Hindus are not "Pagans"

This article was originally published on Medium on September 6, 2020, under the title “Italians are White”.

I’m republishing it here under this new title to ensure that Hindus see it. Worshipping more than one god does not make Hindus like Pagans.

Trigger Warning rape culture, pedophilia, genocide, racism, historical trauma

screenshot: Colosseum in Rome, Road Affair

In the USA there is an idea that Italians are not considered white. That would mean by default that Italians are some kind of people of color. The reason this idea exists is that for less than one hundred years poor Italians who immigrated to the USA faced discrimination from other poor Europeans. Northern European immigrants, you see, considered only other northern Europeans to be the “purest” of white people, according to their invented racial hierarchy of whiteness (all racial hierarchies are invented). The historical laws of the United States, however, as well as the history of Italians themselves show very clearly that Italians are white. That is why most people around the world including Italians themselves identify Italians as white. This means that the history of racism in the USA includes the history of bigotry that Europeans perpetuated against each other but that nuance is not included in modern race discourse. Italians are simply being cast as people of color while northern Europeans are considered the only true white people.

The reason why this is so problematic is that Italians are not just white people, they are the original white supremacist patriarchs. I’m going to explain to you exactly how and why that is true and we will begin our study of Italian whiteness with the Roman empire.

The Romans, ancestors of modern day Italians, had a vast expansionist empire built with imperialism and colonization that lasted from 31 BCE to at least 476 CE (some say it lasted much longer until the 15th century CE). During that time, the Romans and their Greek affiliates were the only people they considered “civilized”. Anyone who was not a Roman or Greek citizen or who did not follow Roman or Greek culture was considered a “barbarian”. Barbarians were the “other”. The Romans borrowed this idea from the Greeks.

It is true that the Greco-Roman idea of civilized vs barbarian doesn’t follow modern ideas of race. To the Romans, anyone not Roman was a barbarian regardless of whether their skin was white, brown, or black. As a result, the Romans invaded and enslaved every nation they could. They oppressed much of Europe including other peoples in Italy. However, Romans insisted on knowing the nation of origin of their slaves so they could better judge what slave to purchase for what work. If they wanted someone to herd their cattle, for example, they might choose a French or Belgian (a Gaul). If they wanted a young boy to use for sex, they might choose an Egyptian. If they wanted someone talented in literature, they probably wouldn’t choose a Briton. This was because of stereotypes that the Romans associated with each barbarian tribe or nation. They believed that Britons were illiterate and ignorant. They believed that Egyptians were highly sexual. They believed that Gauls were good with cattle. They believed that Syrians were effeminate and decadent. They believed that north Africans were emotional but brave. Romans, of course, were the norm, the ones gazing at others instead of being gazed at. (Note: Colonizer is the norm.) The connection between the idea of “nation” and the idea of “race” and the dichotomy of “civilized” vs “barbarian” during this particular period of history is something that was utilized by Europeans later in history as they slowly developed those ideas into modern racism. Roman ideas of the “other” and what could legally be done to the “other” thus formed the basis of what became complex modern ideas of race and institutional white supremacy. (Note: Supremacists justifying genocide.)

Julius Caesar, the first Roman emperor, was blonde, descended from a patrician Roman family. He conquered and enslaved many barbarian tribes. That means that he raped, slaughtered, and pillaged his way through Europe and North Africa. He used his pillaged loot to buy his way into political power to the point where he became the first emperor of Rome. Roman emperors after Julius Caesar took his name as a title meaning “dictator”. Caesar became such a part of the popular consciousness that the month of July is still named after him even today.

Look at these words for “ruler” from different European countries.

Kaiser — German

Czar — Russian

Kaysr — Armenian

Çezar — Albanian

Keizer — Dutch

Kayser — Turkey

Each of these European words come from the name Caesar. The Europeans used these words even after the Roman empire collapsed. They glorified their leaders with Caesar’s name because that is what they learned was glorious from their Roman colonial masters. Their own words for ruler and their own ideas on what ruling should look like were not good enough; they needed Roman ideas and Roman identity. This inferiority complex has lasted for over two thousand years. (Note: Internalized Oppression.)

screenshot: Julius Caesar, Tusculum portrait 50–40 BCE

One invasion that Julius Caesar began and later Roman emperors continued was the conquest of Britannia (modern day Britain). Most people know that the Romans conquered a good amount of Britain but what most people don’t bother to ask is why.

The Romans considered Britannia to be a very rich province. The Romans extracted tin, copper, gold, silver, iron, lead, and salt from that land. They shipped that wealth back to the colonial masters in Rome for profit, despite the fact that those resources obviously belonged to the indigenous tribes of Britannia. The Romans made treaties or agreements with Britannic peoples to divide the resources but the Romans liked to break those agreements. (Note: Broken treaties.) An example of this is when the Romans broke their agreement with the Iceni king Prasutagus who ruled land in the eastern region of Britannia (modern day East Anglia). Prasutagus’s will divided his kingdom and private wealth between his wife and daughters and the Roman Emperor Nero. Instead of honoring Prasutagus’s will after his death, the Romans annexed his kingdom, confiscated his private wealth, publicly flogged his wife Boudicca, and raped his two daughters. Queen Boudicca said the Romans “deface the sacred” and led a revolt against the colonizers that tragically failed in 60–61 CE. (Note: Brutalized native women.)

