Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
I have often wondered what Roman citizens thought as they watched the Roman Empire fall apart culturally, politically, morally, and militarily. Cicero, quaestor, praetor and Counsel of Rome, tried to save the Roman Republic. For his efforts he was chased down and murdered. As Cicero was, perhaps, the most famous Roman, his murder stopped efforts to prevent Rome’s descent into tyranny.
The same thing is happening today to those who attempt to arouse us to our danger. Julian Assange, for example, has been imprisoned contrary to every known US and UK law for a decade without conviction for simply doing his duty as a journalist and reporting the crimes of our rulers, the crimes of the corrupt vermin we continue to return to office and power over us. No one has done anything about it, not even his fellow journalists.
When truth is punished, a country dies.
Rome survived for centuries after its essence had departed, because her enemies were weak in comparison. Rome destroyed itself. As many or more Romans died in civil wars fighting one another than died repelling barbarian invasions, Roman military might ended in self-destruction.
The enemies Washington has created for America are not weak. Russia alone, China alone, perhaps even Iran alone, is a match or more for America. The three together constitute a vast over-match of US military capability. Yet Washington continues to increase hostilities with these countries. The mindlessness of my government is unbearable. Such utter stupidity.
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Once the moronic Biden regime’s economic sanctions and the US loss of the reserve currency role finish off the US dollar, America is finished. We will be a third world country, and the rest of the world will punish us for the sins of our government.
Try to tell this to an American.
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Precisely. And they will punish the white Christians the hardest, joining the enemies within on the genocide. The only clear option now if for those white Christian men to beat back their criminal rulers and buttress a once solid foundation.
Bob agrees
They thought “shit I left the burner on!”
Rome the city and Rome the western empire collapsed in the mid 500’s AD, however the eastern Roman empire hung on until 1453. The eastern empire is looked upon by us as something completely different from the west, but it was established as a capitol along with the city of Rome by Rome itself.
They were Romans in the same way that Rashida Talib is an American.
A rose by any other name and all that jazz.
They were Romans in the same way that Rashida Talib is an American.
A turd by any other name and all that jazz.
Apparently history isn’t your strong point. Not much I can do about that.
i generally have a lot of respect for what you say but here you seem to have stepped outside of your envelope of understanding.. you really don’t know the history regarding this, or are you just trolling us?
successive roman emperors had understood that both the more viable and advanced parts of the economy, and the bigger military challenges, were in the eastern parts of the empire, and moved their headquarters closer to the action, eventually diocletian established his capitol at nikomedia before he retired. once constantine put things back in order (diocletian’s idea of dividing the empire into multiple zones of authority for better governance was repeated several more times before being abandoned, it was a good idea in theory but in practice it meant civil war) he moved the capitol to byzantium and refounded it as nova roma aka constantinople formally and that change stuck for good. the move was as formal and serious and legitimate as could be, the romans themselves did it. the fact that the eastern half of the empire was by and large an older culture, more sophisticated civilization, more complex economy, and by and large greek speaking, did not make them any less roman. to the contrary they were the educated cultured romans, whereas the western half of the empire had for the most part never really managed to get an urban civilization sailing under its own power- huge tracts of the west were absentee-owned estates worked by slaves or serfs (thats where medieval serfdom came form, it was already established in roman times) and the cities in the west were kept alive by government spending. whereas the urban civilizaiton, industry, and trade in the east was what supported the empire instead of the other way around.
latin continued to be an official language of government for a few more centuries even though everyone in the east spoke greek- but greek had been the other official language of the empire for centuries by that point, and even the older latins of an earlier era acknowledged that greek culture was their teacher – the famous “Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, et artes intulit agresti Latio”.
the christian roman empire, which came to be called byzantium only in the last cuple centuries, held back wave after wave of eastern aggression, persian, moslem, steppe nomads, you name it, who would have otherwise overrun europe.
The Ottomans halted the spice trade. The lack of spices in Europe for 4 decades led the King of Spain to steal 3 ships from from smugglers and give them to Columbus to shut him up and send him off the edge of the earth. He literally annoyed the king on several occasions to get the ships. Columbus would not have gone to Florida, and would not have released wild horses, cattle, and wild pigs, if it were not for 1453. The first settlers would have starved without the pestilence of millions of wild pigs, and the free labor of the wild horses.
Yep.
Once the bankers flee with all the wealth like the oppressive usurer Abram did when he fled Ur, the collapse is imminent.
They were probably insouciant.
Most Americans self absorbed and nihilists, spending free time on social media, video games and texting. They are dumbed down about the push for agenda 2030. About two percent have a clue.
You can thank the rapidly decaying educational system that started in the 1960s and the proof of how far it has decayed is with those 3 university presidents testifying to congress.
Yet I blame the parents for much, like not teaching kids values and work ethics, not learning history and how this country was founded. Parents are self absorbed with social media and video games, their kids are an afterthought and they refuse to home school and/or find a Christian school teaching real subjects.
