The History Chap
Published Nov 16, 2023Britain’s Victorious Jungle War Against the Communists
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February 22, 2024
The Malayan Emergency – Britain’s Jungle War v Communists
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February 21, 2024
“College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found”
Johann Kurtz believes the modern university’s survival despite its increasingly irrational and counterproductive actions can be explained as the last modern example of an initiation ritual:
Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.
Our understanding of the college system is incomplete. Until we correct this, we won’t be able to fix or replace the system.
First, consider a paradox: college attendance remains near all-time highs [Link], yet the majority of Americans no longer believe it is worth the cost [Link].
The college system seems irrationally resistant to declining value. We must therefore ask: is there an important non-rational reason for college attendance which we have failed to acknowledge?
I believe the answer is “Yes”. College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found.
Our culture is historically anomalous in lacking explicit initiation rituals.
Mircea Eliade, the great religious historian of the 20th-century, defined initiation rituals as “a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated“.
In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.
— Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth
In Europe, fully expressed initiation rituals were common until the end of the Middle Ages, and in the wider world, until the end of the First World War. Now, they only persist in the West in the sacramental practices of devout Christians (baptism, confirmation, and so forth).
Once, however, these practices were of tremendous importance to us, as Eliade makes clear:
To gain the right to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their works …
In the absence of local community rituals, the universities are a natural site for their replacement. These have always been religious sites, although the nature and expression of this religion has transmuted over time.
H/T to Bruce Gudmundsson at Extra Muros for the link and his additional comments:
This hypothesis accords with the argument, made often in this blog, that education and schooling are two very different things. At the same time, it suggests that one of the definitive purposes of Extra Muros, the encouragement of young people to eschew the conventional college experience in favor of a combination of practical pursuits and systematic self-tuition, may be a fool’s errand. After all, if four (or five or six) years of drinking second-rate beer from red plastic cups does for the office-bound folk of North America what fear-filled rites of passage do for members of the bone-in-the-nose set, then I might well be sailing against the wind.
Upon second thought, I find hope in the possibility that the parasite (or, to be more precise, the cancer) promoted by d’Angelo, Kendi, and company will soon deal the coup de grâce to its mortally-wounded host.
The coming-of-age ordeals of warrior tribes demand that boys who would be men prove possession of such martial virtues as courage and self-command. The rites-of-passage of the modern middle classes, however, require that postulants demonstrate a mixture of conformity, conscientiousness, and, to a diminishing degree, intelligence. (Readers familiar with the oeuvre of economist Bryan Caplan will recognize the source of this troika. However, it is worth noting that, while Professor Caplan will occasionally tip his hat in the direction of the campus-based building of basic brain-power, he devotes far more attention to the collegiate cultivation of the two components of Sitzfleisch.)1
The cult of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse demands complete compliance, not only with its basic tenets, but also with any changes in the party line that, from time to time, may occur. (I am old enough to remember the days when campus commies of the caucasian persuasion could don dashikis without facing charges of “cultural appropriation”.) Thus, those who sit at the feet of the acolytes of critical theory learn an art of great value to people who wish to thrive in a large organization, that of discarding the old hat, and putting on the new one, at just the right time. (Think, if you will, of the mid-level employees of the McDonalds Corporation, who, over the course of the last four decades, were obliged to alter their opinion of the McRib sandwich more often than they changed the oil in their cars.)
1. Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pages 9-21.
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Greek History and Civilisation, Part 3 – The Ancient Greeks: Rising Tensions with Persia
seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024This third lecture in the course deals with the rise of the Persian Empire, and the growing tensions between the Persians and the Greeks, culminating in an account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
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“There’s a moral imperative to go dig out that villa … It could be the greatest archaeological treasure on earth”
In City Journal, Nicholas Wade discusses the technical side of the ongoing attempts to read one of the Herculaneum scrolls:
A computer scientist has labored for 21 years to read carbonized ancient scrolls that are too brittle to open. His efforts stand at last on the brink of unlocking a vast new vista into the world of ancient Greece and Rome.
Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, has developed methods for scanning scrolls with computer tomography, unwrapping them virtually with computer software, and visualizing the ink with artificial intelligence. Building on his methods, contestants recently vied for a $700,000 prize to generate readable sections of a scroll from Herculaneum, the Roman town buried in hot volcanic mud from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D.
The last 15 columns — about 5 percent—of the unwrapped scroll can now be read and are being translated by a team of classical scholars. Their work is hard, as many words are missing and many letters are too faint to be read. “I have a translation but I’m not happy with it,” says a member of the team, Richard Janko of the University of Michigan. The scholars recently spent a session debating whether a letter in the ancient Greek manuscript was an omicron or a pi.
[…]
Seales has had to overcome daunting obstacles to reach this point, not all of them technical. The Italian authorities declined to make any of the scrolls available, especially to a lone computer scientist with no standing in the field. Seales realized that he had to build a coalition of papyrologists and conservationists to acquire the necessary standing to gain access to the scrolls. He was eventually able to x-ray a Herculaneum scroll in Paris, one of six that had been given to Napoleon. To find an x-ray source powerful enough to image the scroll without heating it, he had to buy time on the Diamond particle accelerator at Harwell, England.
