Theme: Sovereignty

CHOKED WITH NEWS (DEPENDENCE) AND STARVED OF HISTORY(SOVEREIGNTY)

–“We are choked with news, and starved of history. We know a thousand items about the day or yesterday, we learn the events and troubles and heartbreaks of a hundred peoples, the policies and pretensions of a dozen capitals, the victories and defeats of causes, armies, athletic teams. But how, without history, can we understand these events, discriminate their significance, sift out the large from the small, see the basic currents underlying surface movements and changes, and foresee the result sufficiently to guard against fatal error or the souring of unreasonable hopes?

May I give you a few examples of how history illuminates the present? After the wars of Caesar and Pompey in the last century before Christ, Rome emerged the only strong power in the white man’s world. Through that unchallenged supremacy she was able to give two centuries of peace to her vast realm, a Roman Empire stretching from Scotland to the Euphrates, from Gibraltar to the Caucasus. This was the famous Pax Romana; or Roman Peace – the greatest achievement in the history of statesmanship. Anyone knowing the history of Rome could have foreseen – some of us definitely predicted – that international affairs after this war would be more unstable, less pacific, than after the First World War, for the obvious reason that from this war two rival powers were emerging – the English-speaking powers supreme on the seas, and the power of Russia supreme on the European continent; two powers so dangerously balanced, and in such irritating contact on a dozen frontiers, that peace would be more difficult to organize than ever before. Even the statesmanship of an Augustus would hesitate to promise a Shangri-La of international accord in this jungle of conflicting interests and distrustful power.

Or consider the origin of the great peoples and civilizations of history; how nearly every one of them began with the slow mixture of varied racial stocks entering from any direction into some conquered or inviting region, mixing their blood in marriage or otherwise, gradually producing a homogeneous people, and thereby creating, so to speak, the biological basis of a new civilization. So the Egyptians were formed of Ethiopians, Lybians, Arabs, Syrians, Mesopotamians; so the ancient Hebrews were the composite of their own various stocks, and of Canaanites, Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, Hittites, and a dozen other peoples that swirled around the Euphrates, the Jordan, and the Orontes. It is not clear, in the perspective, that we Americans are in the stage of racial mixture, that we are not caught in the downward flow of Europe’s civilization, and that – Spengler to the contrary notwithstanding – our future lies before us? But that is an excellent place for a future to be.

Or consider the revolutions that have taken place in history, in the routes of trade, and see what a light they shed upon out time. Most civilizations and cities rise along trade routes. First along rivers, for these are the natural , easiest routes of trade; so great cultures rose along the Nile, the Tigris, the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Tiber, Rhone, Loire, Seine, Thames, Elbe, Oder, Vistula, Dnieper, Danube, Volga, Don. Then, as hearts grew bolder and ships grew large, men sailed into the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and squatted noisily along their shores, as Plato said, “like frogs croaking on the edge of a pond.” What made Greece was the perception of the early Greeks, or Achaeans, that if they could conquer Troy they would control the Dardanelles or Hellespont, and be able to send their merchant vessels without toll or hindrance through the Aegean into the Black Sea, and down the rivers of the Caucasus into Central Asia; in this way they would possess a trade route to Asia far cheaper and safer than the land route of the caravans that bound Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia over weary routes of mountain and desert infested with brigands. That dream of commercial power, and not Helen’s fair face, “launched a thousand ships” on Ilium, and brought Hector and Priam to Achille’s feet. Persia, part of the land route, challenged the victorious Greeks; and note how both Darius in 490, and Xerxes in 480 B.C., in their wars against Greece, moved first to take possession of the Dardanelles – just as a British fleet hovers there now, clinging to strategic Greece, and fearful that the Straits may suddenly be pounced upon by Russian armies lying a few leagues inland in Bulgaria. When Greece defeated Persia at Marathon and Salamis, she was left in control of the eastern Mediterranean and its trade; she blossomed like a flower, while the river cultures, locked to the land, decayed; and for two thousand years the Mediterranean was the home of the white man’s highest civilization.

Why did the Mediterranean cease, with Michelangelo, about 1560, to dominate the commerce and politics of the world? Because Columbus had stumbled upon America, and had unwittingly opened new routes of trade, and new sources of wealth. Soon the Atlantic nations rose to power – Spain, Portugal, France, England, Holland; each prospered on the exploitation of colonies in America and Asia overseas; each financed in this way its magnificent Renaissance; while Italy, mistress of civilization for fifteen centuries, almost disappeared from history.”—