As part of their victory against Boudicca, the Romans wiped out the Druids — the Britannic priesthood who were teachers and judges and who held much of Britannia’s spiritual wisdom. (Note: Cultural genocide.) The Romans justified this slaughter by saying that the Druids sacrificed humans and such barbaric practices couldn’t be tolerated. The irony of slaughtering indigenous people to “save” indigenous people was lost on the colonizers. We can never know if it’s true that the Britannic Druids sacrificed people because the Romans killed them all and thus thoroughly destroyed the entire Druid epistemological heritage. Druids from the rest of Europe went to Britain to learn how to be Druids so in destroying their stronghold on Britannia, the Romans destroyed Druid spiritual knowledge all over the empire. It is possible that the Romans knew they couldn’t control Britannia as long as that land’s fiercely patriotic native priesthood existed so they made up stories to demonize them. (Note: Civilized vs Barbarian.)

The Romans, meanwhile, enjoyed their plundered wealth unconcerned about the suffering of conquered peoples. Roman patrician ladies wore Britannic gold as ornaments on their bodies even as Roman soldiers were raping Britannia’s women. The Romans distributed Britannic silver in their coinage system even as Britons were left destitute. Rome utilized Britannia’s tin, copper, and iron for their war machine even as more Britons were rising up to resist and being slaughtered. Many historians believe that the tin mining in Cornwall, so necessary for Roman bronze weaponry and coinage, was one of the primary reasons for the Roman conquest of Britannia, if not the reason. (Note: Resource extraction.)

Britannia was also rich in wood, being heavily forested. The Romans, having wiped out their own forests in Italy, used British forests to make fires to smelt the metal ores. (Note: Environmental degradation.) In other words, the Romans destroyed the environment for their expansionist empire that made war to fuel war because war made them money. This is a tactic that the British empire later used because they learned from the Romans that it worked so well. The USA learned this tactic from the British and thus the USA is a brutal extractive imperialist empire concerned only with money. (Note: Endless wars.)

The Romans demanded infinite resources from conquered lands to fuel Rome’s expanding empire. (Note: Infinite growth.) They also expected the indigenous tribes of those lands to simply accept Roman pillage. That, of course, didn’t happen. The northern tribes in Britannia fought relentlessly to keep Romans out of their territory. As a result the Romans built a wall across north Britannia to prevent the northern Britannic tribes from attacking their colonial settlements. That wall was called Hadrian’s Wall, after Emperor Hadrian who was leading the Roman colonization of Britannia at the time. Hadrian justified this wall by saying they needed to keep the “barbarians” out of their peaceful Roman empire. The Romans thus cast themselves as victims being attacked by fearful “barbarians”. (Note: Historical gaslighting.) Hadrian’s wall was the northern frontier of the Roman empire and it still stands to this day. Those indigenous peoples who were resisting the Roman colonizers later came to be known as the Scots.

screenshot: Hadrian’s Wall
Hadrian’s Wall Country

The idea of building a wall to defend the land from its own indigenous people is propagated in the USA by President Donald J. Trump. His fascist following justify his wall on the southern border of the USA by saying they need to keep out “criminal” Mexicans. Criminal is another word for barbarian. Mexicans, meanwhile, are Indigenous peoples who were here long before Europeans invaded this hemisphere and created that political border. Indigenous peoples migrated around the Americas much like how people in Britannic tribes traveled and connected with each other long before the Romans invaded them. The Druids in particular traveled freely around the territories of different Britannic tribes, teaching and sharing wisdom with all and creating united resistance against the empire. Putting a wall up would prevent access between tribes and destroy their ability to organize together against the colonizers. (Note: Divide and conquer.)

Another aspect of Roman culture that still survives today is a deeply entrenched system of oppression. Roman pedophilia— which they borrowed from the Greeks — was openly practiced and normalized in Rome. Children who were not Roman citizens and children who were slaves could be sexually preyed upon under Roman law. Thus, “barbarian” children were subject to horrific abuses from Roman pedophiles. This is why Egyptian boys were stereotyped as good sex slaves because the Romans raped all other boys and decided they liked Egyptians best. This was all perfectly fine to Romans because under their law, they didn’t even have a word for rape and sexual crimes could only be committed against a male citizen of good standing. For example, if a girl was abducted and raped then the victim was not her, it was her citizen father who did not give consent. Also, the legal right to rape slave children doesn’t mean that Romans were not also abusing their own children. They possibly were. What it does mean is that it was considered normal to abuse “other” children while it was frowned upon publicly to abuse Roman children. (Note: Institutionalized pedophilia.)

