Satsuma's Journal

Posted by Bret Devereaux

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https://acoup.blog/?p=35753

Hey folks, Fireside this week! I’ve been a bit behind because we had some family travel followed by an issue with a water leak in the basement which has pushed me out of my normal home office space (fortunately no books or computers were harmed and we’re working on water damage restoration now). All of which has a nasty habit of throwing off your work schedule. For patrons wondering where the latest research update is – it is in much the same place, ‘coming’ and for much the same reason.

That said, I’ve wanted to do a musing for a few weeks expanding on some of my thoughts on what I am going to call ‘the chuds’¹ (often also referred to as the ‘statue pfps’)² a group of online ancient and medieval history ‘fans’ (mostly, but not exclusively, on Twitter) whose interest in the pre-modern past is anchored in extremely reactionary political ideology (generally some mix of racism, sexism and authoritarianism). I wrote something of an anthropology of this group for The Bulwark a month back, occasioned by bit of culture-war nonsense around the upcoming Odyssey adaptation which spilled over into a discussion of Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer. So I want to muse a bit on the oddity of ‘history fans’ who don’t know any history and why they end up that way.

Now, I should state at the outset that the structure of ‘chud classics’ on Twitter is a radicalization pipeline: the algorithm channels users who like more mild, less openly fascist accounts (and sometimes just straight up non-fascist ones) towards more concentrated more openly fascist accounts. As a result, there are some accounts at the ‘clean’ end of the pipe that are unobjectionable (I’ve never seen anything ‘off’ from @culturaltutor, for instance), but they’re tied together in the eco-system where if you follow one, you get recommended the others and at least some of the accounts in the middle are quite aware of what they’re doing, actively promoting accounts on the ‘sludge end’ of the pipe. This post is largely about accounts, however, on the sludge-end of the pipeline – @romanhelmetguy, @updatingonrome, @latinedisce, @thehellenist and so on. But I want to be clear, I’m not saying, ‘everyone in this pipe is a fascist,’ but I am saying, ‘the water in this pipe flows inexorably towards fascism’ (because the guy who owned Twitter has decided it should) and at the very least the fellows at the ‘clean’ end up the pipe never quite seem to denounce the sludge end.

What I want to return to is the oddity I pointed out in that piece that the chuds are both really attached to classical antiquity and also don’t know very much about it. Because the inciting incident was a debate over translating Homer, that point got expressed mostly in terms of the fact that a lot of the largest chud accounts that purport to explain antiquity to others don’t know Greek (which makes it pretty hard to have a useful opinion on a translation)! But that is hardly to limit of it: right after the Homer debate, one of the larger chuds got into a second argument with some actual classicists, outraged, Outraged! that they consider the stories in the first couple of books of Livy as basically fables, evidently unaware that among the figures who think the first five books of Livy might be unreliable is…Livy himself! He says as much at the beginning of book 6! But of course the fellow had never read beyond the cool legends in the first two books and so had no sense that the character of Livy’s history of Rome changes quite significantly as Livy gets access to better sources.

And I initially found that lack of knowledge actually kind of puzzling, because the chuds don’t have deep knowledge about any part of ancient or medieval history. That was initially surprising. Working on pre-gunpowder arms and armor, I am used to history enthusiast spaces (like HEMA or historical dress YouTube and such), where you have a lot of passionate, often self-taught folks who are interested in history. And the thing is, there’s a pattern for those folks, which is that they tend to have odd gaps and assumptions in their knowledge, but they also tend to be a mile deep in the details of the specific things that interest them. It’s the classic, ‘guy who has at best a fuzzy sense of what Reconstruction was but can tell you the exact position of every Maine regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg, hour by hour’ sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong – that can have its own problems (especially for the American Civil War) – but there’s deep knowledge about something there.

To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. As a history educator, engaging with that autodidact enthusiast can be really rewarding, because they are often really excited to let you basically ‘widen’ their potholes, to overstretch the metaphor.

But the chuds…it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.

This really started striking me when I got a bunch of them mad about ‘Great Man’ history (a topic we need to address at some length at some point), because they all had the same very short list of available ‘great men.’ For antiquity, it was Julius Caesar and Alexander III over and over again.

Put aside the problems with pure, uncut ‘Great Man’ history. Never Demosthenes or Iphikrates or Seleucus I Nicator. Or on the Roman side, always Julius Caesar, never Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (or Lucius Cornelius Scipio Asiaticus), Titus Quinctius Flamininus, or Lucius Aemilius Paullus, much less Appius Claudius Caecus or Marcus Tullius Cicero. Or, of course, our boy, the man, the legend, Publius Ventidius Bassus ::airhorn sounds::. Of for the guys who are really into the crusades (for really unfortunate reasons), it’s all vague AI images of ‘crusaders’ (invariably Templars), rather than anyone, like, pouring over the details of the Siege of Acre (1189-1191) during the Third Crusade. The pool of their knowledge is all puddle, no potholes – there’s no depth anywhere.³

Which is so strange if you approach the ‘chud community’ as a group of misguided ‘history buffs,’ but suddenly makes sense if you understand them effectively working backwards to their fascination with antiquity.

