The Barbarians Who Sacked Rome Came Into the Empire as Refugees

In his latest essay, Emmet Scott explores the parallels between the barbarian invasions of Rome in the 4th century A.D. with the migrant invasions of Europe in the 21st century.

The Barbarians Who Sacked Rome Came Into the Empire as Refugees

by Emmet Scott

Over the past century many commentators have remarked on the parallels between the modern West and ancient Rome in its period of decadence and decline. The most influential proponent of the idea, perhaps, has been Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West is now widely viewed as a classic of conservative thought. As might be imagined, “progressives” have consistently sneered at the idea, but, then again, they would scarcely be progressives if they didn’t. One is reminded of the Chinese saying: “When a fool sees the Tao [Truth] he laughs. If he did not laugh it would not be the Tao.”

The parallels between decadent Rome and the modern West are actually there. And they are uncanny, and they are becoming more numerous by the day.

In 410 A.D. the walls of Rome were breached and the city plundered by a barbarian army under the leadership of Alaric the Goth. This was the first time since the Gallic sack of the city around 390 B.C. that the imperial metropolis had been entered by a hostile enemy. The fall of Rome shocked the world at the time, but what is not generally known nowadays is that the Gothic army that carried out the atrocity had entered the Empire thirty years earlier as refugees.

Until the second half of the fourth century the Goths had inhabited a vast swathe of territory taking what now comprises Romania as well as the Ukraine. In 375, however, they were attacked by the Huns, a tribe of nomad warriors from central Asia who had been moving steadily westwards during the preceding century and a half. In the ensuing war the Goths suffered a crushing defeat and large numbers of them fled westwards towards the Roman Empire. By the summer of 376 an enormous host of Goths, generally estimated at around 100,000, arrived at the River Danube and pleaded with the Roman authorities to be allowed into the Empire.

The Eastern Emperor Valens, at that moment stationed in Antioch, eventually gave permission for the Therving tribe, which comprised about half the total number of Gothic refugees, to be ferried across the river. For at least two centuries prior to this the Romans had actively recruited barbarians into the army (necessary because of Rome’s abysmally low birth-rate) and Valens reasoned that the Goths would provide a valuable pool of new and cheap recruits. The operation to ferry these people across the Danube was an enormous and costly one and took several weeks to complete and, as Ammianus Marcellinus sarcastically comments, “diligent care was taken that no future destroyer of the Roman state should be left behind, even if he were smitten by a fatal disease.”

Unsurprisingly, within a few weeks of their entry into the Empire, the first clashes with the Roman authorities occurred, and by the end of the summer the Goths were at war with Rome. After several military disasters, the Emperor Valens made a hasty return to Constantinople to personally take charge of the campaign, and was killed in battle at Adrianople in 378 — just two years after he had sanctioned the mass immigration.

But worse was to come. A decade and a half of uneasy peace was terminated in 395 by a renewed Gothic war, this time under the leadership of Alaric. Commanding an enormous host of warriors (who were in fact officially soldiers in the Roman army) Alaric moved south from Thrace into Greece, a land which he proceeded to devastate. City after city was taken, its male population massacred, its female population raped and sold into slavery, and its wealth plundered. Finally, in 396 the Western Empire bestirred itself and its greatest general Stilicho was dispatched with a sizeable force to the relief of Hellas. After a lengthy game of cat and mouse around the Peloponnesian Peninsula the Goths were trapped by the superior science and tactics of the Roman general. Unfortunately, however, Stilicho did not prosecute the siege to its conclusion and the Goths effected a daring escape and made their way to Epirus.

At this moment a Greek political philosopher named Synesius published a widely-discussed treatise on the present emergency and the measures that needed to be taken. He exhorted the emperor to, “revive the courage of his subjects by the example of manly virtue; to banish luxury from the court and from the camp; to substitute, in the place of barbarian mercenaries, an army of men in the defence of their laws and of their property … to rouse the indolent citizen from his dream of pleasure. … At the head of such troops who might deserve the name, and would display the spirit, of Romans, he [encouraged the emperor] never to lay down his arms till he had chased them [the barbarians] far away into the solitudes of Scythia, or had reduced them to the state of ignominious servitude …” In the words of Gibbon, “The court of [Emperor] Arcadius indulged the zeal, applauded the eloquence, and neglected the advice of Synesius.” Instead of exile in the solitudes of Scythia, Alaric was actually promoted to the rank of master-general of the province of Eastern Illyricum, and the Roman provincials, remarks Gibbon, “were justly indignant that the ruin of Greece and Epirus should be so liberally rewarded.”

Does all of this sound eerily familiar? Yet even worse was to come; for the patriot who had saved Greece from Alaric, the general Stilicho, was himself only a decade later denounced by the Roman ruling class and murdered, along with his entire family. This was after Stilicho had saved Italy from a second attack by Alaric, as well as from another barbarian host led by one Rhadagastus which had crossed the Alps and devastated the Po Valley.

What kind of society brings in barbarians who cannot be assimilated in order to replace the children it refused to have; which excuses and rewards the horrific crimes of those barbarians; and which punishes patriots who try to stop the depredations of the said barbarians?

