The Hate that Launched a Thousand Ships?

Last month, in a typically ethnocentric proclamation, the Anti-Defamation League decreed that the swastika, although a venerable religious symbol to perhaps two billion people, was an anti-Semitic symbol of hate.

The Revisionist stands shoulder to shoulder with the ADL in ferreting out all symbols of hate, and therefore, as a result of our own research, we have found that among the numerous artifacts uncovered by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann on the site of ancient Troy were many that were inscribed with the Hooked Cross. The conclusion, using ADL logic, appears inescapable: anti-Semitism existed over a thousand years before the birth of Christianity, and, perhaps, before there were any Jews!

The Trojan artifacts, originally from the second millennium BCE, were bequeathed by Schliemann to the Prussian Academy in Berlin, but were stolen by the Red Army in 1945 and were hidden in a basement for 50 years before surfacing a few years ago in St. Petersburg. It is not known how many of the swastika emblazoned artifacts survived KGB interrogations. In the past few years, Germany, Russia, Greece, and Turkey have all claimed, or re-claimed, ownership of the artifacts. However, it is clear that, should Germany prevail and recover the pieces, they will not be able to display them, since swastikas are banned in modern Germany.

CODOH's stunning revelation of Ancient Hate promises to call for a massive “revision” of Ancient history. For centuries, Greek scholars have believed that the Trojan War was fought over Helen of Troy, the abducted wife of a Greek king (some “revisionists” have argued that it was about economics, but you know the way revisionists are). It now seems likely that future explanations of the Trojan War will rely heavily on the moral righteousness of the Greeks in their battle against Hate.

In addition, other elements of the Trojan saga will likely appear in a different light. The famous episode of Achilles sulking in his tent may now be explained as a result of the latent anti-Semitism of the famous Greek warrior, while the ordeals of Ulysses, forced to wander for ten years after the war's conclusion, might now be explained as just punishment for his failure to bomb the approaches to the topless towers of Ilium.

The repercussions of this revelation are hard to gauge: the impact on condom sales may be nil. On the political front, demands for reparations from the Turkish government, where the ruins of Ancient Troy are located, seem unlikely. The entrail-readers can point to the fact that at least one academic conference in Israel soft-pedaled the issue of Turkish atrocities against the Armenians in the early twentieth Century because of Turkey's close ties with the Jewish state. Still we may expect that these most recent revelations of hate will cause historians of Ancient Greece to stand by and await further instructions on how to think about the past.