Tag: fall of the roman empire

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2

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There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.  After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?  Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don’t even need to feed them much.  Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.

Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that’s what the legions are for anyway.  And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who’s boss.

But even slavery is not the whole story.  When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.  They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.

But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn’t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.  These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn’t match the efficiency of the large plantations.  And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.  The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.

So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.  And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.  So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.  And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.  And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.  So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.

When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.  But at this point, the jig was up.  The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.  Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take up arms to defend their “nation.”  Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic “king” was a matter of complete indifference to them.  In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.

So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.  If a nation doesn’t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.

And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.  Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.  Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.  Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.  Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer/soldiers.  Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.  It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.

As a footnote I think it’s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.  What a brilliant plan.  But not very original.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1

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I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History.”  And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.  His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.  And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.  And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.  Far from it.  He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.  And I can see his point of view.  I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.

Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.  He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.

He further produces as evidence the Romans’ complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.  For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.

As for this last claim I have my doubts.  This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.  In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.  Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.  But let’s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.  What then?

Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?  Well, that’s the question.  It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.  This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.

What is the truth?  I’ll give my opinion in the second part.  But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.

Pick a Province, Any Province

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The United States of America is not the Roman Empire.  I repeat, it is not the Roman Empire.  Regardless of iconography, colonnades in front of classically designed buildings and a Latin phrase or two on our currency this is a different empire.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that parallels can’t be drawn.  I’m sure if I consulted Gibbons, I could find several emperors that were old, depraved, demented and soiled themselves in public like our current commander in chief.

And one of those parallels is that in a declining empire, the uniformity of institutions and way of life begins to break down.  Famously, the Eastern Roman Empire managed to avoid the downfall that overwhelmed the West in the 5th century A.D.  There were various reasons for these differences in fate.  The eastern provinces were for the most part shielded by distance from the full brunt of the Germanic incursions.  The climate itself might have been somewhat responsible.  German tribesmen probably would have found the weather in Egypt and Judea a trifle warm and dry for cattle herding.

So, it should be expected that the intentional destruction of the American nation by its mad rulers will have a disparate effect on different regions and states.  For instance, California has embraced the self-destructive agenda of the Left with great gusto.  Look at how they’ve dismantled their electrical generation infrastructure and the water reservoir system that they depend on for agriculture and human consumption.  They have willingly dismantled their criminal justice system and sanctioned dysfunctional lifestyles like drug addiction and homelessness.  With such an incredible head start few other areas of the country will be able to disappear into neolithic conditions as quickly as California.  Eventually a large part of the state will return to a pre-human state with Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes becoming the dominant lifeform.

But other areas, maybe the Midwest or the South may endeavor to hold onto the forms and trappings of the past.  Just as the Byzantines long maintained Latin as the court language and calling themselves Romans in Constantinople long after their “empire” was just the Hellenized provinces of Asia Minor and Greece, so too these areas may maintain the polite fiction that America still exists long after many of the regions begin to diverge into their new cultures and ways of governing.

For someone looking ahead to what their family will be faced with in the next decade or two, there is real importance in either figuring out ahead of time which areas will provide the best places to live or alternatively, adopting a way of life that will allow you to “jump” successfully when the time comes to make that move.

Personally, I think making a choice of where to live is probably the best way.  Not that I have a foolproof method for picking the winner.  But I think I have a pretty good idea where the losing areas will be.  As stated above, California looks like ground zero for catastrophe.  Similarly, I think the east coast is also a bad bet.  Perhaps looking for places where population density is low and where natural resources like plentiful water, forest cover and a decent climate might be a winning strategy.  As far as population density, I wouldn’t count out a whole state just because there happened to be a large city in that state.  As long as the distance to where you planned to live was several hundred miles away it might make perfect sense.  After all, state boundaries won’t mean much in the future.  Geographic boundaries like rivers and mountains will.  Western New York has very little to do with New York City.  Northern Nevada and Las Vegas are a world apart.

Who knows!  Possibly an unexpected victory by patriots will completely reverse the current decline and fall of the American Empire.  And then places like New York City and Philadelphia will once again become great centers of culture and commerce instead of squalid dung heaps filled with murderous savages.  But in the meantime, consider choosing where you want your family to build their lives.  Choose carefully.

Ah Really, Aurelius?

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So here I am in the ems.  And next up (almost) is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  Yes that Marcus Aurelius.   And really, I’m a big fan.  Holding back the fall of the Roman Empire for almost twenty years is nothing to sneeze at.  I guess he does have to take a hit for being Commodus’ father and all.  I mean he really should have had him put down before he passed but it’s tough for a father to be objective about his kids.

And I like a lot of his quotes.  They are quite enlightened.  But I think sometimes he goes too far.  For instance:

“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”

“Your destruction will mean its end as well“?  What the hell!