Previous posts by Emmet Scott:

2016   Jul   13   The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy
    Aug   1   The Sunni-Shia Divide and Islam’s Puzzling Origins
    Sep   16   The Decline and Fall of the Catholic West
    Oct   8   The African Slave Trade: The Islamic Connection
 

90 thoughts on “The Barbarians Who Sacked Rome Came Into the Empire as Refugees

  1. What kind of society brings in barbarians who cannot be assimilated in order to replace the children it refused to have; which excuses and rewards the horrific crimes of those barbarians; and which punishes patriots who try to stop the depredations of the said barbarians?

    How does one label ‘the kind of society’ without actually providing the name of one in particular? Germany has been letting in and then bringing in Turkish barbarians for at least a generation or more. And through its wealth and power, Germany has been forcing Italy and Greece to do the same…with disastrous results all around.

    The millions of individual decisions not to have children originated in anti-family rules laid down by bureaucracies in western Europe. The statists did NOT reward having children or make it easy or attractive for young men and women to establish families. No one could name a good reason to reproduce. Instead there were lots of reasons not to do so, including spurious credos about over-population.

    After the terrors and tribulations of two enormously destructive wars (one following the other to devour whatever men and wealth survived the first), European men and women were then duped by their governments into taking it easy while the welfare state took care of everyone. One has only to compare post WWII British government’s destructive socialism with post-WWII Australia’s conservative governance to see the bifurcation and decline.
    ——————
    The situation was abnormal in Rome back when the Goths “invaded”. Yet as much as it has been studied, any lessons “learned” were done in a moral vacuum; it was never meant to be “applied history” or ever taught as a warning to a current generation.

    At all cost, government should be prevented from doing for us what we can do ourselves.

    • For example, a “free college education” is neither truly free or truly an education. It’s a corrosive indoctrination that teaches college students to be afraid, be very afraid.

      • Being a product of post-WW2 conservative Australia and having the benefit of a ‘free’ education, I may suggest two observations.

        The conservative government of Menzies only served to enrage us radical university students as we demonstrated against Vietnam, took the pill and burnt our bras. In other words, he may have held off the cultural tsunami for a while, but not for long.

        I see that many of society’s problems could be ameliorated if ALL CHILDREN and ADULTS were able to have a GOOD education where they learnt to honor the achievements of the dead white males, where they studied Constitutional History, and the Classics of Greece and Rome, the Enlightenment, the Bible as an historical as well as spiritual document and learnt about the struggle to establish democratic government which honors individual liberty.

        They should also learn to to critique all the post-modern crap that pretends to scholarship, the Cultures of Revenge (against the dead white males and their offspring) we see on the Left, the hysterical feminists and the non-white traditional cultures (including Islam).

        • “I see that many of society’s problems could be ameliorated if ALL CHILDREN and ADULTS were able to have a GOOD education…”

          DiMu,

          You’re making the mistake of assuming that all (or most) people can be molded like plastic; that each person is a clean slate that can be written on at will.

          In fact, each person has his own agenda, including the far leftists. Some people have said the difference between the left and the right is that the left assumes that people can be molded, and consigns those who can’t to re-education camps; the right assumes people are flawed and different.

          The genius of the US Constitution is that it attempted to construct a system which neutralize the flaws in individual personalities, including the authoritarian or totalitarian impulses of Presidents.

          The educational systems, in my opinion, do more harm in assigning control of tremendous resources to leftists, rather than in indoctrinating students who likely don’t listen much anyway. It’s true that higher education is one of the most wasteful uses of money it’s now possible to find, but I doubt that simply including classical topics would be very effective.

          • The “left” is pushing for more indoctrination through the education system and the “right” blaming that education system for leftist indoctrnation. Two sides of one coin. My 6 children went trough schools and universities and came out untouched by indoctrination. The problem with our young is not indoctrination by education system, but the failure of the family to provide solid base, on which thoughts of our children can be developed in the right direction. It seems that blaiming someone for your own failures is not priority of the “left” any more.

      • And yet both myself, and many of my pro-Brexit and anti-Islam friends, as well as the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos, all went through the (British) state education system…

        • Yes, he *is* informative, isn’t he? Emmet Scott is one of my favorite historians. The most important quality a historian ought possess is clarity (and clarity’s cousin, accessibility). If there were more like him, our next generation would actually be informed instead of the proud-to-be-ignorant dolts who brag they “don’-know-nuthin’-’bout-history”.

    • It would seem a society brings these people in today because they have not learnt from history nor have they bothered to study history. I would not allow strangers in my home so why do we do this with refugees/immigrants. Schools aren’t teaching this and govts aren’t learning this. There will come a time, maybe 2-3 generations down the track, where chaos will reign supreme and mankind may start to die out.

      Thank God I’ll be dead.

    • “The statists did NOT reward having children or make it easy or attractive for young men and women to establish families.”

      Sorry, but Germany has some of the best incentives for young families to be had anywhere… large child benefits, state education etc. Many, if not most, mothers in Germany do not work… the husband’s earnings are usually enough to live on, with a high standard of living. Many families also live in multi-generation households, meaning looking after kids is so much easier, while property prices are very reasonable. In Eastern Europe and beyond, such conditions would be a dream.

