Just Posted Today, A Good Example Of How Fictionalized History Gets People Killed

Roland Bettancourt, professor at the University of California at Irvine has a disturbing and startling example of how lies about history have fueled neo-fasist, neo-Nazi violence from Russia to the United States, in this case a false and ridiculous history of Byzantium.   I have no doubt that popular fiction, movies, video-games, maybe, even, play a role in the romantic bull shit that replaces real history in the imaginations of the susceptible.  And it ends up with people getting killed by the true believers in these lies. 

For many on the far right, talk of Byzantium is cloaked in Islamophobia – both online and in tragic real-life events.

A white supremacist who killed more than 50 worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 railed against the Turks and the conquest of Constantinople in a 74-page manifesto.

“We are coming for Constantinople, and we will destroy every mosque and minaret in the city. The Hagia Sophia will be free of minarets and Constantinople will be rightfully Christian owned once more," the shooter wrote. Throughout QAnon message boards, the reconquest of Hagia Sophia is emblematic of the destruction of Islam and the restoration of a mythic white Byzantium. One post stated: “When we free Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia, maybe we can talk."

And, of course, here, everything as malignant as it is stupid finds its way into the imagination of the AmeriKKKan right:

Despite this modern disdain for Byzantium in the West, it has recently served as an inspiration to various factions of the far right.

In September 2017, Jason Kessler, an American neo-Nazi who helped organize the “Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, inaugurated a new supremacist group called “The New Byzantium" project.

Described by Kessler as “a premier organization for pro-white advocacy in the 21st century," The New Byzantium is based on the white supremacist leader's misrepresentation of history.

His premise is that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. This isn't true. In reality the empire was made up of diverse peoples who walked the streets of its capital, coming from as far away as Nubia, Ethiopia, Syria and North Africa. Contemporaneous sources noted – at times with disdain – the racial and ethnic diversity of both Constantinople and the empire's emperors.

But Kessler's “New Byzantium" is intended to preserve white dominance after what he calls “the inevitable collapse of the American Empire." The organization has been operating under the radar since 2017 with little online footprint. 

The disdain for Byzantium, which the article dates to at least back to that massive boob, Edward Gibbons, is no more historically adequate than this action comics version of it in our much less literate milieu.

Lying about history gets people killed, it leads to people being discriminated against, enslaved and it is such a useful tool of gangsters and thugs that its alleged innocuousness is even stupider.   The idea that lies can be safely considered such, the effective claim that they are all "little white lies" is stupid, especially when, as with the ones told about American history, it's generally People of Color who end up paying for them.