Western white supremacist culture continues this pedophile tradition to this day. In 1996 (just twenty-five years ago) Hillary Clinton demonized and otherized Black children by calling them “super predators”. She said this while she and her husband, President Bill Clinton, created a system of mass incarceration that disproportionately victimized Black children and locked them up in a prison industrial complex that continues to this day. Children in that prison industrial complex are sexually abused and used as sex slaves and other slaves for the state and for capitalist companies. When those exploited Black youth grow up and have children of their own, their children are funneled back into that mass incarceration system by an institutionalized school-to-prison pipeline. In the USA slavery was outlawed by the thirteenth amendment except as punishment for a crime. The modern school-to-prison pipeline and mass incarceration system ensures that the USA always has a fresh supply of enslaved people to exploit. This creates a vicious cycle of abuse just like the Roman system was a vicious cycle of abuse. (Note: Institutionalized slavery.)

The system in the USA has also forced brown children into it for a long time, particularly Indigenous children. This shouldn’t be surprising because the Declaration of Independence — that sacred document that forms the basis of the USA — called the Indigenous peoples of this continent “savages”. “Savage” and “super predator” and are just updated words for “barbarian”. The list of racist labels for Indigenous peoples (including Afro-Indigenous peoples) goes on and on and they are all just alternative words for the Greco-Roman term “barbarian”. This doesn’t mean that white children in the USA are not also being preyed upon. They absolutely are. It just means that it’s not publicly acceptable to abuse white children, while Black and brown children are publicly thrown away to suffer all manner of horrors. (Note: Institutionalized othering.)

Today, former Vice President Joe Biden, who wrote the 1994 crime bill that created the Clintons’ system of mass incarceration, is the 2020 Democratic candidate for President of the United States of America. It is well known that he is an alleged rapist and pedophile. There is numerous video evidence that shows him touching children inappropriately in official government settings. Meanwhile, the current president, Donald J. Trump, is also an alleged rapist and pedophile accused of raping a thirteen-year-old girl while at a party thrown by convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Former President Bill Clinton is also an alleged rapist and pedophile who was also friends with Jeffrey Epstein and flew multiple times on Epstein’s plane which was nicknamed the “Lolita Express”. Bill Clinton was even photographed receiving a massage from one of Epstein’s victims who Epstein was known to be sex trafficking. Nothing has been legally done about Trump or Clinton’s alleged pedophile activities just like nothing has been done about Biden’s. They are permitted their alleged sex offender activities without any repercussions from the law. This is the tradition in the USA. Thomas Jefferson himself, that most admired of Founding Fathers, was a pedophile who raped his Black slave Sally Hemings when she was thirteen or fourteen-years-old and kept raping her, forcing her to have at least six of his children. Their relationship has been described as a romance by some apologists, despite the fact that she was a child and a slave and thus could never give consent. (Note: Pedophile patriarchs.)

Some people might consider it a stretch to connect modern day pedophile culture in the USA to ancient Rome’s pedophile culture. This connection, however, is a fact that I’m about to explain in gruesome detail. Are you ready?

The Roman empire was a system of imperialism and expansionism. It grew so big and bloated from its relentless war machine that it split into two parts; the Western Roman empire and the Eastern Roman empire (also known as the Byzantine empire). The Western Roman empire was ruled from Rome while the Eastern Roman empire was ruled from Constantinople (modern day Istanbul in Turkey). Constantinople was named after the Roman Emperor Constantine. (Note: Historical influence.)

Constantine believed that if his entire empire followed the same religion he could more easily control his subjects. This was not different from what other Romans had done before him. The Romans had previously combined many of their gods with the gods of their conquered subjects to convince their subjects to obey. One example was when the Romans combined their own god Jupiter with the Greco-Egyptian god Ammon to more easily control the Greeks and Egyptians. (Note: Patriarchal control.) Those combinations were between gods that had similarities. Constantine’s chosen religion for controlling his subjects, however, was an obscure eastern Jewish sect called Christianity which was a monotheism very different to what his polytheist subjects followed. Constantine promoted Christianity throughout the Roman Empire despite the fact that even he himself did not believe in it and was only baptized Christian on his deathbed. In order to convince his Pagan subjects away from their indigenous nature-based polytheisms to his own choice of a foreign Abrahamic monotheism, Constantine, his co-conspirators, and their descendants inserted many aspects of Pagan religion into Christianity. This wasn’t seen as sacrilege by a lot of Christians because the early church had already begun to do this before Constantine ever came along. This helped make the Abrahamic monotheism an easier pill to swallow for the empire’s reluctant Pagan subjects. One example is the fact that much of Roman Catholic artwork of Jesus looks remarkably similar to the Roman artwork of Jupiter who was the king of the Roman pantheon. Jupiter was always associated with the Roman emperor and thus was always at the forefront of Roman religion no matter which other God they melded with him. (Note: Cultural appropriation.)

screenshots: Left: Roman God Jupiter, mid 2nd century CE, now housed at the Louvre in Paris. Right: Sacred Heart of Jesus statue in Saints Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church.

