Why Today’s Far-Right Romanticizes History’s Biggest Flops

Walk into any radical internet subculture today and look at the profile pictures or forum banners. Or go to a racist white nationalist rally like Charlottesville 2017. You will see a deep obsession with the imagery of the defeated.

Groups like the Pagan Vikings, the Byzantine Empire, the Crusaders, Napoleon, the American Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and Rhodesian brush fighters all have one thing in common: they lost catastrophically. They saw their states dismantled, their economies shattered, or left their nations in absolute ruins.

This presents a bizarre paradox. Modern extremists constantly preach about strength, efficiency, and civilizational survival. Yet, they choose to "glaze" movements that crashed and burned. Why do history's biggest flops become romanticised internet memes? The answer lies in a subconscious psychological trap that turns total failure into a pristine, unchallengeable illusion.

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Part 1: The "Loser Lineup" vs. Historical Reality

To understand this phenomenon, we must contrast the internet fantasy of these regimes with the grim, messy historical reality of their collapses, tracked from the earliest failures to the most recent.

🛡️ 1. The Pagan Vikings (Collapsed c. 1066)

• The Internet Fantasy: Hyper-masculine, axe-wielding pagan warriors who dominated through pure physical strength and rejected outside influence.
• The Historical Reality: As a political and religious movement, pagan Viking culture completely lost. They quickly realized that their decentralized, raiding-based lifestyle was unsustainable. To survive, the Viking kings abandoned paganism entirely, converted to Christianity, built European-style centralized kingdoms, and integrated into the modern world. The "badass pagan" era lasted barely 250 years before it went completely obsolete.

⚔️ 2. The Crusaders (Collapsed 1291)

• The Internet Fantasy: Holy, unstoppable warriors in immaculate white armor, defending European civilization with absolute unity.
• The Historical Reality: A strategic disaster from start to finish. They spent a massive amount of time murdering fellow European Christians—most famously during the brutal Sack of Constantinople in 1204, where Crusaders literally destroyed the very city modern right-wingers romanticise. The fragile Crusader States were plagued by internal backstabbing, terrible logistics, and completely collapsed within two centuries.

🏛️ 3. Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire (Collapsed 1453)

• The Internet Fantasy: A grand, unyielding, hyper-pious Christian empire that fell only because it was tragically outnumbered by an overwhelming Islamic Ottoman siege in 1453. Calls to make Constantinople and Hagia Sophia Christian or Greek again.
• The Historical Reality: The fall of Constantinople was the result of a centuries-long internal collapse fueled by absolute incompetence, corruption, and economic suicide. To pay for petty civil wars, Byzantine emperors literally sold off their own tax rights to Italian city-states like Venice, hollowing out their own treasury. By 1453, the mighty city wasn't a thriving superpower; it was a ghost town. The population had withered from 500,000 down to a measly, impoverished 50,000 people living surrounded by abandoned, overgrown weed fields. When the final siege happened, the Emperor could only scrape together 7,000 soldiers to defend the walls because his own citizens were too busy fighting religious civil wars over whether to submit to the Pope. They bankrupted and destroyed themselves from within long before the first Ottoman cannon fired.

👑 4. Napoleon Bonaparte (Collapsed 1815)

• The Internet Fantasy: The ultimate, unbothered military genius who conquered a continent through sheer alpha-male willpower.
• The Historical Reality: Militarily and economically, Napoleon left France completely broken, bankrupt, depopulated, and occupied by foreign armies. Furthermore, his Napoleonic Code permanently shattered feudal hierarchies by completely emancipating European Jews and tearing down ghetto walls [Napoleon and the Jews - Wikipedia]. For modern racial nationalists, his actual policy legacy is a total contradiction.

🇺🇸 5. The Confederacy (Collapsed 1865)

• The Internet Fantasy: Noble, gentlemanly rebels fighting for "heritage" and traditional agrarian life against a soulless industrial machine.
• The Historical Reality: They lasted a measly four years. They built a fragile, unstable economy entirely reliant on human bondage, got their major cities burned to the ground, and surrendered unconditionally.

🪖 6. The Nazi Regime (Collapsed 1945)

• The Internet Fantasy: The absolute pinnacle of military efficiency, hyper-advanced technology, and unyielding discipline.
• The Historical Reality: A chaotic, drug-fueled, 12-year dictatorship built on institutional incompetence. Their racial paranoia caused a massive "brain drain" that chased away top scientific minds like Albert Einstein. Their erratic military strategy locked Germany into a suicidal multi-front war it could never win, resulting in their country being physically sliced in half and occupied for decades.