I mean he was a military man.  How about fighting against both the endurable and the unendurable?  Can’t we ever push things out of fate’s hands?

Well, anyway, he’s going to donate several weeks of quotes to the site so I’m grateful.  But I think there should be a limit to just how much silent resignation even a stoic has to exhibit.  Now I know he was basically an Italian so I can’t claim an exemption based on my lineage.  But I can tell you over the last eighteen centuries there has been a precipitous fall off in stoic tendencies among his descendants.  Most Italians like nothing better than to complain loud and long about just about everything happening around us.  You might say it’s our defining behavior.

I’ll end by saying I’m glad I didn’t have him for a boss.  He probably would have continuously lectured me in soothing terms to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and eventually I would have gone mad and murdered him.

Well anyway, his first quote will be January 14th (showing up the night of Saturday, January 13th).

And he really should have made Russell Crowe emperor.  It would have solved a bunch of problems.

Panem Et Circenses

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“I recollect, when I was lamenting to the Doctor the misfortunes of the American war, and exclaimed, “If we go on at this rate, the nation must be ruined; he answered, “Be assured, my young friend, that there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.””

(Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet)

In 1776 England was among the greatest nations on Earth.  And this in multiple measures.  Financially, economically, scientifically, militarily, geographically, even culturally it was a power to be reckoned with.  So, when Adam Smith opined that even defeat in the American War of Independence wouldn’t topple Great Britain, he was correct.  And history has many examples of great powers sustaining a terrible loss and recovering.

But history is also full of great nations abandoning the practices that made them great and falling into ruin.  And although the fall may be gradual, nevertheless, the ruin is assured by the reversal inherent in the loss of so important a characteristic.  There may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall.

And as in so many discussions of the American republic we always seem to come back to Rome as the exemplar of a republic that began as a wildly successful partnership between the common people and the elites and ended up as a tyrannical oligarchy where most citizens were impoverished serfs who were essentially slaves to the rich landowners.

Of course, it took about five hundred years for this change to destroy Rome but it is patently obvious that it was the freedom of the Roman citizens in their heyday that made the Roman legion the most fearsome fighting force of the ancient world.  They were fighting for their small farms and families.  These were things worth fighting and dying for.  But by the fifth century A.D. your average Roman commoner didn’t own anything and wouldn’t care whether he was ruled by a Frank, a Visigoth, a Hun or a Roman emperor.  So why would he fight to maintain the empire?  He wouldn’t.  And so, it fell.

What about us?  How do we end up?  Well, currently the globalists have been announcing that in the future “you won’t own anything and you’ll like it.”  That sounds an awful lot like bread and circuses to me.  We’re creating a state that has no patriotic aspect to it.  Now whether such a state can exist in the current international environment is an open question.  But I would say that the idea that such a country could be a militarily dominant state doesn’t seem likely.  I think that will be on display going forward.  Currently, the American nuclear arsenal acts as a powerful deterrent against the great powers attacking the country.  But the idea of using the threat of nuclear annihilation to coerce Hungary or Afghanistan into celebrating gay pride seems kind of absurd.  So, we can conclude that our influence around the world will diminish along with the diminution of our military and economic power.

So, what will we look like going forward?  Probably like an updated version of England.  We’ll be the former hegemon slowly muscled out of all the territories we used to dominate.  And we already see it.  Asia and Africa are already going their own ways.  Then the Americas and finally Europe.  Who knows?  The day could come when even Canada starts kicking sand in our face.  That would be the bottom.

There is nothing certain about the arc of our historical relevance as a great power.  The elites that currently embrace all of the madness that is leading us to ruin could wake up tomorrow and decide that, “Wait a minute, a closed border and resurgent industrial policy is exactly what the Democratic party has always stood for.  And weren’t Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis magnanimous in defeat and shouldn’t we let bygones be bygones?  And what the hell is going on in the cities with criminals running amok?  Law and order is the Democrat way.”  Hell, they wouldn’t even have to let Donald Trump out of prison.  They’d claim he had been the woke problem all along.  After all we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

They could do this because the underlying motivation is their own self-interest.  If the globalist project suddenly founders then it will be all aboard the new American century with red, white and blue bunting and hip, hip hooray for our boys.  We can even expect another attack on the “homeland” at some point.  But as the Roman elites eventually discovered slaves don’t make very convincing legionnaires.  And I think we may be past the point where American troops will dominate the world stage.  So even if there is a pivot to sanity, we won’t again approach what we were in 1941 or even 2001.  Americans just aren’t going to buy into it again.  We’re just another declining empire with puppet masters pulling the strings and the serfs trying to avoid the consequences of the next reflexive spasm of the great dying beast.