      Rather, my guess is the reason might be the “attractive” bit. Germans are super-sensitive to being considered cool… and I suspect looking after kids, while your friends are out at a techno party, or travelling around the world, might just not be a very appealing proposition.

      • Yet I read that the annual abortion numbers in the U.S.are in the hundreds of thousands. Why are you bringing in workers ? Would it not be better to support the upbringing of those of your endemic culture?

        • “Why are you bringing in workers ? Would it not be better to support the upbringing of those of your endemic culture?”

          1) I’m not American. I’m a British-Eastern Euro hybrid.
          2) “support the upbringing”… doesn’t that seem a bit, well, nanny state-ish? Not necessarily anything wrong with that – but as I understand, it’s not something very much liked in the U S of A…

          And at the end of the day, if a large chunk of your population does not want to work, or is not skilled enough to, you’re gonna need to import workers to take their place…

          Again, not necessarily a concern – it’s what the likes of the US and Brazil have been doing since eternity. Just that previously, those imports were from a very similar, European culture to their own…

          • How about this idea:

            If you sponsor a guest worker, including nannies, you are responsible for all costs associated with that person. This included welfare, education, fines, incarceration, and deportation.

        • That would be “millions” of abortions and yet the USA is bringing in thousands of foreigners while Americans go unemployed.

          So foolish.

      • objection,your honor!
        About half of the females are working. Husbands earnings at lower levels are enough if you shop your food at Aldi’ s and never ever even dream of a vacation on some beach under southern sun.The Germans you meet in beach resorts are middle class double income,which makes this obvious wealth. Btw, our invaders have a problem recognizing wealth as a result of hard work. They think it is just there and moreover undeserved.Hence their attitude.

        • I didn’t visit any beach resorts! I write on the basis of working for a while at a research centre near Munich. All my colleagues’ wives did not work, while the salaries were considerably better than, say, in England with both a considerably lower cost of living, and a better standard of living. The area itself was much cleaner and safer than British cities – so better in every way! (at least, until “Merkelisation” brought in vast amounts of the Third World last year)

    • Only by the insidious doctrine put forth by western leadership did the populous adhear to the idea of welcoming refugees into their homeland. Had it never been ingrained by the governments and media, the numbers would never have gotten out of control. This idea of population control does nothing for indigenous peoples. Have we learned nothing from history?

      • “Only by the insidious doctrine put forth by western leadership did the populous adhear to the idea of welcoming refugees into their homeland. ”

        May I suggest that the population is less susceptible to actual propaganda than has been assumed. In my opinion, what really makes the difference is the active government suppression of alternative viewpoints and the criminalization of anti-immigration views. And even that is of limited benefit. In the USSR, government controlled the media, and no one believed them.

        It should be no surprise that globalist socialists are always exploring ways to control, suppress, and conglomerate communications media.

      • “Have we learnt nothing from history?” Apparently not, or we would have realized by now that moslems were, are, and always will be the enemy.

        Algebra and history were my worst subjects all through my school years, yet even I know that! Obviously the so-called ‘elites’ do not peruse the GoV.

  2. Every aspect of our caving-in to this 7th century hoard makes me sick to my stomach. We have all of the natural defenses to protect our country from these demonic beings, but we don’t seem to want to use them.
    We have two great oceans to protect us from a “civilization” that cannot build ocean-going ships. We have a benign neighbor to the North, and a pesky neighbor on our Southern border (which we could close off anytime we decided to do it).
    And yet we continue to bring more of them in.
    Why? Ignorance? Simple stupidity? Fear of being called WAYCIST?
    I have no doubt that the latter is one of the most compelling reasons.
    (I also wonder if one of the reasons for the election(s) of our current President is his middle name. Probably not, but…)

    • We also possess an apocalyptic level of power but currently a complete lack of will to use it.

      Currently.

      • If the roles were reversed, the Ummah would have turned the West into a radioactive desert a long time ago.

      • I don’t think can reduce things to a lack of will to use the “apocalyptic level of power.” Since a stated objective is martyrdom, it would be more than wasted effort doing so. It would be encouragement.

        • Is it not a symbiotic relationship when one side is willing to die for their beliefs and the other side is prepared to kill for theirs?

  3. Here in Israel we fight back, but we are not allowed to win, we can only hold our ground, and even that is constantly criticized and cursed.

    Our enemies want to commit genocide; to drive out every Jooo, and the liberals support this, they think that they are ‘progressive’ and ‘improvers’ and that they are making life ‘fair’. But they are not, they are destroying and tearing down and will reduce us all to poverty if they can (except for themselves of course).

    They cannot get their heads around the idea that there is usually a very good reason why underdogs are inferior.

    • Remember “The Left would rather rule in Hell, than serve in Heaven”. They are not trying to make the World better – that’s just their cover story for the guillable – they are trying to take POWER (and with that, wealth).

      The leaders of the Left are not mistaken nor ignorant – they are deliberate and deceptive.

      They cannot allow the USA nor Israel to win against their enemies, no matter how barbaric, as that shows a system (the prosperous and successful sovereign nation state) that is a viable alternative to International Collectivism (Rule by the ‘Elites’).

