apricops: the tendency for racists and white supremacists to go gaga over their idea of ancient Rome is so darkly hilarious because of how entirely wrong it is. It’s not a twisting of some kernels of truth, it’s not a misinterpretation, it’s just the exact opposite, and people in Western Europe has been doing it for so long. For centuries people in Britain and Germany would be like/have been like “ah yes, we are special and superior because we are the heirs of the superior Romans” while next to a giant pile of writings by respected Ancient Romans who went “god, Britain is a dump and Germany is full of idiot barbarians. I wish I lived somewhere cool and cultured like Syria or Tunisia.”
occultbookstores: Someone wrote once that Fascism is Roman bimbofication and that’s been living in my head rent-free.
Here’s some homework for you: https://piped.video/watch?v=sEjCNzGOe3Q
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It goes back far further than that.
What historians called the Empire of the Greeks and later the Byzantine Empire , inhabitants called the Roman Empire or republic. Because it was, but western Europeans didn’t want to admit that for numerous reasons.
I mean… which Europeans and when? Because I studied Roman Law with a book written by a fascist, and it sure as hell had a TON of stuff about Iustinianus in there that you were supposed to learn, and that guy lived in full-on Istambul.
If anything I see the distinction between a “Roman” and a “Byzantine” empire more in English texts these days. It’s not like the Brits and the American so-called “founding fathers” didn’t have a massive hard-on for that era and the idealized common law take on their legal system.
I guess this counts as my “thinking of the Roman Empire” for the day. Time to reset that counter to 0 days.
Not Constantinople?
We are treading on very dangerous ground right now.
Because if I say “Now it’s Istambul, not Constantinople” this thread is doomed.
Wait…
Why’d they change it?
I can’t say
People just liked it better that way
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Its ignoring that the Romans brutally conquered and colonized western Europe, oddly in pretty much the exact same manner that western Europe did roughly 1500-1800 years later to much of the world.
Aka: Go in with violence, kill off and enslave upwards of a quarter to a third of the population, then trick the rest into giving you their lands with promises of fairness and copious alcohol.
Also, Roman culture damn near worshiped the Greeks.
They literally used the “noble savage” trope to describe the people of western Europe.
We went overboard on the kill off.and enslave in the Americas. 90% of the population of both continents straight up died.
Yes. There is evidence to suggest that while they(Europeans) definitely took advantage of the deaths, most of the deaths were accidental from disease. Not all of the disease was maybe quite so accidental though.
E.G. one recorded instance in the 7 years war where British/American forces delivered blankets as a gift to nearby natives, some of the blankets were from the infirmary where there was smallpox. However, the notes and letters we have don’t inform us as to whether that was an intentional move on the part of the fort commander, or a logistical error that resulted in the gift being tainted.
Yeah but that was an accident, we gave the poor bastards the plague. Whereas most/all of the killing done in other places was, well, by hand.
Little bit of column A, and a little bit of we have guns…
It is looking for only the dumb pretty parts of Rome and forgetting the rest.
I don’t think German people see themselves as Romans.
You should talk to the holy roman empire of german nations then
Also: Speak to all people on the west-side of the river rhine.
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Maybe not nowadays, but you know how much the third reich tried to symbolically align themselves with the Roman Empire, right? To wit:
On the other hand, additional elements of Roman culture were manipulated by Nazi officials in order to claim a racial affinity with classical Rome, associated in turn with a strong autocratic political system and a militaristic society, which would then be represented as productive of a flourishing civilisation.
Emphasis mine. It’s deeper than that, but there was absolutely a conscious internal propaganda effort in Nazi Germany to represent their “new world order” as aligned with the Roman Empire in a racial, societal, and aesthetic sense.
I don’t know about modern Germans, but the nazis definitely appropriated and identified with classical Roman and Greek culture (here’s one well-regarded book exploring this).
Given that the original post is about fascism and racial supremacy, I assume any German fascists/supremacists it’s referring to share some ideology with the nazis in this regard.
Well, “the people” were told by the nobility that the nobility was roman descendants and that’s why they were supposed to rule over them.
In certain places The Hanseatic League said, “horseshit, we actually make things, what do you do?”
But the lay farmers mostly just went along with it.
So no, modern Germans don’t see themselves as Roman, but that was an important part of the lie that propogated feudalism and held power over those peoples for thousands of years.
I don’t feel like the British align themselves with the Romans either. Just one of many invaders. Has anyone got an example of the British considering themselves ’heirs’ to Rome?
When Boris Johnson wanted to appear “smart” he’d trot out a little Latin, and the Right Wing types would just swallow the whole turd and ask for more
Unfortunately this is true. Arguably it says more about the class system in this country than historical allegiances, but yeah, good point.
No, but I’ve seen plenty o’ people calling themself special compared to people equally wait to us. Having a brit call themself better than a Lithuanian or polish because they’re a different kind of white just boggles my mind
Yeah, being a supposed “heir to the Romans” wouldn’t make anyone “superior” in the slightest. Romans had quite a few flaws themselves.
Besides, I could argue that the metaphorical blood of Roman influence is splattered evenly across the walls of the world, meaning all remaining humans would be heirs to Rome, by that logic.
