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.