I was under the impression that Quigley spoke of a succession of 'Universal Empires' (Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian/Median, Persian) delaying the onset of Decay in Mesopotamia, which finally fell to Alexander's Macedonians. Or might it be thought of as one Universal Empire, with two or three changes of management to reinvigorate it two or three times, thus (again) delaying the onset of Decay?Originally Posted by TimWalker
Last edited by SVE-KRD; 04-25-2009 at 06:33 PM.
I was speaking of a period several hundred years after the time of the Kassites. (roughly 850 BCE to 350 BCE).
Your description of the US and the EU could be either interpreted as 'Octavian vs. Cleopatra' (your and Odin's view), or as the the parting of the ways between the two halves of the Late Roman Empire (Romania vs. Byzantium - my view).
Could be, given how long Mesopotamian Civilization lasted.
Reference your mention of a parting of the ways between the US and the EU, in another post.
Thus, for the US, the answer is probably yes. For the EU, the answer is no - the outcome would be destruction and replacement.
Assuming, of course, that political fragmentation doesn't take place in time to forestall either development, as per Robert Kaplan.
Last edited by SVE-KRD; 04-25-2009 at 07:08 PM.
According to futurist George Friedman the opposite is now true, the oceans are the great unifier and is why, according to Friedman, over the next 100 years whoever controls North America (that being the US, obviously) controls the international system. The Western Hegemon and nucleating Universal State is by necessity a "thalassocracy", a naval power based on complete naval supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
The EU countries are effectively American satellite states, dependent on the US for protection since 1945. They have no will to have militaries large enough to defend themselves from, say, Russia or a resurgent Turkey.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Good analogy!
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Only if 'Octavian' won 'The Battle of Actium' this time around. Suppose this time 'Actium' ended as a bloody stalemate, or else, for some reason, 'Octavian' decided not to fight 'Cleopatra' this time around, but instead let the Cleopatra analog have Europe (our 'The East')? Then, as could have happened for real back then, 'Parthia' moved in on 'Cleopatra', while 'The Northern Barbarians' move in on 'Octavian', and both invaders win.Good analogy!
Besides, I did say that that was your view - that America's best days are ahead of us, under a One World Socialist regime based on our soil. Sorry, but given the belief of many on the Left that America isn't worth defending, but rather, deserves to be punished, maybe even destroyed, I just can't see it. The best I can see is stagnation (slow decay) under the Right, and then, only for a time, before inevitable collapse. The other option being faster decay under the leadership of people who don't really care if we last very long.
Last edited by SVE-KRD; 06-23-2009 at 10:25 AM.
Given what I wrote in my last post, your best bet for the above to come about would be for Mexico to swallow the rest of North America whole, and intact.
Below, I'll let Anthony 58 and Noemie Emery make my case for me:
Somehow, I do not expect that last paragraph to be borne out - at least not in my lifetime.This should be required reading for everyone connected with the Obama White House (from Wednesday's San Francisco Examiner):
The strange disappearance of liberal hawks
By Noemie Emery
For a few heady moments, after it was revealed that Barack Obama had ordered the swift termination of the Somali water-borne terrorists, one could indulge in a favorite fantasy, that the liberal hawk could revive.
In the last century, the words ‘progressive’ and ‘dove’ were hardly synonymous, and a forceful defense of the national interest was a truly cross-partisan cause.
Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and his protégée Franklin were among the loudest voices trying to push Woodrow Wilson into World War I. As President, FDR brought Republicans into his war cabinet; and among the strongest supporters of the Truman Doctrine, Truman being a liberal Democrat, were Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican moderate who opposed the Democratic domestic agenda, and John Kennedy, a Democratic congressman somewhere to the president’s right.
Running for president in 1960, Kennedy ran slightly to the right of Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon, and the Democrat whom Kennedy beat in the primaries, the rather more liberal Hubert H. Humphrey, was also a flag-waving hawk. In the Cold War, union leaders such as George Meany and Lane Kirkland were firm supporters of a strong foreign policy.
But by 1976, the similar views of Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson, a New Deal liberal on the domestic front, were enough to rule him out as a nominee of his party. By 1980, Carter’s weakness drove most of the liberal hawks out of party, though Jeane Kirkpatrick, a one-time Young Socialist, never became a Republican until Ronald Reagan’s second term, and Jackson himself rejected Reagan’s offer of service on the grounds that he remained a New Dealer at heart.
In 2006, Joe Lieberman, the one surviving liberal hawk, was defeated in the Democratic primary by a pacifist candidate, and sent back to the Senate by the votes of Republicans. In 2008, he broke with his party, and campaigned with McCain.
No one could have imagined at the mid-century that this would happen to the party of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, and just how this happened is somewhat unclear. Some think it was the fact that the war over the war in Vietnam took place inside the party, and made it allergic to foreign adventures. Some think the culture war that raged though the country caused most of those prepared to make moral judgments (i.e., that communists and terrorists are evil, and should be stopped by force, or the threat of it) to end up inside the Republican Party.
Historian James Piereson makes the case that it was Kennedy’s murder that began the unraveling: Unable to accept the fact that their president had been killed by a Marxist and not a right-winger or racist, liberals chose to blame the entire country for a general ‘climate of hate.’
When his brother was killed five years later, by a Muslim extremist even less typical of the country than Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals of course blamed the country still more. This led to the view that a country this bad might not be worth defending, and had no right to criticize, much less to oppose, the world's most aggressive or murderous governments. In less than two decades, Kennedy’s death had resulted in the obliteration of Kennedy’s policies from his old party, with many of his former aides in the White House denying he ever was a Cold Warrior.
