Why white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts are obsessed - but very wrong - about the ... - 0 views
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Byzantium – or more properly, the medieval Roman Empire – controlled much of the Mediterranean at the height of its territorial rule in the mid-sixth century.
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His premise is that when Rome fell, the Byzantine Empire went on to preserve a white-European civilization. This isn’t true.
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Mentions of Byzantium are scattered across message boards frequented by both white supremacists and QAnon enthusiasts – who spout conspiracy theories about a deep-state cabal of Satan-worshipping, blood-drinking pedophiles running the world.
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“It all makes sense when you learn that the books of the bible are plagiarized copies of the chronology of Byzantium, and so is the mythical Roman Empire, that never existed in Italy but was in fact centered in Constantinople.”
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In some renditions, Byzantium is, by way of some hazy illuminati connections, the origins of the “deep state” –
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For many on the far right, talk of Byzantium is cloaked in Islamophobia – both online and in tragic real-life events.
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This “reconquest” of Constantinople had even been tied in some online posts to the presidency of Donald Trump, with images circulated online seemingly prophesying that it would happen under his tenure.
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No matter the provenance of the recent interest in Byzantium from America’s white supremacists and conspiracy theorists, one thing is clear: It is based on a very warped idea of the Byzantine Empire that has emerged out of the empire’s fraught place in our histories, caught between ancient and medieval, spirituality and bureaucracy.