Tag: history

Notes from Cicero

For some time now, I have been intending to make notes on the various bits and pieces I pick up while reading and post them here for whatever edification they might happen to offer you. And I very much recommend Mahan’s two-volume Life of Nelson; unfortunately I failed to mark any of the salient points it contained while I was reading it. But here are two little things that caught my attention in my present reading, which is the first volume of Cicero’s extant letters:

1. Those who believe in the New Economics aka Keynesianism will find it somewhat difficult to explain how despite more than two thousand years of technological development and the advancement of economic science, interest rates are still pretty much the same. As of this week, a 30-year fixed-rate mortage is around 4.5 percent. Plus ça change….

To P. Sestius in Macedonia: “In point of fact, money is plentiful at six per cent., and the success of my measures has caused me to be regarded as a good security.”

2. Deflation has not always been considered a disastrous thing by the educated classes, at least by those not beholden to the bankers. And it is ominous to note his optimistic description of Rome and compare it to the present state of our latter-day Rome on the Potomac.

To Atticus in Epirus: In short, I was cheered to the echo. For the subject of my speech was the dignity of the senate, its harmony with the equites, the unanimity of Italy, the dying embers of the conspiracy, the fall in prices, the establishment of peace. You know my thunder when these are my themes.

Immigration and the fate of empires

Sir John Glubb on how immigrants do not strengthen an empire, but rather transform it, weaken it and ultimately help bring about its demise:

The Influx of Foreigners

One of the oft-repeated phenomena of great empires is the influx of foreigners to the capital city. Roman historians often complain of the number of Asians and Africans in Rome. Baghdad, in its prime in the ninth century, was international in its population – Persians, Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Egyptians, Africans, and Greeks mingled in its streets.

In London today, Cypriots, Greeks, Italians, Russians, Africans, Germans, and Indians jostle one another on the buses and in the undergournd, so that it sometimes seems difficult to find any British. The same applies to New York, perhaps even more so. This problem does not consist in any inferiority of one race as compared with another, but simply in the differences between them.

In the age of the first outburst and the subsequent Age of Conquests, the race is normally ethnically more or less homogeneous. This state of affairs facilitates a feeling of solidarity and comradeship. But in the Ages of Commerce and Affluence, every type of foreigner floods into the great city, the streets of which are reputed to be paved with gold. As, in most cases, this great city is also the capital of the empire, the cosmopolitan crowd at the seat of the empire exercises a political influence greatly in excess of its relative numbers.

Second- or third-generation foreign immigrants may appear outwardly to be entirely assimilated, but they often constitute a weakness in two directions. First, their basic human nature often differs from that of the original imperial stock. If the earlier imperial race was stubborn and slow-moving, the immigrants might come from more emotional races, thereby introducing cracks and schisms into the national policies, even if all were equally loyal.

Second, while the nation is still affluent, all the diverse races may appear equally loyal. But in an acute emergency, the immigrants will often be less willing to sacrifice their lives and their property than will be the original descendants of the founder race.

Third, the immigrants are liable to form communities of their own, protecting primarily their own interests, and only in the second degree that of the nation as a whole.

Fourth, many of the foreign immigrants will probably belong to races originally conquered by and absorbed into the empire. While the empire is enjoying its High Noon of prosperity, all these people are proud and glad to be imperial citizens. But when decline sets in, it is extraordinary how the memory of ancient wars, perhaps centuries before, is suddenly revived, and local or provincial movements appear demanding secession or independence. Some day this phenomenon will doubtless appear in the now apparently monolithic and authoritarian Soviet empire. It is amazing for how long such provincial sentiments can survive.

As I noted in a previous post, the influx of Irish, German, and Scandinavian immigrants distinctly transformed the political culture of America in a fundamentally anti-Constitutional manner, not despite but because of their assimilation. In this essay, we can see the way in which the Jewish European immigrants of the post-WWII period have had a predictably inimical effect as well as predict the ultimate outcome of the much larger and more recent wave of Central American immigration. I find this piece to be fascinating because while I hadn’t read Glubb before, I had reached very similar conclusions on the basis of my own historical readings.

