Tangentially relevant to Richard’s recent post and the Gottfried/Hunter discussion (here, here, here, here, and here), last night I came across this candid piece of satire:

“Let’s say you were a person who didn’t care at all about the Constitution, and you wanted to take America back to the past and establish a new order of hereditary nobility. What could be more deliciously reactionary than that? Real, live nobles, walking around on the street. So let’s see what it would take to make it happen.

“First, we need to define noble status. Our rule is simple: if either of your parents was a noble, you’re a noble. While this is unusually inclusive for a hereditary order, it is the 21st century, after all. We can step out a little. And nobility remains a biological quality - a noble baby adopted by common parents is noble, a common baby adopted by noble parents is common.

“Fine. What are the official duties and privileges of our new nobility? Obviously, we can’t really call it a noble order unless it has duties and privileges.

“Well, privileges, anyway. Who needs duties? What’s the point of being a noble, if you’re going to have all these duties? Screw it, it’s the 21st century. We’ve transcended duties. On to the privileges.

More….

In my inbox this morning I found a forwarded email containing a recent interview with Dmitry Rogozin, a popular Russian politician and diplomat.  I suspect that we shall not find his pro-USA, pro-Europe appeal to become a talking point on Fox News anytime soon:

“There is an enormous distance between Europe and the Third World. There is a new civilization emerging in the Third World that thinks that the white, northern hemisphere has always oppressed it and must therefore fall at its feet now. This is very serious.”

“If the northern civilization wants to protect itself, it must be united: America, the European Union, and Russia. If they are not together, they will be defeated one by one.”

Regarding my previous post on empire undermining tradition, Razib Khan takes issue with my statement that there were substantial demographic changes from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. 

He mentions Peter Heather’s book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, the thesis of which would largely support my claim at least as it concerns the Late Empire.  Heather argues that in order for Romans to cope with the rise of the Sassanid Persian Empire, which pushed back Roman legions, Romans had to pull soldiers and taxation income from its European provinces to fight in the Middle East, resulting in a demographic shift in the military and massive immigration across the northern border of the empire. (Sound familiar?)

Regarding earlier times, Khan writes:

“Matthew is obviously correct that Caesar recruited foreigners such as Germans… In fact, from what I can tell most people do not focus on Caesar as much as Gaius Marius’ opening of the army to the unlettered and unpropertied two generations before Caesar’s Gallic Wars….”

I never said that Caesar recruited Germans.  Because Caesar conquered Gaul, he primarily recruited Gauls (although he did recruit Germans and others).  Marius expanded military recruitment to a broader class of people, but it was primarily to other Italic peoples.  Caesar’s Fifth Alaudae was Gallic and it was the first Roman legion composed of provincial soldiers.

Regarding demographic replacement, Khan writes:

“I doubt that there was much demographic replacement.  Genetics doesn’t suggest this (nor does detailed analysis of the purported numbers of the barbarian hordes after the fall of the Western Empire), and remember that ancient cities were population sinks.”

What genetic studies do not suggest this?  The only way one could conduct a conclusive study would be to take a large sample of DNA from the remains of republican Romans and compare it to the DNA from imperial remains (a difficult task because of cremation).  As far as I know, this has not been done.  And even if it has, depending upon the ethnic composition of the mined areas the results could be skewed.  The DNA of contemporary Italians may not be revealing, especially considering the Völkerwanderung at the end of the empire.  For example, many people from Northern Italy today are of Germanic or Celtic descent.

Anecdotal evidence by satirists and Tacitus suggests that the native stock had dwindled, and that the new elite was composed of non-Italic peoples.  Who were these non-Italic new people?  Seneca wrote:

Of this crowd the greater part have no country; from their own free towns and colonies, in a word, from the whole globe, they are congregated. Some are brought by ambition, some by the call of public duty, or by reason of some mission, others by luxury which seeks a harbor rich and commodious for vices, others by the eager pursuit of liberal studies, others by shows, etc.