In 2009, his x-rays showed for the first time the internal structure of a scroll, a daunting topography of a once-flat surface tugged and twisted in every direction. Then came the task of writing software that would trace the crumpled spiral of the scroll, follow its warped path around the central axis, assign each segment to its right position on the papyrus strip, and virtually flatten the entire surface. But this prodigious labor only brought to light a more formidable problem: no letters were visible on the x-rayed surface.
Seales and his colleagues achieved their first notable success in 2016, not with Napoleon’s Herculaneum scroll but with a small, charred fragment from a synagogue at the En-Gedi excavation site on the shore of the Dead Sea. Virtually unwrapped by the Seales software, the En-Gedi scroll turned out to contain the first two chapters of Leviticus. The text was identical to that of the Masoretic text, the authoritative version of the Hebrew Bible — and, at nearly 2,000 years old, its earliest instance.
The ink used by the Hebrew scribes was presumably laden with metal, and the letters stood out clearly against their parchment background. But the Herculaneum scroll was proving far harder to read. Its ink is carbon-based and almost impossible for x-rays to distinguish from the carbonized papyrus on which it is written. The Seales team developed machine-learning programs — a type of artificial intelligence — that scanned the unrolled surface looking for patterns that might relate to letters. It was here that Seales found use for the fragments from scrolls that earlier scholars had destroyed in trying to open them. The machine-learning programs were trained to compare a fragment holding written text with an x-ray scan of the same fragment, so that from the statistical properties of the papyrus fibers they could estimate the probability of the presence of ink.
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Can you make a tank disappear? The Evolution of Tank Camouflage
The Tank Museum
Published Nov 17, 2023It’s not easy to hide a tank. But over the years, military commanders have developed ways to disguise, cover and conceal the presence of their tanks from the enemy. This video is about the “art of deception” – and how, since World War One, through World War Two and into the present day, the science of tank camouflage has evolved to meet the conditions and threats of the contemporary battlefield.
00:00 | Intro
01:38 | WWI
06:26 | WW2
13:42 | Post War
19:40 | Conclusion
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February 20, 2024
Rome: Part 3 – The Expansion of Roman Power
seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.
Lecture 3: The Expansion of Roman Power
• The Conquest of Central Italy
• The Gallic Sack of 390 BC
• The Conquest of the Greek Cities
• Relations with Carthage
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Belt-fed Madsen LMG: When the Weird Get Weirder
Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 15, 2023First produced in 1902, the Madsen was one of the first practical light machine guns, and it remained in production for nearly 5 decades. The Madsen system is a rather unusual recoil-operated mechanism with a tilting bolt and a remarkably short receiver. The most unusual variation on the system was the belt-fed, high rate-of-fire pattern developed for aircraft use. This program was initiated by the Danish Air Force in the mid 1920s, and several different patterns were built by the time World War Two erupted.
The model here was actually a pattern that was under production for Hungary when German forces occupied Denmark. Taking over the factory, they continued the production and the guns went to the Luftwaffe for airfield defensive use.
In order to use disintegrating links instead of box magazines, some very odd modifications had to be made to the Madsen. One set of feed packs are actually built into the belt box itself, and the gun cannot function without the box attached. The only feasible path for empty link ejection is directly upwards, and so a horseshoe-shaped link chute was attached to the top cover, guiding links up over the gun and dropping them out the right side of the receiver. Very weird!
While several thousand of these were made under German occupation, very few survive today and they are extremely rare on the US registry.
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February 19, 2024
The CIA’s covert operations … as inspired by Vladimir Lenin
Along with most people who’ve been paying attention to history since the start of the Cold War, I hold the CIA in dubious regard. They seem to have been involved in so many underhanded escapades in countries around the world — certainly by reputation, if not in reality — that they stand almost in direct opposition to how most Americans liked to think of their country. Jon Miltimore thinks that among their inspirations was the founder of the Soviet Union himself:
I bring all of this up because I recently came across an old document of some significance that I’d never heard of before titled, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare“.
It was authored by George Kennan, the State Department Policy Planning Director who’d go on to be a successful US diplomat, for the National Security Council (which governed the CIA), and the document explained how the US government had to mobilize national resources “for covert political warfare” to combat the Soviet Union.
Kennan was not, in my opinion, a bad man. He had good instincts and sound motives, at least compared to others in the US intelligence apparatus. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War and later was one of the first diplomatic leaders to warn against the US policy of expanding NATO up to Russia’s doorstep, something he predicted would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era”.
That said, it’s clear that Kennan was not appalled by the Soviet Union’s use of covert political warfare. He was impressed by it.
“Lenin so synthesized the teachings of Marx and Clausewitz that the Kremlin’s conduct of political warfare has become the most refined and effective of any in history,” Kennan wrote in the document.