They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.

I actually wrote this all last Monday and then, after I had written it all, Vice President Vance, of all people, provided a nearly perfect perfect example of this process of working backwards from ideology to the past. In a passage in his book (which I encountered via a New York Times article) about one of his favorite prayers, he declares the prayer “feels medieval” but was in fact written in the 19th century (in the rather specific context of the threat to the Pope’s temporal authority – that is, his power as an earthly, secular prince – against the newly created Kingdom of Italy) – and it feels medieval and mystical to him specifically because “you could almost see the angels and demons doing battle” fitting an ideological need for confrontation and heroism even though its origins are not medieval or mystical at all, but quite modern and also rather earthly. Vance acknowledges the actual date of the prayer (though not its political context), but it doesn’t bother him: what matters is that the prayer can be mobilized to fit his ideological needs, not that it actually fits any particular historical context.

So the emotion – the feeling of alienation and disgust from living in a liberal, multiethnic society – come first and the rationalization and search for a new anchors for identity come second. And if all you know about antiquity is what one might learn in an undergraduate course or in high school, it seems initially like a useful ‘anchor’ for that emotion. What they ‘know,’ after all, is that Greece and Rome are the origin point of something called ‘western civilization’ which is either the reason for or a demonstration of the essential ‘special-ness’ of white people (and thus makes them special boys, a necessary salve for their wounded egos) and that those ancient societies had ‘heroic’ leaders who serve to satisfy both the fascist quest for the cult of heroism but also provide archetypal ‘manly men’ who can serve as an anchor for their wounded masculinity because (as Eco notes!) masculinity-anxiety is at the heart of the emotional brew of fascism.

Of course almost all of that is sublimated. What is visible is that their interest in antiquity is focused on on using it as a ‘proof’ for their ideology, rather than for the sake of interest or curiosity. So they seize on individual elements that seem ‘manly’ or ‘heroic’ or which reinforce a white supremacist or male-dominant ideology because the purpose isn’t to understand the Romans but to provide a comforting salve to their wounded feelings.

Which also explains why they don’t ever go deep, develop those ‘potholes’ of knowledge: because while classical antiquity might look at a great distance like a comforting resting place for their ideology, up close it doesn’t fit at all. Instead, it offers quite a lot of challenges. Ancient stereotypes and bigotries do not map cleanly on to modern racism and in any event the clear tendency from classical antiquity is that diversity was a winning strategy – societies that more successfully and more fully incorporated culturally and ethnically different groups won. Societies that stayed small and homogeneous lost. And quite a few ancient writers – Livy, Polybius, even Philip V of Macedon, of all people – recognized this at the time!

Greek and Roman values map very poorly onto the strength-first ‘John Wayne’ style masculinism (‘strength’ or do-what-it-takes ruthlessness are both well down the list of core masculine virtues for either the Greeks or the Romans, but central for this strain of quite badly impoverished modern masculinity) these fellows generally favor and ancient authors, as I note in The Bulwark piece, regularly caveat and question even the value of a ‘heroic life’ of that sort. Instead, the ideal Roman leader is presented as a sober, prudent sort of fellow, with an inherent courage and drive (that’s virtus), but restrained by educated virtues (often captured in the word humanitas) which included clemency and mercy (clementia, mansuetudo).

And of course I imagine we all have no problem grasping the inherent risibility of these guys, nearly all of whom are quite open and aggressively homophobic, being very fond of ancient Greece.

Which in turn serves to explain why – whereas most enthusiast communities quite like it when academic experts engage with them – these fellows hate academic classicists. Because we insist on showing up with the more complex, more grounded, more accurate version of antiquity which does not fit their ideology and so does not comfort their wounded egos and fragile feelings. What they want is simply a recitation of the simplified high school level antiquity, blurred over enough to fit that ideology. Or as one of them put it, the problem with Classics is that, “Classicists chose to privilege the scientific study of the text…deliberately abandoned the prior noble emphasis of what the texts might be said to teach: Greatness!.”

(It is worth noting that while quite a few ancient authors describe the purpose of their writing as providing a knowledge of human affairs and human nature (Thucydides) or a corrective to conduct (Polybius, Plutarch), the idea that they were writing instruction manuals for achieving greatness (magnitudo, ‘greatness’ is not a core Roman value) is largely absent. Instead, the idea that the purpose of studying history is to emulate the habits of great men in order to achieve heroic greatness is a modern one, advanced by Thomas Carlyle, the original “Great Man Theory” historian, although it has precursors in the medieval and early modern genre of “mirrors for princes” (although these generally present themselves as training virtue rather than “greatness,” often focusing more – as Roman and Greek writing did – on restraint in rule than on the achievement of “greatness.” Again, real history is more complex and interesting than the chud’s ‘Boy’s history’ version of the past, to their considerable annoyance.)