The important thing to note is that none of this has anything to do with racial or cultural superiorities, but rather the mere fact of racial and cultural differences between immigrant cultures and host cultures playing out in a repetitive and entirely predictable manner. There’s no point in attempting to assign particular blame to any specific immigrant group, much less to decry awareness of historical patterns as being somehow anti-Irish, anti-semitic, or anti-laraza. If the same pattern has played out everywhere from Asia to Europe and now America over three thousand years, there isn’t any rational grounds to believe that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture upon which the American Empire was originally built was going to be harmed significantly less by the immmigration of smart Russian Jews and hard-working Swedish Lutherans than it is by involuntarily imported African slaves, uneducated Mexican Catholics or half-barbaric Somali Muslims.

The theory points to a very different conclusion than the multiculturalist critic will likely assume. Contra the fevered fears of violent reaction they imagine it will inspire, this theory of imperial decline actually indicates that there is no point even attempting to restrict immigration at this late stage because the imperial culture of America has already been fatally diluted and is now well into the final stage of decadence. The time in which an imperial culture can be preserved is during the Ages of Commerce and Affluence; if the preservationist forces wait until the Ages of Intellect or Decadence to react to immigrant-driven transformations, it is already too late.

What applying Glubb’s theory to the present situation indicates is that those who value the historical imperial culture of America would do much better to focus on building anew on a smaller scale rather than wasting time, money, and opportunity cost on futile attempts to regain what has already been lost. There is a lot to contemplate there, and much of it is not terribly pleasant, but the fact that his historical conclusions happen to point in exactly the same direction as independently developed economic conclusions tends to indicate that they merit more than simply being brushed aside unconsidered.

VDH piles on

He addresses Krugman’s WWII stimulus argument from the historian’s perspective:

I’m not an economist, but as an historian, I consider this an abject misreading of the postwar period, at least through the early 1950s. The war years were characterized by frenetic hyperactivity: Americans worked long hours, women were brought into the work force, new towns and manufacturing centers sprang up, and people gave up necessities — all on the assurance that this furious pace and consumer scarcity would be short-lived.

As WWII ended and the clean-up began, there was an enormous amount of pent-up global demand for goods. Given the wreckage in Europe, Japan, and Russia and the underdevelopment of India, Asia, and South America, we were about the only ones with the industrial and commercial wherewithal to supply the world rebound — often receiving cheap oil, gas, minerals, and interest in exchange, which supplemented our own vast supplies of comparatively cheap and easily recoverable resources. Nor should we forget the psychological element: Americans, after winning two wars, were enormously confident about their newfound international stature and influence.

At home, four years of consumer deprivation during the war and the weak demography of the 1930s had combined to create huge demand, all while society was increasingly leaving the farm for good and becoming suburbanized. The result was that in the late 1940s and 1950s, the birth rate soared and consumers enthusiastically made first-time purchases of washers, dryers, fridges, cars, etc. Thus, the American economy grew by leaps and bounds.

Today’s situation is not comparable: We are in hock to foreign creditors for trillions and have not been a net creditor since the 1980s. A China, Brazil, South Korea, Taiwan, or India is as or more likely to supply recovering demand for food, steel, or electronics.

Krugman should be careful what he wishes for. England, the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, and Italy all engaged in massive WII spending; England did so to a much greater extent than the USA ever did. And how did it work out for their postwar economies? The Broken Window fallacy only isn’t a fallacy when you win a war while incidentally breaking all the windows and killing all the glaziers in the neighboring towns. And the history of warfare declares that this doesn’t happen very often even when you are fortunate enough to win.

Arson-free prophets

Mencius Moldbug explains why it is vital to read history’s losers:

This power, which the old States of Europe expended such rivers of treasure and blood to curb, at the beginning of the century, had transferred its immediate designs across the Atlantic, was consolidating itself anew in the Northern States of America, with a wealth, an organization, an audacity, an extent to which it never aspired in the lands of its birth, and was preparing to make the United States, after crushing all law there under its brute will, the fulcrum whence they should extend their lever to upheave every legitimate throne in the Old World.

Hither, by emigration, flowed the radicalism, discontent, crime, and poverty of Europe, until the people of the Northern States became, like the rabble of Imperial Rome, the colluvies gentium. The miseries and vices of their early homes had alike taught them to mistake license for liberty, and they were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English or Virginian freedom.

