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Cycle of Civilization

August 29, 2017

COMMENT: Interestingly enough, in Switzerland the -in majority- leftish and Pro-EU government has been trying to push Switzerland into EU for years as you’re aware of.

Now the SVP is fighting against a new international contract, called “institutional agreement” which would give (amongst others) the EUGH the Supremacy Clause over Switzerland – end of Swiss direct democracy plus all still existing “state” rights (despite 60% – 80% of all new regulations/laws are already taken over from Brussels..)

REPLY: While the revisionists want to claim that the Civil War was only about slavery when in fact the overwhelming majority of Confederate soldiers owned no slaves, they say history is written by the victor not the loser. There is never a single reason for any war. Iraq was claimed to be protecting the people who Saddam Hussein was gassing. The weapons of mass destruction was thrown in for good measure to make it sound urgent when it was Dick Cheney and his greedy buddies looking for oil. Nevertheless, the Civil War was really part of the Cycle of Civilization. We band together creating large governments and then we disband and move back to tribal jurisdiction. This Cycle of Civilization has been going on for thousands of years.

Indeed, this trend is part of the Cycle of Civilization we must understand run the course throughout history of human existence. The Roman Empire took over states and absorbed them to dominate the Western World. Previously, those states suppresses tribes to create states with a central power. When Rome fell, it broke up not into states, but back into tribes and then feudalism. As invaders reemerged, then these feudal castles banned together for a common defense.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

In the Footsteps of Rome: Is Renewal Possible?

July 25, 2017

In the Footsteps of Rome: Is Renewal Possible?

Once the shared memories of these values are lost, the Empire ceases to exist; there is nothing left to reform or renew.

Is renewal / recovery from systemic decline possible? The history of the Roman Empire is a potentially insightful place to start looking for answers. As long-time readers know, I’ve been studying both the Western and Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empires over the past few years.

Both Western and Eastern Roman Empires faced existential crises that very nearly dissolved the empires hundreds of years before their terminal declines.The Western Roman Empire, beset by the overlapping crises of invasion, civil war, plague and economic upheaval, nearly collapsed in the third century C.E. (Christian Era, what was previously A.D.) — 235 to 284 C.E., fully two hundred years before its final dissolution in the fifth century (circa 476 C.E.).

Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) faced similar crises in the seventh and eighth centuries, as its capital of Constantinople was besieged by the Persians in 626 C.E. and the Arab caliphate in 674 C.E. and again in 717 C.E. The invasions which preceded the sieges stripped the empire of wealthy territories and the income those lands produced.

In both cases, the Empire not only survived but recovered a substantial measure of its former resilience and stability. Fortune delivered strong leadership at the critical moment: leadership that was able to protect itself from petty, self-aggrandizing domestic rivals, force the reorganization of failed, self-serving bureaucracies, inspire the populace to make the necessary sacrifices for the common good, win decisive military victories that ended the threat of invasion, and generate a moral claim to leadership via personal rectitude and/or participation in a religious revival.

Absent such strong, stable, legitimate leadership, neither empire would have survived their existential crisis.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The End Of Empires: Rome Vs. America: “The Populace Is Just As Stultified And Easily Distracted Now As It Was Then”

November 30, 2016

The End Of Empires: Rome Vs. America: “The Populace Is Just As Stultified And Easily Distracted Now As It Was Then”

obama-caesar

The year was 451, and the battle of Chalons (also known as Catalaunian Fields and Campus Martius) was fought between a coalition of Roman legionnaires, Germanic Visigoths, and Gauls against the Huns. Flavius Aetius was the Roman commanding general, and he led his forces to defeat Attila, king of the Huns and commander of the Hun armies. The loss caused Attila to withdraw and skirmish into Italy, but again (this time through diplomacy and concessions) he withdrew in 452, returning into what is now modern Hungary. Attila died in 453, and the Hun menace to Europe had ended.

Aetius had been the declining (and fragmented) Western Roman Empire’s best chance to restructure itself. He had fought in Gaul and throughout Italy and Europe for decades, sometimes even with support from the Huns before Attila began his quest for empire. A master strategist, tactician, diplomat, and warrior, he effectively stemmed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for another 25 years. In all probability, he may have been able to turn things around for a longer period of time.

