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

    • dpunked@feddit.deEnglish
      391·
      1 year ago

      You should talk to the holy roman empire of german nations then

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      34·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • randomsnark@lemmy.mlEnglish
      20·
      1 year ago

      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.

    • s_s@lemmy.oneEnglish
      21·
      1 year ago

      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.