By 1997, when the theme park memorial to FDR opened in Washington, it was devoted almost entirely to his domestic accomplishments, with his role as war leader (the role largely responsible for his current pre-eminence) almost wholly ignored. It’s as if his war role now embarrassed his party. Which made it less than ‘his’ party at all.
There was a brief burst of Democratic esprit after September 11th, but it didn’t last long. At the first reverse, it slipped back into quagmire worship, declaring defeat in advance and in triumph, defunding the armed forces in the midst of a war. That’s not what they did in their moments of glory, which is why they were glorious.
No law says that a domestic big-government liberal can’t be an American exceptionalist, an unabashed patriot, and a resolute warrior. It’s a great tradition that produced some great leaders. Some day, it may do it again.
Last edited by SVE-KRD; 04-26-2009 at 04:13 PM.
Only if 'Octavian' won 'The Battle of Actium' this time around. Suppose this time 'Actium' ended as a bloody stalemate, or else, for some reason, 'Octavian' decided not to fight 'Cleopatra' this time around, but instead let the Cleopatra analog have the Europe (our 'The East')? Then, as could have happened for real back then, 'Parthia' moved in on 'Cleopatra', while 'The Northern Barbarians' move in on 'Octavian', and both invaders win.
Besides, I did say that that was your view - that America's best days are ahead of us, under a One World Socialist regime based on our soil. Sorry, but given the belief of many on the Left that America isn't worth defending, but rather, deserves to be punished, maybe even destroyed, I just can't see it. The best I can see is stagnation (slow decay) under the Right, and then, only for a time, before inevitable collapse. The other option being faster decay under the leadership of people who don't really care if we last very long.
It probably won't be socialist in the strict sense of the term, but plain old Welfare-State Capitalism.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Still, for the reasons already stated, I just don't see it happening.
The Nature of Civilizations
Reconstitution
(note-related to rise of modern saeculum)
Last edited by TimWalker; 09-24-2009 at 10:16 PM.
Interesting, thanks!
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
Renaming or reverting?
It didn't happen in Japan or South Korea, countries that have attained Western economic standards.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
However, it's an interesting trend if it exists. Hmmm... now, where can I get a cotte-hardi and a wrapped wimple?
How to spot a shill, by John Michael Greer: "What you watch for is (a) a brand new commenter who (b) has nothing to say about the topic under discussion but (c) trots out a smoothly written opinion piece that (d) hits all the standard talking points currently being used by a specific political or corporate interest, while (e) avoiding any other points anyone else has made on that subject."
"If the shoe fits..." The Grey Badger.
I will pass on Lederhosen and a Homburg hat, thank you.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
This line in the article, I can definitely prove, at least in the minds of the GI/Silent "Greatest" cuspers:
I Am The Night--Color Me Black
Part I - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swiKTHeDNH8
Part II - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URlR8...eature=related
Part III - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo5Zk...eature=related
~Chas'88
"There have always been people who say: "The war will be over someday." I say there's no guarantee the war will ever be over. Naturally a brief intermission is conceivable. Maybe the war needs a breather, a war can even break its neck, so to speak. But the kings and emperors, not to mention the pope, will always come to its help in adversity. ON the whole, I'd say this war has very little to worry about, it'll live to a ripe old age."
book, copyright 2009
When Giants Fall An Economic Roadmap For The End Of The American Era by Michael J. Panzner
"...In April 2008...BBC New reported that 'Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT [Greenwhich Mean Time], arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.' One geologist present at the conference where the proposal was made said that the 'English imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed'...."
Mecca time as in, mean solar time in Mecca, or Mecca time as in, it's midnight when the sun sets in Mecca?
And doesn't Wahhabi Islam officially consider the earth to be flat? It's my understanding globes are contraband in Saudi Arabia.
"My generation, we were the generation that was going to change the world: somehow we were going to make it a little less lonely, a little less hungry, a little more just place. But it seems that when that promise slipped through our hands we didn´t replace it with nothing but lost faith."
Bruce Springsteen, 1987
http://brucebase.wikispaces.com/1987...+YORK+CITY,+NY
An example of cultural borrowing. Note the simplification, as opposed to adopting the entire art unmodified.
When China Rules The World The End Of The Western World And The Birth Of A New Global Order by Martin Jacques
The book includes a chapter about Japan. Jacques describes how the Japanese have been able to retain their sense of Japanese identity, despite borrowing massively from the cultures of China and the West.
"...Instead of an outright rejection of foreign ideas, the desire to preserve the Japanese 'essence' has instead been expressed by attempting to delineate what...has been described as 'our own realm', namely those customs, institutions and values which are regarded as indigenous....
"The distinctiveness of Japan is thus defined and maintained in two ways: firstly in the notion of the Japanese realm as described, consisting of those elements regarded as exclusively and authentically Japanese; and secondly in the unique amalgam of the various foreign influences combined with those elements regarded as distinctively Japanese. As one would expect, the notion of a Japanese realm takes precedence over hybridity in the Japanese sense of self: although it embraces material objects as diverse as tatami mats, sake and sumo wrestling, Japanese uniqueness centres around how the Japanese behave diffently from non-Japanese, or where the symbolic boundry between the Japanese and foreigners should be drawn...."
Last edited by TimWalker; 02-16-2011 at 05:01 PM.
The Ultimate Suburban Survivalist Guide by Sean Brodrick
"Human history is crowded with the ruins of civilizations that fell apart. And the track record so far is that all civilizations eventually fail; our own is probably not an exception.
"If a new technolgy or energy source comes along, history's wheel can go around for another cycle. That can happen to us, too. The United States and Western civilization as we know it may appear to be coming to a close, but there's no no rule written in stone that says calamity has to happen...."
The author made a couple points that apply to individuals, but could also apply to society as a whole:
"You have to be adaptable
"You have to know what's really important in your life and be prepared to give up or walk away from less important things"
