hyperspacewizard
Well-known member
I almost hope it was that because then it’s an easy fix of stopping that I personally think we just have a bunch of too old petty morally bankrupt cowards running everything
History Western Civilization, Rome and Cyclical History
- Thread starter FriedCFour
- Start date
I agree. Many of the politicians in power joined the government in the 70s and 80s. Mentally they're still stuck in that era.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
See, you say that, but the US culture was still healthy(er) back then. It doesn't make sense to blame the mentality of that time for everything going bad now. We're in shit because too many people in power don't have those morals and beliefs anymore. Even if you say they never did, it's a big deal that they've changed what they pay lip service to. No one in the 90s or 80s would exalt gay people, trans still meant transsexual, which was (and still is? Is it?) defined as a mental health illness, and they certainly wouldn't say not to 'discriminate' against pedophiles. The 80s US congress would look at the UN's kindergaden 'required reading' for 4- and 5-year olds and freak the fuck out.
Last edited:
Wargamer08
Well-known member
That's what a multi-decade war on social norms does to you. It marches on in the schools as we speak.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
We may argue that Rome, initially was a (non-Hellenic) polis itself. Sparta is indeed the closest point of reference in many ways, but arguably, Rome struck the balance between various competitor-poleis. Some of the good parts of Athens, some of the good parts of Sparta, some of the good parts of Thebes...
The key difference is that Rome managed to moderate its own internal influences (or "strains of political thought", if you will) to create a mixed system that ended up working very well. If we take Sparta as one reference point, we should say "the martial strength of Sparta, but without its ultimately brittleness-inducing rigidity".
Alexander himself was the one who came closest to creating a mixed system himself; and we might almost say "the world was not yet ready for that". But he put the idea of the universal empire out there, back into the picture. Since the Atreids had passed from the world, the Greek polities had known no Wanax, no King-of-Kings. Such a notion was only known as foreign; Persian, or Egyptian. But Alexander gave them an ideal again. A hegemonic ambition.
For three hundred years thereafter, every man of a certain calibre wished to be Alexander. Until, in the wake of Actium, that vision of universal hegemony was made real. (They even had the concept of an imperial Leitkultur down to a tee! Alexander had plans for that himself.)
Exactly. And moreover, the point here is that Alexander was born into a world that was already becoming unstable. Hence my calling it a "dying age". The structures of the polis-leagues was no longer sufficient to keep order in a world with expanding horizons and countless new ideas.
Just as Napoleon was forged in the context of the Enlightenment pilosophers, and Chandragupta was the great pupil of the philosopher Chanakya, Alexander was educated by Aristotle and thus a scion of the "Sokratic revolution" in Greek philosophy. These men overthrew the old order and attempted to institute a new, universalist order. (In the unique case of Chandragupta, this effort even succeeded, although -- again, I think, due to "the world not being ready" -- his Maurya empire didn't last nearly as long as it might have, if given three more centuries of cultural "prep work" first.)
Typically, these efforts led to "failure" in the sense that their new order didn't outlast them; but they did invariably lay the ground-work for the "warring states" era. Compare the Successor kingdoms to the post-Napoleonic nation-states: more centrlised, more organised, set up on a larger scale... and engaged in more structural competition between themselves. And in this way, to use the terminology of Spengler, an Alexander or a Napoleon closes out the "summer" of a High Culture, and initiates its three-hundred-year "autumn" period.
(And at the end of that, we see Caesar and finally Augustus to initiate civilisational "winter": the final phase, where a culture's forms freeze into their definitive iterations.)
Carthage was another outsider to the conflict, and in most ways not part of Classial culture-- but rather of Canaanite culture. These two cultural spheres greatly overlapped, but I'd argue that Carthage was to the Levant as Rome was to the Greeks and as America is to Europe. So it is no surprise that Carthage was a great rival to Rome. They were peers and competitors: one fated to eclipse and strangle the other.
Had Rome perished, Carthaginian civilisation would have supplanted it, altering the fate of the world in ways we can scarcely imagine.
We very much mean the same thing here. So, yes, completely agreed.
(As an aside: I re-iterate that the concurrence of Rome fighting Carthage and Macedon is highly similar - both in nature and timing -- to America fighting Japan and Germany. A war to determine the fate of a world-system. The winner becomes the hegemonic power over its civilisational sphere.)
