The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey The clash between the classical order and Christianity is a tale of murder and vandalism wrought by religious zealotry, evoking modern-day parallels Tim Whitmarsh Thu 28 Dec 2017 02.30 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 09.17 EST “The theologian,” wrote Edward Gibbon in his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” Gibbon was a child of the European Enlightenment, and he viewed his task as a historian of early Christianity as a dispassionate, scientific one: to see things as they are, rather than as the pious would want them to be. The conclusions he reached were, perhaps inevitably, controversial in his day. The pre-Christian Roman empire, he believed, was characterised by “religious harmony”, and the Romans were interested more in good governance than in imposing religious orthodoxy on their many subjects. A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its “exclusive zeal for the truth of religion”, a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a class of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel and punitive. Christianity is painted as brave and principled This spirit permeates Catherine Nixey’s book. In her view, the standard modern picture of the Roman empire’s conversion remains, even 200 years after Gibbon, glossed by Christian triumphalism. History, she believes, has given the Church an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel, arbitrary and punitive; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, “a chilly, nihilistic world”. Christianity, conversely, is painted as brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The task she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the error and corruption of the early Church. This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyra in the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger. The story of the destruction of Athena is the amuse-bouche for a feast of tales of murder, vandalism, wilful destruction of cultural heritage and general joylessness. We hear of the brutal end of Hypatia, the Alexandrian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a Christian crowd in the early fifth century (an event dramatised in the Spanish movie Agora). Less well known, in the anglophone world at any rate, is the case of Shenoute. A contemporary of Hypatia’s, he lived further south, in rural Egypt, where he became the abbot of the complex now known as the White Monastery (which still stands in today’s town of Sohag). Shenoute is now considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a particularly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would break into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and smash up any property they objected to on religious grounds. Even more than the physical violence, it is the cultural devastation that draws Nixey’s eye. Early in the book, she describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased. Destroying a pagan statue or burning a book becomes a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb Where did this appetite for destruction come from? Nixey’s short answer is a simple one: demons. Many ancient Christians believed that the world we inhabit is a perilous place, crowded with malevolent supernatural beings, who sometimes manifest themselves in the form of fake gods. It is the Christian’s duty to root these out. Destroying a “pagan” statue or burning a book, then, is a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb: you save the healthy whole by preventing the spread of the infection. If you think that a marble statue is possessed by a demon, then it makes a kind of sense to dig out its eyes and score a cross in its forehead. If you think, along with the North-African theologian Tertullian, that “Satan and his angels have filled the whole world” and laid traps for the virtuous in the form of sensual pleasures, then avoiding the Romans’ bathhouses, dinners and spectacles is perfectly rational – as is a disdain for sexuality. The early Christian world was in a state of perpetual metaphysical war, and choosing sides inevitably meant knowing your enemies. But demons are only half of the story. The real blame, for Nixey, lies at the door of the church fathers, whose spine-tingling sermons ramped up the polarising rhetoric of violent difference. They wove “a rich tapestry of metaphor”, construing theological opponents of all kinds as bestial, verminous, diseased and – naturally – demonic. It was language itself – the forceful, lurid language of a handful of elite males – that stoked the fires of Christian rage against its enemies, fires that blazed for a millennium: “the intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.” Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would expect from a distinguished journalist, every page is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an expert eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill. Writing critically about Christian history is doubly difficult: not only are the ancient sources complex, scattered and disputed, but also there are legions of modern readers waiting to pounce on the tiniest perceived error, infelicity or offence. If there is a weakness in this book, it stems precisely from its Gibbonian roots. This is, fundamentally, a restatement of the Enlightenment view that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilisation’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). Nixey studied classics, and her affection for classical culture runs deep: she writes with great affection about the sophisticated philosophies of the stoics and epicureans, the buoyantly sexual (and not infrequently sexist) poetry of Catullus and Ovid, the bluff bonhomie of Horace and the unsentimental pragmatism of men of affairs such as Cicero and Pliny. When she speaks of classical culture and religion she tends to use such descriptions as “fundamentally liberal and generous” and “ebullient”. How, then, do we explain the Romans’ unfortunate habit of killing Christians? Nixey thinks, like Gibbon, that they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the civic order that the unruly Christians imperilled. Ancient accounts, she argues, show imperial officials who “simply do not want to execute”; rather, they are forced into it by the Christians’ perverse lust for martyrdom. Now, martyrdom certainly has a strangely magnetic allure, as we know from our own era, but the Romans were hardly bemused, passive bystanders in all of this. There is something of the zero-sum game at work here: in seeking to expose the error and corruption of the early Christian world, Nixey comes close to veiling the pre-Christian Romans’ own barbarous qualities. But this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to judge it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.
Form: Excerpt
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Gods
THE ARCHETYPES – THE FAMILY Central to Greek religion in classical times were the twelve Olympian deities headed by Zeus. Each god was honored with stone temples and statues, and sanctuaries (sacred enclosures), which, although dedicated to a specific deity, often contained statues commemorating other gods.[1] They were a family of gods, the most important consisting of the first generation of Olympians, offspring of the Titans Cronus and Rhea: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia, along with the principal offspring of Zeus: Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite,[3] Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysus. The city-states would conduct various festivals and rituals throughout the year, with particular emphasis directed towards the patron god of the city, such as Athena at Athens, or Apollo at Corinth.[1] THE RELIGION OF REAL AND HISTORICAL HEROES Religious practice would also involve the worship of heroes, people who were regarded as semi-divine. Such heroes ranged from the mythical figures in the epics of Homer to historical people such as the founder of a city.[1] THE NATURAL WORLD WAS DENSELY POPULATED At the local level, the landscape was filled with sacred spots and monuments; for example, many statues of Nymphs were found near and around springs, and the stylized figures of Hermes could often be found on street corners.[1] ALEXANDER MIXED EUROPEAN AND CENTRAL ASIAN In the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture spread widely and came into much closer contact with the civilizations of the Near East and Egypt. The most significant changes to impact on Greek religion were the loss of independence of the Greek city-states to Macedonian rulers; the importation of foreign deities; and the development of new philosophical systems.[4] THE NEAR EAST BROUGHT DECLINE ***Older surveys of Hellenistic religion tended to depict the era as one of religious decline, discerning a rise in scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as an increase in superstition, mysticism, and astrology.[5]*** THE ARCHETYPAL GODS ARE SENSIBLE DIVISIONS OF THE WORLD: -THE MASCULINE WORLD- ZEUS (FATHER): King of the gods. God of the sky, lightning, thunder, law, order and justice ATHENA (WISDOM/POSITIVE) Goddess of wisdom, strategy, warfare and skill. ARES: (PASSION/NEGATIVE) God of war, violence and destruction. The force of destruction, savage warfare and bloodlust. -THE REAL WORLD- APOLLO (UPPER): God of light, the sun, prophecy, philosophy, truth, inspiration, poetry, music, arts, medicine, healing. HERMES(MIDDLE): god of travel, trade, diplomacy, persuasion, writings and athletics. HEPHAESTUS(WORKING): god of craftsmanship, blacksmiths and stonemasonry. -THE FEMININE WORLD- HERA (MOTHER): Queen of the gods and the goddess of marriage, women, childbirth and family. APHRODITE (DAUGHTER): goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. HESTIA(YOUNG DAUGHTER): Virgin goddess of hearth, the domestic affairs and home. -THE NATURAL WORLD- POSEIDON(NATURE’S POWER): God of the seas, water, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes (and horses). ARTEMIS(BEASTS): Goddess of hunting and wilderness DEMETER (AGRICULTURE): Goddess of the harvest, fertility, agriculture, nature and the seasons DIONYISUS God of wine, festivals and pleasure.
