Articles

Is Pharos Worth It?

posted February 6, 2018

Site News/Editorial

by Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

A reader wrote with a question that a few of the specialists we’ve contacted for comment have also raised. It’s one I wonder about every day that I work on Pharos.

Is it really worth taking seriously, and replying to, posts by such nutcakes? These are nobodies, and nobody cares what they say. Why draw attention to it and thereby gratify them?

My candid answer is that I don’t know whether it’s worth it, I don’t know whether it helps or hurts to make people aware that these sites exist, and I don’t know whether this kind of attention gratifies them or not. I don’t know how one could know, in fact. But I’ve decided that raising awareness of these appropriations and creating a forum where interested specialists can contribute to responses is preferable to ignoring them, because:

Feminism blamed for fall of Rome

posted February 2, 2018

The blog Château Heartiste, which in a recent post on “How to Solve Feminism” argues that “The solution to feminism… is to Make Men Dominant Again” because “Weak men create a sexual polarity void which is filled with spiteful hags and bitter careerist shrikes who subconsciously resent their empowerment,” cites with approval a long Reddit post on how feminism was responsible for the fall of Rome and attempts to find parallels in American history. In addition, the blog post injects xenophobia into the narrative presented in the reddit post. Both posts were originally written in response to an article in the New York Times arguing that legislative and policy advances for women have required advocacy from men and will continue to do so.

Hercules invoked to oppose gender equality

posted January 25, 2018

Among recent posts at the misogynist site Return of Kings (“3 ways to sleep with women at your job”; “Don’t let your girlfriend have homosexual friends”; “Saudi Arabia grants citizenship to female robot that is more pleasing than most human women”) is a piece entitled “How men can live in the spirit of Plus Ultra,” the national motto of Spain which means, in Latin, “further beyond.” The article argues that men should take inspiration from this motto, and, implicitly, Spain’s early-modern imperial project, and go “beyond” what they believe is possible for themselves, just as Spanish vessels refused to be limited by the traditional boundaries of Europe.

Violent misogyny, white nationalism, and anti-Clinton apparel

posted January 18, 2018

A store on Zazzle.com, an online marketplace for customized merchandise, sells shirts, tank-tops, and coffee mugs featuring a violently misogynist image that appropriates classical antiquity: Cellini’s “Perseus with the head of Medusa” (1545-1554), with the face of Donald Trump superimposed on that of Perseus and that of Hillary Clinton superimposed on the severed head of Medusa.

Racist reaction to David Gyasi playing Achilles in BBC/Netflix “Troy” Miniseries

posted January 11, 2018

David Gyasi, a London-born actor of Ghanaian descent, plays the role of Achilles in the BBC’s and Netflix’ miniseries Troy: Fall of a City. Implicitly racist reactions to this casting have appeared on social media and in the comments sections of press about the show. The topic has now been taken up on Stuff Black People Don’t Like, a site run by Paul Kersey, author of the book Whitey on the Moon, which attributes “the demise of NASA” to “the promotion of blackness and diversity, at the expense of the initial dream of exploring the stars.” [Update: Pharos has documented further examples of racist backlash against the casting.]
[Update: Pharos has published a series of responses from scholars to this backlash.]In the case of Troy: Fall of a City, Kersey accuses the producers of “deconstruct[ing] white mythic heroes to nothing more than Africans” and likens “casting black actors in white roles” to the long-standing practice of “whitewashing” in film, which systematically perpetuates racist stereotypes and limits non-white actors’ opportunities to appear in major productions.

Plato, White Supremacy, and Totalitarianism

posted December 20, 2017

The “American New Right” site counter-currents.com promotes the ethnonationalist idea that “every distinct ethnic group should enjoy political sovereignty and an ethnically homogeneous homeland.” This site published an essay using Plato to argue in support of modern fascism, which, the article claims, “shares with Classical political philosophy…an adherence to an authoritarian and hierarchical communitarianism.”

The white supremacist with a Roman name: Augustus Sol Invictus

posted December 15, 2017

Augustus Sol Invictus was one of the headline speakers at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, where a white supremacist killed one and injured nineteen counter-protestors. Invictus recently abandoned his campaign in Florida’s 2018 Senate race. The SPLC has documented his racist and antisemitic positions and his connections to white supremacists. Invictus was born Austin Gillespie, and Pharos’ particular interest in him lies in his decision to legally change his name to one resonant with Roman imperial history. His name apparently combines the title of the first Roman emperor, Caesar Augustus, whom Mussolini adopted as a model of a fascist leader, and, less obviously, the Roman cult name for the Syrian sun god Ilah hag-Gabal, which the emperor Elagabalus promoted. Later, the emperor Aurelian created an official Roman cult for Sol Invictus. Pharos is inviting specialists to examine the historical implications of the name.

“American Fascist Manifesto” begins with the Roman Republic

posted December 11, 2017

The white supremacist group Patriot Front‘s “American Fascist Manifesto” on their webpage, bloodandsoil.org, begins with an analogy between the United States and the fall of the Roman Republic. It calls for “a new Caesar to revive the American spirit.”

Scholars respond to Aristotle being enlisted in support of misogyny

posted December 6, 2017

In a guest-post on the website of Matt Forney, author of Do the Phillipines, “a thorough analysis of Philippine culture, to better help you bang girls,” John Saxon argues that “The greatest thinkers from antiquity to the modern day have seen that there is a very dark side to women, that if ignored…would lead to individual men and society coming undone.” His survey of philosophers begins with Aristotle, who he says defined “the essence of humanity as the capacity of reason, a capacity which he says makes women inferior to men,” and Plato, who, in the Timaeus, describes “a hierarchy of creation which places women closer to the animals than men are.” His conclusion is that because these “great thinkers” were misogynists, we should be too.

Neomasculine site argues for the revival of Roman “manly character”

posted December 4, 2017

A post on the neomasculine site Return of Kings argues that Rome was great because of its “manly character” and that the “degradation of values” in contemporary society derives from our abandonment of those “virtues.”

Update: Scholars Respond

by Curtis Dozier, Director of Pharos

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