Classics and the Modern Alt Right, with Curtis Dozier

Welcome to the Chameleon Classics podcast. I'm the assistant producer, Malin Haye. When Trump-supporting terrorists stormed the United States Capitol in January 2021, you might have noticed that some among them wore helmets based on Spartan designs. The Association of Extreme Right Political Beliefs with Nostalgia for the Greco-Roman Past may not seem obvious, but it's a link that can be traced as far back as the Nazis, as we heard in episode eight of our podcast with Helen Roche. Professor Curtis Dosier is based at Vasa College and he leads Farros, Doing Justice to the Classics, an online project that documents the use of classical imagery and ideas by far-right groups in America. Today, he's talking to our host Chevexar not just about what these right-wing groups get wrong about their classical sources, but what they get right, and what that means for classics in the 21st century. Hello, Curtis, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me today. Why don't you tell us, just to begin with, Curtis, an introduction to Farros and the work it's doing and sort of how this all began. In 2016, Donna Zuckerberg, writing at Eidolon, her journal for classics in contemporary culture at that time, wrote a piece, How to be a Good Class Assist under a Bad Emperor, talking about how she had observed in her work on that journal that white supremacist organizations online, at that time we called them the alt-right, were very interested in Greco-Roman antiquity. And she was trying to raise awareness of that and point it out to a scholarly community that, for the most part, certainly among white people in this scholarly community, were either in denial about this or just completely unaware that it was happening. And in that article, she suggested that she was interested in creating a platform to document examples of these appropriations of ancient Greece and Rome. And at that time, I was looking for a new project. I had done some writing for Eidolon before that, and I reached out to Dr. Zuckerberg, and I told her, I think I have some institutional resources I could use for this. I think I'm interested in trying it out. And a year later in November of 2017, I launched the site, Ferros. And initially, the project was devoted to documenting examples of hate groups using ancient Greece and Rome and then pointing out and correcting distortions and errors in those appropriations. And we did some great work with that, especially collaborating with specialists in classics and ancient history on many of the topics that came up. But over time, I came to realize that what I wanted to do was put more emphasis on the documentary aspect. And so for the last several years, that's really where I've put my effort, because I started to sense that the more significant work was the work of raising awareness about the phenomenon of white ethno-nationalist interest in ancient history, and in really trying to put front and center some of what I came to see as the similarities between the way they approach the study of ancient Greece and Rome and things I recognized from my training as a classical scholar and my acculturation as a white classical scholar and from the history of our discipline. What's so interesting about your work is that you're very specifically looking at contemporary phenomenon. So you talk about, for example, you have an article on the U.S. Capitol Riot, we'll also link that. The Hundred Hounds of Flyers campaign in the U.K., which anyone in the U.K. will probably remember when they did have a fake Extinction Rebellion account. That sort of made quite a few headlines here. And you talk about how these two are just two examples, sort of contemporary examples of how classics is being appropriated right now. I mean, the Classical Riot, you know, January 6th this year. So it's really a contemporary phenomenon. It's not something that we just need to look back to Nazi Germany or whatever and sort of keep in the past, in a way. Right. What I'm trying to show on the site is the ongoing continuity between the kind of historical work that's been done by the experts you've had on your show and contemporary white, that's no nationalist movements, that we appropriation of Greco-Robin antiquity in support of racist and violent politics didn't end with the defeat of the Nazis and the Fascists in World War II, but has continued in the intervening period and is alive and well, especially online today. The examples you give of the Capitol Riot and the Hundred Handers in the U.K. are good examples because those have a lot of public visibility and they aren't just online, right? They're actually action in IRL, as we would say, in the real world. You know, if you look at those examples, you can see at the Capitol Riot, for example, there were some of the people attacking the U.S. Capitol building were wearing Spartan style helmets or waving flags displaying either the ancient Greek phrase "Molon Labe" or its translation "Come and take them." That's a saying that is attributed in some late ancient sources to the Spartan general Leonidas, who led the Spartan contingent at the Battle of Thermopylae. When the Persians came to Sparta and said, "Well, we're going to invade Greece with a massive army and things are going to go better for Sparta if you would just turn over your weapons to us now and collaborate," Leonidas is said to have replied, "Come and take them." That's a kind of rallying cry, particularly for people who promote the wide available of guns in the United States, but there's a lot of overlap between that community and white supremacist communities and kind of anti-government groups who regard the U.S. government as a totalitarian regime that needs to be overthrown, similar to the Persians. In a sense, it wasn't surprising to find Spartan imagery and phrases at the attack on the capital. The Hundred Handers in the U.K. are an interesting example in different ways in that they're actually using a classical monster as their mascot. I guess you would say the Hundred Handers were some of the primordial monsters described in Hesiod's Theogony, who the Olympian gods had to suppress as part of establishing their hegemony. And again, there's a kind of anti-contemporary regime as they conceive it, vibe