THE END OF EVERYTHING

Posted on June 11, 2024 by abyssum

June 11, 2024Special Edition The End of Everything. History Becomes Now? By: Victor Davis Hanson(Emphasis added) Part One: Why Are Civilizations Erased? – May 28, 2024I wrote The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation out of curiosity about why, on rare conditions, wars don’t just end in the capitulation of the defeated, the occupation or annexation of their homelands, or the victors’ demands to pay reparations or fines. Rather, they sometimes cease only with the complete erasure of the civilization, language, religion, and soon even the memory of the vanquished. There are occasional cases of such annihilation from antiquity—Philip II’s obliteration of Olynthus or the Athenians’ destruction of the Melians—and a few from later times (the disappearance of the Incas by Pizarro and the Spanish or the two-centuries-long Indian wars that resulted in the destruction of Native American civilization as an autonomous culture. But I was more interested in large civilizations that ended abruptly through war, within a day, a month, or two to three years. I chose four examples in The End of Everything—the eradication of the classical Thebans by the Macedonian Alexander the Great (335 BC), the flattening and disappearance of Carthage by Scipio Aemilianus and the Romans (149–146 BC), the Ottoman destruction of Byzantine civilization and absorption of Constantinople (May 29, 1453), and the Spanish destruction of the Aztecs and their capital at Tenochtitlán by Hernán Cortés. In the next five essays, I will briefly summarize some portions of the book’s contents and four case studies in our readings, ending with the epilogue that suggests that even now (or especially now?), the inconceivable can become all too real. What will follow are not excerpts from the book but summaries designed for these essays. I note in the aftermath chapter of the book that while human nature and its precivilizational savagery (cf. October 7) have not changed much, the delivery systems of destruction—nuclear, biological, chemical, and artificial intelligence (?)—have become ever more lethal and increasingly not so controllable. And that should terrify us given the Alexanders, Scipios, and Mehmets in our contemporary midst. But for now, what commonalities did all these targeted, doomed civilizations and their destroyers share? Here is a sampling of a few of the many delusions discussed in the book that helped to obliterate the losers. First, the defeated were in a state of denial about the exact status of their own vulnerability and insidious and ongoing decline, which were apparent to their conquerors but not to themselves. Thebes was the most hallowed Greek city of myth and legend (Antigone, Oedipus, and Cadmus), and forty years earlier, it had unchallenged preeminence among the city-states under the great liberator Epaminondas. But Thebes of the past was not Thebes of the present. Its walls were not as invincible as the “seven-gated” Thebes of the Athenian stage. It had lost the terrible battle of Chaeronea (338 BC) to Philip and Alexander just three years earlier, and it was racked by internal divisions. Carthage was similar. After two prior lost wars, it was reduced to a commercial city without an empire, a sort of Singapore—rich, lavish, but militarily largely impotent. Its walls had never been breached. But then again, no army had ever landed, 80,000 strong, much less one like the Romans. The Constantinople of 1453 was hardly the city of even a century earlier, much less the million-person citadel and bulwark of Christendom, Hellenism, and Western Civilization since the time of its founder Constantine the Great and its later renaissance under Justinian. It had stood indomitable and unassailable for a millennium. The Byzantines bragged that its land walls had never been overwhelmed (the Fourth Crusaders came in on the seaside). Ditto the Venetian-like city of Tenochtitlán. It may have been the capital of a four-million-person Aztec empire. However, the Aztecs struggled with increasingly dissident subjects and an array of enemies, even prior to the 1519 arrival of the Spanish in Mexico. Second, the doomed believed that allies, friends, and compatriots would surely appear at the eleventh hour and save their iconic cities. Would not the Spartans and Athenians save Greece’s most hallowed city? (Not if it meant their own destruction.) Would not the Macedonians attack the Romans to the rear and relieve the pressure off the besieged in Africa? (But why die for Carthage?) Would not a Christian fleet, perhaps led by the invincible Venetians, sail up the Dardanelles and, at the last minute, swarm the Ottoman besiegers from the rear? (But why would self-interested Roman Catholics die for what they considered were Eastern Orthodox apostates?) Would not the vast armies of the Aztec Empire throng to the capital to wipe out Cortés’s pitiful force in a common alliance of indigenous Mexica against these white strangers and their Tlaxcalan stooges? (But why help a murderous regime that yearly sacrificed hundreds of the youth of allied cities?) Third, in all these