And Juvenal avers:

While every land…daily pours
Its starving myriads forth. Hither they come
To batten on the genial soil of Rome,
Minions, then lords of every princely dome,
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician.

One comprehensive study on demographics was by Tenney Frank in the American Historical Review (vol. 21, no. 4: 689–708).  He investigated 13,900 sepulchral inscriptions from the empire.  Looking at whether the names were Latin or foreign, he concluded that of those apparently born at Rome 83% were of foreign extraction. Furthermore, although many of these inscriptions have Greek cognomina, the people probably were often not of Greek extraction but from Hellenized lands (e.g. Egypt, Syria, etc.) where it would have been advantageous to take a Greek name.

In response to a 2007 essay by Charles A. Coulombe and a reply by Edward Feser, Jeff Martin offers the following criticism of empire over at What’s Wrong with the World:

To be certain, there are those who argue that empire is a straightforward transcription of American ideals, particularly politico-economic ones, but the virtual identity of this view with leftist readings of American history ought to give conservatives pause. If conservatives end up sounding like Howard Zinn in terms of narratives, but differ only by virtue of the assignment of an opposite moral value to the narrative, well, the most basic term for what has happened is failure.

American empire, in the judgment of paleoconservatives, is not merely imprudent and tragic, but more often than not a violation of core ethical norms, such as that of subsidiarity.

One could add to this criticism that empires are often revolutionary by their very nature.  If a traditional ‘nation’ implies (as the Latin nasci suggests) link by blood, then empire entails propositionalism, an ideological construct that will eventually undercut older ancestral mores.  One could argue that the constant meddling of empires undermines the traditional beliefs of the native stock, deracinates the population, and finally demographically replaces it.  As Steve Sailer has said, “Invade the world - invite the world.”

There are numerous empires one could examine, but here I shall make a few superficial generalizations about the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire.  Although the republic (since the Punic Wars) was inherently imperialistic and the empire maintained vestiges of republicanism, one can nevertheless document gradual change.

Some generalizations on the Roman Republic and Empire:

- Demographic Replacement.  In an empire,  the native population will eventually be diluted or replaced.  The elite of the Roman Republic were Italic, but in the Roman Empire one eventually finds that the new elite (and many of the emperors) are non-Italic.

- Foreign Military.  The constant need for soldiers required the recruitment of foreigners into the military (starting under Julius Caesar), which eventually resulted in a power shift in military leadership.

- As the people change, so does the civilization.  Think of Petronius’ ridicule of the new Romans (foreigners) in Cena Trimalchionis and their customs.  Traditional morals are replaced by the often foreign practices of a new elite. 

- The spoken language is simplified due to foreign influence (e.g. Vulgate Latin or Koine Greek), art declines, and the country’s infrastructure becomes unaffordable.

-  And finally the chickens come home to roost (vide Alaric).

Moral:  Although republicans might see immediate advantages to empire, they are disinheriting their grandchildren.

Update:  Rome and Demographics

Although President Bush had pardoned the coyote John Allen Aregood and Carly Simon’s drug pusher, it looked as if he would not pardon Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who were convicted for shooting a Mexican drug dealer.  Although a popular grass-roots movement sprang up in support of Ramos and Compean, pleas seemed to fall on deaf ears.  This morning things changed.  Surprising everyone, Bush, although not pardoning the two agents, commuted their sentences. 

Regarding Christianity and the West, Samuel P. Huntington was generally on the mark.  Although he might have been wrong about some things (here, here and here), he was correct about others, including the fact the West could not be equated with Christianity (in the sense that being Christian is not a sufficient condition for being Western) - if for no other reason than Christianity has always existed outside the West, and non-Western cultures appropriated Christianity in different ways.  For example, although Central and South America may be predominately Christian, they combined these Christian elements with their Amerindian heritage [excluding Argentina and parts of Chile], thus creating a new civilization, one he called Latin America.