Jesus Christ, if he ever existed, would have been a semitic Jew from the Middle East. His name wasn’t actually Jesus Christ and he certainly didn’t look like the European Roman god Jupiter (or the European Greek equivalent Zeus). By all accounts, he looked like any other semitic Jewish man from the Middle East (short dark hair, clean-shaven, stocky, about 5' 5", wearing an unbleached tunic that came to his knees with an separate cloth that had tassels). He would not have looked like the tall muscular imposing flowing haired and thickly bearded Roman god Jupiter wrapped in flowing drapery. Jesus Christ also never set one foot in Rome; he lived his entire life in the Middle East. His message was in protest of Roman imperial power on his people’s land in Judea. That message was so popular — and it would have been popular considering how many people the Romans oppressed— that Constantine decided to co-opt Jesus’ movement, culturally appropriate Jesus’s name, and use that bastardized appropriated religion to rule his subjects with an iron fist. That amounted to a genocide of Christians, Jews, and Pagans all at the same time. (Note: Stolen identity.)

The Christians, meanwhile, had their own agenda. Once they took power in Rome as the supreme arbiters of Roman religion, they were relentless in destroying any vestiges of the Pagan nature-based spiritualities that existed throughout the Roman empire. Christians destroyed temples, burned libraries, forced conversions, tortured anyone who resisted. This genocide continued over and over again for centuries until all of the empire was Christian. They did this while still adopting Pagan practices and aesthetics to attract more Pagans for conversion, such as continuing to make Middle Eastern Jewish Jesus look like European Roman Jupiter. (Note: Forced conversion.)

Jupiter, by the way, was popularly known to be a pedophile god. He (also the Greek God Zeus) is described in some stories as having a sexual obsession for an adolescent boy named Ganymede and disguised himself as an eagle to abduct that boy. He took Ganymede to Olympus so the child would remain forever by his side. Ganymede was blonde and described as the most beautiful boy to have ever existed. (Note: White desirability politics.) Jupiter granted Ganymede eternal youth and made him cupbearer of the gods which just so happens to be every pedophile’s dream; a child who never grows up and is always at the mercy of adult sexual desires. The story of Jupiter’s abduction of Ganymede was used by pedophiles in Roman society to justify their culture of pedophilia — which indicates that there were people at the time who spoke against them and the pedophiles knew they needed to somehow justify themselves. (Note: Organized religion protecting pedophiles.)

screenshot: The Rape of Ganymede, Renaissance panel ceiling painting by Baldassare Peruzzi, Villa Famesina, Rome, Italy

screenshot: Jupiter kissing Ganymede, 1760, by Anton Raphael Mengs

The artistic similarities between Roman God Jupiter and Roman Catholic Jesus were never a co-incidence. Roman pedophile culture was transferred to the appropriated Christian religion of Catholicism and this would have been perceived as totally normal considering that Romans had been legally raping barbarian children for centuries, some of whom were Jewish and Christian children. The new Jesus cult was obviously worshiping Jupiter and Jupiter’s priests morphed into Catholic priests as the most powerful priesthood in the empire.

screenshot: Left: Roman coin featuring Jupiter, Roman Emperor Hadrian gold aureus, Rome, c. 121–4 CE. Right: Eastern Roman coin featuring Jesus, Byzantine Emperor Justinian II gold tremissis, c. 685–695 CE

Pedophile Catholic priests and pedophile Christian preachers are therefore not a modern day phenomenon. There were Christians in the Roman empire who spoke against it and in the 4th century Saint Basil of Caesarea issued harsh punishments to pedophiles within Christian ranks. This did not fix anything, however, because instead of addressing the actual problem (patriarchy and rape culture) the church blamed pedophilia on homosexuality which is a total fallacy. A few hundred years of still raping children later, in 1049 CE, Saint Peter Damian wrote a tract condemning clerical pedophilia in the Roman Catholic church and was even supported by Pope Leo IX in his quest to root it out. Their efforts did not work because, yet again, they blamed pedophilia on homosexuality instead of on the real root cause that is patriarchy and rape culture. (Note: Homosexuality as scapegoat.) Pope Boniface VIII, elected in 1294 CE, was a pedophile who said that having sex with young boys was no more problematic than “rubbing one hand against the other.” Pedophilia thus continued unabated in Christendom for centuries with both Eastern Orthodox and Protestant churches steeped in it because they descended from or were intertwined with Roman Christian tradition. Due to their missionary zeal and colonial greed, Roman Catholics and other Christians spread that Roman pedophile culture around the world, including in Black and brown countries, where Black and brown children are still abused to this day. The Christians, meanwhile, believe that Black and brown countries should be grateful that they were “saved” by Christianity. Christianity, in this way, has become synonymous with whiteness. (Note: White saviorism.) The entire world now has a pedophile culture that originates from imperialist colonizing pedophile white supremacist Christian Romans. Generations and generations of people around the world have grown up with the trauma of being sexually violated by religious authority figures which very often translates into more trauma for the next generation. (Note: Rape culture.)