cases, the soon-to-be erased had no idea of their attackers’ genius or murderousness. Was not Alexander the Great tutored by Aristotle? And how could a distant Macedonian army reach Thebes quickly, much less build siege engines ex nihilo to take down the city? Did not Scipio Aemilianus have the renowned historian Polybius at his side, and wasn’t he a student of Homer? Wasn’t it true that Mehmet II bragged of his vast library and surely would not wish to wipe out a kindred storehouse of great literature and science? Did not Cortés express promises of friendship, and would not his wonderous technology be put to good use as a new partner to further enhance the mystical capital on the lake? So, the targeted clung to the inconceivable, when the terrible and very likely stared them in the face. Part Two: Target Thebes, 335 BC – May 29, 2024As the power of the fifth-century Athenian and fourth-century Spartan empires declined, and after Sparta’s stunning defeat at the battle of Leuctra (371 BC), the most ancient of the Greek city-states, Thebes, proved re-ascendant. For more than a decade, under the twin leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, it dominated the politics and wars of the classical Greeks. Thebes had defeated Sparta, invaded its supposedly inviolate homeland, freed the Messenian helots, democratized much of the Peloponnese, and anchored the Panhellenic resistance to Macedonian aggression. But by the time of the Macedonian victory over Greece at Chaeronea (338 BC), both Theban generals had been dead for over two decades, and the city’s prestige rested largely on the fumes of its past glory. So, the city, too, came under the domination of the Macedonians, as did all other Greek city-states. Yet in 336 BC, the 46-year-old conqueror of Greece, the Macedonian Philip II, was assassinated. Ebullition broke out on the rumors of his demise. The 1,500 Greek city-states immediately sensed liberation was at hand. Rumors that Alexander, Philip II’s son, was also murdered next reached Greece. Dynastic chaos supposedly was now engulfing Macedon and sparked renewed resistance. The Thebans, with visions of past grandeur, attacked and imprisoned the occupying Macedonian garrison. They rashly declared their independence and announced that all Greece would be free and would follow their prompt. Supposedly, allied armies from the Peloponnese, led by Sparta, were soon on the move to join the upstart Thebes. The Athenian orator Demosthenes swooned with the news and promised Athenian help. But soon, darker rumors reached Greece. The 21-year-old Alexander, who had fought alongside his father at Chaeronea just three years earlier, was not only not dead, but he had already squashed his numerous rival relatives, old-guard generals, and would-be claimants. Indeed, Alexander was not only now the new successor king of Thebes but also reportedly on his way southward to put down the Greek rebellion some 250 miles distant. And then, in less than two weeks, Alexander, to the amazement of all, actually showed up outside the walls of Thebes with 30,000 battle-hardened Macedonians to cut off the head of the rebellion. He delivered ultimata to release the hostage Macedonians inside the walls,  surrender the city, turn over the firebrand insurrectionists, and thereby save Thebes and see it return as a calm and safe subject city of the soon-to-be global Macedonian empire. He waited only three days as he prepared his assault. The Thebans rejected all those terms. They even insulted Alexander and dared him to take the city. The Macedonians furiously had built siege engines (rams and catapults), massed their phalanx outside the walls, and were now determined to storm the walls and erase Thebes from existence—and so remind the other Greeks of the eliminationist wages of resistance. Then suddenly, as Thebes was surrounded, help from Athens evaporated. The Peloponnesian armies that had reached the Isthmus of Corinth and were not far away suddenly turned around and went home. Thebes was alone. It nevertheless rejected terms and sent its own hallowed phalanx out to fight the Macedonians beyond the walls. What followed was predictable. The deadly Macedonian phalanx pushed the Thebans back into the city, collapsing resistance. Then the entire besieging army broke through and ransacked the city, murdering 6,000 soldiers and civilians and capturing at least 30,000 surviving women, children, and elderly—all at a loss of 500 Macedonians. Alexander enslaved and sold off almost all the survivors. He unleashed the men of rival and hostile nearby city-states who had historically hated the Thebans to ravage the city, murder any hide-out survivors, and loot the countryside. Alexander then leveled all the buildings of hallowed Thebes except for the house of the iconic poet Pindar and some religious shrines. He recovered a small fortune from the sale of the now-enslaved surviving Thebans. As a result, there were now no Thebes, no Thebans, and little reminders of the 1,100-year-old city. As a postscript, the Macedonian regent Cassander, twenty years later, eight years after the death of Alexander himself, founded a new