🇿🇼 7. The Rhodesians (Collapsed 1979)

• The Internet Fantasy: The ultimate hyper-masculine "retro" military aesthetic—short-shorts, FN FAL rifles, and a rugged bush-warrior lifestyle.
• The Historical Reality: A tiny, completely unrecognized breakaway colony that isolated itself from the entire world. They went completely bankrupt trying to maintain an unsustainable minority-rule apartheid state and collapsed into total political and economic ruin within 15 years.

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Part 2: The Tom Holland Paradox and the Crucifixion Complex

Why do people who claim to value strength worship regimes that lost so definitively? The explanation lies in what can be called the Tom Holland Paradox.

In his book Dominion, historian Tom Holland argues that the Western mind is completely saturated in Christian morality. Ancient pagans worshiped the winners—they respected Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great because they conquered and ruled. But Christianity flipped the script. It taught the Western subconscious that the defeated have moral virtue, that the underdog is inherently pure, and that the powerful winner is a corrupt bully.

The political Left openly embraces this thought process. It champions the underdog, driving movements like "Free Palestine" or traditional anti-capitalist socialism, where the oppressed are automatically viewed as holding the moral high ground.

The far-right twist is that despite claiming to hate modern "victim culture" and romanticising pagan strength, they fall into the exact same Christian psychological trap. By worshiping the Confederacy, the Nazis, or the Fall of Constantinople, they are actively looking for a political crucifixion.

Defeat is a rigid requirement for their worship. If a regime survives, it must govern. It has to pass budgets, fix sewage systems, compromise with neighbors, and deal with corruption. It becomes messy, compromised, and human. But because these regimes were utterly destroyed by overwhelming global forces, extremists can freeze them in time as "pure, martyred victims" who died fighting a corrupt modern world. Defeat protects their heroes from the burden of reality, keeping them frozen in an illusion of pristine perfection.

[Actual Government] ───> Must Rule ───> Compromises, Corruption, Failure
[Defeated Regime]   ───> Destroyed ───> Frozen in Time as a "Pure Martyr"

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Part 3: The Insanity of Repetition vs. The China Model

Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the classic definition of insanity. Obsessively trying to "be great again" by mimicking history’s biggest flops is political insanity. If you copy a system that resulted in total destruction, you will likely achieve total destruction.

If you want to see what actual civilizational survival looks like, look at modern China.

Following their "Century of Humiliation" in the 19th and 20th centuries, China did not try to obsessively recreate the extinct Qing Dynasty. They did not waste centuries larping as ancient Han Dynasty warlords or wearing silk robes while crying about British gunboats. They realized their old system was broken.

Instead, they initiated a massive cultural and economic reformation. They embraced industrialization, adopted modern global statecraft, utilized Western capitalist tools, and built an untouchable 21st-century technological superpower. They fixed what was broken by looking forward to the future, not backward to the past. They chose to adapt and win rather than fail and romanticise the loss.

                             

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Conclusion: True Heritage vs. Internet Cosplay

Civilizations survive through reformation, not regression. True greatness is not found in history's ashes, nor is it frozen in a state of romanticized defeat.

If a culture wants to survive, it must stop living in the past trying to resurrect broken regimes. It must adapt to the future, shed its self-destructive illusions, and have the courage to reform. Anything else is just internet cosplay—a digital security blanket for people who would rather feel like tragic, pure martyrs than do the hard work of winning in the real world.

👑 Alternate History: What if King Shaka Zulu Survived The 1828 Assassination?

September 1828. The royal kraal at KwaDukuza smells of treason and impending blood. In our history books, Shaka Zulu is blindsided, struck down by his half-brothers Dingane and Mhlangana, and his mastermind aunt, Princess Mkabayi. But history is fragile.

In this alternate timeline, a loyalist whispers the treasonous plot to the king just hours before the strike. King Shaka moves with terrifying speed. He traps the conspirators in the cattle kraal. Before the sun sets, Dingane, Mhlangana, and Mkabayi are executed. Shaka survives 1828.

To understand how radically this survival changes the world, we must look at what actually happened to the Zulu Kingdom.

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⏳ The Real Timeline: From Assassination to Ulundi

When Dingane murdered Shaka in 1828, he took a highly centralized military superpower and fractured it. Dingane’s reign was marked by paranoia and erratic diplomacy. When Boer Voortrekkers entered Zulu territory in the 1830s, Dingane infamously massacred Piet Retief’s delegation, triggering the catastrophic Zulu defeat at the Battle of Blood River in 1838.

This defeat allowed his half-brother, Mpande, to ally with the Boers, overthrow Dingane, and take the throne. Mpande maintained a fragile peace with the white settlers for over 30 years, but the geopolitical storm was gathering.