This was not to be, as he was assassinated by none other than the Emperor Valentinian III and his henchman Heraclius on 22 September 454.

The emperor killed the very man who had protected and assured his throne, and worse: now there was no true strategist to take the reins of military command. The last great Roman general was no more, and the Western Roman Empire continued to decline and fragment. Odoacer, a half-Hunnish barbarian general rallied forces to mutiny against their (and his) previous commander, Orestes, the Roman Senior military general, in the Battle of Pavia on August 23, 476. Orestes was captured and killed. Less than two weeks later, on or about September 4, 476, Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor and the son of Orestes was deposed by Odoacer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Three Stages of Empire

September 22, 2016

The Three Stages of Empire

I consider it self-evident that we are in the third and final stage of self-serving Imperial decay.

Though Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third is not specifically on the rise and fall of empires, it does sketch out the three stages of Empire.

Here is the current context of the discussion of Imperial lifecycles: the U.S. defense budget is roughly the same size as the rest of the world’s defense spending combined:

Luttwak describes the first stage of expansion thusly:“With brutal simplicity, it might be said that with the first system the Romans of the republic conquered much to serve the interests of the few, those living in the city–and in fact still fewer, those best placed to control policy.”

The second stage spread the benefits of Empire much more broadly:

“During the first century A.D., Roman ideas evolved toward a much broader and altogether more benevolent conception of empire… men born in lands far from Rome could call themselves Roman and have their claim fully allowed, and the frontiers were efficiently defended to defend the growing prosperity of all, and not merely the privileged.”

The third stage is one of rising inequality:

“In the wake of the great crisis of the third century, the provision of security became an increasingly heavy charge on society, a charge unevenly distributed, which could enrich the wealthy and ruin the poor. The machinery of empire now became increasingly self-serving, with its tax collectors, administrators and soldiers of much greater use to one another than to society at large.“

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire

April 3, 2016

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire

In this post, I argue that the ascent of Donald Trump in the US presidential race is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of society, in turn caused by the loss of control generated by resource depletion. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a simple system dynamics model describing the situation and generating another example of “Seneca Collapse”

Donald Trump seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Whether or not he gains the Republican nomination, and whether or not he becomes president, he took the media by storm: people writing on blogs and newspapers are reeling from the impact, asking themselves: where the heck did this come from? What is he? A God? The reincarnation of Hitler? Or of Mussolini? The devil? Or what? Personally, I don’t claim to have been less surprised than most by Trump but, rethinking about the situation, I think it is reasonable to say that something like Trump was unavoidable. He is, really, best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social phase transition. A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse.

For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn’t find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

February 26, 2016

Western Peoples Are Being Re-Enserfed

Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, free farmers were defenceless in the face of Viking, Magyar, and Saracen raiders. The need for protection led to the enserfment of free people who accepted the suzerainty of those able to provide walled defenses and armed fighters to ward off attacks. As time passed, the attacks ceased but the feudal arrangements persisted, and the system became exploitative.

Today jobs offshoring and the financialization of the economy are again enserfing the people, but the cause is debt, not armed invaders. Today’s rentier class, unlike the one that emerged from feudalism, has never provided any service in exchange for the debt peonage that it has imposed.

Below is an excerpt from the Introduction to the German edition of Michael Hudson’s book, Killing the Host to be published in November by Klett-Cotta:

Today’s reversal of progressive values is a historical transition point much like what occurred from the Roman Republic to Empire during the century of Social War, 133-29 BC. Rome’s debtors and plebs lost in a wave of political violence. It was by murder that the oligarchic party prevented the reforms of Tiberius Gracchus in Rome after 133 BC. Julius Caesar suffered a similar fate in 44 BC after moving to take the demos into his camp. Other politicians urging debt cancellation also were killed.

Rome survived not by prosperity at home but by looting foreign regions. Arminius made a brave stand to resist Rome in 9 AD in the Teutoburg forest. But by that time the die was cast. Over the next few centuries the oligarchs imposed debt bondage on a quarter of the population, plunging the imperial economy into serfdom.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Currency And The Collapse Of The Roman Empire

February 19, 2016

Currency And The Collapse Of The Roman Empire

At its peak, the Roman Empire held up to 130 million people over a span of 1.5 million square miles.

