Free Republic

I’ll be reading this. I like the Cato Institute for starters, but the first couple of sentences caught my attention.

It’s one thing I alluded to above with regard to State Socialism in the Roman Empire. It as certainly a factor and seems to belie what you’re saying when you say centralization and taxation wasn’t a problem in the 300s. The Reforms of Diocletian for example, attempting to stop inflation not only by freezing prices, but occupations as well:

http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cjv14n2-7.html

I’m sorry but your analyses and comparison of Eastern and Western Empires is incorrect. The centralization and high taxes were not the root causes of the fall, they were the problems of the 200s century not the 300s.

Centralization and high taxes were not root causes. The collapse of morality was. I never said that. They were certainly significant. Actually, decentralization was a becoming a significant problem in the 300s after Constantine. You wrote that you believe that morals were improving in the fourth and fifth century. What evidence do you have have for this?

The Romaioi had the same problems that the Empire in the West had, although Orthodoxy in the East as in the West served as a stabilizing factor, but as in the Latin West, the Orthodox East had problems maintaining any kind of stable source of manpower loyal to the State. Part of the problem was too much centralization and high taxes, debasing the coinage, but all of that is ancillary to the moral, and there are many accounts of the immorality of the Romaik Empire told even by Monks and Bishops, threatening of a deluge. Indeed, when the city fell in 1453, most of the troops manning the walls were Italian and German mercenaries.

Rome the city fell due to the 1. lack of strong leadership, 2. Disunity 3. A tendency of later, weaker rulers to pay off the invaders (which only left them asking for more) 4. A tendency to move things to the East

Re: 1 Rome had plenty of strong leadership, sometimes too strong.

Re: 2 Sure, when the central government fell because it could no longer levy sufficient troops or depend on its governors because they couldn't be trusted to act with the interests of the State, it became disunited. I think part of it is the familiar problem of the people no l longer trusting their leadership.

But how do you suppose they got to the stage that there was a crisis in confidence about the leadership, and the inability to levy troops in sufficient numbers? Again, part of the problem is that their birthrate was so low, they had to depend on foreigners and mercenaries to man their armies. Even their Generals, like Stilicho, were Germans or foreign nationals.

I'll submit to you that the low birthrate was partly a result urbanization and the public dole, but primarily the moral decline of the civilization as a whole. Roman Society no longer had that firm agrarian Latin peasant with a religious piety for the land and a patriotic fervour for Rome and her institutions, he had left the lands and gone into the cities because the agricultural production was done primarily by slave labor, while the numerous foreign wars fought by the Empire displaced him too. Also, many Romans settled in far-flung areas to the East and West, forming the basis of the Latin Civilization which survived the Roman Empire in time. So, the old Roman Legions were no more because the immorality of Roman society led to the decay of family life, the displacement of Romans from their traditions. And since the family had deteriorated, you no longer had a stable place for Roman citizens to be born, no virtuous young women to be suitable brides for virtuous young men to be the building blocks of the State as a whole; sounds familiar.

The only thing I care about is destroying Marxism and promoting Catholicism.

That was my argument. Cause and effect are not simple to determine. However, a few generations ago, the *assertion* would be that Rome fell due to its moral failings. But that was a conclusion based on questionable evidence. Rome was never a terribly moral place. But likewise, most of the immorality was for those that could afford it. At one point, I’ll note that the Roman government had to ban a common weed from anywhere near Rome, as it was common knowledge that it made a fine poison, especially by housewives tired of their husbands. Not what you would call the most moral of people. Actually, Rome was a terribly moral place before it became powerful, it was a national characteristic, if you will, which was part of the foundation of family life and the customs of their society, backed by the unwavering objectivity of Roman Law itself which became the basis for our own legal systems in the West. Cause and effect is fairly simple to determine. It is so simple to determine that even the Soviet Union considered homosexuality to be a corrosive vice and sought to cultivate that malaise in Target societies by way of inflitration and demoralization. It wasn't only homosexuals, but encouraging liberals to promote a doctrine of moral relativism, to erode the educational system and the guarantors of moral stability, like churches. I've found Yuri Besmenov's description of this process very interesting. He was a KGB defector who was in charge of promoting this cause of demoralization in the West, and there are quite a few of his tapes and videos available. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=915448763957391352# There's something in the nature of homosexuality and immorality which is poisonous, even if you don't believe that God calls down fire and brimstone on Nations which have embraced it, you can see that the various life ways surrounding it and its large acceptance involve a major denigration of the moral certainty and wholesomeness without which a country can not survive. Of course, the Soviet Union hasn't really fallen, which it appears to have done, despite its own legal and cultural hostility to the bourgeois vice of homosexuality, but that's another story.

