Tag: History

Ancient European History – Part 1

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Ancient History is fascinating.  Specifically reading about Europe from 600 B.C to 200 A.D. is fascinating.  The Greeks, the Romans, the Gauls, the Macedonians, the Germans, the Goths, the Scythians even the Persians all interacting (meaning warring against each other) while trying to figure out how to pass from a barbaric tribal social structure into a larger more sophisticated society.  And all this while competing against the more established states like Egypt, Phoenicia and Mesopotamia.

Now some never achieved this.  The Gauls and the Scythians ceased to exist as nations while still in the plundering raider stage.  The Germans and the Goths had to wait for the downfall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. before they could advance.  The Persians, Greeks, Macedonians and Romans all had their day.  The Hellenistic civilization and its several kingdoms and empires had its heyday after Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in the late fourth century B.C.  Stretching from western India to Egypt this civilization lasted in various areas until the Parthians and Romans overtook it.  The last piece to survive was Egypt which Augustus took charge of after the death of Marc Antony and Cleopatra VII in 30 B.C.  Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies whose progenitor was one of Alexander the Great’s generals.  So, all together the Hellenistic civilization Alexander founded lasted three hundred years.  Of course, you could easily make the case that the Byzantine Empire was the extension of this Hellenistic civilization with a thin patina of Roman influence on its surface.  And that shrinking “empire” managed to hang on in the city of Constantinople until 1453 A.D.

The Romans had their run from about 600 B.C. to 476 A.D.  And they did manage to leave their mark on Europe in a big way.  The Romance languages are spoken by a big chunk of the world population and the influence of Roman concepts in law and politics is immense.  So, these tribes from the dawn of real civilization in Europe had a great influence on us in the West.

But in a real way their political institutions were all resounding failures at providing their people with good governance, stability or a satisfying life.  Both the Greeks and the Romans attempted to create republics that provided the citizens with some say in their government.  Athens was a democracy.  Rome had popular elections (in a limited fashion) of their leaders.  But in both cases these civilizations eventually regressed to some form of monarchy.  The Hellenistic states had dynastic kings.  Rome had its emperors that were sometimes dynastic but during the most successful eras successors were selected by the reigning Emperor based on merit.  And in fact, since essentially the emperor was a military dictator, the legions were the ultimate arbiter of who was a successful emperor.  So, Julius Caesar or a Trajan would be beloved by his conquering legions because they would be showered with the spoils of conquest.  Whereas, an emperor without any military ability like Caligula or Commodus would end up assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in favor of someone more competent.  Perhaps military competency was the basis for picking their head of state.  A case could be made for that.

So, the question has to be asked, have we progressed since the ancients?  Is our government superior to the Greek and Roman states.  Let’s see what I think in Part 2.

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.

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?

Master And Commander – The Far Side of the World (2003) – A Movie Review

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I’d heard a good deal about this movie from a friend of mine who was of old Yankee blood and a sailor.  I finally got a chance to see it last week.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

The story follows the adventures of the crew of the HMS Surprise during the Napoleonic Wars as its captain, Jack Aubrey, (played by Russell Crowe) chases a French privateer, the heavy frigate Acheron, from the coastal waters of Brazil, around the Cape Horn and into the tropical waters of the Pacific.

Because the Acheron has a much more substantial hull the Surprise is heavily damaged during their first engagement off Brazil while the Acheron is virtually undamaged.  Aubrey foregoes a lengthy refitting in port and instead makes hasty repairs at sea while doing his best to pursue the Acheron.  But because of the Acheron’s superior battle capability it becomes a cat and mouse game where the Surprise is sometimes the pursued.

And while all this goes on, we meet the rest of the crew.  The ship’s surgeon, Stephen Maturin is played by Paul Bettany.  The doctor not only can saw off a midshipman’s arm as needed but he’s also the captain’s accompanist in their musical string duo.  I kid you not.  The crew and the officers have a complicated relationship with strict discipline and primitive superstition both playing a part.

Eventually through luck and guile Aubrey engineers the attack on the Acheron and we get an epic sea battle with the Surprise’s crew boarding the Acheron.  And the Surprise is victorious and captain and crew prepare for the business of bringing the captured Acheron to port.