If the first great wave of immigrants were incapable of comprehending, much more of loving, the enlightened structure of English Virginian freedom, what reason is there for believing that this second great wave of third world rabble is capable of comprehending, much less loving, its surviving remnants? Even on the purely practical level, who genuinely believes that young men from El Salvador, Mexico, and Somalia are going to be able or willing to subsidize the lives of old white women 30 years from now?

The worst figures in American history

The Right Wing News polls the bloggers. John says: “While this is a fascinating list, this one is unusual in that I honestly don’t agree with a lot of the people on the list. Take a look at it and see if you feel the same way.”

Here were my nominees:

Alexander Hamilton
Abraham Lincoln
Woodrow Wilson
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Margaret Sanger
Susan B. Anthony
Alan Greenspan
Paul Warburg
David Rockefeller
Richard Nixon

I was frankly shocked to see that so many people agreed with me about Roosevelt and Wilson, but didn’t see fit to add “Honest Abe” to the list.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

“While [the King of Sweden and Norway and former Marshal of France] Bernadotte was in Paris I saw him every day. He but faintly disguised from me the hope he had entertained of ruling France; and in the numerous conversations to which our respective occupations led I ascertained, though Bernadotte did not formally tell me so, that he once had strong expectations of succeeding Napoleon…. Bernadotte expressed to me astonishment at the recall of the Bourbons, and assured me that he had not expected the French people would so readily have consented to the Restoration. I confess I was surprised that Bernadotte, with the intelligence I knew him to possess, should imagine that the will of subjects has any influence in changes of government!”
– Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, The Memoirs of Napoleon

Mailvox: catching up on history

BG asks about the Crusades:

I’ve been reading your blog, and comments, for years now, stealing countless hours of productivity from my employer. My brother-in-law, a younger man, who I don’t think is saved but is searching, just emailed me asking me to tell him about the Crusades. He said what information he has found so far has been confusing. I haven’t talked to him yet. He knows I know a lot, but I really haven’t studied the Crusades. Can you or one of the Ilk, please direct me to a good source? I don’t expect to take up your time, but any thoughts on the topic would also be greatly appreciated.

I would start with Stephen Runcimen’s three-volume History of the Crusades. I would then read John Julius Norwich’s three-volume history of Byzantium, which gives a solid background for the events that led up to the Crusades. What those ignorant of Byzantine history don’t understand – which is probably more than 95 percent of the people who bring up the Crusades in casual conversation – is that the Crusades were not an offensive campaign in any way, shape, or form, but rather a defensive one for which more than one desperate emperor of Byzantium had spent years pleading.

MN, on the other hand, has a pair of questions related to American history:

I’ve emailed you once before, and I just want to say thanks again for your blog and column. I’m 24 and I can honestly say that in the year or so since I started following your work, my critical thinking abilities have developed more than in the 12 years of public school and 4 of college combined.

Anyway, being that today is America’s Independence Day, I was thinking about its history, specifically the Civil War. I’m able to effectively rationalize most of my beliefs about it, but I am having trouble with a couple things that I hoped you might help with:

1. I believe I’ve recall you writing that had you been around in 1860, you would have fought for the South. I’m undecided on what I would’ve done. Certainly, the southern states’ sovereignty was being infringed and they had the right to defend it. However, how do you justify defending the institution of slavery? While I do not believe in human equality in any real sense, to my mind, the idea of slavery seems in blatant conflict with both the Declaration of Independence and the ‘Life, Liberty, and Property’ part of the 5th Amendment. I also believe that one of the few legitimate functions of our government is to uphold these basic rights, so in that sense, I can rationalize that perhaps the North was justified. The only counter I can come up with is that slaves were not considered citizens, and thus not afforded these rights.

2. I also believe you’ve called Lincoln the worst president in American history. Because he wiped his ass with the Bill of Rights and ended any notions of state sovereignty, I agree with you to a point. Its to a point because, from some things I’ve read, Lincoln’s plan had he lived was to ship all of the slaves back to Africa or the Caribbean as part of the reconstruction progress. In my opinion, this would absolutely have been the correct move, both at the time and in hindsight from 2010. If this is true, can you really call Lincoln the worst president ever, or were his violations of the Constitution too egregious to overcome? I can’t say that he’s worse than guys like FDR, Wilson, or Obama.