By the time Shaka’s nephew, King Cetshwayo, took power, the British Empire wanted total control of Southern Africa. In 1879, the British launched an unprovoked invasion. Though the Zulu army won a legendary victory at Isandlwana, British industrial firepower ultimately prevailed. At the Battle of Ulundi in July 1879, the Zulu capital was burned to the ground. King Cetshwayo was captured, stripped of his power, and sent into lonely exile in Cape Town and London, marking the tragic end of the independent Zulu Kingdom.

But what if Shaka had never been killed in 1828? By eliminating his assassins, Shaka alters the trajectory of Southern Africa. Depending on his state of mind, history splits into three vastly different realities: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

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😇 The Good: The Diplomatic Sovereign

Signs of the Statesman

Modern media often paints Shaka purely as a bloodthirsty conqueror, but his historical record tells a different story. Shaka was a highly pragmatic diplomat. He actively welcomed early British traders like Francis Farewell and Henry Francis Fynn to Port Natal (Durban). He protected them, granted them land, and was deeply fascinated by European medicine, literacy, and technology. Crucially, Shaka had already begun exploring international diplomacy, having sent official royal embassies to establish contact with King George IV.

The British Protectorate

Safe from internal assassination, Shaka plays the long game of statecraft. Recognizing the unstoppable global power of the British Empire, he bypasses local frontier conflicts and negotiates directly with Cape Town and London. He signs a formal treaty, positioning the Zulu Kingdom as an official British Protectorate. In exchange for exclusive trading rights and acting as a military buffer against interior tribes, Great Britain guarantees Zulu borders and sovereignty.

A Peaceful End

Instead of constant warfare, Shaka pivots his empire toward modernization. He invites British engineers, doctors, and scholars into Zululand on his terms. The Amabutho (warrior system) evolves from a conquest machine into a highly disciplined civil and defensive force. Shaka successfully steers his nation through the turbulent 19th century, transforming the Zulu Kingdom into a wealthy, recognized, and stable African state. He lives to a ripe old age of 100 years, ultimately dying peacefully in his royal bed in1887, passing a thriving empire to his chosen heir—completely avoiding the tragedy of Ulundi.

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😠 The Bad: The Exiled Warrior

The Boer Influx

In the 1830s, the Great Trek begins. Thousands of heavily armed Boer Voortrekkers cross the Drakensberg mountains, searching for land to escape British rule. Unlike his historical successor Dingane—who panicked and resorted to erratic massacres—Shaka views this strictly as a military invasion. He refuses to cede a single inch of Zululand.

The Clash of Steel and Spear

Shaka unleashes the full, unmitigated might of his veteran impis against the Trekkers. The resulting war is catastrophic. While Shaka scores brilliant initial tactical victories using superior numbers, his traditional spears and shields ultimately cannot overcome the devastating firepower of Boer wagon-laagers and cavalry. In a massive, bloody showdown, the Zulu military backbone is broken.

To St. Helena

The Zulus are defeated on the battlefield. Shaka is captured by the Boers and handed over to British imperial authorities who want to prevent further chaos on their borders. Stripped of his crown and his weapons, the legendary king is sent into lonely maritime exile on a remote island, much like Napoleon Bonaparte. Decades before his nephew Cetshwayo would suffer the same fate, Shaka spends his final days gazing at the ocean, watching from afar as imperial powers dismantle his life's work.

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💀 The Ugly: The Mad King's Desolation

Curdling into Madness

Historically, the death of Shaka's mother, Queen Nandi, in 1827 unhinged his mind. His grief was weaponized, turning into a spiral of paranoia and cruelty. In our timeline, his assassination cut this madness short. But in this timeline, surviving the 1828 plot only validates his deepest fears. Shaka believes the entire world is plotting against him. His grief for Nandi curdles into pure, unadulterated insanity.

The Reign of Terror

Shaka imposes his most insane historical decrees permanently. He bans the planting of crops and the use of milk for a year, forcing a self-inflicted famine upon his own people. He orders the execution of pregnant women and their husbands. Entire clans are slaughtered on a whim because they do not look sorrowful enough. The kingdom starves, and the social fabric of society completely disintegrates.

The Desolate Void

To distract from the internal horror, Shaka launches frantic, chaotic military campaigns. The resulting Mfecane (crushing) intensifies exponentially. The regions surrounding the kingdom are entirely depopulated, turning into vast, silent ghost zones littered with bones. Thousands of desperate Zulu citizens flee the madness, fracturing the nation.

By the time a second, desperate coup finally succeeds years later, the damage is irreversible. Shaka is assassinated way too late. He leaves behind a starved, broken, and hollowed-out country. When the British and Boers inevitably march in, they face no resistance. They easily annex a desolate, ruined land that Shaka, in his madness, destroyed himself.