Genesis of destruction of education in America can be traced earlier in last century, to John Dewey and his ilk. Goal was to create a pliable, dumbed down electorate so that the American oligarchs and elites could seize control of central government. Very sad.
The Romans had legalized marijuana … and that was that.
I think a read of Bukowskis “Dinosauria we “is in order.
Only read Bukowski if you enjoy bathing in a septic tank.
“Well, at least Trump isn’t emperor” was probably on some of their minds….LOL
The average peasant was trying to eat and feed their children and keep a roof over their heads. Same as modern people essentially.
It was the “synagogue” as Christ called them, even in defeat/genocide, they managed to pack up the temple, sold all the gold and furniture, and Peter and Paul moved TO Rome as a “gay couple”, and started a false religion. living as Romans.
What was even more maddening than chasing down sages of the millenium, was the person that DEMO’D a model steam engine around 450 A.D.
A MODEL STEAM ENGINE.
LET THAT SINK IN…..
“sold all the gold”??? You’re a little bit dim, aren’t you?
We got a troll here.
He does tend to denigrate commenters here.
By the way, your parents gave you a lovely name.
You’re speaking of Hero of Alexandria’s steam reaction whirligig. It had no power to speak of and even less torque. It merely spun rapidly and, lacking torque, it never was nor could be connected to gears or belts to perform any work (milling, threshing, weaving, pumping etc.)
The first engine capable of useful work was Mr. Newcomen’s atmospheric engine developed about the time of G. Washington’s birth. It’s primary use was powering water pumps in English coal mines, eliminating the problems associated with the mules that previously powered the pumps.
Newcomen engines pulled steam at atmospheric pressure into the bottom of it’s cylinder on the upstroke. At the top of the stroke, cold water was sprayed into the hot, atmospheric pressure steam, below the piston, causing a pressure drop do to cooling. The standard air pressure above the piston would ease the piston downward where the cycle would repeat. the Newcomen engine never powered a vehicle. Always stationary.
Some years later, James Watt, while making a model of a Newcomen engine for the British museum, figured out the steam could be forced into the cylinder under great pressure, producing great power and massive torque. Thus Watt is credited with the invention of the steam engine.
The last working Newcomen engine pumped water into counterweight tanks to operate a drawbridge on the Thames. It was retired from daily service in the 1960’s.
Prior to Newcomen, all machines were powered by muscle (human or beast) gravity or water.
^^^Or wind too.^^^
Sorry for the off topic comment. I’m easily distracted and can get carried away.
Pleasant read and now for some follow up reading… thanks.
Maybe so, but if it wasn’t destroyed, how much of a leg up would it have given humanity of getting to a steam engine that did do work?
Hey there Goat!
Hero’s whirligig was an amusement, an oddity. It had a force like the force of the steam coming out of a modern pressure cooker. Perhaps it could power a mouse trap.
When I muse about what the Ancients could well have developed I think of McCormac’s reaper. The reaper, which soon led to the thresher and the baler etc. required no engine. It was pulled by a farm animal yet it drastically increased the productivity of a laborer’s day. The wheels turning were geared to the mechanism that guided the wheat to the metal cutting edge. No new motive device needed.
The Greeks were sure that a heavier object would fall faster than a lighter object. They spent their intellect arguing whether dissimilar weight balls connected by a chain would be slowed in a fall due to the effect of the lighter or would be speeded up by the heavier. They thought experimentation was unworthy of mind, childish even, and that physics should be proved by intellect, logic and rhetoric. They just never did the Galileo thing of dropping dissimilar weight balls and observing the result.
Even a Newcomen engine was not beyond the materials of the day. They had copper, brass, bronze, iron and even some steel. They understood flywheels, cranks and rocker arms (teeter totter.)
Yes, the industrial age could have been blossoming as Rome was rising. And I agree it’s great fun to speculate on the what ifs.
there are plenty of good reasons why steam engines werent developed earlier. lots of things were in just the right place for them to really get going in the mid-late 18th century. not just technological conditions – things like lathes for example, did not exist in antiquity and any precision fitting parts were one-off articles made by hand – but also economic conditions. The existence of the idea that steam could be put to work doing _anything_ does not necessarily follow from the existence of the idea that it can make a reaction type turbine spin very fast. The ancient greek steam turbine was a curiosity, something to be shown to other well-cultured folks as a ‘heres something you havent ever seen before’ kind of novelty. Generally doing a lot of things with machinery was a very limited idea in the mediterranean because the conditions in which it would evolve before steam power would have even had a practical use, didnt and dont exist – no reliable water power available like there is up in europe. almost all rivers/streams are only seasonal and it was only in very late antiquity that water mills really began to show up and then in only a few rare spots where the water supply was adequate.
