Government's COVID Tyranny Heralding a New Dark Age
Jan 19, 2022 3:41:15 GMT -5
Post by Midnight on Jan 19, 2022 3:41:15 GMT -5
Government's COVID Tyranny Heralding a New Dark Age
January 19, 2022
By Chet Richards
We were having tea under sparkling Southern California stars, just the two of us. Seated with me, the distinguished lady was the director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. She had just given a lecture on Dark Age Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the early 400s. The army had gone south to deal with imperial politics. I ventured the idea that maybe this period was not quite so dark. After all, we know from Scandinavian stave temples that they could build extraordinary structures in perishable wood. And we know about the intricate metal work from this period. Then, too, Saxon Britain did have a sophisticated poetic oral tradition.
She changed my mind. All those things may be true, but Britain lacked one essential: they had no coins. Without money, the economy lapsed back into barter. Long-distance trade, with its information networks, collapsed. People became isolated in their farms and villages. The world beyond became a mystery. Literacy disappeared. For more than a century, until the arrival of Christian missionaries, and with them literacy and coinage, the age was dark.
True, there were some candles in the dark. Tintagel on the Cornish coast was one, giving rise to the legends of King Arthur. And oral histories give us some glimpses into the events of that era of Saxon settlement, but for most people, the land had returned to a pre-civilization state.
It wasn't the fault of the British. It was the consequence of political mismanagement in the larger world of the Roman Empire. The Problem of Succession had troubled the empire from its beginning. They never did establish a constitutional mechanism for picking an emperor. Often it was strongest general who captured the imperium. For term limits, the empire relied on assassination. Civil war was endemic in the third century and became a problem again in the fifth.
Still, the empire could hold its own. After all, it was the world's first stable global civilization. It had endured and prospered through many challenges for five hundred years. But there was one challenge that brought down the western half of the empire: the climate changed. The world entered into a Little Ice Age. The Rhine and Danube rivers now froze each winter, thereby giving yearly access for marauding Germanic invaders. The legions were stressed almost to the breaking point.
The Huns, fleeing west from even colder Central Asia, drove the Christian Goths ahead of them. The Goths were granted sanctuary within the Roman Empire. Nothing new there — the Romans had been integrating newcomers for centuries. But then tragic mistakes were made. Roman officials so badly abused the Goths that the latter revolted and annihilated the Roman army at Adrianople. The Goths were now major players in Roman politics.
Over the next generation, the Goths, and other migrating Germans, became pretty well integrated into the Roman Empire, with Stilicho and Alaric now the commanding generals. The old-timers in the western Roman court were resentful of these new people, however. Their office politics induced the incompetent western emperor, Honorius, to execute his protector, Stilicho, and then demote Alaric. The Roman army, loyal to Stilicho and his deputy Alaric, revolted, and Alaric sacked Rome in 410.
Obviously, what happened was much more complicated than that! But one consequence was the withdrawal of Roman forces from Britain and the beginning of a new Dark Age in the West. The eastern Roman empire, much better managed, continued for another thousand years.
Continued at link
January 19, 2022
By Chet Richards
We were having tea under sparkling Southern California stars, just the two of us. Seated with me, the distinguished lady was the director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. She had just given a lecture on Dark Age Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the early 400s. The army had gone south to deal with imperial politics. I ventured the idea that maybe this period was not quite so dark. After all, we know from Scandinavian stave temples that they could build extraordinary structures in perishable wood. And we know about the intricate metal work from this period. Then, too, Saxon Britain did have a sophisticated poetic oral tradition.
She changed my mind. All those things may be true, but Britain lacked one essential: they had no coins. Without money, the economy lapsed back into barter. Long-distance trade, with its information networks, collapsed. People became isolated in their farms and villages. The world beyond became a mystery. Literacy disappeared. For more than a century, until the arrival of Christian missionaries, and with them literacy and coinage, the age was dark.
True, there were some candles in the dark. Tintagel on the Cornish coast was one, giving rise to the legends of King Arthur. And oral histories give us some glimpses into the events of that era of Saxon settlement, but for most people, the land had returned to a pre-civilization state.
It wasn't the fault of the British. It was the consequence of political mismanagement in the larger world of the Roman Empire. The Problem of Succession had troubled the empire from its beginning. They never did establish a constitutional mechanism for picking an emperor. Often it was strongest general who captured the imperium. For term limits, the empire relied on assassination. Civil war was endemic in the third century and became a problem again in the fifth.
Still, the empire could hold its own. After all, it was the world's first stable global civilization. It had endured and prospered through many challenges for five hundred years. But there was one challenge that brought down the western half of the empire: the climate changed. The world entered into a Little Ice Age. The Rhine and Danube rivers now froze each winter, thereby giving yearly access for marauding Germanic invaders. The legions were stressed almost to the breaking point.
The Huns, fleeing west from even colder Central Asia, drove the Christian Goths ahead of them. The Goths were granted sanctuary within the Roman Empire. Nothing new there — the Romans had been integrating newcomers for centuries. But then tragic mistakes were made. Roman officials so badly abused the Goths that the latter revolted and annihilated the Roman army at Adrianople. The Goths were now major players in Roman politics.
Over the next generation, the Goths, and other migrating Germans, became pretty well integrated into the Roman Empire, with Stilicho and Alaric now the commanding generals. The old-timers in the western Roman court were resentful of these new people, however. Their office politics induced the incompetent western emperor, Honorius, to execute his protector, Stilicho, and then demote Alaric. The Roman army, loyal to Stilicho and his deputy Alaric, revolted, and Alaric sacked Rome in 410.
Obviously, what happened was much more complicated than that! But one consequence was the withdrawal of Roman forces from Britain and the beginning of a new Dark Age in the West. The eastern Roman empire, much better managed, continued for another thousand years.
Continued at link