Macedonian Thebes on the rubble, as a simulacrum of the vanquished ancient city and its people who had long disappeared into history. It was said later that Alexander regretted his extermination and that the Macedonian successors had founded their own city of Thebes in homage to the end of mythical Thebes as a way to ingratiate themselves with the Greek city-states. Rumors spread that a few old Thebans had escaped the original siege, found sanctuaries as exiles from the city, and now drifted back to the Macedonian surrogate city. What explains the last hours of the doomed ancient city? Naïve reliance on fickle allies? Nearly inexplicable ignorance about the true aims and capability of the new young king Alexander? A belief that Thebes was the Thebes of old and that the city-state system of Greece was still vibrant and dynamic? All that and more ensured the annihilation. And so disappeared from history the celebrated home to Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy (Oedipus the King, Antigone, and Oedipus at Colonus) and Euripides’ Bacchae. So, the city and culture that had produced Pindar, Pelopidas, and Epaminondas came to an end, whose memory now lingered only on the Athenian stage. Part Three: The Deletion of Carthage, 146 BC – May 31, 2024Carthage fought and lost two Punic wars against Rome (264 BC–201 BC). After the end of the Hannibalic War (201), the city lost almost all its empire and many of its North African alliances and was forced to pay Rome huge fines. Yet a mere half-century later, by 149 BC, Carthage was once again ascendant. A Roman visiting fact-finding mission returned home terrified, confirming the pessimism of the old Senator Cato, who had finished every speech with Carthago delenda est (“Carthage must be destroyed”). The diplomats had gazed upon a huge city of 500,000, lavish and rich from Mediterranean trade, safe within its massive walls, and seemingly stronger than even its defeated predecessors. Worse, Carthage was now free after paying off all its indemnities early. In the eyes of the Roman Senate, a somnolent monster was about to reawaken and abort Rome’s fated mission of ruling the entire Mediterranean. In truth, however, Carthage was a commercial city, not a maritime or naval empire anymore, set on the conquest of the Western Mediterranean. No matter, the paranoid Romans still clung to the nightmare of full-scale war against a resurgent Carthage that would resume aggression akin to Hannibal’s rampages for nearly two decades inside Italy. So, in 149 BC, a huge Roman fleet of perhaps 80,000 sailors and soldiers, led by the initial two consuls Manilius and Censorinus, landed at Utica not far from the indomitable walls of Carthage. The envoys demanded the Carthaginians turn over all their weapons, including their legendary elephants. The dutiful city complied. But then, the Romans interpreted such obedience as weakness to be further exploited rather than to be reciprocated with magnanimity. So, the consuls presented even more demands from the Senate, including the destruction of the city and its relocation at least 10 miles from the sea. The Carthaginians finally chose resistance to the absurd ultimatum. A furious mob picked new leaders, including the firebrand Hasdrubal (probably no relation to Hannibal’s brother of that name), and hunkered down for the siege. For two years, the consuls failed to cut off the city from its tributary nearby towns that supplied it with provisions. The legendary walls of Carthage, 30 feet thick and towering 70 feet in some sections, remained impenetrable. Cavalry forays from the city took a toll on the weary Roman besiegers camped outside. Finally, the Senate acted and recalled a second set of incompetent generals headed by another mediocre consul, Caesoninus. In their place, the Senate appointed the young Scipio Aemilianus, the adopted grandson of the famous Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Upon Scipio’s return, the entire complexion of the war began to change. He reinstituted discipline among the Roman ranks, drummed out slackers and the sick, bought off or coerced allied cities to cut off supplies to the Carthaginians, and soon walled off the great peninsular city from the mainland. Then, he moved up his siege engines and began creating fissures in the walls. Finally, after a desperate year of fighting, Scipio entered the city, finding, after three years of resistance, rampant starvation and disease. Most of the surviving population was holed up in the upper citadel and had to be pried out of fortified houses. What followed was an utter bloodbath. Well over 400,000 had perished. Some 50,000 survivors were enslaved on the last day of the assault. The legions systematically sectioned off the survivors and block-by-block killed every living thing they found. The city was reduced to rubble (though the ground was not salted as legend insists), and its flotsam and jetsam were plowed under. So ended Carthage of some 800 years. With its demise disappeared the Punic language, religion, and traditions in North Africa. Why had not Carthage comprehended its peril? Appeasers had kept convincing the population