This guy is a PHD? This guy is an idiot. Neither the Romans, the Cursaders nor the Legionnaiers ever "patrol(ed) the streets of Bagdad" What a complete moron.
In all the silliness of the above article - it all boils down to one thing - do you have an army that will fight? Can it kick the cr@p out of other armies? If you answered yes to both - you will be OK.
every empire must be bound together by a common set of cultural values founded in religion.
Many would disagree today. And it is that very disagreement that fractures our resolve and proves the assertion.
How many stealth bombers did Julius Caesar have? How many artillary pieces with a range of 20 miles?
The more things change, the more they ... change!
Bump for later read.
ping
What apparently really happened, is that a climate change had occurred that put pressure on the "horse people" of the steppe, who pushed outward against both the Persians and the Germanic tribes, who then pushed against Rome.
Dr. Fears seems ultimately to have missed out on the real problem with Rome: it fell because Roman citizens had lost their energy -- they were decadent, and had decided to hire foreign soldiers to fight their wars for them. In the words of John Adams, they had ceased to be "moral and religious." And so when push came to shove, they found themselves morally unequal to the task of defending themselves.
I find the article to be pretty shallow. But there is one point that applies and that is that I believe the U.S. is indeed at a crossroads as to the question of whether we will remain a constitutional republic or morph into something else. Our constitution has been stretched and trimmed very much in the past 100 years and the process is accelerating. Governance by crisis is very much at the heart of this and I see no end to it. Some of the crises are real and some are manufactured (Clinton was especially good at that though he is certainly not unique). Our freedoms are slowly but surely curtailed and restricted for the "greater good". One of these days(if it hasn't already happened) we will turn a corner and find that the written constitution is largely irrelevant to how the nation is actually governed having been "interpreted" into something it was never meant to be. The outward forms will probably endure but the intent will be long gone.
Absurd Nonsense. Not even slightly based in historical fact.
bump for later
But not with Rome. If there is a lesson to be learned there it is that an autocracy with a sufficient army can prevail over fragmented democracies as Rome did and Alexander before them. Liberal democracies do, actually, make for neighbors as decent as any other and for the same reasons - if you have a strong government, a competent army, and the determination to independence, they'll be fine. If not, not. "Good fences make for good neighbors."
Nor is the Middle East necessarily a quagmire - God, how I have grown to hate that word! - or the "graveyard of empires" as Fear asserts. It is their birthplace as well - the Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Chaldean, Medean, Persian, Parthian, Sassanid, Hittite, Hurrian, Lydian, just off the top of my head. Ptolemy enthroned a new Pharoah from there. Rome very wisely drew a boundary there considering it had an army of less than half a million men for an empire of the span Fears describes. That isn't simply efficiency, it's a wonder for the ages.
But one must be very careful not to draw too much of an analogy between Rome and the United States - for one thing, Rome's republic was gone in reality well before Caesar, or even Marius and Sulla, and its Augustan government of a Primus Inter Pares was nothing other than a monarchy with all the attendant problems of succession. It was the latter that crippled Rome time and again as her empire entered a renewed age of migratory peoples who finally remapped Europe and the Middle East despite her best efforts at resistance. Moreover, Rome was never an elective republic prior to that by modern standards at all, but an oligarchy.
There is one lesson I'm contemplating at the moment, however, and it is that a high culture such as Rome that is dependent on external food supplies and incapable of reproducing itself was swamped by the influx of hungry, fecund peoples, and that this lesson appears to be repeating itself with respect to Europe and threatens to with respect to the United States as well (albeit to a decidedly lesser degree, panic over immigration despite). That's worth thinking about. Rome didn't deal with it very well.
I agree with the first few posters: the man is an idiot. An educated idiot, but an idiot none the same.
All the facts he musters are true, but the conclusions he draws are nonsense.
The strength of Rome happened before the Caesars, back when the succession of rulers was clear, and followed by all.
When Julius crossed the Rubicon, and destroyed the process of regular succession, it began the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
The strength of America is the rock solid rules for succession, leaving no doubt who's in charge.
Added to that is a constitutional government, with a bill of rights establishing and enumerating the rights of the government and the people. This document is defended by the courts, and ultimately by the people.
The government of the US is unique.
He doesn't see that.
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