Fatal Antigone: Between Modern Lawfare and Cursed Heredity 

Authors and their literary heroes are always subject to conflicting interpretations in different historical contexts. Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone was performed quite differently in the Greek city state of fifth-century Greece than it is in contemporary versions crafted by modern producers and directors beholden to modern literary critics. The story of the mythical and rebellious princess Antigone raises a haunting question whether all we have learned so far from our Western cultural treasure trove, be it from Homer’s epics, Biblical proverbs, or from Shakespeare’s verses, or for that matter from the US Constitution, is just apocryphal nonsense or perhaps a conman job resulting in a terrible waste of time for gullible readers and theater audiences. Projecting our modes of conceptualization into the mindset of our distant ancestors is a game of wishful thinking.

Sophocles’ play Antigone is the centerpiece of Western legal, philosophical and political thought. The play conveys a timeless interaction between the rule of positive law versus the notion of unwritten justice, known also as natural or divine law.  Antigone believes that in accordance with divine laws she must provide for a decent burial for her dead brother, irrespective of his brother’s insurrectionist past and despite the fact the he was accused by their  uncle Creon of what we would call today “terrorist activities.” In Antigone’s mind, divine or natural laws honoring dead kinsmen must precede the written law of her city of Thebes however much the law of her  city strictly forbids memorial service to enemies of the state. As she claims in her defense: ”

Justice, enacted not these human laws
Nor did I deem that thou, a mortal man
Could’st by a breath annul and override
The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven.” (1)

But what god or  which gods? What divine justice did Antigone have in mind? Most modern scholars overlook the fact that the Ancients had a radically different concept of religion and justice than modern lawmakers in the US or EU. Ancient Greeks or Romans could not possibly conceive of the end-time salvation religions like monotheistic Christianity, Islam or Judaism. The Greco-Roman mindset and its conceptualization of the hereafter can in no way be substituted by Christian-inspired notions of justice. Therefore, analyzing Antigone through glasses of Christian self-denial or guilt feelings is a nonstarter. In prodding the self-perception of early Christians, Walter Otto, the well-known authority on the spiritual legacy of Antiquity, makes the following critical statements about Christian sense of justice;  “Instead of pride reigns fear. The fullness and bliss of life have vanished; dignity and distance have been abandoned and the freedom of the spirit has been stifled.” (2)

Those who cheer up Antigone are oblivious of the fact that modern Western legalism and the concept of natural law is largely influenced by the Judaic-centered religion of a vindictive, revengeful, self-centered, Semitic and totalitarian god who must be obeyed and who resolutely rejects the presence  of other gods — and therefore the possibility of existence of other truths or any other forms of justice. “If we reject such considerations as ‘antisemitic,’ we burden ourselves with new forms of ban on thought and discourse that dangerously restrict our reflection on history. … The capacity to historicize and relativize oneself is a precondition to any genuine tolerance.” (3)

These words by Jan Assmann, a renowned modern expert on Semitic religions, certainly do not come as a consolation to American January 6 Capitol protestors, who, similarly to Antigone had also their ideas about justice when rejecting the rapidly enacted voting legislation that had propelled Joe Biden into the White House. Much like Antigone’s outlawed and demonized brother, the January 6 demonstrators were quickly dubbed by Biden’s DOJ commissars with hyperbolic and criminalizing qualifiers such as “insurrectionists,” “seditious individuals,” “obstructers of justice.” Most of them have subsequently faced stiff penalties. However, the same judicial travesty when applied to the upholding of the liberal judiciary in the US and EU is neatly covered in the garb of the liberal rule of law which even King Creon would not object to. Most scholars—in fact most readers or viewers of Sophocles’ Antigone—are justly horrified over King Creon’s inhumane decision to refuse the burial of Antigone’s insurrectionist brother Polynices, leaving his corpse to rot in the field amidst vultures instead. However, modern law and opinion makers in the EU and US are fully in agreement that even eighty  years after World War II, countless burial locations of killed or deceased National-Socialist or Fascist officials and soldiers scattered all over Europe should remain banned from the public eye, with their distant next of kin being denied access to their graves. Former US president Ronald Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery in Bitburg in Germany in 1985 and his unintended homage to the fallen German Waffen SS soldiers was met with massive criticism all over the liberal and Jewish-run media. (4)

In recent times, a Catholic memorial service that has been regularly held each May 13^th over the last thirty years in the Austrian village of Bleiburg in memory of Croat victims of communism was banned by the Austrian government on the pretext that this was the “largest mass gathering of European Nazi sympathizers.”  (5)

One could go on and on with the judicial lawfare or state-sponsored criminalization of the defeated side and mention the case of fallen Confederate soldiers. General Robert E. Lee’s statues have been smeared and torn down, his name likely to be soon branded in high school history manuals with the label “forerunner of modern white supremacism.” 