that one more yielding would satisfy the Romans, when in fact, such obeyance and compliance only whetted the Roman appetite for more. Some clung to the fantasy that the Macedonian firebrand Andriskos might win his war against Rome in the Balkans. According to such vain hopes, surely Rome would recall its generals to redeploy the huge expeditionary African army across the Mediterranean to put down a Macedonian uprising. Few Carthaginians comprehended that the Rome of 146 BC was hardly the poorer and smaller Rome that their grandfathers had fought 118 years earlier but was now poised to control both the Western and Eastern Mediterranean (and indeed would reduce Corinth to rubble almost at the same time it leveled Carthage). Some Carthaginians believed that their allied cities of North Africa would never betray them, nor would their walls ever be breached. Both were pipe dreams, given no foreign army had ever approximated the size and professionalism of Scipio’s besiegers. Nor did Carthage comprehend the diplomatic genius of Scipio, who was offering amnesties, grants, and perpetual Roman alliances and protection for any Punic city that would forsake Carthage and cut off the mother city from the mainland. So, in the end, what followed was the surreal scene of the destroyer Scipio, watching his men’s final sacking of Carthage, at his side his brilliant friend, the Greek historian Polybius. The historian Appian tells us that Scipio began to cry crocodile tears amid quoting passages from Homer about the fate of a doomed Troy—as if he had regretted the mass death that he ensured. Part Four: The End of the Byzantines, 1453 – June 4, 2024Despite bouts of destructive bubonic plague, the pillaging of the city by fellow Christians from Western Europe during the aborted Fourth Crusade (1204), and a tidal wave of Turkish invasions that finally under the Ottoman Sultanate had surrounded Constantinople, the eternal city of 1453 and its vestigial outlands still held out. Under its last emperor, Constantine XI, the embattled capital remained determined to keep what was left of its once grand Byzantine empire and thereby remain the Christian, Hellenic, Greek-speaking guarantor of Romanity in the East. Outside the walls, at the head of a huge army that with attendants might have numbered somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000, Mehmet II, the new 21-year-old sultan, was assured that even the massive Theodosian walls, the greatest fortifications of the ancient and medieval worlds, would fall to his cannons, his Janissaries, and his horde of conquered Christians and Turkish peasants. The city, he knew, was boxed in, a mere 50,000 still inside the walls. To the east, the Bosporus passage to the Black Sea was now blocked by Ottoman forts on both sides of the strait. To the west and the wider Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, the ancient Hellespont, was likewise cut off, patrolled by Ottoman galleys that were protected by forts on both sides of the channel. Prior sultans had largely left alone the once one-million-person Christian city, convinced it would eventually fall without the need to lose tens of thousands butting against the legendary walls. But Mehmet was young, hasty, and inherited an empire at its near apex, already consolidating almost all the old Asian and Balkan empires of the Byzantines. And yet here it still was, stalled after two months, with summer looming, while the city remained defiant and intact, given some 50,000 Ottoman attackers were already dead. Finally, on May 29, 1453 (“Black Tuesday”), the sultan’s generals asked for one last assault on the worn-out defenders on the ramparts. For most of the day, the subsequent waves of Muslim soldiers broke, pelted from far above by gunfire, arrows, rocks, and oil—until the anchor of the Byzantine defense, the Genovese mercenary Giovanni Giustiniani, fell wounded and was carried off to his anchored ships. The result of his absence and the disappearance of his bodyguard was a sudden panic on the walls, as swaths of the ramparts were left unguarded when the Genovese retreated. Immediately in response, the Janissaries focused on the gaps, now redoubled their efforts, scaled the walls, and almost instantly collapsed the Byzantine defense of the inner walls. What followed were three days of looting, destruction, slaughter, rape, torture, and hostage-taking. When it was over, Sultan Mehmet II assumed control of the city, executed many of its most prominent survivors, and sent captive rich boys and girls to his harem. He finally saved a few of the inhabitants once he discovered a need for expert Byzantines and Italians to restore urban services and help transform the 1,100-year-old Roman and then Byzantine city into the Islamic capital of an ascendant Muslim empire. Could Constantinople have survived? It certainly had endured this far—even in a weakened state for over 200 years after the recovery of much that was lost to the Franks and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade. Had the Western Christians sent a small army of even 20,000, with plentiful cannons and gunpower, or had a fleet of 100 