So, what’s the story with this movie?  Why do some people rave about it?  The first thing I noticed was that the movie successfully captured the claustrophobic crowdedness of these sailing ships.  You can feel the lack of air in the hold where the crew sleeps cheek to jowl.  It feels real.  Less like Hollywood’s version of the 19th century English navy.  Right down to some of the midshipman being essentially boys of twelve years or so.  Then there’s Russell Crowe’s portrayal of Aubrey.  Crowe is a damn good actor.  He makes the captain a real figure.  You can believe in him.  And Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship and clashes also ring true.  The man of action and the man of science confronting their conflicting priorities as best they can.  And lastly, the battle scenes are very well done and highly exciting.  The only part of the story that I had trouble with was the final battle.  The boarding scene was intentionally chaotic.  Such an event would have to be.  But honestly at many points I couldn’t tell which side was doing what to whom.  It didn’t ruin the film but I thought it could have been a little less indecipherable.  I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it to lovers of adventure and students of history.

Guest Contributor – ArthurinCali – 17FEB2023 – Civil War Battlefield Musings

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We took a family vacation in the early 90s and drove from East Texas all the way to Nashville. At the time, it felt like we stopped at every Civil War battlefield (twice) along the way. Seeing the meadows and rolling hills with cannons and other historical relics was a powerful sight. Imagining the sounds and smells of gunfire, the bravery and fear of the battles is a humbling moment. I recall a story about a Union guard talking to a Confederate soldier from a Tennessee unit who had been captured and noticing the young man’s ill-fitted clothes and general state of shoddy equipment. He (paraphrasing) asked, “Why are you fighting? You don’t appear to have a major stake in this war.” The young man replied, “Because you’re here.” A few years ago I took an interest in researching my family ancestry and found cousins from Tennessee who served in the CSA. They were mountain folk who didn’t have slaves, a plantation, or much of anything else to their name, but I can imagine them giving the Union soldier the same reasoning for taking up arms.

While the current age we live in likes to take American history and ‘Disneyfy’ it into simplistic caricatures of a good/evil binary, the complexities and nuance remains, especially for the War of Northern Aggression. The current charge that history is not being fully taught is correct, but for different reasons than the detractors point out. All they want is history taught in a manner to ensure those who have been deemed the personification of evil stay that way. This isn’t relegated to only American history, but Western Civilization overall. This is how society has arrived to the asinine conclusions that only Europeans conquered and enslaved other peoples throughout world history. It doesn’t acknowledge the reality that human nature hasn’t aged – that all of humanity contains the ability for committing depravities against their fellow man, while also being able to show empathy and compassion at other times.

Putting Things in Perspective – Part 2 – Civil War Analogy

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After discussing the Revolutionary War last time, the next major historical comparison I’d like to look at is the one comparing our situation to the mid-nineteenth century American Civil War.  In this comparison the Left is equated with the historical “North” and the Right with the “South.”

We’ll start with things that do align in this comparison.  The cultural and intellectual elites of the Abolitionist Movement do line up well with the modern Left.  In fact, there is probably a decent number among today’s Woke Left that are direct descendants from the Abolitionists themselves.  And certain historians believe that the culture of New England and its exports to areas like the Great Lakes area and the Pacific Coast states have preserved the viewpoint and authority of the nineteenth century elites from that region of the country.  From that point of view there is a certain direct analogy between the Northern Abolitionist Leadership and the Modern Left.

But let’s look at some of the other factors.  First of all, let’s look at the driving force of the cause.  The Abolitionists wanted to end slavery.  It’s hard to over stress just how popular this cause was.  It was evident to even many Southerners that slavery was an evil that could not be justified by its benefits to the economy.  For a country whose whole existence is expressed in the single word freedom, slavery is anathema.  Therefore, the moral underpinnings of the Civil War were very powerful.  Certainly, the Southern States were able to muster a justification for the practice of slavery but at no time did this justification convince anyone outside of the South and not even everyone inside.  So, the abolition of slavery was a cause that resonated broadly around the United States outside of the Deep South.

But look at the current agenda of the Woke Left.  It is a rag tag grab bag of radical ideas and identity politics grievances that isn’t even rationally self-consistent.  Feminism and even lesbian feminism are at odds with transgender “rights.”  And the BLM agenda of eliminating the police won’t stand scrutiny by other communities like Asians and Hispanics now that they see that it equates to wholesale criminal anarchy.  It is far from certain that even in the “Blue States” that the whole agenda of the radical Left is entirely acceptable.  This is a major difference between the Civil War situation.  The Left’s agenda today is far less popular than the abolition of slavery was back then.

The next consideration is the location of each “side.”  The Confederacy was never able to convince even some of the slave states to join in its revolt.  The border states Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland never seceded.  And even an area of Virginia refused to join and “seceded” from Virginia to become West Virginia and remain with the Union.  Inside the free states there weren’t any large areas that would have joined the South or opposed the abolition of slavery for the most part.

