The Briefing Room
General Category => Editorial/Opinion/Blogs => Topic started by: mystery-ak on March 16, 2023, 02:03:37 pm
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Are We the Byzantines? › American Greatness
The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become. Will Americans?
5–7 minutes
When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.
Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.
Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.
Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flame throwers—an ancient precursor to napalm.
The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior thousand years of Roman jurisprudence.
Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.
more
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/15/are-we-the-byzantines/
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It kinda looks like it. **nononono*
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Good article. I guess we are declining like Rome, just not the one we generally think of.
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Is VDH attempting to walk a line here? "Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies." He whiffed on this statement as far as I'm concerned.
I "hate" the left because they are the enemy...they have practically nothing in common with me and work against all that I believe and hold dear.
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Is VDH attempting to walk a line here? "Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies." He whiffed on this statement as far as I'm concerned.
I "hate" the left because they are the enemy...they have practically nothing in common with me and work against all that I believe and hold dear.
@SZonian
I think you may be nitpicking just a bit, because (as he always does) VDH makes a very strong allegorical case. In part:
Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy...
Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered. The 14th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.
But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.
The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.
They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.
They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.
Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.
The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naïve. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.
That in fact sounds a lot like us, today.