Ancient Rome and Modern America
Listen to "Ancient Rome and Modern America"
Historians referenced in the episode: Gibbons, Vegetius, Bark, Toynbee, Ward-Perkins, Heather, McNeill, Bury
Comparisons between the fall of Rome and America now:
For more information, read:
Decline and Fall of theRoman Empire by Edward Gibbons
http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/romefallarticles/a/fallofrome.htm
2007 World Almanac
Vanity Fair (October 2006):Empire Falls
Military History Podcast is sponsored by Armchair General Magazine and the International Research and Publishing Corporation
Historians referenced in the episode: Gibbons, Vegetius, Bark, Toynbee, Ward-Perkins, Heather, McNeill, Bury
Comparisons between the fall of Rome and America now:
- Military Conquest
- Rome: Conquest by Germans under Odoacer
- Loss of Identity
- Rome: Germanization of Army and empire
- America: Hispanic Immigration boom into army and country
- Loss of Unity
- Rome: Eastern and Western Roman Empires
- America: Country vs. City, Democrat vs. Republican
- Loss of Economic Strength
- Rome: Lack of gold, lack of exportable goods, income disparity
- America: Outsourcing, economic decline, income disparity
- Loss of Military Strength
- Rome: Overextension, Middle East problem
- America: Overextension, Iraq
- Loss of Population
- Rome: Plague, Lead Poisoning
- America: Avian Flu, Obesity
- Loss of Environmental Security
- Rome: Salinization of North Africa
- America: Lack of oil security, global warming
- Loss of Civic Virtue:
- Rome: Laziness
For more information, read:
Decline and Fall of the
http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/romefallarticles/a/fallofrome.htm
2007 World Almanac
Vanity Fair (October 2006):
Military History Podcast is sponsored by Armchair General Magazine and the International Research and Publishing Corporation
posted by George Hageman at 12:46 PM
10 Comments:
The biggest factor for the Roman cultural degeneration was the loss of fascination about the Roman culture by the would be Romans.
I believe that is worth mentioning that the Global Warming information cited in the podcast is far from a concensus. Since global warming has become a political football, it has been the subject of significant spin.
For Example, the impact of humans on greenhouse gases is greatly influenced by whether water vapor is included in the greenhouse gas calculations . . . excluding water vapor from environmental models is an extremely powerful propaganda tool for people with a political agenda. (When water vapor is taken into account, CO2 accounts for <4% of all global greenhouse gas)
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
Note:
In the podcast, I said that the US had a national surplus of $200 billion in 2000. What I meant to say was that the US, in 2006, had a budget surplus of $200 billion but still a $6 trillion national debt.
Nevertheless, the national debt has grown by 50% since 2000 and so it is still quite a large change.
I apologize for the mix-up.
In your podcast you mentioned that the US is more polticaly divided along geographic lines(Urban, and rural) The US has pretty much been like this one way or another through out it's history.
So I was wondering if you could elberate more on that.
Military History Podcast is one of my favorite podcasts ever, but I was sorely disappointed that this one was a regurgitation of Democrat talking points.
You don't like the president? Fine. But the big difference between Rome and the USA is that there is an orderly transfer of power in the USA. The same president (as you point out in your podcast) had at one time an 85% approval rating and at one time a 28% approval rating. Either way, there will be a completely different president on January 20, 2009.
In the old days, a really unpopular Emperor would have been assassinated. In most cases, this would have caused a civil war. In some cases, all memory of the disgraced emperor would have been erased. Statues torn down, coins defaced, most or all living relatives and political allies killed, you name it.
A lot of numbers were tossed around in this episode without any context. Whatever you think of the Iraq war, the entire thing has cost maybe 1 or 2% of one year's GDP. Compare that to World War II, which cost 105% of GDP. Or military expenditures in the Roman Empire, which was nearly 100% of government spending. US forces in Iraq are maybe 10-15% of our total forces. We still have troops in West Germany to guard against an attack from East Germany, even though there's no such country as East Germany anymore. So the notion that our troops are "overextended" is a bit weak. Was Rome "overextended" when Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC? When they gave up on the place in 54 BC, not to return for nearly 100 years, did that signal a collapse of the Empire? When the Roman emperor Valerian was captured by the Sassanians in 260 AD and used as a human footstool, one could say the Empire was overextended in the Middle East. Yet, even then, the Empire lasted another 200 years (or 1200 depending on how you count). So where's the correlation between "overextended military" and "collapse of civilization"?