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Gods
THE ARCHETYPES – THE FAMILY Central to Greek religion in classical times were the twelve Olympian deities headed by Zeus. Each god was honored with stone temples and statues, and sanctuaries (sacred enclosures), which, although dedicated to a specific deity, often contained statues commemorating other gods.[1] They were a family of gods, the most important consisting of the first generation of Olympians, offspring of the Titans Cronus and Rhea: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia, along with the principal offspring of Zeus: Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite,[3] Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysus. The city-states would conduct various festivals and rituals throughout the year, with particular emphasis directed towards the patron god of the city, such as Athena at Athens, or Apollo at Corinth.[1] THE RELIGION OF REAL AND HISTORICAL HEROES Religious practice would also involve the worship of heroes, people who were regarded as semi-divine. Such heroes ranged from the mythical figures in the epics of Homer to historical people such as the founder of a city.[1] THE NATURAL WORLD WAS DENSELY POPULATED At the local level, the landscape was filled with sacred spots and monuments; for example, many statues of Nymphs were found near and around springs, and the stylized figures of Hermes could often be found on street corners.[1] ALEXANDER MIXED EUROPEAN AND CENTRAL ASIAN In the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture spread widely and came into much closer contact with the civilizations of the Near East and Egypt. The most significant changes to impact on Greek religion were the loss of independence of the Greek city-states to Macedonian rulers; the importation of foreign deities; and the development of new philosophical systems.[4] THE NEAR EAST BROUGHT DECLINE ***Older surveys of Hellenistic religion tended to depict the era as one of religious decline, discerning a rise in scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as an increase in superstition, mysticism, and astrology.[5]*** THE ARCHETYPAL GODS ARE SENSIBLE DIVISIONS OF THE WORLD: -THE MASCULINE WORLD- ZEUS (FATHER): King of the gods. God of the sky, lightning, thunder, law, order and justice ATHENA (WISDOM/POSITIVE) Goddess of wisdom, strategy, warfare and skill. ARES: (PASSION/NEGATIVE) God of war, violence and destruction. The force of destruction, savage warfare and bloodlust. -THE REAL WORLD- APOLLO (UPPER): God of light, the sun, prophecy, philosophy, truth, inspiration, poetry, music, arts, medicine, healing. HERMES(MIDDLE): god of travel, trade, diplomacy, persuasion, writings and athletics. HEPHAESTUS(WORKING): god of craftsmanship, blacksmiths and stonemasonry. -THE FEMININE WORLD- HERA (MOTHER): Queen of the gods and the goddess of marriage, women, childbirth and family. APHRODITE (DAUGHTER): goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation. HESTIA(YOUNG DAUGHTER): Virgin goddess of hearth, the domestic affairs and home. -THE NATURAL WORLD- POSEIDON(NATURE’S POWER): God of the seas, water, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes (and horses). ARTEMIS(BEASTS): Goddess of hunting and wilderness DEMETER (AGRICULTURE): Goddess of the harvest, fertility, agriculture, nature and the seasons DIONYISUS God of wine, festivals and pleasure.
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Curt Doolittle updated his status. GODS THE ARCHETYPES – THE FAMILY Central to G
Curt Doolittle updated his status.
GODS
THE ARCHETYPES – THE FAMILY
Central to Greek religion in classical times were the twelve Olympian deities headed by Zeus. Each god was honored with stone temples and statues, and sanctuaries (sacred enclosures), which, although dedicated to a specific deity, often contained statues commemorating other gods.[1]
They were a family of gods, the most important consisting of the first generation of Olympians, offspring of the Titans Cronus and Rhea: Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter and Hestia, along with the principal offspring of Zeus: Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite,[3] Hephaestus, Hermes, and Dionysus.
The city-states would conduct various festivals and rituals throughout the year, with particular emphasis directed towards the patron god of the city, such as Athena at Athens, or Apollo at Corinth.[1]
THE RELIGION OF REAL AND HISTORICAL HEROES
Religious practice would also involve the worship of heroes, people who were regarded as semi-divine. Such heroes ranged from the mythical figures in the epics of Homer to historical people such as the founder of a city.[1]
THE NATURAL WORLD WAS DENSELY POPULATED
At the local level, the landscape was filled with sacred spots and monuments; for example, many statues of Nymphs were found near and around springs, and the stylized figures of Hermes could often be found on street corners.[1]
ALEXANDER MIXED EUROPEAN AND CENTRAL ASIAN
In the aftermath of the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek culture spread widely and came into much closer contact with the civilizations of the Near East and Egypt.
The most significant changes to impact on Greek religion were the loss of independence of the Greek city-states to Macedonian rulers; the importation of foreign deities; and the development of new philosophical systems.[4]
THE NEAR EAST BROUGHT DECLINE
***Older surveys of Hellenistic religion tended to depict the era as one of religious decline, discerning a rise in scepticism, agnosticism and atheism, as well as an increase in superstition, mysticism, and astrology.[5]***
THE ARCHETYPAL GODS ARE SENSIBLE DIVISIONS OF THE WORLD:
-THE MASCULINE WORLD-
ZEUS (FATHER): King of the gods. God of the sky, lightning, thunder, law, order and justice
ATHENA (WISDOM/POSITIVE) Goddess of wisdom, strategy, warfare and skill.
ARES: (PASSION/NEGATIVE) God of war, violence and destruction. The force of destruction, savage warfare and bloodlust.
-THE REAL WORLD-
APOLLO (UPPER): God of light, the sun, prophecy, philosophy, truth, inspiration, poetry, music, arts, medicine, healing.
HERMES(MIDDLE): god of travel, trade, diplomacy, persuasion, writings and athletics.
HEPHAESTUS(WORKING): god of craftsmanship, blacksmiths and stonemasonry.
-THE FEMININE WORLD-
HERA (MOTHER): Queen of the gods and the goddess of marriage, women, childbirth and family.
APHRODITE (DAUGHTER): goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation.
HESTIA(YOUNG DAUGHTER): Virgin goddess of hearth, the domestic affairs and home.
-THE NATURAL WORLD-
POSEIDON(NATURE’S POWER): God of the seas, water, storms, hurricanes, earthquakes (and horses).
ARTEMIS(BEASTS): Goddess of hunting and wilderness
DEMETER (AGRICULTURE): Goddess of the harvest, fertility, agriculture, nature and the seasons
DIONYISUS God of wine, festivals and pleasure.