The Revisionist trap

Everybody nurtures a conception of Antigone analogously to how one thinks about a household pet. Over the last century Sophocles’ play has been performed hundreds of times all over Europe and the US and will likely continue to attract comments from literary critics for centuries to come. Likewise, everybody judges Antigone’s defiance of Creon’s decrees in his own way. Everybody fits her fate within his own legal, religious or political framework when it best befits his preconceived bias or value judgments. A right-winger will praise harsh measures taken by King Creon who endeavors to secure peace and order in his city threatened by a looming civil war. Modern antifascist activists or LGBTQ+ activists, let alone some modern ageing menopausal drag queen will, by contrast, construe Antigone’s effrontery as a sign of worldwide transsexual/gender liberation.

The necessity of readaptation, reappropriation, revisionism, or probably outright scriptural or legal fraud applies to all fields of science and law, often coming in handy as a tool for academic zealots or nascent political movements in search of cultural and political hegemony. Some contemporary conventional wisdoms, however, must never be revised or questioned. While it is a common and a legally acceptable practice in the US/EU to historicize, that is, inflate or deflate the number of victims of communism or dispute the veracity of distant historical facts and figures, the process of historical revisionism must stay off limits when applied to Jewish World War II victimhood. Any reinterpretation, any new reassessment of the Jewish World War II narrative is a felony in almost all Western states. By contrast, all scientific or literary adaptations, including the fate of Sophocles’ Antigone are given free reign of reinterpretation. Cases of literary reappropriation abound. The late eighteenth-century German playwright Friedrich Schiller was elevated to the level of the spiritual founding father of twentieth-century National-Socialist Germany. His name was adorned in 1935 by dozens of flowery words by hundreds of National-Socialist academics who honored Schiller’s legacy by bestowing the new Germany with the all-year-round headline the “Schillerjahr” (the Year of Schiller) on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of his death. A prominent German lawyer, also a high-ranking National-Socialist politician, Hans Fabricius, wrote in his essay a glowing praise of Schiller:

Schiller as National Socialist! With pride we must salute him. With pride and gratitude. Because no one knows if and what we would be without him. (6)

Latter-day communist and liberal intellectuals didn’t lag much behind with their revisory eulogies. Schiller’s dramas enjoyed great popularity in what was to become the Soviet-ruled East Germany (DDR). Especially popular was his drama Wilhem Tell which depicts the eponymous Swiss freedom fighter (seditious terrorist?). Tell refuses to pay homage to the hat of the late medieval Hapsburg ruler who was terrorizing Swiss peasants. Nowadays we may be disgusted at the sight of those times when European citizens were obliged to kiss the feet of their local rulers, while forgetting that our contemporary liberal deities also require mandatory public worship. Once upon late medieval times, politicians had to kneel down in front of their rulers; now they have to take the knee in front of non-White criminals or stage pilgrimages to the supremely sacred Yad Vashem.

And today’s Schiller? The spirit of the time has changed, along with the arrival of the new liberal ruling class who has tuned up Schiller’s verses to a new set of globalist, multiracial, foreigner-friendly, transgender edicts. Now Schiller’s verses from his Ode to Joy have become the official anthem of the multiracial European Union. The same methods of reappropriation of an author (or when needed demonization), bordering on outright literary or historical fakery, is the inevitable fate of all Western classics and critical historians.

Antigone’s travails know no end. On February 6,1944 around 8 pm, in the midst of US and British nightly aerial bombardments of France (7), the revamped play Antigone was staged by the French nationalist playwright Jean Anouilh at the Paris Théâtre de l’Atelier. Despite power cuts and the freezing cold, the play had a large audience turnout, earning the author an accolade from the German and Vichy government officials in the audience. After the end of World War II, or the so-called Liberation of France, Anouilh’s Antigone did not disappoint his earlier communist detractors because he made Antigone sound like the chief female symbol of antifascist resistance. Thus, the mythical and rebellious Antigone turned after World War II into an antifascist figurehead in the eyes of European leftwing literati. She was remolded into the mirror image of the Spanish communist heroine La Pasionaria or the much-acclaimed American writer and drunkard Ernest Hemingway who after World War II openly bragged about killing dozens of disarmed “Kraut soldiers.” (8)

