Barbarian Mercenaries
Once again, our good friend Steve from Free Citizen has sent me a disturbing piece which comes in under the radar. An alert reader of VDARE has posted evidence that the North Carolina National Guard is recruiting illegal aliens, and another reader makes the case (click the first hyperlink) that Houston is recruiting in Mexico to fill Federal minority quotas.
The ancient Roman government did the same thing; they recruited German tribesmen from outside the Empire to guard their borders, and this resulted in the eventual demise of the glory that was Rome. It took a scant 100 years; the Visigoths were invited into the Empire by Valens in 376, and by 476 the last Western Emperor, Julius Nepos, was deposed. AFter 476 (starting with Theodoric the Great) Germans would rule, and systematically dismantle, the western portions of the Empire. Illegal immigration and an unwillingness to defend their borders were directly responsible for the fall of Rome.
If we follow in their footsteps, can we escape their fate?
The ancient Roman government did the same thing; they recruited German tribesmen from outside the Empire to guard their borders, and this resulted in the eventual demise of the glory that was Rome. It took a scant 100 years; the Visigoths were invited into the Empire by Valens in 376, and by 476 the last Western Emperor, Julius Nepos, was deposed. AFter 476 (starting with Theodoric the Great) Germans would rule, and systematically dismantle, the western portions of the Empire. Illegal immigration and an unwillingness to defend their borders were directly responsible for the fall of Rome.
If we follow in their footsteps, can we escape their fate?
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:15 AM
6 Comments:
Are these examples of ‘jobs’ Americans won’t do? Also, quotas have always been a problem, and now recruiting illegals just exemplifies the problem--turning it into a crisis of ‘unseen’ proportions.
But again, since politics is about what is happening ‘right now’ because of the MSM needed for instant gratification, foresight and considering effects on the future is not even an issue anymore.
:) I hadn`t even considered that these are the jobs we are told Americans won`t do!
Excellent points, William!
Tim, I have though about those pesky barbarians and Rome for more than a quarter of a century. They were a problem certainly but not in the way usually portrayed.
The use of non-Latins as auxiliary soldiers started 200 years before Christ. In other words, barbarians were part of the Roman experience 700 years before the Fall of the West in 476 AD. If barbarians caused the Fall of Rome they sure took their time.
In the East---Byzantium---barbarians of all stripes were used as mercenaries, bodyguards and auxiliaries. And the Eastern Roman Empire lasted another 1000 years---until the Moslems took it in 1453.
Germans tribes began to seriously threaten the Roman Republic around 105 BC. In fact some of the bloodiest defeats Rome ever suffered happened at the hands of Germans right before the beginning of the fist century BC. It was Marius who finally killed enough Germans to save Rome.
But still Germans---among other uncivilized tribes---were used in the Roman army. The Roman Emperor Augustus himself even used German bodyguards, as had Julius Caesar.
By the time of the battle of Adrianople in 378 AD Germans---Ostrogoths and Visigoths---were on both sides. This defeat is vastly over-rated as a reason for the decline of Rome. Here is why:
The Germans Rome had to deal with in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries were the same that she had dealt with for hundreds of years. If fact, none of them presented any threat to Rome’s survival as had those Germans of the 2nd and 1st century BC.
It was not the barbarians who had changed, but Rome. Something had happened to the political, economic and social structures of Rome to make her susceptible to barbarian infiltration.
The barbarians who took the crown for the last Roman emperor in the West---a callow lad named Romulus Augustulus---were actually quite civilized. A later Germanic ruler of Italy, Theodoric, was a strong supporter of Roman tradition. But then., so were most of the barbarians. They did not want to destroy the Empire but to share in it.
What really doomed Western Europe to penury was not the barbarian Germans but the invasions of Italy by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian in the 6th century.
So what caused the Fall of Rome in the West? The jury is still out and has been since Gibbon. What we can say with certainty is that until the 5th and 6th centuries Rome had always ‘Romanized’ the tribes on the frontier---had taught then Latin and cleaned them up a bit. Such men were proud to become Romans---to read Livy and wear the toga.
Our own ‘barbarian ‘infiltration’---all those Mexicans and sundry Latins who pour over our border with the greatest of ease---have never presented a problem to us before. But they do now. But is the problem with them? Why do Americans lack the political will to simply do what every nation since Sumer has done, control the border?
But then why can we not defeat a bunch of rag-bag Islamic killers? These creatures are nothing compared to the German and Japanese legions we destroyed 60 years ago. Yet we dither on the field of battle. And why cannot the most powerful nation in History educate its children? Why can we not cease being vulnerable to wild conspiracy fantasies such as ‘global warming’? Why are 40 percent of us willing for the nation to suffer defeat after defeat politically and militarily?
America’s problems have nothing to do with barbarians at our gates, and everything to do with the barbarians who rule from Washington. It is they we must get rid of.
Good points, Mike!
I know you are more knowledgable about Rome than I am, but isn`t it true that the sheer volume of barbarians coming into the Empire multiplied greatly due to the pressures of the Huns, and that the number of ``illegals`` became too much to handle? I know most scholars have traditionally held that view in years gone by.
I agree with you that Rome fell not because of external events, but I think those events stressed a rotten and unworkable system. The earlier empire could survive because it was indeed prepared to fight to defend itself-something missing in later days.
You are most certainly correct when you state that the German tribes were settled and partly Romanized; that`s why they were allowed into the Empire in the first place. Of course, they never fully integrated once in.
Yep, the Romans changed in later years. I fear we are following in their footsteps!
Those Huns were indeed a pain! Odd that after China built a wall (c. 220 BC) the Huns gradually migrated westward pushing all tribes and such before them until, by the 4th century, the Huns had reached Europe. And right again that they had pushed the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths right up to the borders of Rome, mainly in the Balkans.
But these numbers were small compared to the great German migrations of the late 2nd century BC, the wars of Germanicus in the early 1st century and the wars of Marcus Aurelius in the 2nd. Then the Romans had dealt with and defeated hundreds of thousands, literally entire societies in migration, and had destroyed them. By the 4th century she had lost the capacity to do that even to much smaller tribal groupings of Germans and Huns.
If you are right about America being in a similar situation today, we are in more trouble than revealed by the antics of our ruling classes. But I believe---or perhaps I want to believe---that we more resemble the late Roman Republic that any time period of the Empire. The reason is our military.
The army of the late Republic (133-30 BC) remained efficient and lethal, and passed this destructive power on to the Empire. It was not until Adrianople (378 AD) that Roman arms suffered so serious a defeat as to force upon the Empire territorial and political changes near the frontiers, mainly in the Balkans.
So if we are like Rome before Caesar---a society undergoing massive political corruption but with an ferocious military intact---then somewhere upon our near horizon awaits our man on horseback, our American Caesar.
Needless to say, whatever our ideals of freedom are today, once that happy event occurs these will change forever.
You know, that point about the Huns is lost on most Americans; everybody says that walls never stopped immigrants, yet the Huns gave up on entering China because of their wall, Hadrian`s wall stopped the Scots and Picts from raiding as they pleased, and the whole of East Berlin would have been living in Bonn had Berlin not been walled. Why wouldn`t a properly defended border fence stop at least some illegals?
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