      Hence, they must degrade and debase art, science, the family, the military, civil society, academia, politics, history etc etc etc to convince people that the West is not successful and cannot be successful – only then will International Collectivism have any appeal.

      I’m sure you are familiar with Yuri Bezmenov’s talks on Youtube, or Ion Mihai Pacepa’s book “Disinformation” about the plans and methods of the Collectivists. Watch again closely, the process of ‘demoralization’ is to try and make Collectivism seem less bad than a system of the Free Market, Individual Liberty, and voluntarily cooperating sovereign nations.

      The Left most certainly have their ‘heads around’ the ideas you mention – they don’t care. They only *pretend* to care about gays, left-leaning Jews, homosexuals and women because this deception helps to get them the only thing they actually care about – POWER.

      They see destroying the West as essential to gain POWER over the whole planet. They are not mistaken or confused as to the effects of their policies. They are deliberate ! Listen and understand what Bezmenov is saying about the Marxist methods. These are truly evil sociopaths who care nothing for others, only for their own acquisition of POWER. Hillary Clinton’s lust for power is the norm, not the exception.

    • Best wishes to you , to Israel and the IDF from Australia. It is time we stood united against Islam our common enemy.

    • MC, you guys have a serious role awaits for you. Those leftist liberals you talking about turn out to be secular Jewish descent way too many times. Suspiciously over represented, which fuels people’s conspiracy theories. Also those Jewish leftists use this to stop discussions by labeling anybody speak up against them antisemitic. You guys, the freedom loving, religious, nationalist Jews are the only ones who could openly criticize them, taking their magic shield away from them. Do it! You must speak out and help the other nations fight against the Internationalist Marxists, who hide behind hate speech laws created to protect real Jewish victims!

      • I suppose we have to understand why so many Jews vote Left today, despite the fact that the Left is now anti-Israel and Marxist.

        I can only assume that historically, in Europe, they joined forces with the Marxists and socialists as the political parties most opposed to bourgeois and aristocratic elites, under whom the Jews had suffered terrible antisemitism.

        Now, like the LGBT and black communities, they are living schizophrenics, because we know that the first people to be enslaved or butchered to death under Islam would be the gays, feminists and above all, the Jews and we know that the Lefty, global Marxists want to deprive us of our wealth and property.

        So, they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face!

    • Well, take heart, MC. You actually have a lot of things going for you.

      1) Israel constantly depends on its warriors, so you have a selection factor in maintaining the quality of your people. Your strong welfare state exerts a counter-pressure, selecting against quality. But, your selection based on physical defense is an advantage most Western societies do not have.

      2) Israel is geographically small, so its government, however socialist, has to maintain a personal accountability to the people. I realize the liberals are trying as hard as they can to remove government from accountability, but in a country as small as Israel, it’s impossible to succeed in this.

      3) Israel is maintaining the quality of its population through strict immigration control and the culling out of illegal residents. All things being considered, a static population in a welfare state without an active selection through limited warfare will decline slowly. But, at least you don’t have the massive intake of inferior refugees that the other Western countries are promoting.

      As far as “not being able to win”; as long as you maintain your borders, and repel immigrants, I’m not sure a state of low-level warfare is an entirely bad thing. Obviously, a lot of pressure comes from the US, which shields Israel from even more onerous pressures from the UN and EU organized boycott movements. Israel seems to be taking the correct steps of broadening its alliances so as to not be totally dependent on one power. And I see the long-term interests of the US as being part of a network of rival powers not entirely friendly, so I’m not advocating the interests of Israel as opposed to those of the US.

      To sum it up, the prospects of Israel seem a lot brighter than of some other countries. As you implied, the most fearsome enemy seems to have is the part of its population determined to do away with just those factors necessary for the survival of Israel.

    • Oh poor Israel…I worked as a volunteer on a kibbutz in the 1980s. I am not Jewish myself but understood the fact that Isreal was practically under seige from surrounding hostile states. The kibbutz I was on was below the Golan heights. I liked Israel and the brave people I met making a life in the desert.

    • There is a passage in Gibbon’s masterwork that could have almost been written yesterday, it always springs to my mind when I see the appeasement of Islam and the silence about ethnic-cleansing of Christians from the Middle-East, while Israel is vilified and de-legitimised.

      Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire;

      “The temple of the Christian world, the church of the Resurrection, was demolished to its foundations; the luminous prodigy of Easter was interrupted, and much profane labour was exhausted to destroy the cave in the rock, which properly constitutes the holy sepulchre. At the report of this sacrilege, the nations of Europe were astonished and afflicted; but, instead of arming in the defence of the Holy Land, they contented themselves with burning or banishing the Jews, as the secret advisers of the impious Barbarian.”

    • Dwight Eisenhower called his stand on arab side – the greatest mistake of his presidency. But many more mistakes were made by moshe Dyan, Golda Mair, Perez and the rest of the socialists. Israel still a largely welfare state with at least half of the population having leftist inclinations and only need to survive in the face of the moslem threat makes them vote for the centre or centre right parties. Many Israelis think that peace is possible, that the moslems can be friends and good neighbors and the “palestinians” can justify their resentment of “occupation”. All that proves that stupidity is not something only goyim can be proud of.

