When I shut down Ancient World Magazine in March 2022, I did so with a heavy heart. I felt, and still feel, that this website fills a niche by offering opinionated but well-researched articles about the ancient world. The content was moved to my personal website, but since this seemed to confuse readers into thinking I alone had produced all of the text, I resurrected the website in June 2023 and promised that we would, in some capacity, continue to publish new articles on an irregular and infrequent basis.
Perusing the articles on this website, it shouldn’t take you long to figure out that we are rather on the left of the political spectrum, and proudly so. Considering also my experience managing print magazines, I know that a lot of people interested in the ancient world are, however, rather conservative. So it was not much of a surprise, not too long after shutting the website down, to receive an email from a guy called Michael – I forget the last name and have deleted the mail since – about how much he enjoyed that we had shut up shop because we were obviously leftist idiots.
I never respond to these kinds of messages. During the early years of the website, I would, ever so often, receive emails from readers claiming that we shouldn’t infuse politics into the ancient world, as if that were even possible. Of course, you only ever get these complaints from people who do not like that you point out sexual perversion, racism, inequality, and so on, about a topic that they like, or when you use your knowledge to comment about current affairs.
And boy, are there current affairs to comment on! In various European countries, as well as the United States of America, politicians who can only be described as fascists are in power or about to take power, and it has now become apparently acceptable to brand yourself not just conservative, but a white nationalist, too. It has become acceptable to say that you are “against Antifa”, which means that you are against people who are against fascism and so that means you are, er, pro-fascist? (Never let it be said that these people are smart.)
How did we get here? Ultimately, of course, capitalism is to blame. In particular, the rise of neoliberalism from the early 1980s onwards (Thatcher, Reagan). The idea of collective responsibility was pushed aside in favour of individual responsibility. Rather than have the State organize the economy, it was deemed better to leave it in the hands of the free market. State control was deemed bad; privatization was considered the solution to everything.
Ultimately, this was a way to find an excuse to lower taxes. After all, if the State has less to do and exerts less control, it requires less money to operate. And lowering taxes could be used as a reward to hard-working people and especially to the people who “created” new jobs. A win-win situation! It seemed ideal.
It was, of course, a lie. The free market does not regulate itself. It’s like saying shipping could be improved by turning everyone into pirates. The results speak for themselves: many developed nations suffer from crumbling infrastructure, damage to social welfare, healthcare woes, unaffordable education, and so on. The free market did not benefit all. Instead, it benefited only a select group: the rich. The idea of “trickle-down economics”, that eventually also the poor would benefit from the enormous profits sucked up by the rich, has been trotted out again and again but has failed to actually materialize.
One of the casualties of all this neoliberal nonsense has been the media. Who still reads a newspaper? Many of the big ones that still exist are often owned by billionaires: the Washington Post, owned by Amazon billionaire ghoul Jeff Bezos, is a prime example. Many other newspapers have been shuttered entirely. TV is not doing much better, and who can forget that one of the biggest right-wing mouthpieces on American TV, Fox News, is owned by yet another billionaire.
We now live in a digital age, and this means advertising is king. Media, new as well as old, must do whatever it can to attract eyeballs to ensure its very survival. Any outlet that doesn’t generate the revenue required will, courtesy of the free market, be put out of its misery like Old Yeller. And what generates eyeballs these days?
It’s the far right. Back in 2016, the media handed Trump his victory, and they have done it again. In fact, the media’s obsession with the far-right, whether Marine Le Pen in France, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, or, most recently, Herbert Kickl in Austria, is almost guaranteed to continue unabated.
But it does not have to be this way. In France, the last election was confidently won by the left alliance, much to the surprise of the media. Of course, French president Emmanuel Macron, a former banker (!), immediately pushed these election results aside in favour of forming a centre-right government instead, but that is a different – and completely undemocratic – matter.
The point is that progressives can win when they offer an actual alternative. Here in Austria I was shocked to see that the SPÖ, the socialist party, presented themselves in posters as the “sensible” ones, the “professional” ones, without explaining exactly why people should vote for them. In the United States, the presidential election was for the Democrats to lose and did they ever. Instead of explaining how they would handle healthcare and income inequality, the Democrats picked Republican talking points like reinforcing the southern border as their campaign matter.
The world is at a crisis point. Never before has there been as big a gap between the rich and the poor as there is today – and that gap is only increasing with every passing second. At Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk (X), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta/Facebook) got front row seats – ridiculously rich men who control your news feeds. They will gladly serve you the latest slop about how migrants are stealing your jobs, even though none of it is true.
The far right wants to distract you from the fact that there will only ever be one war worth fighting, and that is the class war. Everything is wrapped up in that. They will distract you with culture wars and other nonsense. These are intended to pit poor people against poor people. Do not be fooled.
In the world, there are only two classes of people: the leisure class and the working class. The former do not have to work, as they could live off their wealth; they are also referred to as the owning class since they own the most. The latter have to work, because otherwise they would starve. The billionaire oligarchs want to distract you with stories about rapist refugees (or whatever), because while you are getting outraged over those foreign poor people, you won’t notice the billionaires stealing from you to make themselves even more revoltingly wealthy.
It is very easy to give into despair. It is very easy to be tricked by the stories of professional charlatans and grifters. But always ask, who benefits from this? You might think that a country could not operate in a way that would actively seek to make the majority weaker, poorer, and sicker to the benefit of a miniscule elite. But to quote the British researcher Stafford Beer (1926-2002), “the purpose of a system is what it does”. The system is working as intended, transferring wealth from the poor to the rich.
Radical change is necessary. We need to create a society that is equitable and just. A society in which billionaires no longer exist. For that society to be created, we cannot fall victim to despair. We must resist the far right with their fear and hate mongering, and show that we can do better. We should do better.