Update:  Although Huntington was correct about Central and South America (just witness a K’iche’e Mass in Chiquimula, which, as one priest told me, pays special attention to “traditional Mayan symbols, calendar and cosmology”), I think he was wrong about Orthodox Europe not being a part of the West.  (It especially seems absurd to exclude Greece from the West.)  This exclusion might have been in part due to his Cold War sensibilities. 

After informing us that Brack Obama recently dined with “conservative opinion leaders” William Kristol and David Brooks, NPR ran a story this morning about the prolific reading of Obama, attempting to paint him as one of the great minds of the American presidency.  Playwright Eric Begosian was quoted as saying:  “Our new president is, in the broadest sense of the word, a reader.”

What are some of Obama’s favorite books?  Over the past decade he has mentioned:

Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon

Doris Goodwin: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Various books by Thomas L. Friedman

Taylor Branch: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

(And his publicists often throw in a few European pieces, for good measure, generic gestures like the Collected Works of Shakespeare.)

If this is what now qualifies as bookish, then what were our ancestors?  Compare Obama to President Calvin Coolidge (back when the U.S. still maintained the appearance of a republic) who in no way considered himself an “intellectual.”  Yet, Coolidge, while in the White House, read works not only in English, but in Latin, Greek, French and Italian.

When Obama passes his time turning the pages of Morrison or Malcolm X, Coolidge was contemplating Cicero, Vergil, Thucydides, Homer, and Dante.  Coolidge might even have read The Satyricon, which exemplifies the waning of republican learnedness at the hands of the new barbarian elite of the empire.

Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote extensively on the clash of civilizations and dangers of unbridled immigration, has died at age 81.

Update:  More on Huntington

Although Huntington was excoriated by the liberal media, his views were not quintessentially traditional.  For example, Sam Francis, discussing Who Are We?, wrote:

The flaw is that even though Mr. Huntington argues that America is not “based on a creed,” he believes there is a creed that in effect defines the nation. It’s just that the creed grows out of and remains dependent on the Anglo-Protestant culture.

The “creed” he describes is one that endorses the “political principles of liberty, equality, democracy, individualism, human rights, the rule of law, and private property”—in short, liberalism. Mr. Huntington is right that many Americans do believe in one version or another of such a creed, but there’s no reason to think it’s the defining trait of American beliefs.

It never seems to occur to Mr. Huntington that the creed he describes is self-evidently false in at least one important respect: It claims to be universal. But if, as he argues, it’s really the product of a specific culture and history (the “Anglo-Protestant core”), then it’s not really universal. It’s just what we or some of us happen to believe.

Regardless, Professor Huntington tackled issues that most academics wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, and for that he should be commended.

Despite popular perception that National Review is nothing but an organ of the Republican Party that’s staffed by neocons, Victor Davis Hanson confidently assures us this morning in his sales pitch for NR‘s web venture:

[T]here is no party-line take on unfolding events. The mishmash of libertarians, social conservatives, blue-dog Democrats, independents, paleoconservatives, neocons, religious traditionalists, atheists, and doctrinaire Republicans who contribute to NRO ensures a wide-variety of views, to say the least.

I suppose we should look forward to seeing many of those purged from NR (e.g. Peter Brimelow, Steve Sailer, Joe Sobran) to be reappearing soon at this crossroads of the American Right.

Here‘s John McCain’s newest Spanish television ad, “Which Side Are They On?” Despite the misleading message of this commercial, we all know on which side Barack Obama is, and we also are reminded that “our side” (see below) is not our side.

English Script For “Which Side Are They On?” (translator unknown):

ANNCR: Obama and his Congressional allies say they are on the side of immigrants. But are they?

The press reports that their efforts were ‘poison pills’ that made immigration reform fail.

The result:

No guest worker program.

No path to citizenship.

No secure borders.

No reform.

Is that being on our side?

Obama and his Congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead.

JOHN MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.