  4. Great article. Edward Gibbon and Oswald Spengler opened my eyes to this uncomfortable reality already 40 year ago.
    Worst of all: The current situation is even more dangerous than in Roman times.
    Due to the current level of technology, the decadence permeats in many more layers of society than back in Roman times, and the risks are much higher.
    Next to this, the Romans and ancient Greeks did not have the collective feeling of guilt towards “The (perceived) Other”, as we have due to an unlucky mix of wrongly understood Christian morals, Enlightenment ideals and Romanticism of the “noble wilds”(Rousseau).
    In addition, the Germanic, Slavic, Ugrian and Turkic tribes invading the Roman Empire did not have a destructive ideology, which made them hate their hosts and prevented them from integrating and assimilating into Roman culture.
    The migrants in Roman times wanted to become Romans themselves, while many of the current migrants want to destroy us and our culture and society.

    • I am in total agreement: The current wave of barbarian immigrants invading Europe are far more dangerous than the nomads of Germany and Scythia who invaded the Roman Empire. The latter had no ideological axe to grind and, as you say, only wanted to share the benefits of Roman civilization, which they actually admired and eventually sought to uphold. The present wave however derives from a culture which is implacably hostile to everything Europe and the West has ever stood for.

    • Excellent point! Islam denigrates the individual and the Left reduces the whole world to Child Psychology Theory where the individual must never have a negative experience and is allowed to stage massive public tantrums when they do.

      Both the postmodern Left and the barbarian Muslims agree that the only way forward is to smash everything in sight!

    • I’ve been thinking the same thing. The descendants of the barbarians who conquered Rome were the ones restoring Roman temples, preserving Latin and putting Roman artefacts in museums. Can we see the descendants of the Muslims do the same with European culture, or would it suffer the same fate as the Bamiyyan Buddhas?

  5. At my work, a colleague says we have to take in masses of 3rd world migrants – even if it means trouble… as he admits, “it will not be easy”!

    Funny how history can repeat itself, with such similarity?

    • Yeah live demonstration about what happens when one forgets history… (and now we repeat it)

    • People are insane these days. We don’t owe this Third World mass of walking stomachs and penii a thing.

      They should already be grateful to us for their very existence, which was facilitated by the miracles of Western agriculture and medicine.

    • And, did the colleague offer a reason why? Short of a active battlefield, it is not impossible to help people where they are.

      • He said “because there’s no way to stop it”…

        Unfortunately the coffee break was too short – but I’ll be returning to the subject at the next opportunity.

        From my experience, people CAN change their minds – although it can a while…

        • What your colleague meant was that, “There is no way to stop it involving puppies, flowers, and safe spaces.”

          There are plenty of ways to stop it. A simple initial step would be suspension of benefits for multiple wives.

  6. Very interesting. However there’s one significant difference between late antiquity and the modern West. The Romans, because of their military weakness had no other option than to admit the barbarians. Their once invincible war machine had disappeared. The West still possesses an overwhelming technical and economic superiority over the rest of the world, but because of the corrosive effects of institutionalised multiculturalism we are paralysed by self-doubt.

    • I do not think its self-doubt which paralyses us… more like corrupt leaders decided that democracy is too much trouble and wants to replace the population to a less intelligent, more indoctrinated one.

    • I think you missed the part of the essay speaking of the very strong natural barrier of the Danube. The barbarians were completely unable to cross the Danube, and it would have been impossible if the Romans had used their military to destroy any attempts to ford the river.

      What happened was that the emperor traded a vexing but solvable problem (could not fill vacancies in the imperial army) for a fatal solution: admitting hoards of alien fighters who he assumed would meekly take their assigned place as Roman foot soldiers.

      Given the natural barrier of the Danube, it would have been easy to keep the Goths out of Roman territory. |A better solution would have been to defend the Danube, but bring arms and supplies over, and tell the Goths it was up to them to organize and fight the Huns. Of course, the Romans would end up facing the Huns, but only after the Huns were weakened by fighting the Goths to the death.

      Sometimes you just have to let nature take its course. The lion is going to kill the cute fawn, and you can’t go around saving every fawn.

      • The Danube, like the Great Wall of China wasn’t an impassable barrier. Given the great length of the river the Goths could have easily crossed before the Romans could muster enough soldiers to counter attack. There’s no single catastrophic mistake that the Romans made that caused their downfall. The cause was a degradation of their military capacity over centuries of neglect and infighting. Also the Persian threat and pressure in the East contributed to Roman weakness, the significance of that other superpower is often underestimated.

  7. A much better example than the Gothic invasion of the Roman Empire is the example of Mohammed’s hijra. Of course, Mohammed is a mostly mythological figure created by Caliph Abd Al Malik to advance Arab Imperialism, but the reason they chose the story about the hijra is instructive.

    Mohammed and his followers were said to have emigrated as refugees from Mecca to Yathrib (now Medina) at the invitation of the Jews and Christians there. Within two years Mohammed and his ‘refugees’ had killed, exhiled or enslaved the inhabitants of Medina. This is what is being celebrated each Ramadan, the first city conquered by Islamic Imperialism. The Muslims today believe they are following this example exactly – and the traitorous Left are helping them to destroy the West (the Left are not confused about Islam or its intentions, they want the West to fall).