Source date (UTC): 2018-07-02 22:46:23 UTC
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According to Christopher Heumann, an 18th-century scholar, pseudo-philosophy has
According to Christopher Heumann, an 18th-century scholar, pseudo-philosophy has six characteristics:[23]
A preference for useless speculation
It appeals merely to human authority
It appeals to tradition instead of reason
It syncretises philosophy with superstition
It has a preference for obscure and enigmatic language and symbolism
It is immoral
Source date (UTC): 2018-07-02 09:06:00 UTC
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The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine
The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World by Catherine Nixey
The clash between the classical order and Christianity is a tale of murder and vandalism wrought by religious zealotry, evoking modern-day parallels
Tim Whitmarsh
Thu 28 Dec 2017 02.30 EST Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 09.17 EST
“The theologian,” wrote Edward Gibbon in his classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption, which she contracted in a long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.” Gibbon was a child of the European Enlightenment, and he viewed his task as a historian of early Christianity as a dispassionate, scientific one: to see things as they are, rather than as the pious would want them to be. The conclusions he reached were, perhaps inevitably, controversial in his day. The pre-Christian Roman empire, he believed, was characterised by “religious harmony”, and the Romans were interested more in good governance than in imposing religious orthodoxy on their many subjects. A distinctive feature of early Christianity, by contrast, was for Gibbon its “exclusive zeal for the truth of religion”, a blinkered, intolerant obsessiveness that succeeded by bullying and intimidation, and promoted a class of wide-eyed mystics. Indeed, Christian zealotry, was, he thought, ultimately responsible for the fall of the Roman empire, by creating citizens contemptuous of their public duty.
Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel and punitive. Christianity is painted as brave and principled
This spirit permeates Catherine Nixey’s book. In her view, the standard modern picture of the Roman empire’s conversion remains, even 200 years after Gibbon, glossed by Christian triumphalism. History, she believes, has given the Church an undeservedly easy ride. Pre-Christian Rome tends to be imagined as cruel, arbitrary and punitive; it is thought to be, in her fine phrase, “a chilly, nihilistic world”. Christianity, conversely, is painted as brave, principled, kind, inclusive and optimistic. The task she sets herself – her own melancholy duty – is to rip away this veneer and expose the error and corruption of the early Church.
This is also, however, a book for the 21st century. What concerned Gibbon was the clash between faith and reason; for Nixey, the clashes are physical ones. This is, fundamentally, a study of religious violence. Her cover displays a statue of Athena deliberately damaged: its eyes have been gouged and its nose smashed, and a cross has been etched into its forehead. The story of this defacement is told in her prologue and reprised in her final words. The events happened in Palmyra in the late fourth century, when some of the oasis city’s magnificent temples were repurposed as sites of Christian worship. Her choice to begin in Palmyra is, of course, a careful one. When she speaks of the destruction wrought on the architecture of the Syrian city by “bearded, black-robed zealots”, the reader thinks not of marauding fourth-century Christian fundamentalists but of television images from recent history. “There have been,” she writes, and “there still are … those who use monotheism and its weapons to terrible ends.” What is revealing about that last sentence is not the connection she draws between savage practices in Christian late antiquity and in the name of Islamic State but the phrase “monotheism and its weapons”. Many modern commentators like to speak of religious terrorism as a horrific distortion of religious truth; for Nixey, monotheism is always weaponised and waiting only for someone to pull the trigger.
The story of the destruction of Athena is the amuse-bouche for a feast of tales of murder, vandalism, wilful destruction of cultural heritage and general joylessness. We hear of the brutal end of Hypatia, the Alexandrian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer who was murdered by a Christian crowd in the early fifth century (an event dramatised in the Spanish movie Agora). Less well known, in the anglophone world at any rate, is the case of Shenoute. A contemporary of Hypatia’s, he lived further south, in rural Egypt, where he became the abbot of the complex now known as the White Monastery (which still stands in today’s town of Sohag). Shenoute is now considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a particularly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would break into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and smash up any property they objected to on religious grounds.
Even more than the physical violence, it is the cultural devastation that draws Nixey’s eye. Early in the book, she describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.
Destroying a pagan statue or burning a book becomes a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb
Where did this appetite for destruction come from? Nixey’s short answer is a simple one: demons. Many ancient Christians believed that the world we inhabit is a perilous place, crowded with malevolent supernatural beings, who sometimes manifest themselves in the form of fake gods. It is the Christian’s duty to root these out. Destroying a “pagan” statue or burning a book, then, is a no more violent act than amputating a gangrenous limb: you save the healthy whole by preventing the spread of the infection. If you think that a marble statue is possessed by a demon, then it makes a kind of sense to dig out its eyes and score a cross in its forehead. If you think, along with the North-African theologian Tertullian, that “Satan and his angels have filled the whole world” and laid traps for the virtuous in the form of sensual pleasures, then avoiding the Romans’ bathhouses, dinners and spectacles is perfectly rational – as is a disdain for sexuality. The early Christian world was in a state of perpetual metaphysical war, and choosing sides inevitably meant knowing your enemies.
But demons are only half of the story. The real blame, for Nixey, lies at the door of the church fathers, whose spine-tingling sermons ramped up the polarising rhetoric of violent difference. They wove “a rich tapestry of metaphor”, construing theological opponents of all kinds as bestial, verminous, diseased and – naturally – demonic. It was language itself – the forceful, lurid language of a handful of elite males – that stoked the fires of Christian rage against its enemies, fires that blazed for a millennium: “the intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.”
Nixey has a great story to tell, and she tells it exceptionally well. As one would expect from a distinguished journalist, every page is full of well-turned phrases that leap from the page. She has an expert eye for arresting details, and brings characters and scenarios to life without disguising anything of the strangeness of the world she describes. Most of all, she navigates through these tricky waters with courage and skill. Writing critically about Christian history is doubly difficult: not only are the ancient sources complex, scattered and disputed, but also there are legions of modern readers waiting to pounce on the tiniest perceived error, infelicity or offence.
If there is a weakness in this book, it stems precisely from its Gibbonian roots. This is, fundamentally, a restatement of the Enlightenment view that the classical heritage was essentially benign and rational, and the advent of Christianity marked civilisation’s plunge into darkness (until it was fished out by Renaissance humanists). Nixey studied classics, and her affection for classical culture runs deep: she writes with great affection about the sophisticated philosophies of the stoics and epicureans, the buoyantly sexual (and not infrequently sexist) poetry of Catullus and Ovid, the bluff bonhomie of Horace and the unsentimental pragmatism of men of affairs such as Cicero and Pliny. When she speaks of classical culture and religion she tends to use such descriptions as “fundamentally liberal and generous” and “ebullient”. How, then, do we explain the Romans’ unfortunate habit of killing Christians? Nixey thinks, like Gibbon, that they were interested, principally, in good governance and in maintaining the civic order that the unruly Christians imperilled. Ancient accounts, she argues, show imperial officials who “simply do not want to execute”; rather, they are forced into it by the Christians’ perverse lust for martyrdom. Now, martyrdom certainly has a strangely magnetic allure, as we know from our own era, but the Romans were hardly bemused, passive bystanders in all of this. There is something of the zero-sum game at work here: in seeking to expose the error and corruption of the early Christian world, Nixey comes close to veiling the pre-Christian Romans’ own barbarous qualities.
But this book is not intended as a comprehensive history of early Christianity and its complex, embattled relationship to the Roman empire, and it would be unfair to judge it against that aim. It is, rather, a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianisation of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.
Source date (UTC): 2018-07-01 16:37:00 UTC
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Curt Doolittle updated his status. THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN
Curt Doolittle updated his status.
THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN
By Anon.
