Rhetorically, of course. The man is an ignoramus. He actually objected to a BBC video that illustrated the Roman empire as a vast polyglot melange of varying ethnicities, because, as all good alt-right Nazis know, Romans were all white British aristocrats.
Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse.
I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right? pic.twitter.com/SqE83Pmf2h
— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 25, 2017
One of his buddies even mocked the idea that there could have been black legionaries — black people have always been slaves, not realizing that this is only a trope that evolved with modern colonialism.
Ah, the famous "Black Romans" – that little known part of history that, uh, never happened
— Peteriot (@peripeteyah) July 25, 2017
You know, we have these nifty DNA technologies that allow us to examine remains from Roman Britain and learn all kinds of things about the colonizers. They weren’t all Kenneth Branagh clones — the early residents of Roman London were mostly immigrants from all over the empire. Even without DNA analysis, we have written historical records that testify to the diversity imported into the island.
But all you have to do is enjoy Mike Stuchbery’s evidence filled smackdown. Totally righteous.
Another lesson the Nazis might want to learn is that despite the flood of foreigners almost 2000 years ago and despite the measurable infusion of non-white, non-Briton blood, the region did what usually happens with an influx of diversity — the resident population absorbed it and survived just fine, eventually becoming the pasty white Englanders we all know and love. We are all children of mongrels, our blood is spiced up with diversity, and it does us no harm.
This seems relevant:
The polygamous town facing genetic disaster
Funniest/saddest comments and tweets are all the ones saying, “Yeah, I guess we were all full of shit, but ROME WAS DIVERSE AND IT COLLAPSED!!!!! Keep the Muslims out of Europe!!”
So, first, BBC lying to appease PC culture. Oh, we’re completely, flagrantly wrong, but still, the very thing we were wrong about is now OBVIOUSLY so destructive and evil that the Roman empire fell apart (300 years later).
We are in such a dark place.
Hey, don’t through Kenneth Branagh under the bus like that. Test his DNA first. If he really is British we’ll see just how much of a mongrel he is!
Glorious
Ironically, the “pasty white” element itself was probably from a not-so-benign migration (the migration of Angles, Saxons, etc from what is now northern Germany and the Low Countries in the 5th Century CE). Historians debate how many of them migrated over, but IIRC the evidence has swung back in recent years towards a large amount of migrants over decades (think 5000-10,000 year over 50 years, that type of thing).
Everyone’s got some Roman or Mongol in ’em. And after WWII they’ve got some American, which is to say “the kitchen sink.” The whole idea of pure blood is ridiculous.
I remember back in high school when someone was shocked to learn that Cleopatra probably didn’t look anything like Elizabeth Taylor and I had to break it to them that, if Moses was a real person, he didn’t look much like Charleton Heston, either.
Mike Stuchbery is my new Hero!
@doubtthat, #2:
Where did you see those comments?
Marcus @6
And then there was Jesus, if he existed.
Several Roman emperors were in fact black Africans. Septimius Severus was born in Africa. The playwright Terence was African. Lucius Quietus, a general and governor of Judea, was a Berber. There are innumerable other prominent roman generals, writers and politicians who were African. There were African popes.
The provincial governor of Roman Britannia from 139-142 AD was a Numidian Berber called Quintus Lollius Urbicus. We didn’t just have dark-skinned African legionaries clomping about in their caligae, we were bloody ruled by one for a bit.
Who needs evidence when you have racism?
@8 Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
They’re in the responses to Stuchbery’s tweets. Some here:
https://twitter.com/r_jazz777/status/890182424910594048
More of them if you click on one of the alt-right guy’s tweets. Stuff like this:
“Yeah and because of it it crumbled. So you’re saying that Britain will share the same fate?”
“Rabble, Rabble, Rabble, how dare you SJWs says Britain wasn’t all white during the Roman occupation!!!!!”
…Science, DNA, history…
“Rabble, Rabble, Rabble, OF COURSE Rome was ethnically diverse, that’s why they fell!!”
It’s amazing how perfectly Trump represents them.
Sorry, that should have been 5000-10,000/decade, not per year.