    The West cannot win until it routs the Left and until we all know and understand that the archeological record shows that the story of Islam’s founding (including the hijra conquest-by-immigration story) are all FICTION. Islam is FICTION, and thus, Islam is FALSE.

    See
    “An Historical Critique of Islam’s Beginnings”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9lIuUjPs0

    Important: we cannot convince Muslims that Mohammed was evil. According to Islam because Mohammed was following Allah’s will he was, by definition, doing good – no matter how brutal the rape and mass murder was.

    We only win when we show that Islam is FALSE – because modern scholarship now shows that Islam’s claims about its origins cannot be true based on the archeological record.

    Stop arguing that Mohammed was ‘evil’ as this does not work on Muslims. We MUST only argue the truth, that Islam is FICTION and is thus FALSE – and that Mohammed cannot have existed as Islam portrays him.

    Only when the whole World understands that Islam is FICTION then can we win.

    • You are quite correct. Mohammed is an entirely fictitious character, his whole persona being based upon an honorary title originally used for Jesus. This is a question I’ve explored in some depth in a couple of my books, where it’s also shown that the much-touted Arab Conquests were actually carried out by the Persian Sassanid Emperor Chosroes II, whose kingdom was later usurped by the Arabs – led by Muawiya. One reason for the invention of the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad was to justify the Arab usurpation of the Persian state. The invention of Muhammad was, as you say, carried out under Abd Al-Malik, who reigned shortly after Muawiya.

      • “One reason for the invention of the ‘Prophet’ Muhammad was to justify the Arab usurpation of the Persian state.”

        Could this be one of the reasons why Shi’ites, largely the modern-day inhabitants of Persia, feel so strongly about Muhammad’s supposed bloodline?

    • There is not an intellectual or historical fact that will change Muslims or Islam. It can only be used to change those who have the (temporary) opportunity to keep Islam out.

      The historical record is clear: whenever the problem of Islam and Muslims is solved, it is through expulsion rather than conversion. I have heard Jay Smith’s excellent and probably completely accurate depiction of the myth of Muhammad, but the fact is, that is completely irrelevant. Muslims are not going to give up Muhammad simply because the historical record shows he never existed. Muslims will simply execute or assassinate anyone who cites the record.

      • This is correct.

        Sad to say, Islam’s cycle of violence -> conquest -> programming -> belief is extremely hard to break once it has been established among a population.

  8. History repeats itself, but never in quite the same way which, I suppose, was meant by Santayana’s maxim that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. However, it is not so much that we have forgotten but, as Dymphna correctly concludes, we have studied history in a moral vacuum without thinking of its wider application to our own times. It is sheer dolt-headed hubris that modern generations have thought themselves to be better and more sophisticated than previous ones. If there is one word which signifies the terminal threat to western civilisation it is ‘indolence’, both mental and physical.

    • Perhaps it had become prohibitively expensive to raise a child in urban, modern Rome, just as it has in Europe and North America.

    • There is no mystery here: The Romans carried practised birth-control and abortion and, if these failed, infanticide. The latter was such a problem for Rome that various authors referred to its malign effects over many centuries. If we were looking for the single most important cause of Rome’s fall then infanticide is right there at the top of the list. The Roman elites were into the partying lifestyle and children – especially daughters – were expensive. Daughters had to be provided with a rich dowry, so they were particularly targeted for elimination – with devastating consequences for Rome demographic health. By the early thrid century the empire therefore sat on the edge of a demographic precipice, and in the middle of the same century it fell over the edge when a terrible plague swept the empire. The Roman world never recovered. The legions had to withdraw from Dacia (modern Romania), large parts of Germany, and southern Scotland. Only one group was demographically healthy: the Christians. Indeed, the Christians used to go around collecting the abandoned babies left by Roman families in the streets. There is absolutely no question that, in legalizing Christianity in the early fourth century Constantine hoped to reverse the demographic slide and the decline of the Roman state. His gamble was extremelt successful in the East, but less so in the West, because there were far fewer Christians in the West.

    • A number of theories have been put forward by scholars to explain this fact [low Roman birthrate]. Among these are the notion that Romans practised contraception and abortion to avoid the birth of unwanted children, that members of the upper classes suffered from a form of dysgenic lead poisoning caused mainly by the use of lead cooking vessels, which rendered many of them sterile, and that a form of natural selection in favour of infertility took place, due to the common practice among noble males of trying to marry heiresses who were the sole children of their families and therefore likely to demonstrate low fertility in their turn. Any or all of these practices may have been genuine contributing factors to the low birth-rate in Rome. However it is the contention of this paper that a far more significant contributing factor to the low birth-rate was the Roman practice of taking very hot daily baths

      http://www.rhm.uni-koeln.de/128/Devine.pdf

  9. Ultimately the Left is the real enemy. But society is unlikely ever to follow that logic through to its conclusion. I can’t see that Stilicho could have anticipated any of this, however, and suffered about as completely as any human being could. Perhaps his desire to protect his nation and people was not tempered by a basic realism about what the Empire had become. It’s a good thing that the liberal fascism that stalks the land all across the Western world is being questioned and guardedly rolled back. But look at how dire things had to get before this finally happened. And the delusional Left will do all they can to subvert and destroy it. And ultimately they may win. We may reach the point where we have to throw in the towel and not sacrifice ourselves and our families protecting what perhaps can no longer be protected. We haven’t reached that place yet, thank God.