And so, as I said earlier, there may be a great deal of ruin in a nation but once the well-being of the citizens is no longer the driving force behind its government that ruin is assured and the greater the nation the more dramatic the fall.  And depending on the surrounding circumstances the fall isn’t necessarily slow.  Keep your eye on the exits.

Good and Bad Emperors

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Last week when I was railing against Joe Biden’s regime, I compared him to the Roman Emperor Tiberius.  Now this wasn’t meant to indicate a great similarity between these two politicians.  It was only to indicate that at a certain point in their careers each one was a debauched old man in charge of a great empire whose heir was a lunatic.  Honestly, the comparison is grossly unfair to Tiberius.  In his younger days Tiberius was a highly skilled and successful general who conquered several important provinces along the periphery of the empire.  By comparison, Joe Biden’s greatest achievement was getting hair plugs.

But it does bring up once again the comparison of the period at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire with our own time.  The end of the Roman Republic was a tumultuous century of greater and greater outrages against the Roman citizenry.  By the time the Caesars ended the farce all that remained was a plutocratic oligarchy harvesting the Roman citizens as legionnaires to conquer the rest of the world for use as slaves on Roman plantations.

But those legions were successful enough that they allowed the corrupt, mismanaged, Empire to expand for another two hundred years and after that to at least survive for another three hundred years.

And how about us?  Will the corpse of the American Republic, hijacked by the managerial mandarins of the federal government in association with the corporate oligarchs continue to rule the Global American Empire for its own half a millennium?

I guess that’s the quadrillion dollar question.  Based on the looks of Joe Biden you might say that five hundred days might be more realistic than five hundred years.  But let’s not be too hasty.  Currently our government is still masquerading as a representative republic where elections decide who is in charge.  A place holder like Joe Biden whose name is still familiar to those who remember him as a senator and vice president might be a very good way to begin the transition to the imperial model.

And after all most emperors aren’t necessarily “good emperors.”  You got Augustus and (arguably) Tiberius in the good column.  Then you get Caligula.  With the right public relations team even Caligula can last a few years.  So, with the right press secretary and national press Joe can survive.  Kamala, on the other hand is more in the Incitatus category.  Like Caligula’s horse, she is just a bridge too far and cannot pass the smell test.

And right in line with this common-sense limit no one is speaking of Kamala Harris as a realistic successor to Joe Biden, either in 2024 or afterwards.  The powers that be are respecting the instinct for self-preservation that still exists in the American populace.

But we could end up with an actor like Gavin Newsome or Elizabeth Warren or even AOC (God forbid.)  So, it’s well within the bounds of possibility that this empire could sputter along almost indefinitely with cretinous puppets in charge.  But what could shorten the span of time of the empire is military disaster.  All the way up to around 180 AD the legions provided a reliable bulwark against the incursions of the external enemies of Rome.  Germanic tribesmen and Persian armies alike still had to reckon with a relatively well-trained and professional army that could be brought to bear against an enemy.

Unfortunately for us this same military preparedness doesn’t seem to be available any longer.  But at the same time, the bluff is still being used to attempt to intimidate the other powerful regimes.  So, the spectacle of the Middle Eastern retreats (especially the rout from Afghanistan) is a recent indicator.  And now the bluster toward Russia and China rings quite hollow.

A true military debacle would be the catalyst for a much quicker loss of prestige and possibly the destabilization of the oligarchy that currently calls the shots in America.  After all, if we can’t even hold off medieval goat herders like the Taliban then why exactly would we allow the IRS and the FBI to treat us like slaves?

So, I guess my thought is that the American Empire can last practically indefinitely as long as it retains the competency that maintains it as a great power.  But if its military prowess declines then so does its ability to coerce the American people to knuckle under to its tyrannical demands.  The outcome of Biden’s saber rattling against Russia and China may be very instructive concerning the future of our oligarchs and their junta.

And by the way, where is our Caesar?

Burn It!  Burn It All!

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Ah, the heady days of our civilizational maelstrom.  As the world we knew is ripped to shreds and flung around us in centripetal chaos I can recognize fragments of familiar things flying by.  Sort of like the images that Dorothy sees in the scene where she is riding in the tornado and sees her friends and relatives float by in a rocking chair or a row boat.

You recognize some normal American ritual or an icon of a former day.  There’s a flash of recognition and it triggers some reflexive emotion or thought.  And then it flies by and is gone and the reality of being spun around in a howling cyclone of fragmented bits of the former reality returns.

But when we’re not fighting for our lives, human beings have to search for the interesting and enjoyable things around them.  Even in hell there must be a coffee break where people gather around the water cooler (or battery acid cooler) and shoot the breeze.  It’s just the nature of the beast.