@cervantes
They were born in North Africa, but that doesn’t mean they would have looked like subsaharan Africans (especially since the Romans re-colonized Carthage with citizens from Roman Italy). Septimius was mixed Punic/Italian Roman in ancestry.
Really Brett? Here’s a portrait of Lucius Quietus.
That was a satisfying set of tweets (and I’ve never said that before).
When ultra-conservatives talk about Rome, it’s always a Dunning-Kruger fest.
They seem to feel that imperial Rome is “theirs” and that they know all about it without ever needing to actually read a book or ten on it.
it is kind of amazing how tenaciously people can hold on to some story about reality in the face of all the actual evidence to the contrary when that story props them up to some how be to be important or better than everyone else.
uncle frogy
@16 williamhyde
I get the impression that they confuse the First Reich – the Holy Roman Empire – with the Classical Roman Empire. Start with Nazi ideology, force it backwards in time, then miss your mark by 500 years, and you have a theory indistinguishable from what they say about Classical Rome.
@cervantes: It’s unclear whether Septimius Severus, Geta, and Caracalla would be considered “black” to a modern viewer. We actually have a contemporary colour portrait of them: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41ir7m/were_there_actually_any_black_roman_emperors/. The top hits on Google claiming that they were black are from a Rastafarian web site, which I think that we can agree might be biased.
There certainly were plenty of dark-skinned people in the Roman empire, some of them serving in important positions. But Rome’s African holdings were mostly north of the Sahara, a region whose majority population is not “black” today and probably wasn’t 2000 years ago either (based on what we know of the egyptians, punii, etc. — though we do know for certain that there were black pharaohs).
Rome was an equal-opportunity slaver. People were not enslaved based on race, but rather (mostly) based on being defeated enemies or having been enslaved by someone else outside the empire then sold to them. Later on, after the empire stopped expanding, they started enslaving their own peasantry (aka “serfdom”) — again, without any known basis in race.
Bah, wrong link. That should be https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Severan_dynasty_-_tondo.png.
A while ago there was a thread in the Graun about genetic diversity, on how measurable it is by DNA analysis and on what that might mean. I’m happy to say the same thing here that I said there: all it means is that people move around quite a bit and shag each other a lot.
doubtthat @18: I doubt that they’re thinking that deeply. I think they’re going by older media images of Rome, with all those white Hollywood actors or British Victorians drawing pictures of themselves and their neighbours wearing togas.
Haha, you’re probably right.
Alt-Right Razor – Assume the theory that requires the least amount of knowledge about the world.
@15 Cervantes
I don’t see how that contradicts what I said.
@19 Unperson
There were probably more than a few traders, slaves, and folks from beyond the border voluntarily signing up to be soldiers from subsaharan African groups, although the Roman Empire proper didn’t stretch further south than Egypt, the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, and parts of the Atlantic Coast of Africa. The kingdom that was ruling Nubia at the time was a friendly client regime of the Roman Empire for most of its existence (I can’t remember if it was Kush or a successor kingdom).
My favourite part in the whole Twitter mess (Paul is still flogging a horse the Romans rode in on) was Paulie claiming “all (modern) depictions pf Romans (by white people) are white, that is evidence!!!
Well, obviously Rome was ethnically diverse. Whenever it conquered a different ethnic group with a different set of gods it just took their gods and added them to their pantheon.
It was perfectly fine for other ethnic groups to worship their gods provided they gave some respect to other groups’ gods (including dead Roman emperors).
The Roman Empire ran into trouble when it came across intolerant monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity, which refused to give respect to other groups’ gods.
The Western Roman Empire collapsed when it had become ethnically non-diverse with Christianity as its state religion, and was invaded by heretetical Christians from outside the Empire.
Tabby Lavalamp@#9:
And then there was Jesus, if he existed.
He totally looked like Cesare Borgia, didn’t he?
Paul Joseph Watson — whose only role in life is to stand next to Alex Jones and make his boss appear charming, witty and intelligent by comparison.
But Jim Caviezel could totally work too … not so much The Passion of the Christ Caviezel as Person of Interest Caviezel.
The other funny thing about their defenses is that they point to ancient statuary and art and are basically saying, “See? They looked like normal people. So of course they were white!”