What @Cherico notes is correct. I would hardly call Alexander a failure -- rather the opposite, I'm a great admirer -- but he did not succeed, specifically, in the aim of creating a universal empire. And yes: that very much was his goal. Everything we know about his plans serves to illustrate this. The division of his empire wasn't even his idea. Obviously, we weren't there. but the only account we have tells us that when asked who should get the throne, his answer was kratistos.
"The strongest."
And he got his wish, albeit three centuries later. Rome was the strongest. A worthy heir to an imperial dream. Just as @Lord Sovereign noted. In a way, Alexander was one of the... if not founders, then at least one of the grandfathers of the Roman Empire.
(And to be clear: I rather like the idea of deliberately creating multiple kingdoms to prevent a univeral power -- it's very reminiscent of Leto II's Golden Path -- but I'm not aware of even the slightest hint that Alexander entertained such a notion.)
Last edited:
. . .
The fact you believe this is how successful the Progressive Left was in hiding their agendas from the public.
Pedophilia acceptance was a core part of the early gay rights movement in the 1970s, and the academic literature of the time explicitly called for such destruction of social norms. In fact, much of academia as far back as the 1950s, with the Kinsey Report, was exalting homosexual and other non-heterosexual sexual ideas as ideal or more common than they are.
The rot is old and deep, the mask has only come off since they think they've won and are attempting to mop up the resistance at this point.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
In some respects, it’s safe to say the left won the culture war.
But right now they are losing the peace quite decisively.
If only people in power back then had bothered understanding what they were dealing with and shut it down. None of this would be happening.
Carrot of Truth
War is Peace
They managed to censor everyone that went against the groupthink for about 4 years, but that could only ever be a temporary state of affairs. The lefts entire ideology when put into practice fails epically and cannot realistically be sustained. I liken it to a self destructive religious movement sort of like Byzantine Iconoclasm.
Skallagrim
Well-known member
We may go yet further, and argue that the existence of "the left" is the reason for the culture war.
"The left", after all, is the term for those particularly malformed children of the Enlightenment who sought to overthrow all order and civilisation and all faith and dignity; so that they might make their own perverted parody of paradise here on earth.
Their culture war started then and has not abated since. Only their tactics have changed, just as their nature is ever-shifting and un-fixed. Their efforts gave us the guillotine, and then later the gulag and gas chamber. It gave us cancel culture, it gave us an industry dedicated to pornography, it gave us dozens if not hundred of imaginary genders, it gave us an obsession with divisive race-politics, and it gave us endless hate and spite and bile.
Now ask yourself what it took. What it has taken. What it continues to take.
They have won many victories, but I'll dispute that they have won the war, if only because the war is not over. It will not be over until the left is broken-- or we are. And they surely know it. They surely intend to wipe out everything that isn't them. Because they, having instigated this culture war, know exactly what it is.
It is not a war between two cultural attitudes, or mindsets, or beliefs. It is a war between culture itself one side... and the left on the other side. It is their war, their anti-crusade, their jihad-- against culture.
LordsFire
Internet Wizard
In the end, it not only can, but must end with their defeat.
Because the anti-culture that they create, perverse and destructive in all ways, cannot sustain a civilization.
The only question is whether or not they will destroy their civilization, and thus be defeated in self-destruction.
Lord Sovereign
The resident Britbong
Not even that. It’s a question of how much damage the poison does before it finally works its way out the system.
It can do a lot of damage, but I don’t believe it’ll be fatal.
mrttao
Well-known member
for example. nambla was founded in 1978
North American Man/Boy Love Association - Wikipedia
Doomsought
Well-known member
Financial support continued up until 1991, where a bill was passed by congress to prevent the organization from the funded through the UN.
mrttao
Well-known member
which just about tells you everything you need to know about the UN.
I honestly think history will have a cruel sense of Irony and the children of the revolution will end in much the same fashion as the ancient regieme they overthrew.
The question is, who will be doing the beheading, Christians or Muslims?
Skallagrim
Well-known member
As things continue to deteriorate, the trouble caused by unassimilated muslims in Western Europe will get worse -- or rather: increasingly more acute -- but they have no real path to durable power. Their organisational structures are shit, and the kind of trouble they pose is closer to that of a rampaging mob of chimpanzees on cocaine than it is to, say, a methodical revolutionary effort.