The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY DO THAT.)
Their conclusion is as follows: They donât have a snowballâs chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. Itâs just a matter of how long it takes.
A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points.
30% of the American population will actively revolt.
This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10% of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15% of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70% of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30% of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow Thatâs how discontent the people are and how much the people donât support the government.
The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would.
Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishmentâs ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford.
Taking America in a land war is almost impossible.
The United States is absolutely full of natural terrain chokepoints, making marching an army across it against armed resistance almost impossible, and it is large enough that no sustained air campaign would be possible. The Japanese Admiralty realized this themselves during WWII, which is why many of them were against attempting to invade. Also, by an interesting coincidence, most of those chokepoints are in hard conservative states, where the resistance would be strongest. The government would lack the ability to reclaim its own land by force, especially when the previous point about infrastructure is taken into account. President Lincoln, on the matter of potential European involvement in the first American Civil War, stated, âAll the armies of Europe with a Bonaparte as a commander, could not take a drink from the Ohio.â
A significant majorityâbetween 55 and 70%âof the military would defect to the side of the citizens.
The problem with suppressing the people with a military, that literature and fantasy tend to overlook or ignore, is that the military is the people, too. In order to get any military to fight their own, you first have to convince them that it is necessary to do soâthat it is justified. The Communists also ran into this problem, but they overcame it with psychological conditioning and creating a dog-eat-dog atmosphere within the military. The American government having actively recruited people who are patriotic, practical, brave, who have civilian families, and having reinforced those values throughout their training process, lacks the ability to convince the majority of their fighting force to engage against their own people. The moment a civil war breaks out, over half of the American military will defect to the rebel side. They will bring military gear with them and, more dangerous, military training. lt only takes one Navy Seal or Army Ranger to potentially train hundreds of civilians into a dangerous resistance force. Theyâve done it before, in other nations. You can be damn sure they can do it on their own home turf.
But it gets better.
At least 10% of the people who defect to the civilian side would not do so openly, and they would not abandon their posts.
The moment a civil war starts, not only does America lose over half its military to the cause, but their own command structure will suddenly be infested with moles, plants, and âtraitors.â There would be almost no way of knowing who is actually on their side and who is supporting the uprising. Worse yet, if one of those people happens to be the captain of one of the nuclear submarines on standby in dark water, the civil war is already lost before it even gets started.
Russia has already publicly stated that it will support any rebellion in the United States against the established government and will send troops and aid to support the resistance. This is pretty self-explanatory. The last thing the government would need during a civil war is Russia breathing down its neck, but they would get exactly that. To supplement two-thirds of their own military leaving and civilians being trained by military elites, Spetsnaz would drop in and the resistance would get armor and air support from the only other nation on the planet that stands a decent chance of fighting us openly and winning.
The media fearmongers because itâs profitable.
The media, for all of its paid shillery, would give coverage of everything the resistance does because it is immensely proï¬table for them to do so. It would be guaranteed views. The only response the establishment would have would be to either allow it or order a total media blackout on the rebellion. Either way they lose, because both outcomes would awaken hundreds of thousandsâif not millionsâof people. We can only win on the media arena, and they can only lose. Itâs merely a matter of what they think will minimize their losses.
American civilians are armed and dangerous.
In spite of all of the illegal attempts from the political left to disarm the American people, there are approximately 89 guns for every 100 Americans. Furthermore, we are one of the top three arms manufacturers on the planet (the others being Russia and France). The establishment would be in trouble even if their opponents were unarmed, but any rebellion of the people in America is, by definition, an armed one. They could be easily armed further by stealing weapons or even outright being given them by sympathetic interests (unsurprisingly, an overwhelming number of weapons manufacturers on American soil are deeply traditionalist, and the odds are good that many minorâand at least one majorâwould side with the rebels).
The last resort Catch 22.
The United States has an enormous stockpile of munitions and explosives, up to and including a massive number of nuclear warheads. But they cannot use any of this in this Civil War. The establishment has to play a game of âweâre the good guysâ with the rest of the world while this is all taking place. There will be lines they cannot cross, because to do so would elevate the issue from being an internal matter to an international one. The moment they throw an ICBM at Ohio or drop a nuke on Austin, Texas, it stops being a civil war and becomes an international relief effort where the other militaries of the other first world nations come to save the American people from their own out-of-control and tyrannical government. The rebellion, meanwhile, is not nearly so limited re: the hypothetical nuclear submarine captain. The rebels could threatenâwithout bluffingâto nuke Washington DC, but the establishment has no equivalent threat they could return.
===== COMMENT ======
Former red team planner for the government here. If there was a revolution in the US, the rest of the world would get involved, fast. Depending on the type of uprising, there is a large chance that it would not be a quick affair. It would be brutal, it would be bloody, and the US government could start a global scale war. Here are the top ten issues that came up.
1) The US power grid can be taken down by a series of âsurgical strikesâ with the exception of the Texas grid. By surgical strikes, I mean a few marksmen (US army-tier Marksmenâthe minimum requirement) hitting certain spots on the grid would fuck a lot of the military and government because they need the grid more than Bubba and his friends do. Additionally, while all government agencies have backup generators, they will be hard pressed dealing with the resultant looting and other madness that would come with power outages. This would effectively create another front for the military. It would also turn the people against the government more quickly and paralyze the governmentâs propaganda machine. Worse stillâthe key points of the US power grid are publicly obtainable information, and not only are the points too many to be effectively guarded, they are not guarded anyway.
2) The estimated desertion rate in case of a civil war is 75% in the case of a left-wing president. 50% of that would be assumed to immediately betray the president. The remaining (treasonous) military would be fighting its own. Yet another front created in the war. Additionally, there is an assumed 25-50% desertion or outright betrayal rate in three letter government agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, ATC, TSA, etc.). Additionally, it is assumed that 5% of the initial 50% betrayers would stay in their job and become saboteurs. 10% of that 50% would contain key information that would be of critical danger to the US government. Of that 10%, 1% would be able to deliver that information to the USâ foreign enemies. What you should get from this is that the second the United States government declares war on its own is the second it ceases to exist as the state we know it.
3) âTea baggers,â âright-wing extremists,â and âoath keepersâ which are considered untrained racists who arenât âgood with a gunâ often are A) veterans who now have more time to have fun at the range, sometimes more than some Army units or Marine units. In addition to previous military training, B) often camp and do other outdoor activitiesâmore than many in the military do, as the focus has gone away from field exercises, and C) often have better equipmentâoutside of armor and heavy weaponsâthan the military. However, C) is kind of irrelevant because many of the places in which these people could hide would make the kind of war the US fights with the equipment they use pointless.