Christianity, by the way, is the richest religion in the world and the Roman Catholic church is the richest religion within Christianity. They have brutally extracted wealth and people from other people’s lands the same way the Roman empire did. Consider the Crusades. The Crusades occurred because the Byzantine Empire (which you’ll remember was the Eastern Roman empire) was in decline in the Middle Ages. The religion of Islam and its political adherents were invading that land and forcing conversions to Islam, much like how the Roman Christians forced Pagans to convert to Christianity (only more intensely efficient). This meant that the Roman Catholic church was losing members to Islam but also losing access to the “holy lands” of Jesus’s birth. Critical trade routes that went through those “holy lands” were now under the control of Muslims, not Christians. Multiple popes called for numerous crusades (nine total) over a period of two centuries to take back Jerusalem. European kings heeded the call of the Roman Catholic church. They gathered their armies and marched to reconquer lost Roman territory (and those critical trade routes). Ordinary people also heeded the call despite being untrained and unequipped. Constantine’s tactic of using an appropriated Jesus/Jupiter religion to control his subjects worked better than he could have imagined even centuries after his death. (Note: Christianity upholding empire.) The Roman Catholic church and Italians profited again and again from these crusades, just as the Roman empire before them had profited from an endless war machine. That relentless war machine, however, had the inevitable impact of damaging the eastern Roman empire itself. The western Catholic Europeans raped and pillaged the eastern lands of Christendom that their “holy” crusade was supposed to protect. The Byzantine empire (Eastern Roman empire) officially ended in 1453 when a weakened Christian Constantinople finally fell to the Islamic Ottoman empire. (Note: No separation of church and state.)

This does not mean, however, that the Ottoman empire was in any way heroic. The Ottoman empire considered itself the natural heir to the Roman empire. The Ottoman Sultan declared himself Kayser-i-Rum (Roman Caesar) and that title continued to be used by various Ottoman rulers through the centuries. They continued many of the Roman empire’s practices such as the slave trade, expansionism, imperialism, and institutionalized rape culture which very likely included pedophilia because we don’t know how young those girls were when they were forced into harems. Pederasty, the exploitation of young boys by older men, was also practiced just like in Rome. The Ottomans continued the Roman worship of white beauty when they valued white slaves much higher than Black slaves and used both girls and boys as sexual objects. The Roman God Jupiter would have been proud of them but the Ottomans also continued the destruction of Pagan religions or any religion not theirs. They forced conversions and committed genocides. The Ottoman Empire, which is now modern day Turkey, didn’t outlaw slavery until 1964, just fifty-six years ago. It could be argued that Turkey is even now returning to such policies with their dreams of recreating the Ottoman empire. (Note: Imperial greed.)

Meanwhile, the damage Roman Catholics and other Christian missionaries have done around the world for profit is incalculable. The Goan Inquisition in India lasted from 1560 to 1820. That’s two hundred and sixty years of the Roman Catholics raping, pillaging, torturing and murdering the Indigenous Hindus of Goa as well as people of other faiths who lived in Goa such as Jews and Muslims.

screenshot: Breast ripper, a torture device used by Roman Catholics on women or anyone with breasts who did not comply. The device was heated in fire and then used to burn off the breast. If women didn’t die, they were horribly disfigured.

Indian children who survived the tortures of the Goan Inquisition were handed over to Jesuit priests for “instruction”. So many Indian children were thus sexually abused by Catholic priests over the centuries. Simultaneously they were being indoctrinated into Christianity so that they themselves would later become the abusers. The Roman Catholics did the same thing in Europe and around the world, particularly to those who refused to follow the dictates of Christianity. The violence of Christian missionaries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, is well documented. What isn’t acknowledged is that their violence is still ongoing today. (Note: Christian supremacy.)

In 1999 — just twenty-one years ago — the Roman Catholic Pope Jean Paul II called for a “Crusade” in Asia. He instructed his bishops to begin with India. The Pope said this while he was in India, showing utter contempt for Hindus in their own indigenous land. For Christians, Hindus are the barbarians who need to be civilized with Christianity because Hindus have resisted Abrahamic conversion more successfully than any other Indigenous nation. (Note: Abrahamic Empire.)

screenshot: Countries dominated by Abrahamic religions vs countries not dominated by Abrahamic religions

The influence of Italian and Roman Catholic domination in the Americas led to over five hundred years of genocide and destruction of the indigenous peoples there. The Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci who explored South America beginning in 1499 abducted Indigenous peoples and forced them into slavery. He was so talented in telling Europeans lurid stories of the South American Indigenous peoples, insisting that it was a “New World”, that the Americas were named after him instead of after Christopher Columbus who supposedly “discovered” that “New World”. Meanwhile, most people seem to forget that Columbus was also an Italian. He discovered nothing since there were millions of Indigenous peoples in the Americas for thousands of years before he ever arrived but beginning in 1492 he raped, pillaged, and slaughtered his way through the Caribbean as well as Central and South America. He began a sexual slave trade of Indigenous girls as young as nine for Spanish men. The Romans would have considered such girls “barbarian children” and thus eligible to be enslaved and sexually exploited by “civilized” people such as the Roman Catholic Spanish (who while not Italian were still European adherents of Roman Christian culture. Their rape and pillage of indigenous lands was not different to what the Roman empire had done for centuries. Columbus simply did what his Roman ancestors and his Roman Catholic priests taught him was acceptable. (Note: Transatlantic slave trade.)

