We talk about the Fall of Rome because, though the Emperor Constantine had no idea Rome had Fallen when he moved the capitol, to us it looks like it had. Remember that Gibbon was writing back when it was assumed that Classical Sculpture consisted of the gray, bare stone they were digging up.
About Gibbons’ time they also began to erect “Classical” buildings that were bare and gray like the ones that were left in Rime and Greece. People who talk about how “sophisticated” they are always good for a belly laugh. So the BBC has “I, Claudius” with a statue in his garden that is bare gay stone. This is Sophisticated Authenticity.
It is exactly as sophisticated as the Cargo Cult. In fact, it is exactly LIKE the Cargo Cult.
So our Cargo Cult history says that when Constantine moved from Rome, Rome fell. From OUR point of view, during the following period Rome DID fall, that is, it “fell” in OUR areas of Western Europe. But the Classical World had developed and lived for a millennium before it ever set foot north of the Alps. So it didn’t Fall because it lost that territory.
The World View sophisticates have now is that the Mediterranean world Fell when it lost territory north of the Alps.
The truth is that the Mediterranean world barely noticed. Our Cargo Cult history is built on this Fall of Rome crap.
You cannot begin to understand how ridiculous our history, Chronicles of Culture History, Marxist history and all the rest are until you get used to this Cargo Cult belly Laugh.
Real thinking is not in the same WORLD with these morons.
#1 by shari on 02/26/2008 - 4:00 pm
With all the PHD’s everywhere, it’s really sad that there is so little love of learning. Not everyone can, or even wants to be a scholar, but a whole people {race} benefits from honest scholarship. Now we just PAY for what, a lot of the time, passes as scholarship.
#2 by Dave on 02/26/2008 - 5:13 pm
The vulgarity of America’s faux “classical” government buildings, particularly its courthouses and legislative buildings says everything about the pure and unadulterated wrong headedness of what we are dealing with in this country.
Those buildings cannot be retrofitted to today’s requirements but the historic preservation crowd insists on preserving the vulgarity of the past regardless of cost or consequences. That is big time stupidity in and of itself.
And isn’t it something about how the crowd that insists on preserving this “history” is also invariably orthodox politically correct. It’s weird. They are victims of PBS.
They are those “A” students BW talks about who can’t think. What a plague they are. Courthouses and the halls of government are full of them.
#3 by mderpelding on 02/26/2008 - 7:15 pm
What is Rome?
And why, did “it” fall?
I’m pretty sure that all the Romans didn’t someday cease to exist. It would have been a real example of genocide if they did, I reckon.
This is all Marxist history. Societies self destruct to create new societies.
Yup, one day the whole empire just vanished and it was replaced by crazy Germanic barbarians. Evil slavers and racists one and all.
They also hated Jews!!!
I’m guessing that they also held negative views of our GLBT friends.
Just like that, an entire race of humans disappeared and were replaced. Like pod people.
Your history flows through your veins.
Not pages in a book.
Remember that.
#4 by Prometheus on 02/27/2008 - 2:07 am
There is a fatal flaw in directly correlating what is happening in the western world today with what happened in Rome. Superficial similarities to be sure, but our problems that affect our race, were not the problems that the Romans faced back in their day.
It in interesting to read how Rome fell, and Byzantium just popped up like mushrooms after the rain. The reality is that the transition was probably far more seamless. It turned to Christianity and away from paganism, and kept on going. It could be argued that Rome didn’t fall until 1453. Constantinople during its fall was unlike classical Rome, but more than a millenia’s worth of years lay between them.
History tries to portray the west as brief periods of light, the renaissance, classical rome, classical greece, the age of exploration, amongst centuries of darkness, ignorance and misery, as if we default to barbarism.
But we don’t, and that is what makes our race special.
#5 by backbaygrouch4 on 02/27/2008 - 8:08 am
Despite efforts of 19th century Germans to create history as a science, it remains simply a subdivision of rhetoric. St. Augustine may have coined the concept of Rome’s fall in his City of God. In it, and it has been forty years since I read it, the City of Man gives way to the higher purpose of the City of God, that is, the administrative center of the Church. The rhetorical purpose of Rome’s fall is theological. The fall was invented to glorify the Church. Gibbons, who hated Christianity, put a different spin on the same facts. He strung together surviving texts and created a narrative that had the Church overthrowing secular Rome with its subversive philosophy. The point being that neither Fall had anything to do with reality. It is no more than political ax grinding from various perspectives. Both Augustine and Gibbons imposed their ideas on a flow of events that had nothing to do with their ideologies. History is indeed Bunk.
#6 by Dave on 02/27/2008 - 11:54 am
We are innudated with color in our lives owing to electricity and advanced chemistry, two fields white men excel in. That is why we find pastels, grays, and the off whites so tasteful. We have no starvation for color.
Not so in Claudius’ time. Coming up with color in clothing, buildings, all the man made stuff was a far bigger deal to them than it is to us at present.
They needed color and strived for it the way white people usually strive for things.
History is always a conceit of the present, a consensus on a story book version of the past.
We imagine a gray past because in our time man made color is no big deal. But we still want HDTV.
The important point here is that white people do not emphasize their heritage, nor acknowledge themselves as creators of worlds. Accordingly, we feel no need for our own version of “Black History Month”.
That’s because we actually are creators of worlds, in distinction to nonwhites who always follow behind us.
It’s just illegal to mention this in a multiracial society, a tryanny where the reality of genetic racial inequality must not be acknowledged.
#7 by Simmons on 02/27/2008 - 12:40 pm
http://vdare.com/ I hope this works. It seems at v-dare they have a writer about to outgrow his college education (maybe if it is not too scary). Derbyshire begins to ask why jews are afraid of DNA, perhaps next he will stumble onto “Wordism.”
#8 by Simmons on 02/27/2008 - 12:46 pm
Secondly we should not act suprised that many on the Right never question these dogmas, they are after all authoritarians. These people even act in deference to their college professors of insanity and stagnation. Next time a know it all spouts the gray classics era stuff ask them point blank if they really believe a society lived in monochrome.
#9 by Tim on 02/27/2008 - 1:22 pm
Simmons,
Jews are afraid of DNA for the exactly the same reason we love it. It proves behavior is race based. They don’t like the obvious. Once the obvious becomes fact. Then they would all have to move to one Jewish country and leave us alone. They have forever worried about having to leave and form a country on their own. They believe they are different. But they don’t want us to know it. We would once again ask them to take a hike.
On the brighter side, today I noticed the birds singing a little louder. Everything was going so well. I assumed some major battle for our side had been won out in the world. Sure enough I pulled up Drudge and Bill Buckley had croaked. The Mantra is killing R-Cons before we can bring them to trial.
(R-Con is my new abbreviation for respectable conservative sounds nice and criminal).
#10 by shari on 02/27/2008 - 1:36 pm
I wonder if one reason an ancient Roman would so startled at our “classical” buildings is that a grey
lack of color would be the color of prisons or tombs?