Doing Justice to the Classics
Simple announcement of appropriations online
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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,” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.”
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 […]
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.”
