Ridiculous. People will use anything to justify anything. The fact that some fascists pointed to Ancient Rome is almost certainly just a result of the outsized space Rome and Greece occupies in the western cultural landscape.
The challenge most certainly does not “remain”. Modern classics departments are essentially just history, language, literature, archaeology, and anthropology rolled into one, with a specific focus on the ancient Mediterranean.
I was taught Classics at a moderately posh school. And the Roman Empire - which was a very effective nationalist war machine, but utterly barbaric ethically - was very consciously echoed by the British Empire.
It's still consciously echoed in the US. Congress has a couple of giant fasces on the wall behind the Speaker. How much more of a clue does anyone need?
This is no longer obvious in modern Classics departments, and modern Europe draws on more recent history. But it's still a very obvious motivator for imperial Anglophone militarism and commerce. Most obviously in the UK, our recent crop of neo-imperialists not only drop Latin into their speeches but seem to think of themselves as classical heroes.
Actually, I would say that the closest thing you have to R.E. today is the European Union, sans the military might, of course. For all the glory of the Roman legions, it is often forgotten that the Roman empire was a common market first and foremost. Without the economic ties, the empire would have been much more fragile from within.
And the EU of today resembles that ancient structure quite a bit. A huge amalgamation of a babel of nations with a shared citizenship, unification of various laws, regulations and standards so that Portuguese butter is not that different from Finnish, a lot of internal trade reaching even the most outlying extremes of the continent, a conscious building of a pan-European road network, even the original treaty establishing the European communities was signed in Rome.
Interestingly, having semi-hostile Asia Minor (Erdogan) and having almost no control over North Africa is an obvious kind of security problem for the EU, which any Roman general would immediately point out. A secure southern border would be the almost impassable Sahara, not the Mediterranean Sea.
Also, it's very obviously not the case that studying classics makes you imperialist. I don't doubt that some right-wingers may like to add classics into their educational program, to create a link to the past, as you say, but that is not inherent in classical studies.
I studied classics (mostly Latin and Greek) at the university level, and not only was the phenomenon to which you refer not obviously part of the teaching, it wasn't there in the first place.
In any case, the problem isn't the substance of studying Latin, or studying history of any kind for that matter. It's about people who already have right-wing views liking to use classical aesthetics.
And it doesn't help that at that time universities and the study of classics was basically the preserve of the upper classes, who naturally had elitist ideological biases.
There was definitely a sense among many that modernity, democracy, multiculturalism, liberalism were tied up with and responsible for the chaos in Europe at the time. And fingers were pointed at communists, socialists, Jews, liberals, secularists, etc, and in that period nationalists and ultimately fascists or other ultranationalist authoritarians were able to take root. And they often did so by appealing to their imagination of the past.
If you showed that fast food place to an Italian fascist they would probably blow it up because it was low culture and glorifying consumerism.
That having been said, the study of classics being unfashionable due to fascism isn't at all true.
The rootless proletariat of Rome is oddly enough something that communists latch on to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37811.The_Assassination_...
You should probably read what an ideology actually believes before making sweeping pronouncements for them. This is how we end up with American rednecks being called nazis and american college students communists when the first are slightly right of center market liberals and the second are slightly left of center market liberals.
You shouldn't assume that you're talking to Americans.
Judging from your comment I can assume you're not American, therefore you might be familiar with Coletti's study on the rural roots of fascism.
Have an excerpt that you might find interesting: ''' One can not say based on these figures that Fascism has become strictly rural; one can only say that a good half of the Fascist militias come from the rural areas. Not only are we not ashamed of this, but we would like to proclaim — as a badge of honour — that Fascism in the Po Valley is today largely "rural". '''
Lastly, one of the "good things that Mussolini did" (as his supporters love to repeat) is precisely the creation of agricultural land after the 1929 crisis. The n.3134 law on land quenching (legge sulla bonifica integrale) turned ONE THIRD of the land into agricultural soil (more here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Land).
You shouldn't assume other people suffer from delusions. Best regards.
Regarding delusions, I was referring to the "volkish" beliefs in German fascism.
No.
Behold a Nazi:
https://old.reddit.com/r/goth/comments/ire2cs/what_is_up_wit...
The sinequanon of American consumer culture is style over substance.
Want to be a Nazi? Buy this flag.
Want to be a Communist? Buy this beret.
Never mind seeing what the ideology actually stood for. That would require an uncomfortable, and possibly dangerous, amount of thinking.
>And there are plenty of college students who genuinely believe in communism.
No there aren't. There are plenty of college students who like social democracy, there are very few who want to empower the working class American - fat, white and 40.
About, what? Slaughtering everyone not part of the master race? Yeah, tons of thought there, all of it stuck in the stone age.
You are viewing "American consumerism" through a very narrow lens, and an incorrect one at that. The people that buy nazi stuff here generally drink the koolaid. I don't know what you're reading but naziism is still taboo here.
A simple question: have you actually read Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto?
I also think that they have as much power as witches did in Salem, for largely the same reasons.
That said don't expect the moral panic to calm down any time soon. It's odd seeing the side of politics I identified with until recently become a larger danger to democracy than the side I was sure would implement a theocracy.
Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist death cult which glorifies in violence and war, believes in strict competitive social hierarchies where some people are born inherently and disposably inferior to others, and is deeply threatened by non-conformity.
Fascism is also pro-corporate and anti-localist. And it's fundamentally Romantic and emotional, and deliberately anti-rational.
Nazis were a subset of fascism. The US and Russia both show many signs of same in embryo but without the goose stepping and the silly helmets.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fas...
1. There's a clear continuity of goose-stepping in Russia from a time that long predates Putin.
2. We have goose-stepping in the United States, too, that long predates Trump, and will almost certainly outlast him. It doesn't look like weird one-handed salutes, it looks like a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
2. You can argue for a lot of things metaphorically and perhaps even have a case, but that's not goose-stepping.
That's a non sequitur.
"All this referencing of the ancient world" gave us the Renaissance and the Englitenment. And in tandem with the influence of christian morals, ended up giving us human rights, the respect (instead of contempt) for the powerless and the victim, and so on.
"Fascism", on the other hand, was an isolated ideology, it only really took off to a signficiant degree in Italy and Germany [1], and had nothing to do with the ancient world (although in the german version it had a fondness for paganism).
[1] While Japan was an Axis ally, theirs was just a plain-old nationalism, it had nothing to do with the ancient Greco-roman world, and also nothing to do with the economic etc. politics of Italian fascism (whereas German national-socialism had a lot in common with it). As for the rest, modern historians don't even consider Franco's Spain as fascist.
The challenge remains to reconnect with the past without using it to justify atrocities in the present. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is not limited to European history! China does historicist propaganda films too! As do a lot of places, right down to warring caucasian microstates)
(I would reccomend Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time Of Gifts", which is nominally a walking tour but has an incredible connection to the history of Europe and the places he's walking through. Everything from Charlemagne to Esterházy to Roland to Homer)