In the fall of 1944, Anouilh along with thousands of other French nationalist intellectuals was on edge as waves of massive purges were being carried out by self-styled antifascist liberators — with the full benediction of American/UK legislators. Anouilh’s skill for allegorical plots and his irony-clad literary style, however, helped him weasel in and out and survive the vengeful shooting gallery of the antifascist victors. This was not the case with hundreds of his colleagues and fellow travelers who ended the winter 1944/45 with a rope around their neck. (9) The late 1944 Paris scenario was a postmodern reenactment of the duel between the two Antigone’s brothers who had killed each other in their quest for the throne. The much-decried modern cult of wokeness, the religion of political correctness, the dogma of cancel culture, along with their leagues of virtue signalers did not start yesterday — their origins must be traced to 1945. Or even further back to Sophocles’ Antigone and her doomsday father/brother Oedipus…

 Genes as natural law

“In large measure, our fate is in our genes”. (10) This quote by the American molecular biologist James Watson may shed in hindsight additional  light on the fate of Antigone. And for that matter it can better explain the behavior and sociopolitical choices of people throughout the ages. We can change our lifestyles, we can change our citizenship, we can learn or unlearn our acquired cultures, but for now at least, we can’t change the DNA passed down to us from our distant ancestors. No wonder that Watson’s words come as a shock to modern social science theorists and lawmakers who, despite empirical data to the contrary insist on the sole role of the economic and political environment in shaping human behavior. Some contemporary American scholars complain that “Most political science degree programs do not require any coursework in the life sciences, much less genetics.” (11) Their words basically echo belatedly the words of German biologists and geneticists who fell into disgrace after 1945.

The above observations are by no means novel; similar — albeit more expressive and now banned — German words such as “Ahnenerbe” (ancestral heritage), “Erbanlagen” (hereditary factors), “Rassenhygiene” (racial hygiene) were used hundreds of times by hundreds of German psychiatrists, geneticists, physicians, criminal law experts and historians during the fateful years of 1933–45. For obvious political reasons, after World War II such German appellations had to be shred and gradually replaced by vague, neutral and more academically and politically correct terms such as behavioral genetics, evolutionary biology, and sociobiology, in an attempt by contemporary race scientists to clear their names in advance from any tentative suspicion of harboring racism or “Nazism.” When one looks at Antigone’s fate from the point of view of her genetic makeup, the entire play obtains a deadly different meaning.

Antigone was a progeny of kinship inbreeding; her father Oedipus was a husband of her mother Jocasta. Both Antigone and her father Oedipus, whom she had faithfully accompanied until his tragic death, were children of the same mother. Her doomsday fate resulting from the incestuous bond between her father-brother Oedipus and his mother Jocasta had been predetermined on the day she was born. It comes as a big surprise that Antigone’s genetic makeup has never been studied in the analysis of her rebellious behavior. In addition, one must also wonder, what made Sophocles and ancient Greek playwrights, as well as their future readers and viewers relish such morbid tales of incest and kinship killings — all the more as the ancient Greeks had laws allowing parents to physically remove their handicapped children. In fact, Antigone’s father, Oedipus, as a newborn baby had been ditched in the wilderness by his parents, most likely because his parents had suspected their lineage of carrying a serious genetic flaw, thus spelling doom for the city; “Sympathy with the decadents, equal rights for the degenerates — that would be the deepest immorality, that would be the very perversion of morality!” wrote a prominent German lawyer in reference to Nietzsche and his attitudes towards the legislation of ancient Greeks. (12)

What was crossing Sophocles’ mind when he wrote Antigona will never be known with certainty. Very likely he wrote the Oedipus trilogy having in mind how mixed interracial marriages or incestuous bonds are bound to cast a curse on entire ancestral lineage and in the long run destroy the life of a tribe or ingroup in the Greek polis. German scholars in National -Socialist Germany insisted on the careful choice of partners and a good insight into the family tree of both the wife and her husband. Crime and heredity are deeply interwoven, since recessive criminal genes of one or both partners may lead to disaster for future distant offspring.

Just as research on human heredity must not disregard the fact that man, in contrast to all other living creatures, is spiritually determined, we must request today from social science that it also takes into account the biological process which is closely linked the mental/spiritual process. (13)

The above quote is from a prominent German medical doctor who was dealing with crime and heredity in National Socialist Germany and who also proposed an academic curriculum fusing natural science and social science research into a single whole. He added an ominous remark that wouldn’t sound well in the ears of left-leaning college professors: “And no one can deny it: biologically based psychopathology and social science are much closer to each other than psychopathology and experimental physics.” (14)

With each regime change, such as the one that occurred in Germany and Europe, and to some extent in the US in 1945, comes along inevitably the change in political dogmas. Each time a regime change happens the new ruling class must automatically doctor up new “paradigms” in order to make scientific research fit better into their dominant ideology. Just as the story of ancient Greeks, their racial and genetic makeup, their beliefs and their mores were a foremost topic of interest to German scholars after the National Socialist takeover, so has the liberal-communist dogma of interchangeability of human races become a new myth of our times.