Thanks Sara and the rest who are courteous.

I’ve been posting here for more than a year with occasional rude posters. No big deal. Generally Freepers are intelligent Americans who are concerned about the welfare of their families and the destiny of their homeland. That’s always what it has been about for me.

The Admins have already told me I was ok, since the Religion section is kind of slow. Don’t much know what all the fuss is about, but if people want me to post entire articles. I don’t care. I’ve actually tried to post/write more lengthy things and it gives me this governor limiting he length of my post, so I’m thinking, oh, excerpts it is. I’m just too lazy to go back through again and post all of the links throughout, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyhow, I consider a moral life to be the foundation of stable families without which the State, any State, can not long survive. The very nature of homosexuality militates against that and it has done great damage to the Catholic Church, incidentally.

For those who don’t care to read what I’ve written, I’ll direct you to the old Western Canon of Moral and Spiritual Writers from which the inimitable Bishop Sheen derived a great part of his wisdom: +Boussuet, +Manning, de Maistre, Burke, +Bellarmine, +Goffine and the Prophets.

I’ve found it very interesting that in this age, people have left off ascribing God’s wrath to natural calamities. I see no reason for this other than, perhaps, that people no longer trust God’s providence as they once did. If their theodicy no longer includes natural disasters, it also seems to have abandoned man made disasters, or even the thought of condemning behavior which was considered reprehensible even by most people in educated society half a century ago.

think these people are naive. Ultimately, a civilization's continued existence depends on its martial virtue (in the sense of potency). Plenty of very pious Christians have been erased from this world, including many in what is now Turkey, most of the Middle East and North Africa. Actually, that brings an interesting point, because the contemporary accounts of the Greek Empire in the East by the time of the Crusades had begun to decay morally as well.

Belloc actually handles that thesis quite handily in his book http://books.google.com/books?id=5ryGAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=belloc+on+the+roman+church&source=bl&ots=rCbzs8Z0_v&sig=8np-hr2MoW49X_gX5lyyCxcQgWU&hl=en&ei=rUCiTcivE-H30gGJo6ifDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CDIQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false

The thesis that spiritual and moral generation or exhaustion is what spells the end of civilizations isn’t a new one. It’s very persuasive, and you can see that more than a few influential people believed in it with regard to the Roman State.

What I’m suggesting is that the calamities which followed on the heels of the extreme moral exhaustion of the Roman Empire, which wasn’t entirely Christian at the time you speak, maybe about half, came as a result of the moral decay which negatively effected the fertility of the women and the desire to form families. You can see from contemporaries in the quotes that Sheen is making that the family is under attack and the generality of the population is mercilessly immoral.

I’m actually surprised to see this much resistance to the idea here of all places. After all, this IS a socially conservative site. We do believe, like Richard Nixon, that the State will suffer correspondingly if the people are not moral, and all around us we see these influences destroying the coherence of American Society, not only on an intellectual plane, without which there can be no right actions, but in every aspect of society from folk culture down to the elites themselves who regard those of us who hail morality with contempt, even if they agree with us publicly.

[i]I meant to say that for a while, the Emperors themselves were successful military leaders - it wasn’t possible to become Emperor without winning a (civil) war of succession.[/i]

Indeed, it guaranteed in certain cases that the successor was the best man for the job, or at least the best at doing all of those things, administering provinces, influencing allies, isolating enemies, that made for an effective leader during that time period.