Venetian galleys arrived, or had East and West agreed to cease their religious differences and reunited Christianity, then certainly the Sultan would have failed. Instead, a millennium of civilization disappeared. Within 40 years, most of the Greek-speaking surviving scattered enclaves in mainland Greece, the Balkans, and along the Black Sea shoreline were conquered, wiped out, and vanished. For the next century-and-a-half, the Sultanate systematically swept away Byzantine culture from the Mediterranean Crete to the Dodecanese Islands, ensuring that Asia at least would be forever non-European. It is easy to talk pejoratively of “Byzantine”—a modern synonym for bureaucratic rot. In truth, the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire survived for a millennium, even as its western half fell. It was in Constantinople that most of the classical Greek texts from antiquity survived, where the greatest cathedral in the Christian world, the emperor Justinian’s Hagia Sophia (the church of “Holy Wisdom”), had remained the world’s largest and most impressive church for over a thousand years, and where the modern European tradition of a codified set of laws was first established. Yet the road to May 29 was familiar from earlier civilizational erasures. There was a sense of Byzantine complacency, of denial that what had never fallen and never been breached would somehow endure—if perhaps in extremis descending archangels would save their favorite emperor and city. In reality, the city was broken, its population fractious and scattered, distrustful of Western Christians as much as of Muslims, and the too few defenders squabbling and torn by internal strife. Even during the last week of the city’s life, after nearly two months of heroic but increasingly doomed defense, those on the walls believed they would still see any day a Western fleet of savior Christians, no doubt fighting their way through the Ottoman fleet and rescuing the city. Surely, the Pope would not let the bulwark of Christendom fall and thereby expose Europe to the Islamic onslaught. For too long, Constantinople’s elite underestimated the young sultan. They naively assumed that he was to be like his father and earlier rulers, who preferred to allow the overripe city to fall into their laps in a few generations rather than lose thousands trying to storm it. Only too late did Constantine XI realize that Mehmet II was a destroyer, determined to be enshrined in Islamic memory as the hero who finally expunged ancient Christianity from Asia. Part Five: The Annihilation of the Aztecs, 1521 –  June 5, 2024Hernán Cortés was an unlikely conqueror of civilizations. He was born into a middle-class Castilian family and left Spain just 12 years after the European discovery of the New World. At 18, the young Cortés planned to get rich, acquire estates, and thus advance in the New World’s Spanish elite hierarchy—in a way impossible back in an impoverished Castille. But after landing in what is now the Dominican Republic, Cortés languished for some 15 years as a ne’er-do-well estate owner and minor official—before gaining permission in his mid-thirties to explore the vast but mostly unknown lands of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America. Based on rumors of a vast, rich civilization in the heartlands of modern-day Mexico, Cortés landed in what is now Vera Cruz, on the eastern coast of Mexico, in February 1519. He immediately ordered his small army inland, following rumor and occasional guides for some 250 miles, until he entered the vast city-upon-the-lake, Tenochtitlán, the capital of a four-million-person empire, known then as the domain of the Mexica, now as the Aztecs. For the next few months, the rag-tag band of some 500 Spanish conquistadors, at times augmented by a thousand or so Tlaxcalan indigenous allies who deeply resented their subservience to the Aztecs, camped out in Tenochtitlán under careful scrutiny if not at times confinement. The city was deemed nearly invulnerable to outside attack, a Venice-like island hub on a vast lake protected by various intricate levies, locks, and causeways. After several months, the initial wonder disappeared from both sides. The Mexica no longer saw the bizarre Spanish interlopers as deities, demi-gods, or a supernatural race—despite their strange steel armor, Toledo blades, cannon, harquebuses, crossbows, horses, huge mastiff dogs, and strange white appearance. The Spanish seemed altogether a different species from the Aztecs, at least as perceived in their practice of Catholicism, lust for gold, repugnance for human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy, and various frightening Aztec gods. Cortés, whether in transit or camped in Tenochtitlán, was under constant danger from increasingly angry Aztecs to a second Spanish expedition sent to Vera Cruz to arrest the insubordinate upstart. Yet he surmounted all such challenges—at least for a few months—by flipping the newcomer Spanish contingent to his own side, and thus augmenting his tiny conquistador force inside Tenochtitlán to some 1,500 while taking hostage the emperor Montezuma II himself. And then everything