in invoking these monsters as their inspiration for their racist flaring campaigns in the U.K. and elsewhere. So those are just a couple of public-facing or prominent examples, but what I've really become interested through working in the site is what some specialists working on what supremacy call high-brow white nationalism or academic white nationalism. And there's this whole ecosystem of people who are writing about the ancient world in a way that positions them as -- I think they like to think of themselves as thought leaders in white ethno-nationalism, if you like. They use all the trappings of academic discourse. They cite their sources. They include bibliographies of scholarship they've consulted in their articles. Many of them have PhDs, by the way. If you look at the Hundred Handers or the U.S. Capitol Riot, the actors there seem to kind of conform to certain stereotypes about what a racist looks like. But the people on these thought leader sites, as I call them, many of them have PhDs. Many of them have taught or do teach at academic universities. It's not just left to -- and I think this is what you're saying -- it's not just left to the sort of assumed racist that you're hiding behind their keyboard anymore. There are people with doctorates. There are people even at the riot who were very well educated that don't fit into the stereotype of being the white nationalist. It's also worth noting that with the new government change in the U.S. they have now made white nationalism the biggest terrorist threat -- forget about international terrorism -- the biggest terrorist threat to the U.S. -- and I would say the same to the U.K. that it's not been designated here as such -- is internal white nationalism and white supremacy. So this is not a sort of fringe issue either with the people who are doing it or its effect anymore, I mean, as the riot has -- as the insurrection really has very much proved. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I think the only thing I'll say about the insurrection is that if it looks like the engagement with ancient history from people wearing helmets and waving flags, it's not very sophisticated or there's not a lot of depth to it, or the use of the hundred handers as an inspiration looks like a kind of simplistic gesture. But if you go on to -- if you go into these sites, the ones that are described as hybrid white nationalism, you find a lot of depth in the engagement with the ancient world. And, you know, that forms a kind of intellectual foundation and sort of almost philosophical foundation for some of the violent action in the real world that we see, because that's the place where I see the most intersection between the approaches being taken by these white ethno-nationalists and ways that I've been trained or learned or acculturated to approach the ancient world. Well let's talk about the ancient world for a moment. So let's look at some of the texts, like Plato's Republic, which as far as I'm aware I think is still the most read classical text. Certainly in the U.S. it's part of the great books. You know, you're off -- you're probably going to read it as a freshman there. It's not that they have nothing to draw on, right, from the ancient world. They are using things like Plato, Aristotle as their inspiration. So tell us a little bit about the sort of origin text some of them are using. I said that originally my approach was to try to complicate or refute the ways that these groups were talking about the ancient world. But over time I came to realize the documentary aspect was more important. And that was because they actually find a lot in ancient material that they don't need to distort. They don't need to distort it to claim it as material that supports the politics they want to promote in the present. Plato's Republic is a good example in that description of the supposedly ideal state. The character of Socrates recommends what we would understand to be eugenic measures, both the control of who is allowed to reproduce and the control of which babies are allowed to survive. The interpretation of the passage is a little uncertain. It's not clear whether Socrates is suggesting that they be killed or that they be segregated somewhere outside of the ideal state. But it looks very much like a recommendation of eugenic measures which conform very directly to white ethno-nationalist belief in hierarchy and the sort of essential superiority of some groups of people over other people to say nothing of, you know, genocidal attempts to implement such eugenic measures throughout history. Another text they cite a lot is Aristotle's politics, which is notorious in academic circles for Aristotle's theory that some kinds of people are slaves by nature. Interestingly, they don't cite that passage very frequently. They're much more interested in Aristotle's reflections on ideal constitutions and the ideal composition of a citizenry. And they focus very much on passages in the politics where Aristotle gives examples of mixed populations leading to civil strife because one of the central beliefs of white ethno-nationalism is that any kind of difference in a citizen body will inevitably, they believe, lead to conflict. So they find in Aristotle what they believe is confirmation of that idea from a very respected historical figure. They're very interested in the Greek city-states in the poles of the classical period especially, which they regard and describe as the first ethno-states, that is the first racially pure nation-states, they believe. And in that, they point to things like Pericles' citizenship laws in classical Athens. Pericles in Athens is commonly thought of as a pinnacle of ancient civilization, but it had a extremely exclusive citizenship system where the only way to be a citizen was to be the child of both parents who were citizens. And foreigners really had no opportunity to obtain citizenship and in fact were subject to special taxes and other burdens. So they see that as a desirable way to manage citizenship and they see the idea that this took place in Pericles in Athens as proof that that is a key to civilizational success. And then on the other side, they're very interested in so-called fall of the Roman Empire as proof that immigration, multiculturalism destroys