    I loved Gibbons’ hilarious take. The elite indulges the zeal, applauds the eloquence, and neglects the advice of Breitbart, Trump, the Baron, et al.

    • Stilicho is one of history’s most remarkable and tragic figures.

      He was a man that truly deserved the sobriquet, “The Last of the Romans”

      His martial successors Aetius and Belisarius are also worthy of that sobriquet.

      • Stilicho’s father was a barbarian too but no-one could be described as better assimilated than Stilicho.

        • Stilicho is indeed an outstanding example of an outsider who integrated into European ways.

          We would not have a problem if the current mass of invaders emulated his behavior.

  10. According to Spengler’s timeline, our Julius Caesar hasn’t come yet; we’re at the point when the Roman Republic was about to turn into the Empire.

  11. Don’t know if I’m quoting this precisely, but: a people who will not defend themselves are doomed to extinction (or maybe slavery?). And then there is also the fact that a people who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it — forgive me if I’m saying something that someone else already said here. It’s early am. . . full brain hasn’t kicked in yet.

    Anyway, Germany is far ahead of us, but USA has been going down the same path. Perhaps the change in leadership will help us (USA) — I sure do hope so.

    Evidently history does repeat, you just have to look back far enough to learn that. The contrast between USA in the 1950’s (when we arrived here) and today is mind-boggling but it crept up gradually so a lot of people don’t seem to notice it.

  12. And keep in mind that Goth and Roman at that time were Christians. As was Stilicho and his entire family. Yet, they were murdered.

  13. I have to bring up again. I have to wonder where the population reduction people are in all of this. If Europe has been reducing their population (to make the world more sustainable) they why aren’t they standing up to call for a halt for this? Probably because wealth is driven by population. That would be a great ruse to make a future argument for immigrants. It would be a great long term lever to pull. That is my speculation.

  14. The simple answer to the last question is a society just like ours. We seem to refuse to learn from history

  15. I have a slightly different take on this.

    We know the Roman empire was divided into the fabulously wealthy patricians and the rootless plebeians who were dependent on handouts. Everything depended on the Roman legions, who maintained the empire, including the “taxes” from conquered provinces.

    The original stock of hardy Roman farmers, quick to use the plow or the sword, had long since deteriorated into a mass of shiftless moochers waiting for the next handout or circus. The empire itself was run by a massive bureaucracy and a professional Praetorian guard that guarded or replaced emperors as it wished.

    Rome had become a massive welfare state and a huge empire whose government was totally remote from the people it governed. Also, Rome had long since conquered the individual tribes and countries in its domain, turning them all into Roman citizens and losing their cultural identities.

    Rome’s welfare state was barely a shadow of the huge establishment today devoted to saving the lives and reproductive ability of the most damaged humans, but it was enough to make Rome lose its edge in the barbarian, dog-eat-dog world of that time.

    In brief, Rome suffered not only low population, but a deterioration in the genetic quality of its people. The government of the Roman empire was built on a house of cards: huge, inflexible, bloated enough to crush any individual independence or cultural separation within the empire.

    My theory of welfare and genetic deterioration does not directly explain the piece de resistance of the destruction of the empire: the leaders who fell over themselves to allow the barbarians inside their borders, and eliminate or kill any of the native military who showed signs of being able to repel the invasion. The only observation I could make is that in a small country, such a leader would rather quickly end up on a stake, gibbet, or carving table, but in a huge empire is well protected.

    • I’ve also read that Roman citizens suffered under enormous tax burdens and that they often wished to give up their citizenship, especially in barbarian-majority lands, so they wouldn’t be taxed. The barbarians didn’t tax the people because they lacked the infrastructure of collection, I assume.

    • The roman empire was sterile from all point of views.
      And there is no (western) Europe without the connection of the germanic tribes to the rest.
      Was this “connection” violent ? Sure, pas certainly less destructive than the roman conquest had been.

  16. The author notes that we can recognize obvious parallels between our world and that of the past, in particular, ancient Rome. He also notes that when one makes the connection, the idea is sneered at by the progressives, those people who dominate academia, the media, and popular culture.

    Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to counter the progressive naysayers instead of ignoring them and brushing them aside? We should not let them get away with faulty analysis and conclusions because they will continue to broadcast their errors (or lies) to the public and most importantly to their students. By challenging them, their ideas would be shown to be in error and they would not be free to misguide without being refuted.

    The naysayers tell us there are no lessons to be learned from history. Many believe that the purpose of studying history is so that we can understand why our world is the way it is. History doesn’t tell us what to do or what not to do.

    In the case of the Romans, they tell us that the Romans don’t present simple answers to our problems. There is no simple model to follow or reject. They were too different from us. The progressive historians stress the differences and tend to neglect the similarities.

