Ibero-America

Europe

Russia and Central Asia

Middle-East

Asia

Africa

---

August 19-25, 410 A. D.

This week we take our readers way back, for a very good purpose. One of the leading assertions of the Clash of Civilizations crowd today, is that the United States of America must abandon its republican tradition, and become the "new empire," policing the world, and suppressing economic development wherever someone might suspect a future "challenge" to the United States.

Empires, however, are well-known for their propensity to destroy themselves, and their populations. One need only look at history.

Which brings us to our event of the week, the fall of the Roman Empire. Historians date the collapse of the Western part of the Empire from the moment at which the Visigoth tribes (from Northern Europe) overran Rome on Aug. 24, 410.

This denouement was the result of a long process, through which the Roman Emperors had created the conditions for their own destruction. According to the imperial principle, the Romans had not only conquered as much of the world as they could, they had concentrated on looting the areas which they had taken over, of whatever wealth existed. They took slaves, raw materials, and everything of value they could find, demanding endless tax and tribute.

Thus, instead of building up, or even maintaining, agricultural production in Italy, for example, they imported grain from the hinterlands. Rather than educating their own citizens to become skilled craftsmen, and to come up with inventions and improvements, they suppressed technological innovation, and thus suffered from extremely low productivity, in agriculture, in particular. Indeed, the agriculture estates around Rome were terrible places where slaves were worked to death, only to be replaced by the ceaseless flow of new slaves. In such a slave-based society, there was no need for technological advance or skilled labor.

Thus Rome created a culture by which its citizens destroyed themselves —and it became rotten-ripe for takeover.

In effect, Imperial Rome was the ultimate "consumer" society. Its population was largely unemployed, except for those who fought its wars and policed its far-flung borders, and that vast unemployed population depended upon the state for survival. The idea of people being satisfied with "bread and circuses," the very phrase, comes from the heyday of the Roman Empire, when the Empire sustained the population of Rome on the public dole, and kept them amused with grand, bloody spectacles, provided at the expense of the state. By 354 A.D., shortly before the end, there were 200 official holidays a year in Rome at which the mob was treated to such monstrous "entertainment," and the circuses and arenas were expanded to hold hundreds of thousands of people.

With the population so degraded, is it any wonder they did not rally against the invading "barbarians"?

The modern-day apologists for an "American Empire" may hope that they can avoid Rome's fate, but in fact, the postwar United States, especially from 1964 to the present, has increasingly followed both the ideology and the physical economy of the Roman Empire. The United States has shut down its own production, and brought in tribute from the rest of the world. We have increasingly taken up military "police actions," rather than developing collaborative relations with other sovereign states.
...more