I fully expect the urbanised areas of Western Europe to fall prey to various short-lived mini-caliphates (think ISIS) at some point, but these will be highly vulnerable to ultimately being starved out. Assuming that active effort is even required: in case of societal breakdown to any serious degree, cities suffer starvation even if no external force is applied.
Meanwhile, America and Eastern Europe run no realistic risk of falling to islamic dominance, so this is a local problem that the weak, self-satisfied leftists in Western Europe have invited into their own home. We may only hope that the non-leftists living in Western Europe will duly punish these cosmopolitan lunatics for their transgressions, when the time comes. But that hope is not in vain; in fact, that rather ties to the broader analysis of the culture wars, just above this post...
Last edited:
mrttao
Well-known member
Except we have seen them forcibly push those invaders into rural areas to "diversify" them in literally every single western country.As things continue to deteriorate, the trouble caused by unassimilated muslims in Western Europe will get worse -- or rather: increasingly more acute -- but they have no real path to durable power. Their organisational structures are shit, and the kind of trouble they pose is closer to that of a rampaging mob of chimpanzees on cocaine than it is to, say, a methodical revolutionary effort.
I fully expect the urbanised areas of Western Europe to fall prey to various short-lived mini-caliphates (think ISIS) at some point, but these will be highly vulnerable to ultimately being starved out. Assuming that active effort is even required: in case of societal breakdown to any serious degree, cities suffer starvation even if no external force is applied.
Meanwhile, America and Eastern Europe run no realistic risk of falling to islamic dominance, so this is a local problem that the weak, self-satisfied leftists in Western Europe have invited into their own home. We may only hope that the non-leftists living in Western Europe will duly punish these cosmopolitan lunatics for their transgressions, when the time comes. But that hope is not in vain; in fact, that rather ties to the broader analysis of the culture wars, just above this post...
Skallagrim
Well-known member
I live in a rural village in the Netherlands -- at the moment, the most insanely open-to-clearly-fake-refugees country in Europe -- and I can give you a direct report of the situation. Yes, it is true that the urban cosmopolitans are trying to "spread the problem"; but this is causing immense resistance even here, to the point that it's brought down the goverment and triggered elections due next month. This "we'll force the barbarians on you yokels!" approach has brought more normies to the vehement anti-mmigration camp than anything else in the past twenty years, and because of it, it now seems that as of next month, we'll have a majority in favour of dramatically restricting the numbr of refugees that we'll accept, and a majority in favour of a Switzerland-style binding referendum.
So... great going, dear elite. Keep it up. Keep making the normies mad.
Supposing, however, a worst case scenario (which is always wise) in which all opposition parties are kept divided by clever establishment politicking, and the proposed -- ruinous -- course is pursued for years to come. Well, what of it? The big effect is that vastly more people will become anti-immigrant and anti-muslim, to the point that such sentiments will have a supermajority of support within two decades. At that point, the establishment can either abolish democracy and thus start a civil war (which they will lose), or they can yield to the demands of a by then far more powerful and far more radical populist opposition (which will start deporting the unassimilated barbarians, by any means necessary, including means presently barred by treaties-- which they already want to abrogate anyway).
And now suppose that it does come to civil war and real fighting. I've seen the muslims they try to dump here. Few have jobs. None have farms. They live, by and large, as welfare leeches. They are, in short, useless and hopeless. If it comes to a fight, they'll all be dead within a weak of hostilities breaking out. A few farm hands (who, this very day, would already love to go skull-crushing over at the nearest refugee centre) will sort the matter out with zero subtlety.
At which point we're back to the native country-side (which has farms, and coherent communities) versus the cities (which get to starve, and are atomised and alienated). Sure, the government would love to destroy loads of farms, but that, too, is causing major pushback. And the Netherlands is a major exporter. Even if they eliminate two-thirds of all farms, the back-country would still have enough left to be fully self-sufficient for food in a time of crisis. Whereas the cities would have food for a week at most. After that, it'll be all over for them.
(The fact that the Netherlands is a major agricultural exporter, by the way, also limits establishment desires to destroy farms. Doing so on a truly grand scale would wreck the economy to a degree that their regime would not be able to survive the crash.)