Rome had conquered much of the known world. The Empire built 50,000 miles of roads, as well as many aqueducts, amphitheatres, and other works that are still in use today.

Our alphabet, calendar, languages, literature, and architecture borrow much from the Romans. Even concepts of Roman justice still stand tall, such as being “innocent until proven guilty”.

So, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins’ asks, how could such a powerful empire collapse?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collapse Of The Paper Gold & Silver Market May Be Close At Hand – Steve St. Angelo

February 18, 2016

Collapse Of The Paper Gold & Silver Market May Be Close At Hand – Steve St. Angelo

There is something seriously wrong taking place in the markets today. This is also true in the paper gold and silver markets as well. For a paper precious metals futures market to function properly, there has to be ample supplies of physical metal. However, the ongoing trend of falling precious metal inventories points to big trouble in the paper gold and silver markets.

We must remember, a collapse does not happen overnight, but the endgame does. This can be clearly seen in the collapse of the Roman Monetary System:

As we can see from the chart above, the devaluation of the Roman coin, the Silver Denarius, started slowly about 50 AD. This continued until the silver value of the Denarius plummeted in 241. This had a profound impact on the population of Rome, shown in the chart below:

You will notice the population of Rome peaked at approximately 1.6 million people about 100 AD, started to slowly decline, and fell off a cliff at the end of the 5th century. The population of Rome fell from over one million people to 12,000 in a very short period of time. Thus, the collapse of the Roman Monetary System paralleled the disintegration of Rome itself.

What took place in Ancient Rome, is also taking place in our global modern high-tech world. When Nixon dropped the convertibility of the U.S. Dollar into gold in 1971, a few years later… the gold futures markets started trading. No longer was the world’s reserve currency backed by gold, instead the Dollar was valued against the gold price traded on the futures exchanges.

Number Of Owners Per Ounce Of Registered Gold Goes Exponential

Again, to have a properly functioning futures exchange, there has to be available supply of metal. However, if we look at the long-term trend of Registered Gold inventories at the Comex, something looks painfully wrong here:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire: was it caused by climate change?

February 15, 2016

The collapse of the Western Roman Empire: was it caused by climate change?

Image from the recent paper by Buentgen et al., published on “Nature Geoscience” on February 8, 2016. The red curves are temperature changes reconstructed from tree rings in the Russian Altai (upper curve) and the European Alps (lower curve). Note the remarkable dip in temperatures that took place starting with the 6th century AD. But, by then, the Western Roman Empire was past and gone. Its collapse was NOT caused by climate change.

The relationship of climate and civilization collapse is a much debated subject. From the recent collapse of the Syrian state to the much older one of the Bronze Age civilization, climate changes have been seen as the culprit of various disasters befalling on human societies. However, an alternative view of societal collapse sees it as the natural (“systemic”) result of the declining returns that a society obtains from the resources it exploits. It is the concept termed “diminishing returns of complexity” by Joseph A. Tainter.

On this point, we may say that there may well exist several causes for societal collapse. Either climate change or resource depletion may sufficiently weaken the control structures of any civilization to cause it to fold over and disappear. In the case of the Western Roman Empire, however, the data published by Buentgen et al. completely vindicate Tainter’s interpretation of the collapse of the Roman Empire: it was a systemic collapse, it was NOT caused by climate changea.

We can see that there was a cooling episode that probably affected the whole of Eurasia and that started with the beginning of the 6th century AD. This period is called LALIA (Late Antiquity Little Ice Age) and it seems to have been stronger than the better known LIA (Little Ice Age) that took place during the 18th and 19th centuries….click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Empire of Lies

February 9, 2016

The Empire of Lies

The Trajan Column was built in order to celebrate the victories of the Roman Armies in the conquest of Dacia, during the 2nd century AD. It shows that the Romans knew and used propaganda, although in forms that for us look primitive. In those times, just as in ours, a dying empire could be kept together for a while by lies, but not forever.