The Roman Catholic church supported Columbus and justified the rape, pillage, and slaughter of the Americas with the Papal Doctrine of Discovery. This legal document was issued by the Pope in Rome in 1493 — just one year after Columbus arrived in the Americas. It stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be “discovered” by Christian rulers. It also said that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted” and that “barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” (Note: “Barbarous nations.”)

The Doctrine of Discovery meant that the Abrahamic ten commandments, which forbid theft and murder among other things, did not apply to a Christian who committed such acts upon non-Christians. This led to the genocide of Indigenous peoples all over the Americas and the extraction of their bodies and wealth; a relentless war machine to take control of indigenous lands and people for Christianity. This Papal document was even used by the US Supreme Court to justify their own conquest of lands in North America, most notably in 1823. Meanwhile, the white male Christian colonizers were careful to culturally appropriate Indigenous practices to make their US empire an easier pill for everyone to swallow. One example is that the Founding Fathers based the US Constitution on the Indigenous Great Law of Peace even as they called those Indigenous peoples “savages” and committed many genocides against them. Christian supremacy continues to reign in the USA with almost all presidents being Christian, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump. The current Presidential candidate for the Democratic party, Joe Biden, is a Catholic. It is a fact that the USA’s pedophile culture is connected to and stemming from ancient Rome. Never forget that the Italian Catholic pedophile Christopher Columbus and his friends in both Spain and the Vatican led the way for all these other white men. (Note: Christian supremacist patriarchy.)

Modern day Italian Americans revere Christopher Columbus. It was they who campaigned for a Columbus Day all over the USA to remind other Europeans that Italians have a deep rooted history in the colonization of the Americas. Indigenous peoples, meanwhile, have protested Columbus Day because it is a celebration of a mass murdering rapist colonizer. As a result that holiday has been changed in many localities to Indigenous Peoples’ Day which commemorates indigenous resilience to colonizer genocide. Italian Americans have fought this change. Some of them even dare to deny that Columbus was a slaver and insist that his introducing Christianity to the Americas was a great thing. They have said that renaming Columbus Day marginalizes Italian Americans and erases their heritage. They have also protested the removal of Columbus statues from public areas for the same reason. (Note: Colonizers defending genocidal heritage.)

Meanwhile, their Roman Catholic religion continues to loot the people of the Americas even today while Black and Indigenous peoples remain the most economically disadvantaged communities. The church continues this colonizer policy of rape and pillage even under the so-called progressive Pope Francis. He did not divest the Roman Catholic church from all their corporate interests, he merely said some words about capitalism. He did not dismantle the corrupt Vatican bank, he merely changed its image by hiring women. He did not return land back to Indigenous peoples, he merely apologized for the Catholic church being a colonizer. He has done nothing substantial to stop Catholic priests from raping children, he has instead pardoned pedophile priests. When he was challenged for pardoning those priests, he muttered about forgiveness and making mistakes. Do you see a pattern? His gaslighting is so extreme that even experienced decolonizing activists have fallen for it. Many people say that Pope Francis is still better than previous popes because he is the first pope who does not come from either Italy or the historical lands of the Roman empire. He is from the global south, his defenders say. What they don’t tell you is that Pope Francis is Latin Italian American. That’s correct. He is Italian just like two hundred and seventeen popes before him. (Note: Propaganda warfare.)

Despite all this history, poor Italian immigrants suffered prejudice in the USA when large numbers of them arrived as immigrants from 1890 onward. This was not because Italians were not legally considered white in the USA (they were) but because of historical xenophobia between European national identities. It was white-on-white crime, stemming from prejudice rooted in an invented hierarchy of sub-races within whiteness. The laws of the United States, meanwhile, firmly accepted Italians as white regardless of those northern European prejudices. Italians could marry northern Europeans and since interracial marriage was illegal in this country until 1967, this would never have been allowed if Italians were not considered white. Italians could send their children to white schools which means they were not segregated. Italians were allowed into “whites only” labor unions despite a long history of racism in the labor movement. There were never any restrictions or bans on Italians from entering the USA like there were for so many Black or brown peoples. These are all institutional privileges of whiteness. Italians were and are considered white by law and custom. (Note: Social Acceptance.) The fact that they faced discrimination from ignorant people in the USA is because of the ideas of stereotype and hierarchy their own Roman ancestors created. Remember the stereotypes Romans applied to their slaves depending on which nation they were from? Italians in the USA were suffering from the delayed after-effects of their own ancient system of oppression. Anti-Italian sentiment due to European stereotypes was so strong that in 1891 eleven Italians were lynched in New Orleans. This violence was in fact a protest against Italians’ protected legal status as white and yet the law was not changed to suit those common prejudices. Italians were and have remained legally white. (Note: Institutionalized protection.)

During the same time period that northern Europeans in the USA were discriminating against Italian immigrants, Italians from Italy were invading Ethiopia which at that time was the only African country not colonized by white people. The first Italo-Ethiopian war in 1895–1896 failed but the reason why Italy was trying to colonize Ethiopia was because Italians wanted to increase their prestige with the rest of Europe. They knew that their own Roman ancestors had taught other Europeans how to colonize but those same peoples were now outperforming Italians in the scale of global dominance. The British, French, Belgians, Germans, Portuguese and Dutch all had colonies in Africa and it was outrageous to the Italians that they themselves did not. The Romans had ruled north Africa, after all. Therefore the Italians invaded Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Libya. (Note: Anti-Black racism.)