4) Outside influence is a huge problem. Russia has already stated they would back a Texas separatist movement, and right now we already have enough problem keeping Islam in check. The second the US has to fight in a âcivil warâ is the second it becomes a proxy war between NATO and whoever wants to mess with America. While America has amazing nuclear and air defense, if it comes to a civil war you have to assume that in a best cast scenario the US military is going to be operating at 50% capacity at best. Shit would go down. Hard. And fast. And if Russiaâspoiler alert: one of the best militaries in the world at fighting in an urban environmentâsent trainers and helpers to rebels, you can reliably bet that they would also possibly deliver weapons to them. So instead of fighting âTimmy TeaBagger,â you are fighting âTimmy TeaBagger who is buddies with Vlad.â
5) A civil war is not just the US versus the rebels. There will be looting. There will be rioting. Cities will burn. The National Guard cannot fight both the rebels and rioters in a city that would also cut off their supplies. Additionally, if you donât think that the rebels will send in instigators into the citiesâor worse, stand alone actors (A Lone Wolf on steroids. Think Timothy McVeigh, but instead of one van they have a whole fleet of them. A good movie example would be Bane)âyou would be mistaken. If the US government cannot even help its own people, why would its own people support the remaining (treasonous) military? Worse yet, if someone emptied out prisons (There are more prisoners in the US than there are people in the entire Chinese Army), you would have more crime than the police could ever handle.
6) Logistics and infrastructure in the US are crumbling and failing. Any war fought against a rebellion in the US would be a logistical nightmare, even before the rebels started going full Al-Qaida and putting IEDs in the road. A retired general who was contracting with us on the team said, âThe only thing holding together the USâ infrastructure is duct tape and the will of the Department of Transportation. And often enough, there isn’t enough duct tape.â Your most loyal cities to the US government, as we polled, are also the most logistically easy to cut off. NYC? San Fran? L.A.? D.C.? Baltimore? Most of them require crossing water to enter, from certain directions. Most of them have critical airports. Some of them have critical ocean ports. If anything happened to just TWO of the cities on the list, it would create a logistical clusterfuck.
7) Your âJohnny Rebâ and âTimmy TeaBaggerâ states (i.e., âredâ states) all have something most of your âoh so progressive,â âArenât we so European,â âOh my god, we are just like Sweden,â blue states donât. Blues are mainly consumer states. Reds are producer states. Urban areas donât have farms. The second that shit goes down, realize a lot of those blue areas are likely to starve. In a civil war scenario, we predicted that at least 10,000 people would die of starvation if the war was not finished in a year. The numbers get worse after that. Or better, rather, for the country after the war.
8) The US has way too many choke points, and the government forces would often be on the wrong side of them. This ties into the logistical nightmare, but it also has to do with an odd phenomena. Liberals like to live near the ocean. Many of the dividers of the country, like the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, Appalachia, the Missouri River (fun fact: the biggest choke point for the US government is in Missouri) are red state areas. Sure, air travel is a thing, but a majority of the US government’s needs would have to travel by ground. Even still, many of the major airports are outside of the city. Of course, the US would use military base air fields, but if civil war did break out⦠which bases would be safe? Which ones would have fallen to the deserters?
9) PR Nightmare. Every rebel killed on CNN would be spun as âthe US government killed X Civilians today in a strikeâ on foreign news and pirate media not owned by the government. That isâas pointed out earlierâif the US media could even function in a civil war or uprising. Your ârebel scumâ know that the main thing that holds together the USânay life in the US as we know itâis the 24 hour news cycle and the media. The second it’s gone, you are going to have urban anarchy. If you are from America, can you imagine a day without TV, newspaper, or Internet? Your average urban youth canât. If you donât think that isnât going to cause rioting, you must have a real high regard for how much restraint they have. Assume in a civil war that your ability to talk to the people is compromised. Also assume that in the case of a civil war that rebels may know how to monitor conversations like the US does, as there are manuals online on how to do so.
10) This one is either 1 or 10, depending on who is asked. The US will never nuke its own. The second it does, they have lost the civil war and other countries will come to âliberateâ the US from its own ârepressive regime.â Additionally, if any general, minuteman, nuke tech, or nuke sub captain decided to side with the rebellion, the US government is immediately SOL.
In short: The second that a âcivilian uprisingâ or âextremist group terrorist attackâ turns into âcivil warâ is the second the US loses. As a result, you will never see a civil war. You will see Waco, you will see Bundy Ranch, you will see all sorts of militant group confrontations and maybe even some skirmishes. But the US government fears its own people way the fuck too much to ever start a civil war.
As an American, I want all other Americans here to remember this. The government is against you, almost openly now, but they also know that they cannot win if it comes to open war. We have a trump card they cannot match. If it comes to a fight, THEY WILL LOSE, so there are elements in the establishment who will do absolutely everything in their power to prevent it from coming to that. The US Government is not in support of its people, and the people are not in support of the government.
It is within the means of certain interests to start World War III simply as a distraction to avoid an American Civil War, because, by their reckoning, it is better to ruin other âlesserâ nations like Syria and spill the blood of patriots than lose their own grip on power. ***********YOU HEARD RIGHT. WORLD WAR III ITSELF COULD BE A DELIBERATE FALSE FLAG TO PREVENT A POWER CHANGE IN AMERICA. REMEMBER THIS.***********
Source date (UTC): 2018-06-30 21:23:37 UTC
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THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN By Anon. The United States Governm
THERE IS ZERO CHANCE THE GOVERNMENT WOULD WIN
By Anon.
The United States Government has extensively studied the concept of second American Civil War (along the assumption that it will be left versus right. HMM. I WONDER WHY THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY DO THAT.)
Their conclusion is as follows: They don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of winning. The moment civil war is declared, the government loses. No scenario or outcome ends in their success. Period. It’s just a matter of how long it takes.
A longer analysis will follow, but here are the salient points.
30% of the American population will actively revolt.
This alone is enormous and damning. Historically, you only need 10% of the population to actively participate in a rebellion to successfully overthrow the establishment: We only had 15% of the population actively attempting to throw out the British during the Revolutionary War; roughly 70% of what remained was neutral and simply stood by. By contrast, 30% of Americans in modern America would support a revolution to stop their own government if it happened tomorrow That’s how discontent the people are and how much the people don’t support the government.
The government would need infrastructure more than rebels would.
Already working with significant handicaps, the establishment would need electricity, access to the Internet, bridges, and airports to coordinate any active campaign against the rebellion. By contrast, the rebellion can work in the dark. Considering how easy it would be to sabotage US infrastructure, one of the first things the rebellion would do is collapse bridges, destroy, or seize power plants, and cover the Interstate in IEDs. This is relatively simple to accomplish, and it would inflict enormous damage on the establishment’s ability to restore order. It would also cost an enormous amount of time and effort to fix any sabotage, because the establishment would need to provide military protection to any workers attempting to rebuild, which is a drain their active fighting personnel resources that they could not afford.
Taking America in a land war is almost impossible.
The United States is absolutely full of natural terrain chokepoints, making marching an army across it against armed resistance almost impossible, and it is large enough that no sustained air campaign would be possible. The Japanese Admiralty realized this themselves during WWII, which is why many of them were against attempting to invade. Also, by an interesting coincidence, most of those chokepoints are in hard conservative states, where the resistance would be strongest. The government would lack the ability to reclaim its own land by force, especially when the previous point about infrastructure is taken into account. President Lincoln, on the matter of potential European involvement in the first American Civil War, stated, “All the armies of Europe with a Bonaparte as a commander, could not take a drink from the Ohio.”
A significant majority–between 55 and 70%–of the military would defect to the side of the citizens.