My answer to question one comes in two parts. First, as a libertarian, I would prefer an institution of voluntary private slavery to the present system of federal slavery that is in effect today. Either I own myself or another party does. If I am prevented from selling something, in this case my body, then it is obvious that I do not legally own it. Someone else does. In the present United States the government claims legal ownership of its citizens, as evidenced by the Selective Service Act and the income tax, so it is a little bizarre for present-day involuntary slaves of the state to posture about their opposition to historical involuntary private slavery. Note that the fact your owner has not elected to draft you is of no more significance to your legal and factual status as a slave to the state than the fact that the owner of a field slave in the 1800s did not require him to work in the fields on a particular day.

As to the second part, state sovereignty is not conditional. For good or ill, either it exists or it does not. Also, slavery could not possibly have been the primary issue inspiring secession due to the fact that four slave states remained in the Union. But regardless of whether or not slavery was the secondary or tertiary factor beyond the pre-war economic rape of the South by the North, that is totally irrelevant with regards to the question of whether a sovereign state had the right to secede from a voluntary union or not. The great evil of the Civil War and the irrelevance of slavery can be seen by the fact that the Union is no longer voluntary, but is imposed by force to this date even though private involuntary slavery is now a dead issue.

Regarding the second question, my opinion of Lincoln has absolutely nothing to do with his plans regarding the former slaves. The reason he is by far the worst president is because he murdered the American Republic and imposed the American Empire on the American people at a tremendous cost in American blood. He was America’s Caesar, and like Caesar, he received a fitting reward for his treasonous crime against his country.

UPDATE – In answer to the inevitable and illogical argument that the Southern States secession was all about slavery, consider the following analogy. Suppose you want to fly a flag, as permitted by the rules of your homeowner’s association, but the committee that runs the homeowner’s association suddenly decides they don’t want you to fly one. They show up at your house unannounced to inform you of their decision, then barge into your bedroom in order to confiscate any flags that they might find. If then you punch the head of the committee in the face, was your desire to fly a flag the cause?

Cue Derbyshire

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the next revolution:

As grills across America fire up this weekend some Americans may want to crack open a history book instead of a cold beer. A Marist poll finds that 26 percent of Americans dont know whom the United States declared its independence from.

In fairness, there’s not much reason an immigrant from Honduras, Egypt, or Somalia should either know or care about who declared what regarding whom. And one can’t reasonably expect natural-born Americans to have time to learn anything about the Revolution of 1776 in only 12 years of public school when there is so much to learn about Sacajawea, Sojourner Truth, the Mayans, and all the other important figures of history who made America what it is today.

Atheism and action

In which the connection between godlessness and the commission of acts of mass violence is explained by Napoleon, as per his personal secretary and biographer, Bourrienne:

During the negotiations with the Holy Father Bonaparte one day said to me, “In every country religion is useful to the Government, and those who govern ought to avail themselves of it to influence mankind. I was a Mahometan in Egypt; I am a Catholic in France. With relation to the police of the religion of a state, it should be entirely in the hands of the sovereign. Many persons have urged me to found a Gallican Church, and make myself its head; but they do not know France. If they did, they would know that the majority of the people would not like a rupture with Rome. Before I can resolve on such a measure the Pope must push matters to an extremity; but I believe he will not do so.”—”You are right, General, and you recall to my memory what Cardinal Consalvi said: ‘The Pope will do all the First Consul desires.'”—”That is the best course for him. Let him not suppose that he has to do with an idiot. What do you think is the point his negotiations put most forward? The salvation of my soul! But with me immortality is the recollection one leaves in the memory of man. That idea prompts to great actions. It would be better for a man never to have lived than to leave behind him no traces of his existence.”