Barely thirty years later, in 1922, the people of Italy supported Benito Mussolini in his rise to power. Mussolini founded fascism and his propaganda relied heavily on rebuilding the lost glory of the Roman empire. He was so popular among the common people that the Italian king handed the government over to him. Mussolini thus attempted to conquer Ethiopia in the second Italo-Ethiopian war in 1935. East Africa still bears the scars of Italian white supremacist influence to this day. The Roman Catholic church supported Mussolini’s expansionist agenda because they have always supported colonial violence in the name of Roman and Christian and white supremacy. (Note: Fascism.)

screenshot: Mussolini and Hitler having a good laugh

Adolf Hitler formed his Nazi party in Germany after watching Mussolini’s fascist black shirts. Hitler’s Munich Putsch in 1923, a failed coup d’état in Germany, was modeled directly after Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, a successful coup d’état that led to Mussolini assuming control of Italy’s government. Hitler was a great admirer of Mussolini and ancient Rome. The two fascist leaders became friends and were partners in the Axis powers, along with Japan, who fought the Allies in WWII. Italians committed many war crimes during WWII that they have never been held accountable for. The second Italo-Ethiopian war was part of their fascist vision to control the world. (Note: Plans for global domination.)

Some people make the argument that southern Italy has a different history from northern Italy and therefore southern Italians should not be considered white. They contend that the majority of Italian immigrants in the USA were southern Italians and therefore it is accurate to say that they were not white. While it is true that southern Italy does have a slightly different history to northern Italy, whiteness is about institutional power and southern Italy has held and continues to hold institutional power over Black and brown peoples. Southern Italian missionaries were the first to spread Catholicism throughout Asia and the Far East and were the first missionaries in Japan where they profited from the silk trade. They culturally appropriated the robes of Zen Buddhist monks to trick the Japanese into thinking they were similar to Buddhists. Southern Italians lusted after colonies in Africa the same as north Italians because they were in dire poverty and wanted the riches that African colonies would bring them. So many southern Italians emigrated to the USA at that time because of that poverty, just the same as many Anglo-Saxons emigrated to the USA because of dire poverty. Southern Italians committed war crimes against African peoples as well as fought the Allies using guerilla warfare in north Africa. Southern Italians supported Mussolini and his fascist National List party by joining his Blackshirts which enabled him to take power in 1922 and then win the 1924 election in a landslide. Southern Italians revered the Roman empire and supported Mussolini’s vision that Italy regain its lost imperial power. It is a fact that quite a few southern Italians are still full of pride in Italian white supremacy. They also participate, along with the rest of Italy, in the whitewashing of Italy’s war crimes. They do this by portraying themselves as victims of the fascism they created. (Note: Re-writing History.)

screenshot: Mussolini’s landslide election win

Placing a marginalized identity on white supremacist people who have a two-thousand-year-old history of imperialism and genocide means that those white supremacists have been given a tool to gaslight their victims. They can infiltrate the spaces of Black and brown peoples and demand the right to speak. That’s the biggest danger of peddling the lie that Italians are not white. They can erase their crimes against humanity. They can distance themselves from the roots of the systems of oppression that their ancestors created. All of humanity loses in that situation, particularly Black and brown peoples. We can’t dismantle systems of oppression if we don’t know what their roots are and for this lie to become popular now when Italians have only just started to acknowledge some of their historical violence is disastrous. This distortion of the facts must be interrupted with the truth. (Note: Controlling the narrative.)

One argument that is made to pass off Italians as “not-white” is the idea that Italy was originally inhabited by the Etruscans, who some have said may have been Black from Africa but were most likely Indigenous Europeans according to these DNA analyses. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the Etruscans were Black. It is true that the Etruscans had a large empire in Italy that consisted of independent city states, some of which worked together to rule their civilization. They developed much of the infrastructure that would later comprise the infrastructure of the Roman empire. The Romans adopted certain Etruscan religious practices, some of their clothing, and even some of their words. Do you know what happened to the Etruscans? The Romans slaughtered them in 396 BCE. Any Etruscans left alive were enslaved and sold. In Etruscan cities, entire populations were wiped out or sold into slavery, while their territory was re-settled by Romans. The genocide of the Etruscan people meant that the few of them who were left were assimilated into Rome by 90 BCE but had no institutional power there; Etruscans never became part of Rome’s political elite. So even if the Etruscans were Black, Rome was not Black. Rome was white and so was the Roman empire. (Note: Co-opting Black identity.)

Modern day Italians are not the political descendants of the Etruscans. They are the political descendants of Rome. Even if Italians do have some Etruscan DNA, which they likely do in Tuscany and other Etruscan cities, and even if that Etruscan DNA is Black, Etruscans are not upheld as Italy’s cultural or genetic heritage. Their Pagan religion is not followed. Their practices are not revered. Their skin color is not celebrated. Their name is not even mentioned. Etruscans are not upheld as the ancestors of Italy by any institutions of power in Italy. Instead, the Romans and the Roman empire and the Roman Catholic church are upheld. Christopher Columbus is upheld. Because Italians are white. (Note: Assimilation.)