fell apart. His firebrand subordinate Pedro Alvarado, in the absence of Cortés, had murdered hundreds of Aztec festival goers. The bloodbath aroused the entire population of the city proper, somewhere between 200,000-300,000, well apart from the allied and subject lake tribes. In what followed and became known as the Noche Triste (“Mournful Night”),the Spanish attempted a secret flight from their confinement amid storm and darkness along the causeways to the mainland. It proved a disaster. Some 600-800 Spanish were captured or killed, and hundreds were subsequently sacrificed at the city’s center—and eaten. For a year, Cortés’s once hopeful expedition was written off as an ungodly disaster. He fled to his only remaining allies, the Tlaxcalans—his remnant force wounded, sick, and eager to sail back to Cuba. Yet somehow, Cortés regrouped, restored morale, was resupplied with men and materials, built a fleet of small ships, disassembled them, transported the brigantines over the mountains to Lake Texcoco, and launched his navy against the city. He then waged a combined land and sea attack over the causeways, bolstered by tens of thousands of Tlaxcalans eager for revenge against their Aztec nemeses. Outbreaks of smallpox, malaria, and whooping cough decimated the Aztecs, who found themselves increasingly alone, as thousands of their allies either stayed home or began slowly to join what was thought to be the eventual winning Spanish side. Like the false regrets of Alexander and Scipio, Cortés, in his official reports to the Spanish crown, claimed he had the intention of destroying the city block by block but preferred to keep it intact as an indigenous jewel in the new Spanish province of Mexico. Perhaps. But when he was done, hundreds of thousands of Aztecs were butchered, more enslaved, the city leveled, and Aztec religion, dialect, traditions, and customs increasingly forgotten and relegated to isolated settlements of native peoples who remembered only in folklore and myth the once wondrous city on the lake. Again, Cortés never at one time had more than 1,500 conquistadors. So, how did he destroy an enormous empire? The Aztecs had no idea with whom they were dealing and missed several chances to kill Cortés and his small band when they were holed up on their initial visit to the city. They had little way of knowing that Castilian conquistadors were some of the most fearsome warriors of sixteenth-century Europe, honed by decades of warring against the Muslims of Spain during the Reconquista and fighting nonstop against Protestant enemies of northern Europe as well as Italian rivals. And more unfortunately for them, Hernán Cortés was an unlikely but undeniably natural leader, a military genius who far surpassed his contemporaries in talent, courage, and sheer audacity. Nor did Aztec leaders calibrate how hated they were by their subjects, given their yearly harvests of thousands of captives for sacrifice to their hungry gods and their constant demands for tribute. One of the more amazing aspects of the Spanish conquest of the New World is how a Spanish interloper was seen as the salvation of thousands of indigenous peoples rather than their own kindred Nahuatl overseers. “Cultural confusion” is often used to explain the abject dichotomy between the Spanish and the Aztecs: the Europeans fought to kill, take ground, and break the will of the enemy; the Aztecs often engaged in “flower wars” to hit, stun, bind, and capture human fodder for their mass human sacrifices at Templo Major. Moreover, they never fully understood the advantages in such Western wars that steel blades and armor, cavalry, gunpowder weapons, and crossbows gave the vastly outnumbered Spanish in conflict against warriors who often fought individually, without formation, protected by cloth, and equipped with sharp obsidian blades whose edges dulled after a few blows. Like “new” Thebes, “new” Carthage, and “new” Kostantiniyye (later Istanbul), a new Mexico City was built atop the center of Tenochtitlán. But it was a city founded not on similar but antithetical protocols to its flattened and soon forgotten predecessor. Part Six: Is Civilizational Erasure Possible Today? – June 7, 2024We saw on October 7 unprovoked mass slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, decapitation, and hostage-taking, and agreed that human nature has not changed much since the era of the Aztecs or Macedonians. But the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear, chemical, biological, and the use of artificial intelligence—have evolved far beyond the muscular strength of the old, resulting in the specter of instantaneous and comprehensive mass death. True, civilizational annihilation, as we saw in the past, is the rare exception, not the rule of the victors’ terms to the defeated. Even the defeated and murderous Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were recalibrated into democracies rather than erased as peoples. Yet currently, there are five autocratic nuclear powers (counting Iran)—as numerous as those democratic (U.S., U.K., France, India, and Israel). And those threatening to use such nihilist weapons