At the beginning of the 5th century AD, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote his “De Mendacio” (“On Lying”). Reading it today, we may be surprised at how rigid and strict Augustine was in his conclusions. A Christian, according to him, could not lie in any circumstances whatsoever; not even to save lives or to avoid suffering for someone. The suffering of the material body, said Augustine, is nothing; what’s important is one’s immortal soul. Later theologians substantially softened these requirements, but there was a logic in Augustine’s stance if we consider his times: the last century of the Western Roman Empire.

By the time of Augustine, the Roman Empire had become an Empire of lies. It still pretended to uphold the rule of law, to protect the people from the Barbarian invaders, to maintain the social order. But all that had become a bad joke for the citizens of an empire by then reduced to nothing more than a giant military machine dedicated to oppressing the poor in order to maintain the privilege of the few. The Empire itself had become a lie: that it existed because of the favor of the Gods who rewarded the Romans because of their moral virtues. Nobody could believe in that anymore: it was the breakdown of the very fabric of society; the loss of what the ancient called the auctoritas, the trust that citizens had toward their leaders and the institutions of their state.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What Happens to Cash When Governments Go Electronic?

February 1, 2016

What Happens to Cash When Governments Go Electronic?

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; What happens to paper money when the government moves electronic? Is it just cancelled? Does cash then become worthless?

Thanks

ANSWER: It appears that electronic currency will arrive first in Europe. The cash will be demonetized so yes, it becomes worthless. However, they will most likely give you a window in time to redeem cash for electronic money. Keep in mind this will produce a windfall for government. They are most likely going to tax anyone who cannot prove why they have the cash.

This is typical. It is also not a modern invention. The Roman Emperor Trajan (98-117AD) saw the treasury being depleted with the cost of his Dacian War. The brilliant idea was to DEMONETIZE all older coinage prior to Nero’s reform 64AD. What they were doing was declaring the old coinage to be invalid for paying taxes. As a result, you had to turn it in under the pretense it was worn. In truth, he reissued coins with 10% less silver content. So he was taking in the old, melting it down, and thereby increased the money supply by 10%. This was the Great Restitution Issue of Trajan. Politics never changes. The same responses can be cataloged into a book – perhaps I will do that in my next life since I already have a lot on my plate for this one.

What’s Eroding the Middle Class?

January 18, 2016

What’s Eroding the Middle Class?

This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution.

I have devoted many blog posts to the erosion of the middle class, for the specific reason that when the middle class–the layers of the economy between the Power Elites and landless laborers/state dependents–erodes away, the nation/empire is destabilized and descends into crisis.

A society without a functioning middle layer of economic and social activity is not stable, though repression can mask this for a time.

As historian Peter Turchin explained in his book War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, societies that lose the cohesion needed for concerted, collective action collapse, either by failing to meet an external threat or from internal conflicts.

Economies constructed of a supremely wealthy elite, a thin layer of independent artisans and small farmers, and a great mass of laborers with no assets has no shared sense of identity or purpose; those at the bottom have little in common with those at the top, and the thin middle that is scraping by has little affinity with either the elite above or the poverty-stricken below.

This erosion of a self-employed, independent middle class was an important pre-condition for the collapse of Rome and the French Revolution.

As I have outlined in some detail, the middle class in the U.S. is eroding: the lifestyle that was widely accessible to a broad swath of households in the 1960s is now only available to the top 10% below the wealthy (the top 5%). This includes not just possessions like a home or vehicle but productive assets that can be handed down to the next generation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empires (Like the U.S.) Fall When Corruption Becomes Rampant

January 8, 2016

Empires (Like the U.S.) Fall When Corruption Becomes Rampant

Widespread corruption destroys empires.

By way of example, corruption was one of the main causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire:

The Praetorian Guard—the emperor’s personal bodyguards—assassinated and installed new sovereigns at will, and once even auctioned the spot off to the highest bidder [and see this]. The political rot also extended to the Roman Senate, which failed to temper the excesses of the emperors due to its own widespread corruption and incompetence. As the situation worsened, civic pride waned and many Roman citizens lost trust in their leadership.

The Ottoman Empire started its decline when the sale of offices, bribery and corruption became widespread. Indeed:

Most historians point to “degenerate Sultans, incompetent Grand Viziers, debilitated and ill-equipped armies, corrupt officials, avaricious speculators, grasping enemies, and treacherous friends.