civilization. So those are some periods of history that they talk about a lot. And like I say, you can kind of complicate the view that they're taking. They have a simplistic reading of the sources. They take the sources at face value for the most part. There's a lot of ancient experience that is ignored in their analysis. But I think fundamentally, Aristotle and Plato did recommend these things. The Greek city-states did practice exclusive citizenship. And so it feels to me like our work, the important work is not in trying to show that the ancient sources do not support them but in admitting that there's a lot in the ancient sources that's congenial to white ethno-nationalist politics. And that of course is the reason these groups are so interested in the Greco-Roman world because they, for two reasons, they find a lot that is congenial to their politics there, as we've just been discussing. But also, that period of history is widely admired and respected. And so it becomes a source of legitimacy and respectability for their ideas. If they can point to someone like Aristotle or Plato or Peraklion Athens or the Roman Empire, all periods of history that are widely believed to be significant, are widely believed to be populated by great minds whose ideas are worth taking seriously, that have a long history of being used as models and anti-models for the present, they're going to do that because their goal is not to understand history but to give legitimacy to the ideas they want to promote in the present. And of course, we've seen consistently in the history of both of our countries, whether it be the UK's massive colonial project, I mean, project is a very kind way of putting it, and slavery in the US, the Enlightenment in the US, eugenics movement in the US. I mean, this is not something without history. I mean, this has been used for a very long time as a way to legitimize the most horrendous parts of both of our country's histories. And that's why actually, we really need to think about the legitimacy and the history in the same breath because part of the legitimacy is the oldness of the ideas. And in a sense, the continuity of the ideas, they will look at colonial projects, they will look at institutions of enslavement, and they will say, these are times when these ancient ideas were being used, these ideas were the normative way of looking at, they will claim these ideas were the normative way of looking at human relations for all of history. So why aren't we using them now? These are time tested, tried and true ideas, they would say. And so the farther back in the past, the past that they can push them, the more legitimacy they believe it gives them, because in general, again, a central sort of tenet of white ethno nationalist thought is that the contemporary world has degenerated or is in irrevocable decline. And so they like to look at big sweeps of human history and say, these were periods where we knew what we were doing, say by having violent politics and hierarchical social structures and so on. And now that we've tried to get away from those, everything is falling apart, they claim. So the historical nature is part of the legitimacy in addition to the prominence in the public imagination that classical ideas have. And by the way, they're very explicit about that. There's an article on the Daily Stormer, the most notorious and violent neo-nazi site in the world, that actually is a discussion of theories of classicism that uses a book about the classicism of the 19th century in the United States to talk about the significance of Greco-Roman antiquity for the white ethno nationalist movement. And they are able to quote that book, that book's analysis of classicism that ancient models or ancient materials served as models and anti models and sources of wisdom and sources of virtue and sources of continuity of identity with ancestors. These are all the ways that white ethno nationalists use it. But this book is, which is not a white ethno nationalist book, it's just a scholarly accounting of 19th century attitudes towards antiquity. They overlap quite a bit. And then on an even sort of punchier note, there was a white supremacist organization in the United States called Identity Europa for a number of years, which would leave racist flyers using classicizing imagery on college campuses as a way of terrorizing those campuses and recruiting. And that group, one reason that group fell apart is because a hacker group got ahold of their discord blogs and released this giant cache of the sort of chat conversations of the members of this group. And inside that, inside that cache, one person in the group asked, shouldn't we be focusing more on Germanic and Norse mythology? Isn't that really better for the racial claims we're trying to make? And one of the organizers of the groups replied and said, yes, those would be better for the racial claims we're trying to make, but they're not as widely respected and as widely known as classical material. So we're going to use the classical material. I mean, that in itself is shows that how self aware they are of the power of the material they're using. But I think what you what you know to the sort of double history is very, very important and again is often ignored by the field. And you've got the history, you've got the original source text, you've got the two and a half thousand year old texts that do talk about these things. But as you say, you've also got basically half a millennia at the very least right from the 17th century onwards, a massive canon of text after text after text after text from writers, very well respected writers through Europe and obviously in the US, that talk about the classics in that way. And you write in one of your articles on your site, you talk about how you know, there's scholars from the early 20th century who talk about all of this, they analyze the text, these are respected scholars at the time publishing scholarly texts that talk about the things in the same way that in Nazi Germany, you had a lot of the classic professors in in the most respected universities in Germany, some of the most respected universities in Europe, appropriating classics in the classroom and in the books they wrote for, for the Nazi regime. So it's a double history. And