It is those last three sentences that demonstrate the connection between atheism and large-scale tragedy that Richard Dawkins and other historically illiterate atheists have so much trouble recognizing. It is not atheism itself that is the problem, but as I explained in TIA, atheism combined with a burning ambition to achieve immortality through material ends. Whether this immortality is achieved through military glory, the creation of a New Man, or the construction of a new society on the ashes of the old one is not important, the point is that the underlying motivation to commit acts of horrific violence involves more than the simple absence of the belief that one will face judgment for one’s actions in this life.

Those who trouble to actually read the words of the historical individuals will see a striking similarity in the mindset of men as superficially different as Napoleon, Lenin, and Mao. Again and again, it becomes apparent that the ideology that supposedly drove each of them was merely cover for their burning personal desire to seek immortality through action. This is the most obvious in the case of Napoleon, who secretly loathed both the liberty and the bloody regicides of the Republic whose armies he led so effectively, because his biographer was privy to his private thoughts long before his actions began to contradict his supposed republicanism. But, the same concept quite obviously applies to many of the more lethal Communist leaders as well, since most of them were no more genuinely committed to Communism than Napoleon was to liberty, equality, and the French Republic.

For such men of burning ambition, ideology is nothing more than a means to a self-serving end. Men have little to fear from an atheist libertarian or a Christian monarch, but they have everything to fear from an ambitious atheist who dreams of great actions and is determined to leave the world with the recollection of his existence.

Mailvox: the whitewashing of Lincoln

It’s kind of sad when Electric Six presents a more accurate view of Abraham Lincoln than most mainstream historians. AJ wishes to better understand why:

My father recommended to me a book called “The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War” by Thomas DiLorenzo. I’m not sure if you’ve read it or heard of it – I’m guessing that you have – but this book’s main focus is Lincoln’s rape of the Constitution, and the downfall of state sovereignty. Checking out the sources DiLorenzo used – as amateur as I may be in that area – they all look legit.

I’ve never really been a Lincoln fan in the first place, but this book made me sick to my stomach. Other books I have read and sources I have looked at, among them Murray Rothbard’s “Just War”, corroborate all of the evidence that Lincoln was a liar, power hungry, and a sociopath of the highest order. His Emancipation Proclamation was designed to provoke slave uprisings in states where the North did not have control, knowing full well that only women and children remained in those areas – yet it is hailed and revered as one of the greatest and most moving speeches ever given by a president. He has his face on Mount Rushmore, on our currency, a memorial in DC, and his own day in February – the same man who suspended the writ of habeas corpus, muzzled the press when it spoke out against him, imprisoned thousands of NORTHERNERS for political dissent (re: clamoring for peaceful secession) and is described as a dictator by even his most ardent of historians (though a benevolent one, they insist).

If people knew the truth about Lincoln – specifically the blacks who hold him up as the Great Emancipator, despite his desire to ship them all out to Africa and/or South America to preserve the “purity” of America – life in America would be drastically changed. And if they saw the similarities between the goings on before the War of Northern Aggression and what’s going on now, they might see some disquieting parallels. The only difference is that our current president doesn’t have to muzzle the media – they’re his already. The least of his crimes were against civil liberties, and the worst was starting the bloodiest war on American soil for the sole reason of destroying state sovereignty. Dishonesty in science and archaeology usually just annoys me, but I consider it par for the course. The same goes for most historians, but this is just too great to ignore. This makes me angry, and it should make everyone else angry, too, if they weren’t so historically ignorant.

I’m sure you know all of this already, and have probably written about it before, but my question is this: WHY have historians ignored Lincoln’s obvious agenda and wickedness? Why have they painted him in such a false light? I understand this isn’t anything new for history writing, but all of the evidence is there. I understand dishonesty in certain arenas, but against a corrupt politician? Historians usually revel in that sort of thing. Why does Lincoln get a free pass?

AJ answered her own question when she said “If people knew the truth about Lincoln… life in America would be drastically changed.” Lincoln is a secular saint for the same reason that the Roman Senate deified Octavian Augustus – he was the first emperor of Imperial America. Lincoln was, without a doubt, the worst president the united States of America because he murdered what had been a free and voluntary republican confederation in the name of a Federal Union imposed by violence.

Naturally, the would-be totalitarians of today revere him. But every freedom-loving American, black or white, should mark the end of the Republic by him. Sic semper tyrannis.