Paris and the fall of Rome

Boston Globe (hat tip - Hot Air) ^ | 11/16/15 | Niall Fegurson

[jocon307]

This piece is making me rather upset and feeling a bit doomed. OK, I don't really think I'm doomed but I'm afraid my children and grandchildren might be doomed.

I know it is bad form, but I'm about to get called away. I'll check back on this thread ASAP.

[Pelham]

bump

[ClearCase_guy]

Paris was also involved in the fall of Troy. Dude gets around.

[Fai Mao]

I am not sure that Edward Gibbon is a reliable source.
He had an agenda to show that the fall of Rome was caused by Christianity and failed to mention the Byzantines who considered themselves to be Romans and didn’t fall until 1453

[M-cubed]

Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in Paris on Friday night? <<

NOPE!..sit in the truck.....We’ll take care of the heavy lifting.....come out when u feel safe...

[combat_boots]

The Gibbon.

Now there was a dry, ponderous book.

[Paladin2]

Great Post.

[CatoRenasci]

I’ve been likening the influx of Muslims into Europe to the barbarian invasions of the 4th and 4th centuries AD for several years now. It’s finally getting some traction.

[CatoRenasci]

You have obviously not read Gibbon....

[Vermont Lt]

History doesn’t always repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

I feel that today the US is on the brink. We are too indebted and too extended. One good punch and we are down for eight.

We are Britain in 1936, we are the USSR in 1988 (in terms of decay, not philosophy.)

[Mariner]

Survival is not rocket surgery.

All you have to do is ID the bad guys and kill them.

It's been working for untold millennia.

However, it appears Western Society is no longer capable of survival. So Western Man must build a new society to preserve Western Civilization...or adopt an effective one from history.

Or die.

[aquila48]

” I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard. I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase.”

What, not even “a moment of silence” or “a candlelight vigil”, Niall?

[DuncanWaring]

Hashtags!

Don’t forget the hashtags!

[jobim]

From Will & Ariel Durant's epic work:

What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by
the educated classes, it had not seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility; by
a.d. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes. Though branded as a crime,
infanticide flourished as poverty grew. Sexual excesses may have reduced human
fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of
eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed in to the West.

The rapidly breeding Germans could not understand the classic culture, did not accept
it, did not transmit it; the rapidly breeding Orientals were mostly of a mind to destroy
that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility. Rome
was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication
within.

Moral decay contributed to the dissolution. Men had now, in the middle and upper
classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban
congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought
together a hundred cultures whose differences rubbed themselves out into indifference.
Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran
riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.
The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class
struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her
consuming wars.

[Dick Vomer]

I have all the volumes from Our Oriental heritage to the Age of Napolean.

I’ve read large parts of them and realize how short changed students are now in college.

[jocon307]

That is interesting if totally over my head.

[jocon307]

Thank you!

[Twinkie]

I’m to the age where my eyes will not let me read a whole
lot. Lately, I’ve become more aware that we weren’t taught
much real history - especially anything that might be
unpleasant. - I’d never heard or read about the Gates of
Vienna or how the Christians there STOOD in the face of
terrifying Mohammedan hordes or about the city of 100,000
human beings slaughtered and raped by the Mohammedans;
beheaded and thrown in the river that ran through that city.
The walled city had allowed in a relatively small number
of Moslems who then opened the gates to the hordes that
set upon the populace. One Hundred Thousand human beings
slaughtered. - Yes. We are armed. My father was a warrior
who would come back & haunt me if I wimped out now. He
fought Hitler’s hordes & charged hell with a bucket of
water. He would expect no less of me.

[jocon307]

Yes, hashtags and holloween costumes and “black lives matter” which is such a huge joke that it make occupy wall street look like a serious response to serious problems.

We have what was once one of the finest Universities in the world in a tumult over halloween costumes.

When I see that all I can think is I’d have to put my money on Isis for the win.

And that is just about enough to make me despair.

[Bon mots]

How do you say "Traitor" in German?

Europe has been betrayed by its leaders. While I am violently opposed to all forms of violence, other voices would gladly see some of them swinging from lampposts.

I would be happy enough if they were sent packing along with the 'refugee' army of terrorists.