part of the issue is obviously that even if we accept the original texts have this history. Classics also needs to come to terms with accepting that there's a good canon of 500 years of modern classics, sort of accepting the creation of the field is based almost on the acceptance of this and a whole bunch of academic texts spanning right up really to the 50s and 60s. Yeah, that's exactly right. So if you look at some of the texts we were just talking about earlier, Plato and Aristotle and so on, you can actually make an argument that Plato doesn't intend for us to accept Socrates's arguments at all points in the dialogue. There's all these ironizing readings of the Republic that recognize the flaws in some of the claims Socrates makes and so on. So you know, there's a dramatic setting which, you know, the sort of surface reading of the of the claims being made doesn't always take account of so that would be the way to complicate the use of Plato's Republic as a recommendation for eugenic measures. But for most of the history of the interpretation of Plato, and really up to the present day, you know, that has not been the dominant way of reading Plato the dominant way of reading Plato has been to say that, for the most part, Plato accepts us to expects us to accept Socrates's point of view. And that has enabled people to use the Republic as a justification for eugenics in many periods. And similarly with Aristotle, it's his prestige as a thinker, you know, he's routinely shows up on the greatest, most influential philosophers or even human beings lists that you any of those lists you can find, he routinely shows up on those and and that really provides endorsement throughout history of for his ideas, which were used to justify enslavement in the United States, which are implicated because of his claims about environmental determinism, the way that geography affects the nature of people who are born there in unchangeable ways that's implicated in the history of all kinds of racist thinking, and all that sort of rests on his prestige as a thinker. And you're very right to say that's not just something that happened in in the in the fourth century when he was writing, but something that has been reinforced through time by the way those texts have been used. And so, again, I think if we focus on trying to refute the use of these texts, that's important. But if we focus on that, we run the risk of ignoring that history, that the thing that we are refuting may actually reflect the dominant mode of interpretation for half a millennium, if not, in some cases two and a half millennia. We've sort of got one of the solutions, if you'd like, which is to incorporate the history of classical interpretation and really recognize that history and take responsibility for it as a field as well, which is a whole other conversation, but actually accepting that classics has been used in that way and incorporating hopefully right down to teaching in curricula that the original texts say this and 500 years of scholarship say this, that's a one real way to begin breaking down and sort of resisting. It helps us sort of resist the impulse of also making this civilization, high civilization, great past really that idealization, that's one of the ways that we can, we can move away from this. Another one that you've done is correcting some of the errors, which I know you say you don't do as much anymore for this very reason, but you, you know, go over where those those faux, and maybe not always faux academic arguments break down. Another thing you're doing is of course documenting all of these uses. So that's three, but what are some of the things that we should continue doing and we I actually mean that both as you as an academic, but those of us who also use the classics interact with the classics respect the classics love putting them on work with them theatrically. What should also be done in this, in this attempt to dismantle the superiority of the classics and begin dismantling this extremely dark history of the classics as well. I want to put the emphasis kind of just add emphasis to what you said about including the the historical perspective on the uses of antiquity in our curricula because I actually think a lot of professional scholars are aware of that history, but they don't make it a routine part of the way they talk about the discipline and talk about the value of the discipline so I mean you put it very well that that it's not just enough to know that but it needs to be sort of enacted as part of the way we present the discipline and by the way I don't think we need to worry about that hurting harming the the status of the discipline I think actually in an increasingly multicultural world in a world that is increasingly aware of the violence that forms of knowledge per perpetrate presenting our discipline as a way to understand part of the history of of racist and xenophobic ideas is actually a very valuable contribution we can make to to the study of history and to human progress. So I think we need to as you say we need to be aware of of that history the way classics has been used in particular in support of violence and we need to make make that part of the way we represent the discipline both to our students and and publicly because what I feel is really core to the way the hate groups use antiquity is this uncritical admiration for antiquity that's the that's the fundamental thing it's this idea of classicism if you like the putting of ancient civilizations on a pedestal as primarily or even wholly admirable and deserving of emulation and so I think we need to be doing as much as we can to tell a much more complex history of both the violence inherent in classical culture and the violence that is such a big part of the history of that of the way that culture has been used and implemented in the world and what I think that leads to I think or or maybe actually not where it leads to but where all that starts I think is with an act of self reflection that people who are engaged in the study or promotion or even just enjoyment of the ancient world should engage in is think about our own relationship to the ancient world how that relationship was was formed by certain assumptions about the value of the ancient world and really look at the