The Yuan Empire (led by the Mongols) also collapsed due to corruption:

The decline of the [the Yuan empire] was a result of a number of factors, these being incompetent and rivaling leaders, corruption, revolts, decadence, factional struggles, assassinations, external attacks, and disease.

Moreover:

Toward the end, corruption and the persecution became so severe that Muslim generals joined Han Chinese in rebelling against the Mongols.

Former history professor at the University of Alabama Larry Clayton notes:

The [Roman] republic evolved into an empire and the empire grew corrupt from its own tremendous power. There arose, like mushrooms after a long rain, self-indulgent vices driven by pride and power. An oft quoted observation noted:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” wrote the English essayist and historian Lord Acton in 1887.

Long after the Roman Empire disappeared, other empires, notably the ones of France, England, and Spain began with the conquest and settlement of the New World. By the end of the nineteenth century, European nations had created economic, military and commercial empires across much of the globe.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Dictators of the Roman and American Empires – The Blue Ribbon Has To Go To Obama

December 23, 2015

Dictators of the Roman and American Empires – The Blue Ribbon Has To Go To Obama

obama-dictator

Every group (and especially an empire) needs its good or evil spokesperson, leader, or figurehead to focus upon: the embodiment of the particular group or nation. The size of the group is irrelevant: there simply must be a leader that exemplifies the characteristics of the group. History is replete with great leaders, however, benevolence and goodness are not necessarily a leader’s qualities. For every good leader, it seems there are a plethora of those who are self-serving, power-hungry despots whose aims are either not for the people or (the other end of the spectrum) against the people.

To be sure, these bad leaders are usually good actors: able to dupe the people into believing that they are the ones who are fit to lead. In this manner, the leader chosen is a reflection of the people and needs only feed upon the wants and desires in the populace and then manipulate those desires to his advantage. We continue with the last segment but this time in micro perspective: a comparison of the Emperor Nero of Ancient Rome with the “would-be Emperor” and dictator of America, President Barack Husein Obama II.

Behind every evil leader are bad people who are aiding the despot’s rise to power. The Emperor Nero (born December 15, in the year 37 A.D.) was aided to take the throne by his mother, Agrippina, who proclaimed him worthy of it and enabling it in the year 54 A.D., when he was only 16 years old. Agrippina had been married to the Emperor Claudius (her third husband), and probably poisoned him.

With Barack Obama, we saw that he was aided and mentored by convicted terrorists of the Weather Underground, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fall Of The American Empire: “They Intend To Collapse the Financial System”

December 19, 2015

Fall Of The American Empire: “They Intend To Collapse the Financial System”

“…for two weeks the mob had been rioting uncontrolled in the streets…The economy of the greatest empire that the world had ever seen was coming apart like an unraveling sweater…the cost of maintaining…gigantic armed forces…was bleeding the nation white and in addition there were the heavy subsidies that had to be paid to the…nations dependent…for support. The impoverished government had neither the funds nor the power to stop the riots.”

Readers, are we close to such a point? It happened, for the excerpt above was taken from the book, Those About to Die, by Daniel P. Mannix, written in 1958, and the nation was the Roman Empire. There are many similarities between the decline and fall of Rome and the decline of the United States of America, standing upon the threshold of its fall.

As you well know, the economy is stretched to its breaking point, and the American Empire has over-extended itself, much in the manner of the now-defunct Roman Empire. As with Rome, the United States has experienced a severe influx of illegal aliens, encouraging “immigration” by individuals who (most of them) come to the U.S. not to contribute, but to consume, or even worse: to “conquer,” as a fifth-column. The conquest (especially for illegal aliens crossing the border illegally from Central and South America) is actually seen as such: a “retaking” of Aztlan, alleged land in the U.S. these aliens claim historically as their own, the whole “process” called La Reconquista, or “the re-conquest.”

The Roman Empire had done this, in a manner:

“Throughout its history, [the Roman Empire] had taken in outsiders: a constant stream of individuals looking to make their fortune…supplemented by large-scale migrations.”

(The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Peter Heather, p. 159)

“Multiculturalism” as is very evident in Europe (the latest being Norway, paying non-Norwegian individuals up to $9,800 to pack up and leave) is currently tearing the countries of Europe apart.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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