It is also a fallacy to talk about whiteness from the perspective of genetics. Whiteness has never been about genetics. It has always been about institutional power. It has always been about political control and inventing narratives that support that political control. That’s why the idea of whiteness in the USA included more ethnic groups as more Europeans arrived, because the white people in power were always seeking to hold majority power over the Black and brown peoples they subjugated and enslaved. This is why the privileges of whiteness were legally allowed to European Jews even though they were not perceived to be white socially by the common people of Europe. Jews were allowed into the social perception of whiteness through a process of willing assimilation and even before then, they still were allowed privileges that Black and brown people were never allowed because the government of the USA legally recognized European Jews as white. Legal recognition means institutionalized power. (Note: Ignoring facts.)

Tanned white people are not brown people and legally never have been in the United States of America. Italians had the institutional power of being white even as they sought social acceptance by northern Europeans. Establishing Columbus Day was all about that. Italians were reminding everyone that they were the most white supremacist of all Europeans. (Note: White power.)

No one seems to notice that the tactic of assimilation was taught to northern Europeans by Romans. Remember the southern Britannic tribes who were brutally colonized by the Romans? They were assimilated into the Roman empire. They mixed socially, married Roman troops, learned Latin, ate Roman food, walked on Roman roads, paid taxes to Rome, swore fealty to Rome’s emperors. Many Britons gained Roman citizenship. Emperor Constantine (who you’ll remember promoted Christianity throughout the Roman empire) was commanding the Britannic Roman army when he won his famous victory at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. That battle is seen by many as the definitive moment when Christianity became the religion of the empire. Roman Britons were so thoroughly assimilated that they were winning battles under the Roman emperor in Rome. They believed that they were no longer barbarians and were finally civilized. This is why today English people are so proud of their Roman “heritage”. (Note: Loss of identity.) The northern tribes who never accepted Roman rule were by stark contrast called “savages”. That’s another word for barbarians, remember? This perception of the Scottish people stuck through the centuries in England until the unification of Scotland with England in 1707. Even that unification was always shaky. The ripple effects of Rome’s propaganda tactics between the tribes of what is now known as England and Scotland is still felt in Britain to this day. (Note: Divide and conquer.)

Whiteness has never been about DNA. It’s always been about institutionalized power. So returning to the point about the Etruscans, do we call the USA a brown country because Indigenous brown peoples used to populate the entirety of this land? Is the United States of America an Indigenous brown country? Some of the white citizens have miniscule amounts of native blood though they have never learned any indigenous culture. Do we say the majority white people of the United States are brown? What about the army? There are Black and brown people in the US army. Do we say the US army is a Black and brown institution? NO. The USA is run by white people. It is a white country, with a white supremacist system, with a white supremacist war machine, which spreads white supremacist imperialism around the world. The United States devastates the environment to extract resources, leaving Black and brown countries to suffer the consequences of ecological disaster such as climate change. If a Black or brown country doesn’t give up the resources the USA wants, the USA simply invades and bombs them, much like how the Romans would send their army to indigenous lands to slaughter tribes who opposed their extraction of resources (and even to slaughter tribes who didn’t oppose them). There’s a reason why Washington DC is full of Greco-Roman architecture. The “Founding Fathers” of the USA admired the Romans for what they called their ideals of “liberty” and “republic”. The irony of the reality was lost on them both regarding the Romans and themselves. The Romans would certainly have admired the ruthless white supremacist imperialism by which the USA controls the world. Italian Americans certainly admire it and love to take credit for it with their Columbus Day. It’s possible that Italians in Italy are jealous of the USA’s supremacy, considering the fact that some of them openly revere Mussolini even today. (Note: Unrepentant violence.)

Maya Angelou wisely said that when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them. So don’t give Italians a pass. Northern Italians. Southern Italians. They are white. They have always been white. Less than a century of marginalization in the USA does not erase over two thousand years of worldwide imperial dominance, forced conversion, and institutional rape culture. To pretend like history doesn’t exist means that we’ll never truly heal from our colonial trauma.

The Western Roman empire lasted for over five centuries by rape and pillage and genocide and the Eastern Roman empire lasted for much longer of the same. So many tactics and ideas of colonization such as building walls, extracting resources, enslaving natives, destroying the environment, committing genocide, demonizing indigenous peoples, “civilizing” indigenous peoples, “saving” indigenous people, using religion to control, cultural appropriation, institutional rape culture, institutional pedophilia, legalized looting, infinite growth, wars for more wars, authoritarian governments, assimilation, whitewashing their own crimes, portraying themselves as victims, gaslighting real victims, and on and on — all these tactics come from the Italians and their Roman ancestors.

The Italians are the original colonizers. The original extractors. The original white supremacist patriarchs.

The system of white supremacy that Black and brown peoples have suffered from for centuries comes from the over two-thousand-year-old Roman system proudly upheld by modern day Italian Americans.

Wake up. History didn’t begin five hundred years ago.

Italians are white.