way those assumptions ignore some of the violent history that we've been talking about and that's going to look different for different people right I mean some people if your identity is one of a colonized person then probably the violence of the ancient world is going to be a lot more obvious to you when you encounter it then it is for me as a white American man right for me this is a task of excavating how I came to classics and the things that I reflexively believed about what that would mean for me and my value as a human being and not every person in the world has that relationship but when you look at the overwhelming whiteness of the discipline for example you can it's I think it's at least reasonable to say that a lot of those ideas about the superiority of Western civilization the elevating power of the classics the idea of a valuable inheritance that I at least personally wanted to associate myself with I can now see by by studying this those ideas I think are pretty pretty prevalent maybe lurking in the background maybe not informing the way we do our scholarship but maybe informing the way we promote our discipline or justifies existence or maybe even just the way we motivate ourselves to go into the classroom every day and I really think we need to examine those and so I think what I'm trying to do with the documentary side of my of my work is sort of invite that act of self reflection whatever that looks like for you and your background in in classics and invite that exploration of maybe the unstated assumptions about the value of the classical world that are underpinning your relationship to it absolutely I think having that documentation I think one of the other things and this is a big problem everywhere we don't like to document the bad things and by documenting actually having it there as a record it's no way to deny it and I'm actually going to add one other thing to my to my list which is another really easy solution certainly that comes to my mind is if we just change and I know your your your faculty isn't called classics faculty right it's called a Greek and Roman antiquity faculty which is part of the way there but the other thing is we start expanding our idea of what classics is if we include Egypt at the very very start but then Persia and Asia Minor and the Mediterranean in general and we actually start to understand that in a midst even the ancient world in a midst all of these texts was a huge amount outside of just the borders of Greek and Roman borders that were constantly changing and interact and interacting with a massive amount of other people people from the African continent and from the Asian continent for sure we can immediately complicate the idea of some white classical past from its very source because no one in that white classical past imagined a white classical past and they certainly didn't experience one so part of the solution is simply just realizing that this time two and a half thousand years ago to two thousand years ago or whenever was in itself not one of just Greeks and Rome but one of a great number of civilization and yes part of the step of that is changing this name classics to just what it is which is Greek and Roman study and then incorporating in classics a whole bunch of other study which of course a wealth of academics are trying to do now because all of us in some way I do think idealized antiquity whether for us it's this idea of the birth of Western theater or whatever it is it's got to be thought about in one of these these other bizarre fears and pushbacks is that well why don't we just scrap the classics I don't think neither one of us is saying we need to scrap them in fact what we're saying is we need to study them more and in more detail and with much more perception and in a much more extensive way than we've studied them before let me just say one more thing about that because one of the biggest similarities between the approach to Greco-Roman antiquity on the white ethno nationalist sites and the traditional study of classics is that the white ethno nationalist sites take a very narrow view of what Greco-Roman antiquity includes they are only interested in a narrow set of regions as you brought up the different the regional question sort of where are the geographic boundaries of antiquity that are interested in a very narrow set of people only men only politically powerful and wealthy men only geographically central men and so on they take a very narrow you might say curated way of constructing what Greco-Roman antiquity includes but that act that way that narrow view of what Greco-Roman antiquity includes is the dominant mode of studying antiquity one that excludes a lot of geographical variety a lot of we would say now socioeconomic variety a lot of gender variety and so on and so that you're exactly right that we need to study more I like that way of putting it and I just want to add that the moreness has always been needed in the discipline even without the white ethno nationalist they look like an old-fashioned traditional canonical scholars of classics in a lot of ways and so when we when we expand in the way you're describing that is a way to break their hold on what antiquity is that's a brilliant way of putting it and I think we have basically solved classics in the last half an hour so let's hope everyone in in acts and we won't have to keep talking about this but of course that isn't the case but this has been a very very enlightening and a very comprehensive podcast so we thank you very very much for your time today Curtis thanks so much for having me on the show thank you for listening to this episode of chameleon classics brought to you by chameleon productions you can find details of our guests work in the notes for this episode at chameleon productions dot org slash classics podcast you will also find a list of further reading if you want to know more about any of the topics covered in this episode for more information about chameleon productions including details of our upcoming film of euripides's medea head to our website or follow us on twitter at chameleon p instagram at chameleon productions and facebook this podcast was produced and hosted by shavek char the editor was Stephanie chungu and the assistant producer was malin hay