Ah, the struggles that I had each year with each new set of students! I had to convince them that ALL of the Romans were NOT Italian, the first Roman Emperor was NOT Julius Caesar, but Augustus Caesar, the Roman slaves mentioned (and pictured!!) in our Cambridge textbook were NOT supposed to be dark-skinned, and the myth about Hercules was NOT as it was portrayed by the Disney cartoon.
I tried, really I did, to make a small dent in the general American ignorance about Ancient Rome.
(Quite a task, since each year some of them were convinced that they had signed up for Latin American Studies!)
The ancient Romans were Weeping Angels?
The mainstream, SJW media doesn’t want you to know that Rome was run by pissing cherubs. WHITE pissing cherubs.
*Called Putti in Rome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putto
magistramarla@31, Reminds me of a fellow student in my German-language class (in the States). He insisted all Germans were nazis at the (then) present time, which was (then) forty-something years after the end of the war. And never true at any point in time.
It’s amazing to me that these people never critically examine their biases even when it leads them to outrageously stupid assumptions.
Like, this fucking muppet *really*, *truly* thought the BBC would just ahistorically inject black people into a cartoon historical recreation solely for reasons of “political correctness”, as if they would draw random background characters as African while portraying ancient China. He holds on to this idiotic assumption even when presented with the much more reasonable possibility that maybe an Empire that stretched into Africa would have Africans in it, and maybe his ignorant ass just hadn’t considered that fact.
It’s like the nutcases who can be readily led to believe that Obama was preparing to invade Texas, or that Planned Parenthood was eating baby parts or that Satanists were murdering children all over the country. I just don’t understand how anyone can be *so ludicrously wrong* and not question the biases and sources of information that led them to those big mistakes. Instead they act like “oh, I was guess there wasn’t a ridiculous anti-white conspiracy at the BBC… *this* time” and go on being fucking morons.
Brannagh is an immigrant too. He’s Irish. Northern Irish but still. Moving to Reading knocked the corners off his Belfast accent (still took him two tries to pass his Received Pronunciation exam) but if you can track down the Billy plays, from when he was appallingly young, you can check out his original Ulster boy voice.
The Roman Empire may have been a very diverse place, but it was diverse in a very different way from what North Americans are accustomed to (i.e. a majority of northern Europeans, a downtrodden minority of mostly western Africans, and a spattering of everyone else on the planet). That’s why I’m often baffled when people try to project their modern European or North American viewpoints on the ancient Mediterranean, either from the nordicist or the afrocentrist camp. A case in point for the nordicists are the ones you make fun of, who probably imagine all Romans speaking with an english accept. A case in point for the afrocentrists is the Atlanta Black Star article linked to by cervantes #15, where everyone who was born anywhere in Africa is declared black (something especially silly for Carthage, which started out as a Phoenician colony and was later repopulated by Romans). By the same token, the leaders of Apartheid South Africa could be included in a list of great black statesmen.
zibble (#35)
Not that African-looking people would be out of place there, either, even if they’re more likely to be Negrito than African.
There is a certain kind of rightit wingnut on the comment section of The Guardian and The Independent that calls London Londonstan ,i reply ,yes that is correct ,the place where Londoners come from .
PZ @30
How are they responding to the actual forensic evidence that the Roman Empire was genetically diverse? I’d say that chemical and genetic analysis of the remains of actual Romans trumps racist layman interpretations of statues.
The boss @30 Most of the English have fallen in love with the sun and and are now a reddish brownish colour ,go in to an English chemist and you will find tanning stuff next to skin lightening stuff .
….is that really a thing?
Mary Beard abused on Twitter over Roman Britain’s ethnic diversity:
Professor Beard (see @43) is getting support for her standing up to the eejits, Monica Lewinsky defends Mary Beard in Twitter row over black Roman Britons. The initial part of the article is about support from various celebrities (as indicated by the title), and has been redacted from the following excerpt:
And Mary Beard is right — ‘Romans’ could be from anywhere, from Carlisle to Cairo:
I rather liked the following reader’s comment:
And this particular exchange: In reply: “That makes Honor Blackman…?” (Other replies tear into the lack of logic as well.)