But look at today.  Instead, the Red and Blue States are only an indicator of the majority status of each side in a state.  But geographically we can see that this is really a city versus countryside polarization.  The cities in the Red States are full of Leftists for the most part and even deep Blue States like California and New York have rural areas that are completely red.  This definitely helps our side.  These concentrated populations of Leftists work well when you want to cheat during an election but it doesn’t help much when you are trying to control a population that is diffused over thousands of square miles in some cases.  Controlling the back country especially when it is adjacent to a Red State may turn out to be an impossible job.

And finally in the 1860’s the slave states were so afraid of a Republican holding the White House that they seceded before Lincoln could even assemble his government.  We’ve seen two truly woke administration already.  Obama and now Biden.  And Biden is using all the force of the federal government to destroy our way of life.  But what it seems to show is that determined state leaders can use the state laws to combat these Woke orders and possibly nullify their effects without having to leave the Union.  This is still a preliminary evaluation but I think it is worth seeing if the lessons learned from Sanctuary Cities can be applied to other issues like Second Amendment Rights and First Amendment Freedoms.

So, from the point of view comparison, it seems to me that our side is significantly better off in the present situation than the South was during the Civil War.  And that is definitely a thing to be happy about.

White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century by John Oller – Book Review

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Tyler over at the Portly Politico sent me this recommendation. I read the review and it sounded interesting for you history buffs.  Here’s his message followed by the link to the original book review at the bottom of the post.
A buddy of mine wrote a great book review for his blog, Corporate History International, that I thought might be of interest to you.  It’s a review of John Oller’s White Shoe:  How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century.  He touches upon some of the historical parallels between the Progressive Era and our current times, albeit subtly.

 

White Shoe: How a New Breed of Wall Street Lawyers Changed Big Business and the American Century by John Oller

New White Shoe Review for You

 

The Father of History / The Father of Lies / Summer Reading Fun!

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My Professor of Ionic Greek was a very funny guy.  He said that the charm of reading Herodotus is that his prose reminds you of your Great Aunt telling family history.  The whole story is one big run-on sentence meandering back and forth and including everything from news of the great war to gossip about somebody’s wife cheating with the milkman.  And sometimes it’s difficult to tell which part she feels is more important.

In the same way, Herodotus starts off the history of the Persian War by claiming its origin was the kidnapping of Helen by the Trojans!  From there we get a family history of the first Asian ruler to conquer the Greeks living in Asia Minor.  Apparently, the origin of this dynasty involves a King allowing his wife to be seen naked by a commoner.  This triggers his wife’s anger so severely that she conspires with the commoner to kill her husband and usurp the throne.  All of these stories are given with either a tongue in cheek or a storyteller’s desire to be complete.

But in between all this chatter you get some stories that are told nowhere else and that record the (mostly) accurate exploits of the ancient world’s greatest generation.  You’ll hear about Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis and Plataea.  You’ll meet Leonidas and the Spartans, Themistocles and the Athenians and Xerxes and the Persians.  And mixed in with that you’ll hear unlikely stories of the origins of historical nations based on the amorous adventures of Heracles and other demigods.  And you’ll feel that you’re in the midst of a tumultuous time full of heroes and villains.  And you’ll discover the ancient dichotomy of the East vs. the West.  It’s freedom versus slavery.  It’s nation versus empire.  It’s intelligence versus brute force.

There are places where the story bogs down.  You see Herodotus was a world traveler and he relates all the tales he was told in his various travels.  During his time in Egypt he collected much material on the rulers and doings in Egypt.  Sometimes it gets to be a little much.  But mixed in with this minutia will be stories that sound like they came out of the Tales of the Arabian Nights.

In terms of historical accuracy Herodotus was far inferior to his successor at Athens, Thucydides.  His history chronicles the aftermath of the Persian War.  This was a sort of Cold War between Athens and Sparta that eventually went hot.  Thucydides provides precise details of the military and political actions and forgoes all mythical and religious causes.  But the content is basically the story of Athens committing suicide.  I much prefer reading the story of its finest hour.

Every summer I read from two greek classics.  I read the Odyssey and I browse Herodotus.  Those two books give me hope that the legacy of the West isn’t a myth.  Odysseus tells me that the value of the brave man and the faithful wife can overcome the chaos and nihilism of the world.  And Herodotus tells me that freedom reappears in this world from time to time and that it is the most valuable substance in the universe.

In future installments, I’ll select some of the stories that I think make the case that the gossip Herodotus is still relevant and interesting 2,400 years later.