The national debt / deficit as a percentage of GDP is not particularly large right now, and in fact is a bit on the low side. It's pretty much the same now as it was in the "roaring 90's". For that matter, so is wealth distribution, greenhouse gas emissions, outsourcing, foreign ownership of debt, illegal immigration, income disparity, obesity, oil dependency, and whatever else you're railing against. Comparing 2007 AD to 1997 AD is like comparing 127 AD to 117 AD. "That bastard Hadrian will doom us all! If only Trajan were still alive..."
It should be noted that most people in Imperial Rome were SLAVES. The "class divide" was EXTREME. It wasn't that the top 1% of people in Rome owned 90% of the country's wealth. It's that the top 1% of people in Rome OWNED the bottom 90% of people AS wealth. But there have been plenty of countries with wealthy folks calling the shots. What makes America unique in history is the unprecedented ability to CREATE wealth.
America is not "losing population", and certainly not to Avian Flu, nor in fact to Obesity. America has a positive birth rate, and just topped 300 million people. I'm not aware of any Americans who have died of Avian Flu. I do know that ONE HUNDRED MILLION people died worldwide in 1918 due to Spanish Flu, yet this did not alter destroy America. Obesity might cause health problems for people after many years, and someone who otherwise would live to 80 might only live to 60. The same could have been said of smoking in the 1950's, yet you wouldn't characterize smoking as an epidemic that would wipe out society. Personally, I think we've traded one "pandemic" for another. You want to lose weight? Take up smoking. You want to quit smoking? Get ready to gain weight.
Global Warming is a pseudoscientific myth used by certain politicians and scientists as a money and power grab. Carbon Dioxide is not pollution. It is plant food. Plus, it doesn't cause Global Warming. There have been plenty of periods where there has been much more Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere, yet this did not affect the temperature. If you want to use Global Warming as an example of how the USA is like ancient Rome, then a better example would be the manipulation of the public by the ruling class using unsubstantiated claims. For instance, a comet seen at Julius Caesar's funeral games was said to be his soul ascending to heaven, proof of his divinity. This claim gave Augustus divine right to rule the empire, and most future emperors tapped into Augustus' divine right, or claimed special kinship with some supernatural entity.
The United States military, in fact, has stopped considerable environmental damage. Saddam drained the salt marshes and now they are thriving. Saddam torched thousands of oil wells in Kuwait (which the current global warming crowd back then said would cause a nuclear winter), and the fires were put out by the US military with help from (ahem) HALLIBURTON.
A better comparison would be that both the US and the Roman Empire built sophisticated public works on a massive scale. For instance, the Romans built the harbor at Ostia, the Aquaducts, and roads which are still used to this day. The USA built the interstate highway system, Hoover Dam, and the Golden Gate Bridge, to name a few.
One might also draw a comparison to Gladiatorial Games and the Jerry Springer Show, but that would be short changing the Romans, since gladiatorial contests were an important part of the Roman Religion.
Anyway, GREAT PODCAST SERIES. I'm only busting your chops on this one because the rest of the series has been so good that this one stands out as a real klunker. Good luck!
You are in for a big surprise if you think that America is strong today. It is a house of cards. A disaster waiting to happen.
Similarities with Rome are striking, but the US position is more similar to the Spanish Empire.
- Prosperity based on debt
- Wars financed by debt
- Bankruptcy (SOON for the US - in fact it has already started)
- Military defeat in a war that just cannot be won (Netherlands for Spain, Iraq for the US), despite having the best army
- Depleting resources (gold for the Spanish, oil for the US)
- Growing disparity between the interest of the people and the ruling class
In our lifetime the US Empire will end.
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Well, I tend to agree with this remark posted in one of the comment :-
"The same could have been said of smoking in the 1950's, yet you wouldn't characterize smoking as an epidemic that would wipe out society. Personally, I think we've traded one "pandemic" for another. You want to lose weight? Take up smoking. You want to quit smoking right now? Get ready to gain weight."
"Hispanic Immigration boom into army and country"
Spanish immigrants arn't the only immigrants in the US, ignorantly people forget that the only real Americans are the Native Americans.
Everyone else is a foreigner, if you look at it from that perspective.
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