Although, Christianity did make for SOME smoother transitions, in some cases a perspective emperor would resign and allow a more able man take his place, and rather than killing his opponents, a new occupant of the throne would simply blind his enemies and put them in a Monastery, but that’s another thing...

And actually, if you can say that Rome fell at all, looking at the tremendous drop in central authority, collapsing infrastructure and administration following the transfer of power in the West to the successors, whoever they were and wherever they were as they chose to call themselves Vandals, Goths, Franks and so forth, the result of this dramatic transformation which brought such a qualitative and quantitative change to the Empire, was part of a chain of causation going back to the moral decay described by St. Augustine, St. Martin of Tours and others living at the time.

We don’t really know much about the Germans except for what the Romans and the Greeks wrote about them, and homosexuality wasn’t much mention, so I don’t know how you could make that claim.

I’d welcome it if you had it, but from what I remember from some desultory reading was the Germans didn’t admit that people like that existed.

Also, most Roman Emperors were military leaders throughout the Byzantine period all the way up till the Fall in 1453. If I understand you correctly, simply being a military leader in itself wouldn’t be problematic.

A combination of effects with a single cause which was an immoral agency acting on the individuals in the society which led to the things you describe.

I’d point out that the plague around 300 effected the Empires enemies too.

It would be easy to make an educated guess because you can look at the written record, consider how much it influenced court society and society at large and why.

Also, you’d have to account for how Eunuchs were employed before during and after the Empire’s resurgence in the Sixth, Eighth and Thirteenth Centuries.

Of course, multiculturalism is accompanied by moral decay, especially the soft Marxism of the Frankfurt School. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Of course, I suspect that despite the fact that the Eastern Empire was a multi-ethnic society, it was still able to forge a critical unity based upon the moral influence of the Orthodox Church which perpetuated the Classical heritage of the ancients and kept people’s mores in check to bring stability to the society, accounting for its tremendous resiliency.

It’s interesting in the tape of Nixon that he starts off by denying that his concerns are moral, but the more he talks about it, the more he realizes that his concerns are indeed moral ones. He’s worried about the children who will watch the cultural marxism of Karl Reiner on All in the Family, a supposedly family show showing indecent filth like that to children... in fact, I think I was 12 myself when I watched the episode that Nixon is talking about.

Are you familiar with Nixon’s controversial tapes dealing with this issue? They’re available on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TivVcfSBVSM

The Barbarians were always a factor in Roman history, it’s just that she was always better equipped in terms of manpower to field an effective military and social response, but by the time we’re talking about, owing to the decay of the societies morality, so say Nixon, +Sheen and other historians, they were incapable of keeping the political integrity of the Empire intact as it was before, and the outer borders deteriorated.

It’s like a disease which attacks the structure of the bones, eventually, the mass of the body itself is insupportable because of the decay.

I think the professor is making a bold claim to throw the gauntlet down, but I agree with your assessment; they’re one factor out of many.

I’ve been posting here before and the question was dealth with before by the management. As far as I understood there was no problem.

You keep harassing me if you wish, but after your frankly infantile yammering, I’m not interested in talking to you.

I left high school a long time ago and I recognize it for what it is, and I’m fairly certain that you’re derailing the thread because you actually object to the content.

If I’m incorrect in that admittedly gratuitous assertion, then I’ll at least apologize to you, though you don’t deserve one.

Your incivility is remarkable.

You clearly have a problem with the content. Your false accusations and insulting verbiage don’t really do whatever it is you’re trying to say much credit.

You’re violating your own forum rules there.

Eunuchs were used well into the Byzantine period and later, but they weren’t particularly numerous. They may have played a role in corruption, but the issue is really dealing with homosexuality and immorality, which does have a marked influence on a society on all levels and was remarked upon by contemporaries in Periclean Athens, for example, and by St. Augustine in his Confessions.

You’ll also notice Nixon’s point just after Archbishop Sheen’s. They’re all making the same argument for immorality, and homosexuality, as the source of the decline. of course, there’s also Sodom and Gomorrah...