Episode 82: 'Western Civilization' and White Supremacy: The Right-Wing Co-option of Antiquity
The term "Western civilization" has long been a staple of the American Right, but with the recent resurgence of white nationalism, it is having something of a comeback. Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly are hosting a two-week Mediterranean "cruise thru history" to "explore the roots of Western civilization." The Intellectual Dark Web's Jordan Peterson tells us \u201cThe West is Right,\u201d while The Daily Caller and Fox News are busy \u201ccelebrating the West." Neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach hails \u201cYouth for Western Civilization." Both the traditional and so-called alt-right ground their worldviews in a fictional moral arc of "The West\u201d that bares little resemblance to reality. \xa0 Learning from the past and applying those lessons to the present is a good thing. But in pop political discourse, the Classics have been misused and abused to promote an origin story that never was - a white Greco-Roman world birthing our noble, so-called \u201cJudeo-Christian\u201d American empire to gloss over a history of exploitation, imperialism, slavery and conquest. \xa0 On this episode, we\u2019ll explore the right-wing obsession with the ancient world, it\u2019s influence on neoconservative empire-building and alt-right white nationalism alike, and how our common cultural understanding of the ancient world has been perpetually white-washed to promote a clash of civilizations narrative and racist pseudo-science. \xa0 We are joined by Dr. Sarah E. Bond, Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, and Dr. Cord Whitaker, Associate Professor at Wellesley College.