The problem with suppressing the people with a military, that literature and fantasy tend to overlook or ignore, is that the military is the people, too. In order to get any military to fight their own, you first have to convince them that it is necessary to do so–that it is justified. The Communists also ran into this problem, but they overcame it with psychological conditioning and creating a dog-eat-dog atmosphere within the military. The American government having actively recruited people who are patriotic, practical, brave, who have civilian families, and having reinforced those values throughout their training process, lacks the ability to convince the majority of their fighting force to engage against their own people. The moment a civil war breaks out, over half of the American military will defect to the rebel side. They will bring military gear with them and, more dangerous, military training. lt only takes one Navy Seal or Army Ranger to potentially train hundreds of civilians into a dangerous resistance force. They’ve done it before, in other nations. You can be damn sure they can do it on their own home turf.
But it gets better.
At least 10% of the people who defect to the civilian side would not do so openly, and they would not abandon their posts.
The moment a civil war starts, not only does America lose over half its military to the cause, but their own command structure will suddenly be infested with moles, plants, and “traitors.” There would be almost no way of knowing who is actually on their side and who is supporting the uprising. Worse yet, if one of those people happens to be the captain of one of the nuclear submarines on standby in dark water, the civil war is already lost before it even gets started.
Russia has already publicly stated that it will support any rebellion in the United States against the established government and will send troops and aid to support the resistance. This is pretty self-explanatory. The last thing the government would need during a civil war is Russia breathing down its neck, but they would get exactly that. To supplement two-thirds of their own military leaving and civilians being trained by military elites, Spetsnaz would drop in and the resistance would get armor and air support from the only other nation on the planet that stands a decent chance of fighting us openly and winning.
The media fearmongers because it’s profitable.
The media, for all of its paid shillery, would give coverage of everything the resistance does because it is immensely profitable for them to do so. It would be guaranteed views. The only response the establishment would have would be to either allow it or order a total media blackout on the rebellion. Either way they lose, because both outcomes would awaken hundreds of thousands–if not millions–of people. We can only win on the media arena, and they can only lose. It’s merely a matter of what they think will minimize their losses.
American civilians are armed and dangerous.
In spite of all of the illegal attempts from the political left to disarm the American people, there are approximately 89 guns for every 100 Americans. Furthermore, we are one of the top three arms manufacturers on the planet (the others being Russia and France). The establishment would be in trouble even if their opponents were unarmed, but any rebellion of the people in America is, by definition, an armed one. They could be easily armed further by stealing weapons or even outright being given them by sympathetic interests (unsurprisingly, an overwhelming number of weapons manufacturers on American soil are deeply traditionalist, and the odds are good that many minor–and at least one major–would side with the rebels).
The last resort Catch 22.
The United States has an enormous stockpile of munitions and explosives, up to and including a massive number of nuclear warheads. But they cannot use any of this in this Civil War. The establishment has to play a game of “we’re the good guys” with the rest of the world while this is all taking place. There will be lines they cannot cross, because to do so would elevate the issue from being an internal matter to an international one. The moment they throw an ICBM at Ohio or drop a nuke on Austin, Texas, it stops being a civil war and becomes an international relief effort where the other militaries of the other first world nations come to save the American people from their own out-of-control and tyrannical government. The rebellion, meanwhile, is not nearly so limited re: the hypothetical nuclear submarine captain. The rebels could threaten–without bluffing–to nuke Washington DC, but the establishment has no equivalent threat they could return.
===== COMMENT ======
Former red team planner for the government here. If there was a revolution in the US, the rest of the world would get involved, fast. Depending on the type of uprising, there is a large chance that it would not be a quick affair. It would be brutal, it would be bloody, and the US government could start a global scale war. Here are the top ten issues that came up.
1) The US power grid can be taken down by a series of “surgical strikes” with the exception of the Texas grid. By surgical strikes, I mean a few marksmen (US army-tier Marksmen–the minimum requirement) hitting certain spots on the grid would fuck a lot of the military and government because they need the grid more than Bubba and his friends do. Additionally, while all government agencies have backup generators, they will be hard pressed dealing with the resultant looting and other madness that would come with power outages. This would effectively create another front for the military. It would also turn the people against the government more quickly and paralyze the government’s propaganda machine. Worse still–the key points of the US power grid are publicly obtainable information, and not only are the points too many to be effectively guarded, they are not guarded anyway.
2) The estimated desertion rate in case of a civil war is 75% in the case of a left-wing president. 50% of that would be assumed to immediately betray the president. The remaining (treasonous) military would be fighting its own. Yet another front created in the war. Additionally, there is an assumed 25-50% desertion or outright betrayal rate in three letter government agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, ATC, TSA, etc.). Additionally, it is assumed that 5% of the initial 50% betrayers would stay in their job and become saboteurs. 10% of that 50% would contain key information that would be of critical danger to the US government. Of that 10%, 1% would be able to deliver that information to the US’ foreign enemies. What you should get from this is that the second the United States government declares war on its own is the second it ceases to exist as the state we know it.
3) “Tea baggers,” “right-wing extremists,” and “oath keepers” which are considered untrained racists who aren’t “good with a gun” often are A) veterans who now have more time to have fun at the range, sometimes more than some Army units or Marine units. In addition to previous military training, B) often camp and do other outdoor activities–more than many in the military do, as the focus has gone away from field exercises, and C) often have better equipment–outside of armor and heavy weapons–than the military. However, C) is kind of irrelevant because many of the places in which these people could hide would make the kind of war the US fights with the equipment they use pointless.
4) Outside influence is a huge problem. Russia has already stated they would back a Texas separatist movement, and right now we already have enough problem keeping Islam in check. The second the US has to fight in a “civil war” is the second it becomes a proxy war between NATO and whoever wants to mess with America. While America has amazing nuclear and air defense, if it comes to a civil war you have to assume that in a best cast scenario the US military is going to be operating at 50% capacity at best. Shit would go down. Hard. And fast. And if Russia–spoiler alert: one of the best militaries in the world at fighting in an urban environment–sent trainers and helpers to rebels, you can reliably bet that they would also possibly deliver weapons to them. So instead of fighting “Timmy TeaBagger,” you are fighting “Timmy TeaBagger who is buddies with Vlad.”
5) A civil war is not just the US versus the rebels. There will be looting. There will be rioting. Cities will burn. The National Guard cannot fight both the rebels and rioters in a city that would also cut off their supplies. Additionally, if you don’t think that the rebels will send in instigators into the cities–or worse, stand alone actors (A Lone Wolf on steroids. Think Timothy McVeigh, but instead of one van they have a whole fleet of them. A good movie example would be Bane)–you would be mistaken. If the US government cannot even help its own people, why would its own people support the remaining (treasonous) military? Worse yet, if someone emptied out prisons (There are more prisoners in the US than there are people in the entire Chinese Army), you would have more crime than the police could ever handle.
6) Logistics and infrastructure in the US are crumbling and failing. Any war fought against a rebellion in the US would be a logistical nightmare, even before the rebels started going full Al-Qaida and putting IEDs in the road. A retired general who was contracting with us on the team said, “The only thing holding together the US’ infrastructure is duct tape and the will of the Department of Transportation. And often enough, there isn’t enough duct tape.” Your most loyal cities to the US government, as we polled, are also the most logistically easy to cut off. NYC? San Fran? L.A.? D.C.? Baltimore? Most of them require crossing water to enter, from certain directions. Most of them have critical airports. Some of them have critical ocean ports. If anything happened to just TWO of the cities on the list, it would create a logistical clusterfuck.