You know I really enjoyed thinking about the minutia in the giant ant movie yesterday.  Thinking about the characterizations and the movie conventions that they employed back then was the most fun thing that I have thought about in weeks.  And it occurred to me that here is so much substance, so much American-ness in these old silly things from sixty, seventy years ago.  And not because there’s great art on display.  This is a story about giant ants.  Nothing more absurd is imaginable.  Nothing less important exists.  And yet the people who wrote the script and acted the scenes managed to do a good job of creating this ridiculous world that they were employed to create.  The guy who played the booze-soaked hobo in the hospital ward was highly entertaining.  The general working with the cop to operate the bazooka for the phosphorus bombardment of the ant nest was amusing in his portrayal of upper management trying his hand at a front-line task.

Maybe that is what the future looks like.  We’ll be like the medieval monks copying and illuminating fragments of the classical world to preserve something for when the rampaging vandals have run out of places to sack and burn and whoever is left sets about the hard work of rebuilding civilization from what’s left of the wreckage.  So, I’ve found new direction in celebrating whatever fragments and shards of the old order strike my fancy and even any worthwhile new shoots as they present themselves.  Certainly, it’s an uphill battle while the orcs are still busy burning and pillaging all around us.  And from time to time, we’ll have to put down our quills and cap our inkwells and pick up a battle axe and shield to fend off the latest incursion of rampaging savages.

But there is absolutely more sense in celebrating the things that give meaning to life and to enjoy art; high or low, than there is in just bemoaning the destruction and dwelling on how low we have fallen.  After all, no one threw a switch one day and ended the dark ages and began the renaissance.  The knowledge was always there.  It needed people who were willing to apply that knowledge.  It needed human ingenuity and imagination and a little breathing space between them and the nearest barbarians.

So don’t be surprised if I sound a little happier.  Sure, the orcs may win this war.  Our whole civilization may come crashing down in an orgy of death and darkness.  We may be on the cusp of a millennium of ignorance and misery.  But as Hurin said in the Silmarillion, “ Aurë entuluva!”, “Day shall come again.”  It seems inevitable that human intelligence will persevere over entropy and stupidity.  There is in life that which strives against chaos.  I’ll bet on us.

Now, let’s take another look at that giant ant movie.  Have you ever noticed how annoying the girl scientist gets when she’s down in the ant nursery in New Mexico?  She starts yelling at her colleagues, “Burn it!  Burn it all!”

I mean who the hell is she?  Especially since Ben and Bob are going to have to haul her fat butt up several steep inclines by rope to get her out of that cyanide laden death trap.  It’s not like she has the upper body strength to get herself out.  She could at least act a little more polite.  An incipient girl-boss even back then.  Ah well.

No One Talks Collapsing Empires Better Than the ZMan

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My favorite dissident has what I think is a fascinating discussion of what happens when an empire, e.g. the Soviet Union or the Romans starts to die.  He discusses the transition from central rule to oligarchs.  I think he makes some truly excellent points.  We may already be quite a ways along the process.  And he shows how differences in circumstances can lead to different outcomes.  A good read.

16MAY2019 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Our Modern Satyricon – VDH

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Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist by training so it is perhaps unsurprising that he finds the analogies between Petronius’s Satyricon and the cultural rot of our own age.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/15/our-modern-satyricon/

But I still praise him for the accuracy of his point by point comparison.  Comparing the present age to post-republican Rome has become a common trope but Hanson points out just how accurate it is.  Nothing new here, just the scholarly expertise of the author pointing out the exactness of the analogy.

Peak Civilization

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Hat tip to Vox Day as he links to and quotes a very interesting article about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by one of its modern descendants, an Italian chemist named Ugo Bardi.  Vox is referencing in his title the science fiction story “A Canticle for Leibowitz” where a future world forms monasteries to preserve knowledge through a new fictional Dark Age as the analogy of us recognizing the coming Dark Ages after ours.  Which also hearkens to Rod Dreher’s book “The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation,” where he compares the present societal decay with the post Roman age that sparked the monastic age.  Bardi in his article goes into the extant texts of Romans from the beginning of the Roman crisis under Marcus Aurelius all the way to end of the Empire in the Fifth Century to argue that the Romans never figured out either what was happening to them or that the Empire could end.

I’ve been fascinated by the spectacle of the Roman Empire since I was a schoolboy hearing about Rome from my Catholic grammar school nuns.  Thinking that we are in an analogous situation is equally fascinating and depressing.  But maybe there is still time to avert such a collapse.  Vox thinks it’s probably too late for the US.  I try to be more optimistic.  If you find the current societal situation at all analogous to that other example of civilizational collapse then you might be interested in looking at both posts.