The Odyssey of identity: Why we must fight for the face of Helen of Troy

As Helen of Troy is about to be portrayed as black in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, the latest episode in the war for the soul of the West questions our very fundamentals. You see, Greek history marks the beginning of the West, so the Trojan War is the first great Western story. And in the Bronze Age, Greeks were white. Same as all Europeans ever. In fact, the Western civilisation, in all its glory and tragedy throughout the millennia, has been a predominantly white affair. Beyond good or bad, this is a fact.

The Kenyan Lupita Nyong’o may be the most beautiful and talented actress on planet earth. Still, she cannot be Helen of Troy. The same way that Matt Damon cannot be Shaka, the Zulu king, and Leonardo DiCaprio could not dare imagine playing Martin Luther King. Because all the film-watching ignorants, children and teenagers out there must know that African warriors and US civil rights movement leaders were black u just as Helen of Troy was white. Elsewise, we produce uneducated fools.

Fortunately, the rumor that Nyong’o will portray the “face that launched a thousand ships” has ignited a firestorm that got people to talk about it. On one side, we have Elon Musk, who brought the subject up. On the other, Christopher Nolan – a director we once trusted with the gravity of history. Musk’s verdict was characteristically blunt: “Nolan has lost his integrity”. But this is not just a dispute over casting. It is a diagnostic check of civilisational disease.

We should start with the source material. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are not vague suggestions. They are the bedrock of European literature, referring to an actual war which took place around 1200 BC. In Book 3 of the Iliad, Helen is described as leukōlenos, which means “white-armed”. In the Odyssey, she is xanthê, “golden-haired” or “fair-skinned”. Homer portrays her as the daughter of Zeus, the ultimate archetype of Achaean beauty. She was white, exactly because the world that gave birth to her was the cradle of the European identity.

Pretending otherwise is not “creative interpretation”. It is a deliberate, ideological falsification of our shared heritage. This progressive trend of “race-swapping” historical and fictional figures – from Anne Boleyn and Cleopatra to the Little Mermaid and now, potentially, Helen of Troy – is creating a context where facts simply do not matter. When a Netflix documentary depicts the Greek-Macedonian Queen Cleopatra as a Sub-Saharan African, it is not “representation”. It is an admission that the narrative is more important than the truth.

This phenomenon is dangerous because it treats history as a toy for social engineering. If we can delete the physical reality of Helen of Troy today, we can delete the historical reality of the Battle of Marathon, the clash at Tours, or the Normandy landings tomorrow. When facts become negotiable, the progressive elites of Davos and Hollywood gain total control over our collective memory.

Moreover, let us be direct: This trend is, in its essence, a manifestation of a new, systemic racism against white people. Under the disguise of “equity”, the cultural establishment is engaged in a project of erasure. You will never see a white actor cast as Nelson Mandela or Mansa Musa – and quite rightly so, for that would be an insult to the history of South Africa, Mali, if not blacks in general. Yet, the history and mythology of the West are treated as fair game for dismantling.

By replacing white archetypes with black actors in stories that belong to the European tradition, the woke culture is signalling that white identity has no right to its own symbols. It tells white European children that their ancestors and their legends are fluid, irrelevant, or, worse, something to be corrected. In the 8th century, the iconoclasts broke the icons of the saints. In the 21st, the woke bureaucrats are breaking the images of our heroes.

We have seen this script before. Whether it was the Black Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton or the multi-ethnic Viking courts in Vikings: Valhalla, the goal is the same: Uprooting the cultural foundations and values of the West. This is the ultimate target: A world without roots, without borders, and without a past that can be recognised as ours. If Helen can be anyone, then she is no one. If the “face that launched a thousand ships” is stripped of its specific, Greek and European identity, then the ships themselves have no home to return to.

The lesson for Europeans should be clear. We cannot defend the identity, sovereignty and borders of our continent and Union of nations if we do not first defend the truth of their culture. We cannot allow our past and legends to be colonised by an ideology that hates the people who created them. History is not a diversity seminar, and the daughter of Zeus does not need a modern makeover. She needs her face back.