Romans Invaded Western Europe in Retaliation; So Did the U.S. Invade Afghanistan

Rush Limbaugh gave an opinion about fairness and unfairness in society today. He gave as an example the Roman invasion of western Europe instead of Eastern Europe as occurring because of the easy geographic terrain to the west instead of more challenging to the right for Eastern Europe. Geography is 'not fair', and it was simply fate of happenstance that led the Romans to choose the easy way to a sure win. I disagree and will write about that later in this article.

The more important point is that the idea that life is not fair is used as a veiled reasoning in support of a conservative concentration of wealth and aristocratic disequilibrium to the advantage of a rich minority over poor masses. The classic battle since Edmund Burke of the masses to have a fair financial posture in society with a limit on the range of disparity between the rich and poor--say a one-hundred fold difference in annual income, in this global corporatism dominated political era is seriously challenged.

The reason for the difficulty in keeping a sound liberal bearing in the modern environment is that the classical liberal battle was muddied by the rise of socialism. Thus today the argument in the United States is largely between Conservative Corporatists and Liberal socialist; actual liberalism without socialism has faded away from the public viewing screen, and the recent Supreme Court decision to not limit Corporate political advertising spending because that would violate free speech will make it more difficult to recover the ancient liberal cause to resist exploitation by aristocracy. Paradoxical Adam Smith actually sought to liberate individuals of the middle and lower classes from the dominating power of aristocracy in the business and trade environment. Corporatism through networking and the concentration of wealth has restored the conservative aristocratic domination over society; A sort of Intron Oil of the political genome has evolved over Wall Street's Oval Office.

So Rush Limbaugh as the largest corporate sycophantic broadcaster of an independent sort, naturally enough supports corporatism as the embodiment of capitalism. Implicitly the political propaganda required to resist socialism and extol the virtue of unfairness in nature, politics and society is a defense of an aristocratic, natural right to rule over the masses.

Mass market aristocrats are today's Nietzschian supermen and women ruling over docile, raving dwellers of the lowlands. Not mentioned is that in a wild, unfair environment, the masses have a right to choose democracy, to limit the size of corporations to 2000 workers and staff-- so none concentrate too much wealth, and to limit the number of corporations that may be bought in to by any individual to just three--also to limit the concentration of political power and wealth.

In Adam Smith’s day--also that of the revolutionary founders of the United States, the aristocracy was simply royal whereas today they are simply rich. Modern social revolutionaries in support of renormalized smaller scale national capitalism and against the authoritarianism of corporatism and socialism ought to take the most practical measures required to create a free society for the modern world. The difficulty is that it requires ingenuity, intelligence and more mass education--while corporate supporters of socially fiscal stratified conservatism have unlimited advertising budgets as they rightly should. The problem is not in free speech but in the enslaved minds of American politicians.

Some have speculated upon the causality of Imperial Roman invasion of western Europe rather than Eastern Europe. It is held by some that geographical convenience of the comparative avenue of military ingress between Western and Eastern Europe led the Roman leadership to choose the easy western route over the Alps instead of the more challenging barriers to Eastern Europe. The concept is of course wrong.

The Roman invasions of Western Europe and of North Africa were simple challenge/response dialectics following the Toynbean historical cycles. Roman invasions of Western Europe and of the North African region followed invasions by the Carthaginians of North Africa and Germanic and Viking peoples of Western Europe of Italy.

The Carthaginian war by the populous and in particular under the military leadership of Hannibal who invaded Italy by way of Spain and the Alps led to the battle of Cannae. Hannibal lost his vision in one eye while waiting at the threshold of victory over the Romans for resupply from recalcitrant citizens of Carthage. The delay fundamentally turned the tide of battle to defeat for the Carthaginians.

If the Romans had any need of instruction about defending their nation against foreign invaders after the war with Hannibal conclude ding with Scipio Africanus ( “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 96% how I react to it. “) sacking, burning and salting Carthage in Africa, it would have been provided by the invasion in two primary waves by hundreds of thousands of Northerners determined to access the fabulous wealth of Rome. Civilization and its storehouses of wealth attack the attack of the uncivilized like flies not uncommonly.

The Romans sent the same general--Marius--the uncle of Julius Caesar--out to defend against the Germanic tribes twice. The first was a battle at Marseille in which 100,000 northerners were slaughtered to fertilized the fields of agriculture for years as an unintended consequence, and the second produced the same result after the intimidating northerners slid naked down the Alpine slopes in a different route of invasions. The Italians did gain blonde bloodlines in more quantity as a result of the attack.

The Romans also determined to invade the homeland of the barbarians that had sought to plunder Rome. Julius Caesar and his tenth legion as well as others took Britain and Germany as far as the Rhine-even venturing a little beyond. The policy of the United States in attacking Iraq and Afghanistan roughly follows the same logic--that worked fine a couple thousand years ago and today it is perhaps obsolete in several respects as a practical reply to the 9-11 attack.

The 9-11 attack was created by several U.S. trained in Afghanistan former mufsidoon comprising an international guerilla organization. The occupation of Afghanistan to install a western friendly government that would not in the future harbor any anti-American terrorists was an asymmetric financial expense-and the terrorists were a fluid international element escaping to other regions.

One may adduce several reason for the causality of wars of civilization against barbarians, yet without a viable economic foundation in the barbarian nation to be invaded that could sustain a long term occupation by the reactionary imperial power the effort isn’t terribly practical. We read of the invasion of Mesopotamia by the rich Roman General Cassius in pursuit of the Parthian and the consequent annihilation of his legion beyond the Euphrates. We remember the defeat of the decadent Alexandrian empire’s Seleucid Empire in Israel by Judas Maccabeus the Jewish leader. It is obvious that the reason western Roman imperial holdings were more lasting in western Europe than in North Africa was the comparative fertility of each region as well as the comparative freedom from rival civilized power the Romans experienced in holding western Europe rather than in Mesopotamia.

Central Eurasia presents many challenges in security for the United States comparable in several respects to those encountered by the Roman Empire. Securing frontier defense outposts might be practical in Afghanistan, securing an entire nation and freeing a very populous Pakistan and Indian subcontinent as elate middle east from a variety of improvisational and ad hoc anti-American terrorist organizations is perhaps not possible through military investment and badly planned and inefficient civil investment through local ‘friendly’ government administration. The U.S. Government has serious difficulties in planning rational ecological economic investment in the U.S. economy itself much less in more barbarous or if not that at least more underdeveloped Central Asia. Perhaps the Obama administration will get a few Home Depot and Wal-Mart Stores to go up before exiting the area with less a trillion dollars give or take a few pennies.