    If they highlight any similarity, it is usually to denigrate us. For example, one may hear the Romans were just as misguided and divided as we are. I may counter that to say that the Roman Empire was a dictatorship and there was usually only one way problems were dealt with. Today, there are ideas expressed outside of establishment corridors that are available to anyone who is not brainwashed into orthodoxy and by propaganda.

    Lastly, the progressive claim that because the view of the past has changed with almost every succeeding generation, with successive re-writings, there is no constant truth. It is true that more evidence are discovered with the passage of time that give more information on what took place in the past. I believe many use this to undermine the constancy of the story-line. In addition, they introduce their new ways of looking at the world, such as the Marxist view. For them, there is no constant truth. Truth is relative to time, place, people, and circumstance.

  17. My own theory is that – in the UK, at least – house prices moved sharply upwards in the late 70s/early 80s to soak up the extra money made available due to the decision of lenders to allow both partners incomes to be taken into account when taking out a mortgage to buy a property.
    With more money available, house prices simply moved upwards with the result that it now took both partners incomes to buy the same house which the husband’s income alone would previously have financed.
    With women forced to work to pay for the family home, the size of their family had to go down to one or two as mother’s couldn’t spend time at home looking after children.
    So we now have the situation where home-owning indigenous families in work can’t afford to have children, but immigrants living on benefits in state-subsidised housing can have as many as they wish at the expense of those who can’t afford to……

    • Outside London, properties can still be quite cheap. Eg in my town in the Midlands, 3-bed houses are advertised around £150k. And in London in the 1990s, properties were very cheap compared to now… with wages not too much less.

      The problem is supply vs demand – thanks to immigration, demand for housing has skyrocketed, while housebuilding could not keep up the pace.

  18. A decisive factor in the fall of Rome not discussed here, is that Roman citizenship was once highly valued. It was a status that was not given out willy nilly until the coming of the empire and to those who were not of Roman origin but knew how to use such a status to their advantage.

    One only need to rattle off a few Emperor’s names to realize that.

    Roman citizenship was THE rallying point for all Roman citizens who were once taught to value such a status and the dominance of Rome – compare that to what has now befallen the West with its whimpering approval of all and sundry as citizens, sometimes even with dual-citizenship (now there is a contradiction in terms) and without so much as asking them to pretend to even like the country that has given them such an advantage.

    There is another aspect to the watering down of the Roman legionnaire – the then world’s most formidable fighting machine – and the populace in general, and that is that the Roman Legions employed what were termed ‘auxiliaries’ who were non-Roman soldiers from conquered lands and who were used as specialist troops, such as archers, charioteers and light infantry.

    Many of these troops who survived their tenure with the Roman army or navy, were permitted to settle on Roman lands once their time was up. They could worship their own ‘Gods’ and maintain their cultural norms so long as they were ‘seen’ to pay respect to Roman law and Gods.

    Sound familiar?

  19. All of the West is Rome. It’s unlikely that any defiance of Islamic invaders will unfold in Europe. Europe is just too far gone. The rollback will happen in Australia & hopefully the US. Not in Canada or other socialist Euro-style states. In the 2020’s the dominoes will start falling as Western states go Islamic, i.e. adopt sharia, expand the jizya (welfare checks etc), build more mosques, establish prayer rooms everywhere, allow street prayers twice a day in the busiest downtown intersections in most Western cities, pass laws forcing Western banks to adopt Islamic banking departments, etc. The craze to appease Islam will feed on itself, and during it all the terror attacks will increase.

  20. @Emmet Scott – it seems that a Cambridge professor disputes a Ukip donor’s claim, that an influx of Barbarians helped to bring about ancient Rome’s downfall…

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4006182/You-don-t-monopoly-history-Millionaire-UKIP-donor-Arron-Banks-embroiled-row-Cambridge-classicist-Mary-Beard-claiming-Roman-Empire-destroyed-immigration.html

    I’m wondering if t‎here’s something I’m not aware of, or if a new PC version of Roman history may be being created before our eyes?

    (ps according to the article, it seems that the discussion on twitter is still ongoing)

  21. The entire premise of this story is false. The Visigoths were not “barbarians”. You cannot compare them to moslems. The Germanic tribes, as a matter of fact, are the ancestors of white people […]. Alaric had been completely [betrayed] by the Romans, who had long already become a fractured “multi-cultural” society that readily made slaves of just about anyone, and also killed people for fun. Remember the Gladiators? The Germanic tribes had been fighting Roman occupation and subjugation for hundreds of years. Despite that, many Goths had been in the Roman army, Including Alaric. He got completely [betrayed] by Emperor Flavius Honorious who incited the Roman population to kill all the Goth Roman soldier’s wives and children, amounting to tens of thousands of people. Afterwrads, some 30,000 Goth/Roman soldiers defected to Aleric (now chief of the Visigoths) and the went on their way to revenge. They did plunder Rome, but only burned a few buildings, and largely did not harm it’s inhabitants. The REAL barbarians were the pompous Romans. I think the true analysis here should be the Trump Train sacking the corrupt, self-serving, pompous establishment in Washington DC!! I can’t copy/paste, but google military wikia Alaric.

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