Movement, one of the founding organizations of the Nationalist Front coalition of neo-Nazi groups. At a rally in Georgia on April 21st, 2018, reporter Christopher Mathias asked Schoep, “can we talk about the Nazi salutes your friends are giving on the stage?” In a video of the exchange taken by Mathias, Schoep disputed the term “Nazi salute” and said it was, instead, a “Roman salute.”

“Great European Leader” Hitler compared to Alexander the Great

posted April 20, 2018

Jason Jorjani, the founder of the xenophobic and neo-fascist site AltRight.com that Pharos has previously documented, called Hitler “a great European leader” like Alexander the Great in footage taken by an undercover agent of the British anti-extremist group Hope not Hate. This and other footage of Jorjani and his associates can be viewed in a New York Times article reporting on Hope Not Hate’s investigation.

Lucretia invoked to illustrate the desirability of being raped

posted April 11, 2018

“Feminists are Hysterical About Rape Because No Man Wants to Rape Them” is a recent headline on the misogynist site Return of Kings, whose appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity Pharos and others have documented. The article mocks the #metoo movement, accuses women of “manufacturing stories about sexual assault and rape,” and celebrates the “days of Vikings, global conquests, and crusades, where raping and pillaging were common” because women raped in that period “fulfilled their biological imperative…to pass on the strongest genes possible to her offspring.” The article features Hans van Aachen’s painting of The Rape of Lucretia (pictured below) in order to support the claim that being raped is desirable and to perpetuate the myth that only attractive women are raped.

Further racist backlash against “Black Achilles”

posted April 6, 2018

In January Pharos documented a racist site commenting on the casting of David Gyasi to play Achilles in the BBC’s miniseries Troy: Fall of a City. The racist backlash against this casting has not, however, been confined to this one site. With Netflix streaming the miniseries in the US beginning on April 6th, we are updating our survey of racist commentary on the show. Pharos contributor Tim Whitmarsh has already written an excellent response to many of the arguments found on the sites below for Radio Times. Our responses are now available.

White Supremacist Site celebrates Pericles’ Funeral Oration

posted March 30, 2018

Augustus Sol Invictus, who was the headline speaker at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 and whom the SPLC and Pharos have previously documented, publishes a website called The Revolutionary Conservative. The site’s mission statement endorses violence against Muslims, including “reconquista,” and against those who protest hate groups. Articles on the site promote anti-semitic paranoia about Jewish influence over the media and banking. One of the organizations listed on their “confederates” page of “colleagues, peers, brothers-in-arms, and friends” is a call-in show that can be reached at the number 424-3-GO-NAZI. They also have a page for Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ “Funeral Oration.”

Macrobius said to reveal unspeakable “gynocentric reality”

posted March 9, 2018

A Voice for Men is a platform for the “men’s rights movement.” It has recently been added to the SPLC’s list of hate groups for its advocacy of “male supremacy” and their “vilification of women” that “makes them no different than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT community, Muslims or Jews.” They also post frequently about Greco-Roman antiquity: a post on A Voice for Men claims that Macrobius’ Saturnalia reveals the “gynocentric reality” of the fifth century CE, when this fictional account of the conversation at an elite dinner-party was composed. In Macrobius’ time, according to the post, there were greater “constraints on men’s behavior” than on women’s.[Update: Pharos had documented another article by this author]

Scholars Respond to misogynist nostalgia for Roman Masculinity

posted March 5, 2018

Pharos documented a post on Return of Kings (now listed by the SPLC as a “male supremacy” hate group) that complained that “there are very few institutions left that teach the traditional manly character that built all of Western Civilization.” The post recommends that men emulate Roman virtus, which the post translates as “manly character,” and, as a corrective to the “degradation of values” in the present, urges them to “adopt…the very way of life that ushered our civilization into the once-great civilization it has been in the past.”

Inequality in the Confederacy “a manifestation of ancient Greece and Rome”

posted February 19, 2018

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.”

Juvenal made to support modern homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny

posted February 9, 2018

Those Who Can See is a site that promotes “Human Biodiversity”/”HBD”, a euphemism used by racists for [pseudo]scientific racism. It also appropriates Greco-Roman antiquity in support of its racist, xenophobic, and misogynist agenda. A post that takes its title “O Tempora, O Mores” from Cicero’s first Catilinarian oration uses the Roman satirist Juvenal, the poet Martial, and the philosopher Seneca to portray several Obama-era progressive policies as evidence for America’s decline: President Obama’s announcement in 2012 that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, Obama’s implementation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012, and the Military Leadership Diversity Commission’s recommendation in 2011 that women be allowed to serve in combat roles in the US Military.

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