The Greek man always feels himself to be a son and heir: from his ancestors he inherits property and dominion, rank and fame, the noble shape of his body, strength, power, courage and achievement. The two belong together, for one is inconceivable without the other. … We are familiar with the hereditary curse in the Oresteia, which always beget new bloodguilt. This is not the revenge of a jealous god, but the natural effect of a natural cause, a fate that extends to several people, given that the family is a unit of blood. (15)

How do those ancient Greek tragedies square away today with the issue of the much-debated topic of natural laws vs. legal positivism in modern jurisprudence, especially in the US? Imposing universal rights and the concept of dignity across the board on all peoples worldwide has had so far little positive effects in terms of securing a lasting multiethnic environment or world peace. An indigenous man from Borneo or Sumatra has a different idea of natural laws and its derivative human rights than a merchant from Queens. A Palestinian-American will have a different concept of natural law and the underlying justice than an American Jew. An African-American DA conducting court proceedings involving a White American defendant will likely file a different motion than a White defense attorney representing his White client.

The American common law, unlike European civil law brags of the superiority of grand juries when passing a final verdict on an indicted suspect. But if a jury is composed of more than half of different non-White or mixed-race jurors, it is highly unlikely that the judge will hand down a just sentence, and it’s relatively unlikely that a White suspect will be acquitted.  The multiracial US and its protectorate, the multiracial EU, are more and more in the process of copying the policy of the ex-communist judiciary in Eastern Europe and Soviet Uinon where the verdict against political dissidents was known before the staged trial had even started. One good thing about Antigone is that she harbored no illusions about her fate. She had known all along that she was by her bloodline destined to die young and that she could not expect any salvation, either from people or the gods.

Notes:

1. Sophocles, Antigone, transl. Storr, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1912). p.15
2. Walter Otto, Der Geist der Antike und die christliche Welt (Bonn: Verlag F. Cohen, 1923), p. 36.
3. Jan Assmann, The Mosaic Distinction or the Price of Monotheism. Transl. by David Lorton / Litrix.de 2004, online, p.9.
4. David Green, “This Day in Jewish History, 1985; Ronald Reagan Sparks Storm with Visit to German War Cemetery”, Haaretz, May 4, 2016. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2016-05-04/ty-article/.premium/1985-reagan-visits-german-war-cemetery/0000017f-f460-d47e-a37f-fd7c41730000
5. Hasnain Kazim, „Neonazis in Kärnten; Gedenken mit Hakenkreuz und Hitlergruß“, Der Spiegel, May 10, 2018. https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/oesterreich-neonazi-treffen-in-bleiburg-kaernten-a-1206675.html
6. Hans Fabricius, Schiller als Kampgenosse Hitlers (Berlin: Verlag Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, 1934), p. 164.
7. Jean Claude-Valla. La France sous les bombes américaines :1942-1945 ( Paris : Les Cahiers libres de l‘histoire, Nr.7, 2008).
8. Wolfgang Stock, „Hat Ernest Hemingway im Krieg wirklich 122 Deutsche getötet?“, Der Spiegel, December 21, 2023. https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/ernest-hemingway-hat-der-schriftsteller-im-krieg-wirklich-122-deutsche-getoetet-a-3bb3b624-78d6-4c87-880a-207daed266ab
9. Dominique Venner, Histoire de la Collaboration (Paris : Pygmalion, 2000), pp. 515-516.
10. D. Watson, quoted in Time, March, 20, 1988.https://time.com/archive/6702116/science-the-gene-hunt/
11. Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott, “The genetics of politics: discovery, challenges, and progress”, Trends in Genetics, October 2012, (Vol. 28, No. 10, p. 528). https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0168-9525%2812%2900111-4
12. Kurt Kassler, Nietzsche und das Recht (München: Verlag Ernst Reinhardt, 1941), p.67.
13. Friedrich Stumpfl, „Verbrechen und Vererbung“, Monatsschrift für Kriminalbiologie und Strafrechtsreform, 29. Jahrgang, Heft 1 (München: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1938), p.2.
14. Ibid.
15. Walter Haedicke, „Die Anschauungen der Griechen über Familie, Herkunft und Vererbung“, Volk und Rasse, 12.Iahrg., Heft 10, (München-Berlin, 1937), pp. 371-372.