7) Your “Johnny Reb” and “Timmy TeaBagger” states (i.e., “red” states) all have something most of your “oh so progressive,” “Aren’t we so European,” “Oh my god, we are just like Sweden,” blue states don’t. Blues are mainly consumer states. Reds are producer states. Urban areas don’t have farms. The second that shit goes down, realize a lot of those blue areas are likely to starve. In a civil war scenario, we predicted that at least 10,000 people would die of starvation if the war was not finished in a year. The numbers get worse after that. Or better, rather, for the country after the war.
8) The US has way too many choke points, and the government forces would often be on the wrong side of them. This ties into the logistical nightmare, but it also has to do with an odd phenomena. Liberals like to live near the ocean. Many of the dividers of the country, like the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi River, Appalachia, the Missouri River (fun fact: the biggest choke point for the US government is in Missouri) are red state areas. Sure, air travel is a thing, but a majority of the US government’s needs would have to travel by ground. Even still, many of the major airports are outside of the city. Of course, the US would use military base air fields, but if civil war did break out… which bases would be safe? Which ones would have fallen to the deserters?
9) PR Nightmare. Every rebel killed on CNN would be spun as “the US government killed X Civilians today in a strike” on foreign news and pirate media not owned by the government. That is–as pointed out earlier–if the US media could even function in a civil war or uprising. Your “rebel scum” know that the main thing that holds together the US–nay life in the US as we know it–is the 24 hour news cycle and the media. The second it’s gone, you are going to have urban anarchy. If you are from America, can you imagine a day without TV, newspaper, or Internet? Your average urban youth can’t. If you don’t think that isn’t going to cause rioting, you must have a real high regard for how much restraint they have. Assume in a civil war that your ability to talk to the people is compromised. Also assume that in the case of a civil war that rebels may know how to monitor conversations like the US does, as there are manuals online on how to do so.
10) This one is either 1 or 10, depending on who is asked. The US will never nuke its own. The second it does, they have lost the civil war and other countries will come to “liberate” the US from its own “repressive regime.” Additionally, if any general, minuteman, nuke tech, or nuke sub captain decided to side with the rebellion, the US government is immediately SOL.
In short: The second that a “civilian uprising” or “extremist group terrorist attack” turns into “civil war” is the second the US loses. As a result, you will never see a civil war. You will see Waco, you will see Bundy Ranch, you will see all sorts of militant group confrontations and maybe even some skirmishes. But the US government fears its own people way the fuck too much to ever start a civil war.
As an American, I want all other Americans here to remember this. The government is against you, almost openly now, but they also know that they cannot win if it comes to open war. We have a trump card they cannot match. If it comes to a fight, THEY WILL LOSE, so there are elements in the establishment who will do absolutely everything in their power to prevent it from coming to that. The US Government is not in support of its people, and the people are not in support of the government.
It is within the means of certain interests to start World War III simply as a distraction to avoid an American Civil War, because, by their reckoning, it is better to ruin other “lesser” nations like Syria and spill the blood of patriots than lose their own grip on power. ***********YOU HEARD RIGHT. WORLD WAR III ITSELF COULD BE A DELIBERATE FALSE FLAG TO PREVENT A POWER CHANGE IN AMERICA. REMEMBER THIS.***********
Source date (UTC): 2018-06-30 17:23:00 UTC
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The Third Version of Man
THE THIRD VERSION OF MAN (Nietzsche in Anglo Scientific Language) By Daniel Gurpide Jul 31, 2017 8:27pm –“My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.”–Friedrich Nietzsche THE THIRD VERSION Nietzsche’s message was one of evolutionary change, of man’s progress toward full consciousness. He taught that the whole value and meaning of a man’s life lies in his participation in this progress – in his contribution to it. Man should not be merely himself and conform to his own ‘nature’. He should still seek to give himself a ‘super-nature,’ to acquire a superhumanity: that superhumanity that Judeo-Christian monotheism’s vocation is to prevent him acquiring. The idea of attaining superior consciousness is one of breeding upwards to the superman. It is furthermore the idea of the self-determined being: self-ordained to take integral charge both of the world and of himself, and to give them a new meaning, a new destiny. The discipline of philosophical anthropology has coined the term Third Man to denote this concept. [CD: the aristocracy: a search for agency: transcendence. To leave the animal man behind. Yet, this is the feminine and abrahamic strategy: “Do not leave us behind, we will drag you down.”] FIRST VERSION Seen in this light, the First Man would be identified with the evolutionary process leading to the development of the characteristics that distinguish hominids from other primates: hominisation. His appearance would coincide with the invention of language, the development of hunter-gatherer bands and the use of magical shamanism, which would allow him to mimic the evolutionary strategies at work in the surrounding environment – and in this way to compensate for the instinctual deficiencies caused by his ethological plasticity. SECOND VERSION Several hundred thousand years on, sometime after the last glaciation, there would emerge for the first time what can be described as the Second Man. He is the inventor of the Neolithic Revolution, of agriculture, and consequently of sedentariness and the first human demographic explosion; the founder of cities and urban life, of politics, religion, the division of labour, and the development of so-called ‘pyric technology’ (implying energy production technologies based on combustion: wood, coal, oil, etc). It is the world of the Spenglerian Hochkulturen – ‘High Cultures’ or civilisations. Depending on the way the Second Man reacted to the challenges of that time, one might then distinguish between: 1. Societies that refused or ignored any sort of historical transformation, thus heading more or less deliberately towards irrelevance and extinction. Examples might include the Australian aborigines and the non-Negroid native populations of sub-Sahara Africa (Pygmies, Khoisan). 2. Cold societies that tried to petrify early achievements in the form of endless repetition. As with the famous Aranda of Levi-Strauss, ‘faithful to their tradition’, such cold societies have become fossils of their ancestors’ history. They no longer evolve except as result of external and contingent ‘events,’ under the pressure of external factors. They are at the mercy of any environmental variation that is not previewed in their programme. In brief, they cannot survive except under the condition of not meeting again the train of history from which they alighted. This is the case of most sub-Saharan and Amazonian cultures: they became the ‘object of history’ – of other cultures’ history – once they came into contact with them. 3. Tepid societies that were active but unwilling ‘preys of history,’ such as the Far Eastern, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and pre-Columbian civilisations (*). The classic example is Japan, with a history marked by external influences which were simultaneously welcomed, rejected, and originally transfigures into what finally became Japanese culture – from the introduction of Buddhism in classical times to the Meiji Restoration after the end of the Shogunate. And finally, 4. Hot societies: these became ‘subjects’ or ‘agents’ of history. Generated by the Indo-European Revolution, they took full charge of the historical dimension of man and have come to express its heroic and tragic character with a project of collective destiny that was consciously assumed. In this broad picture, a final point should be made regarding the particular role played by the birth in the Middle East of an historical tendency – represented mythically by the separation of Abraham and the founding of Israel, and prolonged in a complex way by the other monotheistic religions. Jewish-Christian monotheism introduces a split within post-Neolithic society: while remaining immersed in history, it rejects the effects of the Neolithic Revolution, not this time from a practical standpoint – like cold societies – but from a moral standpoint. It finds driving force in the promise of an eschatological ‘end of history,’ and in constant ‘demystification’ of history’s creations – in particular through reversal of the concept of the divine. From instrument and projection of human