Barbarian Invasions come to the American Thinker
Check out My latest article at the American Thinker.
To regular readers of Birdblog much of this article will be familiar; it is a composit of several old posts which I spliced together while adding new details. I won`t ever do that again! I had a hard time making it work; the original version I sent to Mr. Lifson at TAT read exactly like what it was, and I was asked to do a rewrite (the crazy thing kept growing and growing, and I kept staring at it until I could no longer tell if it was any good or not.) He made a few minor changes to the rewrite, all of which were reasonable. (To make it less pedantic, he removed some historical references) and he altered my line about the barbarian invaders destroying the Empire in a hundred years (which they did; pushed by the arrival of the Huns in 370, the Visigoths crossed the Roman borders in 376 opening the invasion period, and the date historians assign to the fall is 476) to several hundred years (which, I suspect, sounds less alarmist and is true since the invasions continued past the assigned date of the fall.) These were minor, reasonable changes, and I am very grateful to have such a patient and generous man as editor; most editors would simply have rejected it. Mr. Lifson is a terrific guy! (That`s why the American Thinker is so good!)
To regular readers of Birdblog much of this article will be familiar; it is a composit of several old posts which I spliced together while adding new details. I won`t ever do that again! I had a hard time making it work; the original version I sent to Mr. Lifson at TAT read exactly like what it was, and I was asked to do a rewrite (the crazy thing kept growing and growing, and I kept staring at it until I could no longer tell if it was any good or not.) He made a few minor changes to the rewrite, all of which were reasonable. (To make it less pedantic, he removed some historical references) and he altered my line about the barbarian invaders destroying the Empire in a hundred years (which they did; pushed by the arrival of the Huns in 370, the Visigoths crossed the Roman borders in 376 opening the invasion period, and the date historians assign to the fall is 476) to several hundred years (which, I suspect, sounds less alarmist and is true since the invasions continued past the assigned date of the fall.) These were minor, reasonable changes, and I am very grateful to have such a patient and generous man as editor; most editors would simply have rejected it. Mr. Lifson is a terrific guy! (That`s why the American Thinker is so good!)
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:35 AM
2 Comments:
This was an excellent piece. I was inspiured to immediately send a e-mail to the White House. I support President Bush in many area but this is not one of them. I have nothing against Mexicans at all - but this is a nation of laws and they are breaking them. What galls me more than anything is local government, police and sheriffs who refuse to process these law breakers.
This was a marvelous piece, and even though I appreciate what you mean about the difficulties of combining several posts into one, you did an excellent job and it flows beautifully. Moreover, it so chock-full of facts and statistics that it has an overwhelming impact. I love all the history too -- you really studied your history well. I must admit I'm very fuzzy on a lot of this so I really appreciate learning about it. Thanks - I'll post a link to it on UT - I'm only sorry I didn't do it in a more timely fashion.
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