A Journal for Western Man-- Issue VII
Harry Roolaart
It is often said that the downfall of nations, has been, and still is a long, protracted period of peace in which liberty and security are taken for granted, and, one in which the range of vision falls from the long view, to the short view. In short, a problem of slothfulness and indolence. We know liberty requires "eternal vigilance" while security must be state of the art. We know our weapons must be better than the other guy's, if we wish to discourage the enemy's attack. But�really�it's such a bother.
*Western civilization has already suffered the attacks of murderous barbarians.
*It has already suffered the consequences of plagues extinguishing entire populations.
*Countless times, we�ve witnessed the massacres of innocents dead at the alter of fanaticism and religion.
*And, it has already toyed with irresponsible ideas that have brought man to his knees.
Historically, the war that was declared against our nation on September 11, 2001, is not new � all that our nation suffered, suffers still, and will suffer has been know to happen before. More importantly, history tells us of a world super power ignorant and pacific to maintaining its eternal vigilance against enemies within its borders and those beyond its realm of influence and it speaks of the necessary destruction of that power as a result of its ignorance.
That power was the Roman Empire.
Its great fall echoes against the halls of history and its familiar reverberations, while being repeated in more dangerous, modern times ought to be seized and studied by casting a long view back in time, for clarity and guidance towards the dangers confronting us today.
Roman citizens, generals, senators and Caesars, in the end, chose the pacific arts of politeness, civility, and neglect, in order to reap the rewards of a long peace and tranquility against their enemies. It did not accomplish what they sought. Instead, its pacifism had the effect of a giant sleeping aid administered intravenously, it swept through their vitals like a slow poison and rendered them incapacitated for what was to come � a dark world from which erupted barbarian hordes that saw to the destruction of Roman architecture, its infrastructure, its arts, sciences and finally, the severing of knowledge from most of human life for hundreds of years to come.
And so started the Dark Ages
This is not difficult to grasp from our perspective, that of historical hindsight. It is recorded in our history books, after all. But, imagine traveling back in time and bluntly informing a Roman Senator of the calamitous events that would befall his empire�imagine the surprise and utter disbelief on his face. �Impossible and utter nonsense,� the Roman Senator would say, clapping us on our shoulders, highly amused. �We are the greatest empire in the world!� Whether from Roman pride or the sluggish pace that makes decay and corruption difficult to observe, the Roman Senator�s reply would prove in the last analysis to be a denial of the facts.
At the time, the cultural knowledge that suited an empire and its powers, its morals, its arts, its ideals, and its sciences had been cast aside in favor of exhausting verbal disputes around the subject of metaphysics, a millennia old argument, impossible from the start, that sought to reconcile Plato and Aristotle. Highly irrational quibbling over the secrets of a so-called Platonist invisible world occupied the minds of citizen and Senator alike. Mysticism dulled their senses and judgment.
In its foreign policy, the incapacity of the empire�s petty and distracted government often assumed the appearance of appeasement towards, if not treasonous correspondence with the enemy. Peace, they declared, at any cost, even at the expense of Roman military virtue. With its leading minds spreading irresponsible ideas to occupy the minds of men, and with its military reduced and spread thin across the Empire: the fire of genius was extinguished; its military spirit had evaporated. With the invasion of the barbaric tribes, the Roman Empire came to an abrupt and violent end.
If, prior to the September 11 events, we had bluntly informed President Bush that a faceless tribe out of the East would attack the United States and slaughter over three thousand innocent lives, while simultaneously bombing our two most prized icons, the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and if we were to then tell him this attack would be implemented with primitive box cutters alone, we can well imagine his response: "Impossible and utter nonsense," the President would have said, clapping us on our shoulders, highly amused. "We are the only super power left in the world. We represent freedom and tolerance and peace. No one hates us that much."
When asked for his response to Islamic hatred of America, the President said: �I'll tell you how I respond: I'm amazed. I'm amazed that there is such misunderstanding of what our country is about, that people would hate us. I am, I am -- like most Americans, I just can't believe it.� Amazement despite years of terrorist attacks against overseas U.S. installations and hundreds of U.S. lives lost? If this isn�t denial, what is?
As with the great Roman Empire, we find America traveling down a similar road: highly vulnerable, distracted by a petty U.S. government, useless quibbling � far left vs. moderate left, far right vs. moderate right, the left vs. the right � with both parties clamoring for the middle. The impossibility of reconciling what cannot be reconciled. Aided by our intellectuals, our media and public felicity, U.S. foreign policy, in keeping with its internal policies, gears itself not towards a proportional balance between the arts of peace and the arts of war, but towards a soft policy of reconciling differences between the United States and its avowed enemies, appeasement for the sake of our long sought after prize: a long peace and uniform democratic governments worldwide.
Religion, so priests and soldier tell us, gives us our moral justification in a war against terrorism. Television screens shower us with images of our cathedrals: our commander in chief expresses war-time rhetoric from the pulpit of churches while elsewhere, our clergy admit to the need for military justice from the pulpit of MSNBC. Both clamp their teeth just short of uttering the unmentionable: "a crusade." News programs report on mystical practices and suppositions as if they were facts; the entertainment industry produces a plethora of other-worldly nonsense for our consumption; intellectuals teach our children that reality is an illusion and the mind as impotent; the populace aligns itself with Eastern mysticism and calls it the New Age; tarot readers replace psychotherapists; and clairvoyants now aid most criminal investigations.
Intellectuals, having long sought refuge in our educational institutions, and momentarily swept aside by the 9-11 attack, are now crawling back before our television screens and classroom lecterns, carefully coiffing their hair against the hot lamps of the limelight and the soft hue of impregnable minds: arguing the case of the enemy, inspiring undeserved guilt in administration officials, warning students of our own barbarism, and wielding exhaustive, irresponsible and irrational arguments that are in fact the first weapon of mass destruction our nation has suffered: an intellectual, slow poison � decades old - that seeks to destroy our successes, silence reason, undermine American values, and incapacitate an already weak government with moral uncertainty.
We follow in the footsteps of that other flawed empire!
But, we may prevent our fall, if only by our acknowledgment that the fatal conditions existent in ancient Rome, also exist in present day America. It is not too late. The eerie parallels of that Empire to our current plight ought to be entrenched in every American�s mind. As a people and as individuals, we ought to be able to reason out the inevitable consequence of the path we have laid for ourselves and the road towards destruction constructed for us by our enemies within and without our borders.
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