creativity, and pride in the process through which the Second Man becomes master of himself and of the world, the divine turns into a ‘transcendent’ condemnation and relativisation of human adventure. The religion of the Bible’s essential effect – if not its express intention – amounted to obstructing man’s capability to fully realise the powers of freedom and creative autonomy arising from humanisation itself, powers that were historically reinforced by the Neolithic Revolution and the development of great cultures. Precisely at the time the Indo-European revolution attained its maximum power and expansion, this messianic tendency – based on the moral rejection of history and civilisation – infiltrated the Roman world and reached a point of synthesis through the so-called ‘Constantinian compromise’, giving birth to ‘the West’. Step by step, it repressed the original European colective unconscious and corrupted the European culture of the time, transforming it into something hybrid. From the two souls living in Europe’s chest since that moment, the Jewish-Christian is evidently that which today, in its secular and more radical form, celebrates global hegemony. (*) It is difficult to disentangle the twisted skein of contacts, exchanges, and influences that tepid cultures originally received from without. Some have hypothesised a role of primer for Indo-European influences and groups by way of imitation, competition, or re-elaboration. For example, Indo-Aryan influences on Chinese culture, and through the latter on Japan; or the complex pattern of contacts between Egypt and Mesopotamia on the one hand and, on the other, the different waves of invaders that from Central Europe on several occasions spilled into over the Near East. More uncertain are those hypotheses that suggest a connection of this type with the pre-Columbian empires. There are also hypotheses, more scientific in this case, about the existence of a ‘hyperborean’ Indo-European civilisation which had influences on an almost planetary scale. DG
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The Third Version of Man
THE THIRD VERSION OF MAN (Nietzsche in Anglo Scientific Language) By Daniel Gurpide Jul 31, 2017 8:27pm –“My humanity is a constant self-overcoming.”–Friedrich Nietzsche THE THIRD VERSION Nietzsche’s message was one of evolutionary change, of man’s progress toward full consciousness. He taught that the whole value and meaning of a man’s life lies in his participation in this progress – in his contribution to it. Man should not be merely himself and conform to his own ‘nature’. He should still seek to give himself a ‘super-nature,’ to acquire a superhumanity: that superhumanity that Judeo-Christian monotheism’s vocation is to prevent him acquiring. The idea of attaining superior consciousness is one of breeding upwards to the superman. It is furthermore the idea of the self-determined being: self-ordained to take integral charge both of the world and of himself, and to give them a new meaning, a new destiny. The discipline of philosophical anthropology has coined the term Third Man to denote this concept. [CD: the aristocracy: a search for agency: transcendence. To leave the animal man behind. Yet, this is the feminine and abrahamic strategy: “Do not leave us behind, we will drag you down.”] FIRST VERSION Seen in this light, the First Man would be identified with the evolutionary process leading to the development of the characteristics that distinguish hominids from other primates: hominisation. His appearance would coincide with the invention of language, the development of hunter-gatherer bands and the use of magical shamanism, which would allow him to mimic the evolutionary strategies at work in the surrounding environment – and in this way to compensate for the instinctual deficiencies caused by his ethological plasticity. SECOND VERSION Several hundred thousand years on, sometime after the last glaciation, there would emerge for the first time what can be described as the Second Man. He is the inventor of the Neolithic Revolution, of agriculture, and consequently of sedentariness and the first human demographic explosion; the founder of cities and urban life, of politics, religion, the division of labour, and the development of so-called ‘pyric technology’ (implying energy production technologies based on combustion: wood, coal, oil, etc). It is the world of the Spenglerian Hochkulturen – ‘High Cultures’ or civilisations. Depending on the way the Second Man reacted to the challenges of that time, one might then distinguish between: 1. Societies that refused or ignored any sort of historical transformation, thus heading more or less deliberately towards irrelevance and extinction. Examples might include the Australian aborigines and the non-Negroid native populations of sub-Sahara Africa (Pygmies, Khoisan). 2. Cold societies that tried to petrify early achievements in the form of endless repetition. As with the famous Aranda of Levi-Strauss, ‘faithful to their tradition’, such cold societies have become fossils of their ancestors’ history. They no longer evolve except as result of external and contingent ‘events,’ under the pressure of external factors. They are at the mercy of any environmental variation that is not previewed in their programme. In brief, they cannot survive except under the condition of not meeting again the train of history from which they alighted. This is the case of most sub-Saharan and Amazonian cultures: they became the ‘object of history’ – of other cultures’ history – once they came into contact with them. 3. Tepid societies that were active but unwilling ‘preys of history,’ such as the Far Eastern, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and pre-Columbian civilisations (*). The classic example is Japan, with a history marked by external influences which were simultaneously welcomed, rejected, and originally transfigures into what finally became Japanese culture – from the introduction of Buddhism in classical times to the Meiji Restoration after the end of the Shogunate. And finally, 4. Hot societies: these became ‘subjects’ or ‘agents’ of history. Generated by the Indo-European Revolution, they took full charge of the historical dimension of man and have come to express its heroic and tragic character with a project of collective destiny that was consciously assumed. In this broad picture, a final point should be made regarding the particular role played by the birth in the Middle East of an historical tendency – represented mythically by the separation of Abraham and the founding of Israel, and prolonged in a complex way by the other monotheistic religions. Jewish-Christian monotheism introduces a split within post-Neolithic society: while remaining immersed in history, it rejects the effects of the Neolithic Revolution, not this time from a practical standpoint – like cold societies – but from a moral standpoint. It finds driving force in the promise of an eschatological ‘end of history,’ and in constant ‘demystification’ of history’s creations – in particular through reversal of the concept of the divine. From instrument and projection of human creativity, and pride in the process through which the Second Man becomes master of himself and of the world, the divine turns into a ‘transcendent’ condemnation and relativisation of human adventure. The religion of the Bible’s essential effect – if not its express intention – amounted to obstructing man’s capability to fully realise the powers of freedom and creative autonomy arising from humanisation itself, powers that were historically reinforced by the Neolithic Revolution and the development of great cultures. Precisely at the time the Indo-European revolution attained its maximum power and expansion, this messianic tendency – based on the moral rejection of history and civilisation – infiltrated the Roman world and reached a point of synthesis through the so-called ‘Constantinian compromise’, giving birth to ‘the West’. Step by step, it repressed the original European colective unconscious and corrupted the European culture of the time, transforming it into something hybrid. From the two souls living in Europe’s chest since that moment, the Jewish-Christian is evidently that which today, in its secular and more radical form, celebrates global hegemony. (*) It is difficult to disentangle the twisted skein of contacts, exchanges, and influences that tepid cultures originally received from without. Some have hypothesised a role of primer for Indo-European influences and groups by way of imitation, competition, or re-elaboration. For example, Indo-Aryan influences on Chinese culture, and through the latter on Japan; or the complex pattern of contacts between Egypt and Mesopotamia on the one hand and, on the other, the different waves of invaders that from Central Europe on several occasions spilled into over the Near East. More uncertain are those hypotheses that suggest a connection of this type with the pre-Columbian empires. There are also hypotheses, more scientific in this case, about the existence of a ‘hyperborean’ Indo-European civilisation which had influences on an almost planetary scale. DG