include almost all the dictatorial nuclear clubs. Iran routinely threatens to obliterate Israel and, for the first time in history, hit the Israeli homeland with a huge swarm of 320 cruise and ballistic missiles and drones. (About half the ballistic missiles failed to launch or imploded en route). Threats to launch nuclear weapons rather than lose Ukraine have come thick and fast from Russian generals, media blowhards, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and former president Dmitry Medvedev (e.g., “Attempts to restore Russia’s 1991 borders will lead only to one thing—a global war with Western countries with the use of our entire strategic [nuclear] arsenal against Kyiv, Berlin, London, and Washington. And against all other beautiful historic places that have long been included in the flight targets of our nuclear triad.”). There is no need to list all the targets that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has threatened to nuke. Periodically, Pakistan talks of resorting to nuclear weapons to overcome India’s strategic and demographic advantages. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has produced an entire corpus of existential threats—to use the remedies of his grandfathers to deal with the Armenians, to rain down a storm of missiles on Athens, and to “come at any night unexpectedly” against Israel. China threatened to nuke Japan if it were to help Taiwan and issued a snuff video of such an envisioned strike against Japan, with a warning: “When we liberate Taiwan, if Japan dares to intervene by force, even if it only deploys one soldier, one plane, and one ship, we will not only return reciprocal fire but also start a full-scale war against Japan. We will use nuclear bombs first. We will use nuclear bombs continuously until Japan declares unconditional surrender for the second time.” The reaction to such “hyperbole”? It is not much different from the naivete of the Thebans or Carthaginians. So, we, too, dismiss such threats as mere braggadocio. And like prior vanquished states, we assume that we are still preeminent as of old. We preen still that we are so strong that no entity would dare attempt the inconceivable—even in the age of September 11, the gain-in-function Covid-19 virus, and the mass cheering throughout the Muslim Middle East on news that 1,139 innocent civilians were grotesquely butchered at a time of peace in the worst single-day mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The postwar American imperium ended two decades ago, as massive borrowing and spending, costly quagmires abroad in Iraq and Afghanistan, an increasingly ossified, bureaucratic, and woke military, an open border, millions of illegal aliens, and suicidal energy, race, and crime policies have combined to encourage our enemies to no longer fear the United States and friends and allies no longer to respect us. America is on its own. There is no help on the way, any more than there was a Spartan army to the rescue of Thebes or a Genovese fleet to save Constantinople at the eleventh hour. Like the deluded of the past, America shrugs that it is borrowing $1 trillion every three months, with little worry that the interest on the soaring national debt alone exceeds the defense budget. Our military is short 45,000 recruits—after 8,500 skilled officers and enlisted men, many with natural COVID-19 immunity, were drummed out, and witch hunts sought to root out nonexistent cabals of “white supremacists.” The country has been more divided than at any time since 1861. The legal system has lost global respect, as it has degenerated into a Third-World extension of the state’s hounding of its enemies. Past prestigious institutions, brands, and labels have blown themselves up due to their incoherence, incompetence, and hubris—whether Disney, Anheuser Busch, Target, United, Boeing, Harvard, Columbia, or MIT. No one knows where the limits, if any, will be on Artificial Intelligence—only that those who have designed Google, the old Twitter, and Facebook to warp elections and suppress the news are the same who have moved on to programming AI. It is past time for America to practice fiscal sanity, protect our skies from storms of enemy missiles, repair the Pentagon and end its woke agendas, secure our borders and restore the primacy of citizenship, reunite the country, and let the voters, not the lawyers, select a president. There was a time when Macedon would not have dreamed of attacking a hallowed Thebes, when Rome would not have dared to land a fleet near the harbor of Carthage, and when Constantinople fought its enemies a thousand miles away rather than from its walls. Decline is a choice, not a fate, and when it is perceived, all sorts of Alexanders and Scipios arrive out of nowhere, the sort of men who can make an end of everything. If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.Plato

About abyssum

I am a retired Roman Catholic Bishop, Bishop Emeritus of Corpus Christi, Texas
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

1 Response to THE END OF EVERYTHING

  1. Mary D says:
    June 13, 2024 at 8:12 pm

    I agree with Plato

Comments are closed.