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A Concise History of the Global Empire

A Concise History of the Global Empire

Like all past empires, the Global Empire has gone through its parable of growth and glory and is now starting to decline. There is not much we can do about it; we must accept that this is how the universe works.

For everything that exists, there is a reason, and that’s true also for that gigantic thing that we sometimes call “The West” or perhaps “The Global Empire.” To find that reason, we may examine its origins in an older but similar empire: the Roman one.

As someone might have said (and maybe someone did), “Geography is the mother of Empires.” So, the Romans exploited the geography of the Mediterranean basin to build an empire based on maritime transportation. Rome was the center of a hub of commerce that outcompeted every other state in the Western region of Eurasia and North Africa. It was kept together by a “Lingua Franca,” Latin, and by a financial system based on coinage, in turn based on the availability of gold and silver mined from the Empire’s mines in Spain. More than all, it was based on a powerful military system created by the Roman wealth.

Like all empires, the Roman one carried inside the seeds of its own destruction: the limited amount of its mineral resources. Roman gold and silver were used to pay not just for the legions but also for expensive commodities coming from China that the Empire couldn’t produce in its territory. As long as the Romans could keep producing precious metals, the amounts lost to China to pay for silk and spices didn’t matter so much…

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The Drones are Coming! The Drones are Coming! The Twilight of the Global Empire?

The Drones are Coming! The Drones are Coming! The Twilight of the Global Empire?

This clip looks like a videogame, but it is not (caution, disturbing images). You are seeing Azeri drones destroying Armenian military units during the recent war in Nagorno-Karabakh. Is this the harbinger of the collapse of the Global Empire?

Many things have been happening in 2020 that will reverberate for many years in the future. While the West is busy with its “great reset,” a small war was fought in a region of the world that you probably had never heard about before: the Nagorno-Karabakh. There, the army of Azerbaijan soundly defeated the Armenian army.

What made this campaign peculiar is that it was the first time in history that a military confrontation was decided by drones. After that the Azeris (the people of Azerbaijan) had gained control of the sky, their drones could pick the Armenian military units one by one and destroy them at ease. There are video clips all over the Web showing vehicles and other installations being destroyed, and people being shredded to pieces and tossed around like ragdolls.

No surprise: the writing was on the rotor blades. Already in 2012, I had started thinking about the consequences of the development of military robots in a chapter that I wrote for Jorgen Randers’ “2052” book. I returned to the subject in 2019, noting how cheap drones would change the rules of war because they could be managed by small organizations, possibly by private military contractors.

We don’t know exactly who managed the drones used by the Azerbaijan forces, but we know that they were made in Turkey, not a major player in the world’s power game. Azerbaijan, then, could afford to deploy a number of drones sufficient to overwhelm the Armenian forces even though it is a small country with a GDP of just about 44 billion dollars per year.

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Are the Martyrs Coming Back? Julian Assange and the Fall of the Global Empire

Are the Martyrs Coming Back? Julian Assange and the Fall of the Global Empire

And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand (Matthew. 12:25)

The more the current world drama unfolds, the more I am amazed by how closely we are following the path that the ancient Roman Empire followed toward its final collapse. Dmitry Orlov, another student of civilization collapse, seem to think in the same way. In a post on his blog, he notes how Julian Assange could be the first martyr for truth of modern times, he calls him “St. Julian.” Says Orlov:

If all goes well, he (Julian Assange) will be released and reestablish himself as a media personality of great stature. And if everything goes badly and the Americans do get their hands on him and torture him to death, he will die as a martyr and live in public memory forever.

I don’t know whether Assange has been baptized, but a proper choice of saint for him would be St. Julian of Antioch, who was martyred during Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of Christians between 303 and 313 AD. Julian was stuffed into a sack filled with sand, vipers and scorpions and dumped in the sea. Diocletian’s initiative was a failure: the son of one of his lieutenants, Constantine, not only canceled the persecution of Christians but made Christianity into Roman Empire’s state religion. He then moved its capital to New Rome (Constantinople), abandoning Old Rome to languish in the Dark Ages while his New Rome went on for a thousand glorious years.

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When Jerusalem was in Tuscany. The Last Gasps of a Dying Empire

When Jerusalem was in Tuscany. The Last Gasps of a Dying Empire

Did you know that in Italy there is a place called “Jerusalem in Tuscany?” In the monastery of San Vivaldo,” you can find a 16th-century sanctuary structured in such a way to make pilgrims go through an experience similar to that they would have by visiting the real Jerusalem. The sanctuary is still very much the same as it was when it was built, half a millennium ago.
The key feature of all empires is their centralized control over different social and economic subregions. Control is normally obtained by military means, but that’s not strictly necessary. Our modern Global Empire does not disdain the use of lethal force, but it is kept together largely by the soft communication techniques we call “propaganda” or, more recently, “consensus building.” Some ancient empires were also based on communication techniques, in particular the Catholic Church which dominated Western Europe for about one millennium using its monopoly on Latin as ‘lingua franca’. Here, I am examining the traces left by the last attempt of the Church to maintain its dominance by developing a completely new, image-based, communication system. It didn’t work, but it was impressively modern and it compares well with our present icon-based communication systems.

Imagine yourself in Europe during the late Middle Ages — it was a different world for many reasons but one would perhaps be the most striking: language. Today, Europe is organized in terms of sharp borders of linguistic areas that usually correspond to national states. Inside the borders, there is one — and only one — “correct” language while dialects or minority languages are at best tolerated and often despised.
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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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