Now I want to say two more things before we move on. First, I don’t want this analysis to be taken to mean I think it is impossible to do good, rigorous history from what we might understand as ‘conservative’ principles. Indeed, I think it quite clearly is – a scholar trying to understand why the Romans are so successful at obtaining and then maintaining an empire, for instance, might be seen as embarking upon a conservative project. Likewise, there’s an obvious “Burkean” conservative angle to the study of the collapse of the functioning norms of the Roman Republic. On the flipside, there are ideologies – generally extremist ideologies, like fascism – which simply cannot survive sustained contact with the historical evidence and it is thus not surprising that fascists thus reject the historical evidence even as they engaging in a ‘cult of traditionalism.’ They cannot let the real past get in the way of their imagined past, after all.

Secondly, I want to be clear as to what my project is when it comes to engaging in spaces that have ‘chud classicists’ in them. I am not trying to convince the chuds. Someone cannot be reasoned out of a position they did not reason themselves into and as I hope I’ve demonstrated the chuds do not believe what they do because of careful reason and study: they believe it because it coddles their wounded egos and fragile injured feelings. No amount of careful study will change the fact that these fellows have the emotional maturity of spoiled children.

However, what I do not want is for other folks coming into these spaces to assume that ‘chud history’ is the only kind, much less that the past corresponds to it. My goal in engaging, to the degree I do, is thus to make clear that a better, more rigorous, more sophisticated, more complex vision of the past exists, to put up a flare to signal, “if you want knowledge, facts and understanding, rather than coddled feelings, seek them in these other places.” It is then up to those folks to decide which they prefer: the comforting lie or the discomforting truth.

On to Recommendations:

First a few of my own things! As noted above, this week’s fireside topic was occasioned by a piece I wrote for The Bulwark, “Why Stone-Faced Fascists Keep Getting Antiquity Wrong” about a month ago. I then also had a chance to stream a live conversation on the topic with archaeology Flint Dibble; you can watch the recording of the conversation, “The Rise of Chud Classics” on Youtube.

I’ve also had a number of unrelated podcast appearances; I can’t remember which recent ones I have linked here, so I’ll just roundup the bunch. I sat down with Ancient History 101 to talk about the First Punic War, with Frames of Space to talk about insurgencies, protest movements and pushing back against the state, and with The Prancing Pony Podcast to talk about some of the military aspects of Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (for two hours because I had a lot to say).

On for things that are not me. First, I want to note again Ancient History 101, Alexandra Sills’ new ancient history podcast, which is steadily building up a really impressive back-catalog of episodes with experts on exciting topics. The episodes range from topic themed episodes (“Slavery in Roman Society” or “What is the Spartan Mirage”) to more historical-events coverage or biographical (like episodes on Domitian, Themistocles and Fulvia) and even some ‘inside baseball’ on Classics (“How Do Museums Work?” “What is ‘Classics’ Anyway?”). Absolutely something to throw into your podcast rotation if you are even a little interested in antiquity.

In modern military theory reading, the mononymous James had a good short essay on where drones fit into modern warfare, making the argument – which I think is correct – that right now drones are working as just another kind of fires, filling capabilities that other weapon-systems could already do, only more cheaply. That’s not nothing, mind you: providing a capability in greater quantity or at lower cost can have a huge effect, but I think it calibrates expectations more accurately to the kind of changes we should expect to see in war as a result of drones: a change, to be sure, but perhaps not (yet) a revolution.

For this week’s book recommendation, I am going to recommend a very new book, J. Parshall, 1942: Crux of War (2026). Longtime readers will doubtless recognize Parshall as half of the author team behind the fantastic Shattered Sword (2005), the very second book recommended on this blog back in 2020.

The topic of 1942 is right there in the title: the book is a history of the Second World War in 1942, taking that year – which it argues was the crucial year – month by month. This is a great case of a situation where the book’s argument is tightly intertwined with its structure. Parshall argues that no individual battle in 1942 was decisive but that the year, taken in its totality across all theaters, was decisive, so his month-by-month structure serves to let the reader take in all of the theaters together (as someone would have done at the time!), rather than having them split up (as is more normal). Parshall also does a great job here of keeping a truly global perspective, refusing to leave out fighting in China, on the Eastern Front, in the Atlantic and so on, which sometimes get left out of other accounts. That requires, of course, a lot of very good writing to keep a reader anchored in what is going on as they shift theaters, but fortunately, Parshall is a very good writer and makes heavy use of maps and diagrams that accomplish the task.

Equally valuable, Parshall keeps an eye on the overall strategic situation throughout. The book opens with a summary of all of the major powers’ situations at the war’s start and poses to each a few strategic questions – the things they must do or avoid in order to be victorious. That creates a sort of benchmark against which the monthly progress can be tracked and helps the reader follow the significance of what is happening. Combined with the occasional ‘thematic’ sections within a given month, tracking one aspect of the war over a longer time frame, the book does a remarkable job keeping the reader connected both to the events of the moment and also the broader picture.

This book honestly is a masterpiece, a remarkable achievement. It’s also a lot of book, in the best possible way. The book itself runs some 1200 pages; it has the months marked on the side of the page for easy navigation. It has dozens and dozens of maps, images and diagrams. It is exhaustively well-cited. And it is really effectively and clearly written. Absolutely give it a look.

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https://acoup.blog/?p=35753