water mills were what made it even practical for people in the middle ages to begin thinking of things to _do_ with water power and lots of machinery was invented anonymously in the medieval centuries utilizing water power. By the time people started tinkering with steam again, there was already in place a whole economy that made use of driven machinery to do things. There also existed a by then long tradition of making reasonably precise cylindrical objects which also in antiquity were a rarity of handcrafting. It was only after a couple centuries of us making and using guns that we had come to think of making consistent cylindrical bores as something commonplace , and likewise had developed tools to accomplish that- things like lathes, which were actually still kind of a new idea in the 17th century/early 18th c when newcomen was doing his stuff. even newcomen’s engines were marginally effective because of poor precision in making such large objects fit together and still move. making an engine especially the size of those old ones is a whole different matter than making clocks etc.
and then one also has the other economic matters like fuel. The mediterranean was always starved for wood once civilization got underway there. Even if youd shown up with a fully built running steam engine in 200 BC, or 200 AD, demonstrating it for sale to do work cheaper than animal (or human) muscle could, a potential customer might ask and what about its fuel costs, in the mediterranean in many urban areas the wood was pretty expensive and shipped in from a ways off, not just carted in from nearby woods, often already burned to charcoal as thats a more compact form of fuel than plain old wood.
many industrial sites in the mediterranean were abandoned because of fuel constraints. copper smelting in cyprus first shifted to shipping the ore to the coast of asia minor and smelting it there, and then stopped altogether, as more tonnage of charcoal was needed than ore per pound of copper produced. Same thing for the roman iron mines in the islands between corsica and italy. they exhausted local fuel supplies, started shipping charcoal from the mainland opposite to the island, then shipping ore to the mainland, and finally chut down the operation, not because they ran out of ore, but they ran out of fuel.
the romans instead began mining most of their metals in spain.
anyhow, any fuel intensive economic activity would have been a non-starter in the mediterranean of late antiquity. one more piece of a big picture which was lacking then. When steam got going in the 1700s they had started burning coal and happened to have a lot of it in the same part of england that they started using the engines to pump water out of tin mines.
lots of variables for why things did or didnt happen, if even one of them isnt present then the magic doesnt happen.
Thx Nony. Never heard or read the fuel problem in the Med area. Makes sense.
How true this article is its coming and I do not think it can be stopped the country has become just a hell hole abortion drugs thugs in the gov even the president is head of a crime family and the whole administration is on the take . the military has become a woke joke the top guys are communist and are no friend to the very country they are supposed to be defending . the people are all about themselves a lot of them on drugs a baby has no rights old people will be next The church is in deep trouble with a communist pope who is a climate nut job we have had it
God inspired men to build a society of law, and government that would be for the people. That in the future would also benefit His original chosen people, and would also help keep Christianity to flourish by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The men who God inspired were called, the founding fathers, who were very imperfect men, that also had skeletons in their closets as the majority of people do.
To cut to the chase, like all societies past, America will fall, in the same way Rome fell, destroyed from within. History again repeats itself.
This time though, we may just be at the end of the last age on earth before the return of the LORD, and KING Jesus Christ, what a great day that will be.
America has fallen indeed, off the rails ( as other countries now under tyranny not allowed self defense (the E.U. hell hole, etc) proof:
Amen brother.
https://www.breitbart.com/sports/2023/12/10/high-school-basketball-player-older-brother-beat-up-coach-after-getting-benched/
Sloppy writing & sloppy thinking. And no one in the comment section even notices.
Time to replace PCR. 3rd grade writing & thinking isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Quality everywhere has declined significantly. I bet that’s what Romans were thinking.
Communism learned long ago that creating internal strife and division is the best way to collapse and take an enemy country. This is best done in steps. First is liberation movements such as feminism that make women an enemy of their husband and collapse the family from within. This is done easily once Christianity and its principles are departed from society. Then other evils such as homosexuality are introduced to polarize society even further as men are no longer able to get along with liberated women and the courts are always against the man. Then comes the final blow of bringing in foreigners with their own satanic religions and customs. As society attempts to accommodate these foreigners, it elects politicians who are sympathetic to their cultures and religions and in the process these politicians tear down the historical markers and foundations of their own country leaving it without course or direction. In the last and dying stages of a nation, its currency is wasted by the politicians in power as they give it away to those who have infiltrated the nation and it becomes worthless.
The first thing they should have thought was go after their leaders. 😉
Cicero said something to the effect of beware the enemies within are more dangerous than the enemies outside the gates.
https://ko-fi.com/Post/Its-A-Wonderful-Life-C0C7RYVFS
Surely the Romans thought the same thing we’re thinking “Why didn’t anyone stop this when we saw it begin? Why did I watch, idly, until it was too late?”
There are numerous contemporary views on the collapse of the Empire. Early Christian writers such as Hippolytus and Tertullian expounded quite a bit on the moral decay. Most of their writings can be found on line for free.
The Romans were probably thinking, ” Damn. PCR sure slobbed Kissingers knob over there.”
Romantic point of view. There’s a valid question in the verbiage. Reactions are more interesting than the subject, less the valid question within.
the romans had moved their government to constantinople a century and a half before that, and were doing just fine. they realized that the old capital city was no longer viable and acted accordingly. they held on for another thousand years.