We have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war, by a tendency to view war as a sort of sporting context outside of all political context, by a national tendency to seek for a political cure-all, and by a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations — the perpetual rhythm of [struggle, in and out of war].
The document is fascinating because it appears to mark the genesis of the US government’s first formal steps into the world of political warfare — a well-documented history that includes toppling governments, assassinating world leaders, tipping elections, and torturing enemies.
All of these efforts, of course, initially targeted external parties and countries to serve “the national interest”.
This is no longer the case. The CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies no longer restrict their covert political warfare to foreign states, and I’m not talking about just Operation Mockingbird and other domestic propaganda efforts.
The CIA is clearly putting its thumb on the scales of US elections in ways that should terrify all Americans.
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QotD: Cleopatra VII Philopator
This week on the blog we’re going to talk about Cleopatra or to be more specific, we’re going to talk about Cleopatra VII Philopator, who is the only Cleopatra you’ve likely ever heard of, but that “seven” after her name should signal that she’s not the only Cleopatra.1 One of the trends in scholarship over the years towards larger than life ancient historical figures – Caesar, Alexander, Octavian, etc. – has been attempts to demystify them, stripping away centuries of caked-on reception, assumptions and imitation to ask more directly: who was this person, what did they do and do we value those sorts of things?2
Cleopatra, of course, has all of that reception layered on too. In antiquity and indeed until the modern era, she was one of the great villains of history, the licentious, wicked foreign queen of Octavian’s propaganda. More recently there has been an effort to reinvent her as an icon of modern values, perhaps most visible lately in Netflix’ recent (quite poorly received) documentary series. A lot of both efforts rely on reading into gaps in the source material. What I want to do here instead is to try to strip some of that away, to de-mystify Cleopatra and set out some of what we know and what we don’t know about her, with particular reference to the question I find most interesting: was Cleopatra actually a good or capable ruler?
Now a lot of the debate sparked by that Netflix series focused on what I find the rather uninteresting (but quite complicated) question of Cleopatra’s heritage or parentage or – heaven help us – her “race”. But I want to address this problem too, not because I care about the result but because I am deeply bothered by how confidently the result gets asserted by all sides and how swiftly those confident assertions are mobilized into categories that just aren’t very meaningful for understanding Cleopatra. To be frank, Cleopatra’s heritage should be a niche question debated in the pages of the Journal of Juristic Papyrology by scholars squinting at inscriptions and papyri, looking to make minor alterations in the prosopography of the Ptolemaic dynasty, both because it is highly technical and uncertain, but also because it isn’t an issue of central importance. So we’ll get that out of the way first in this essay and then get to my main point, which is this:
Cleopatra was, I’d argue, at best a mediocre ruler, whose ambitious and self-interested gambles mostly failed, to the ruin of herself and her kingdom. This is not to say Cleopatra was a weak or ineffective person; she was very obviously highly intelligent, learned, a virtuoso linguist, and a famously effective speaker. But one can be all of those things and not be a wise or skillful ruler, and I tend to view Cleopatra in that light.
Now I want to note the spirit in which I offer this essay. This is not a take-down of the Netflix Queen Cleopatra documentary (though it well deserves one and has received several; it is quite bad) nor a take-down of other scholars’ work on Cleopatra. This is simply my “take” on her reign. There’s enough we don’t know or barely know that another scholar, viewing from another angle, might well come away with a different conclusion, viewing Cleopatra in a more positive light. This is, to a degree, a response to some of the more recent public hagiography on Cleopatra, which I think air-brushes her failures and sometimes tries a bit too hard to read virtues into gaps in the evidence. But they are generally gaps in the evidence and in a situation where we are all to a degree making informed guesses, I am hardly going to trash someone who makes a perfectly plausible but somewhat differently informed guess. In history there are often situations where there is no right answer – meaning no answer we know to be true – but many wrong answers – answers we know to be false. I don’t claim to have the right answer, but I am frustrated by seeing so many very certain wrong answers floating around the public.
Before we dive in briefly to the boring question of Cleopatra’s parentage before the much more interesting question of her conduct as a ruler, we need to be clear about the difficult nature of the sources for Cleopatra and her reign. Fundamentally we may divide these sources into two groups: there are inscriptions, coins and papyrus records from Egypt which mention Cleopatra (and one she wrote on!) but, as such evidence is wont to be, [they] are often incomplete or provided only limited information. And then there are the literary sources, which are uniformly without exception hostile to Cleopatra. And I mean extremely hostile to Cleopatra, filled with wrath and invective. At no point, anywhere in the literary sources does Cleopatra get within a country mile of a fair shake and I am saying that as someone who thinks she wasn’t very good at her job.
The problem here is that Cleopatra was the target of Octavian’s PR campaign, as it were, in the run up to his war with Marcus Antonius (Marc Antony; I’m going to call him Marcus Antonius here), because as a foreign queen – an intersecting triad of concepts (foreignness, monarchy and women in power) which all offended Roman sensibilities – she was effectively the perfect target for a campaign aimed at winning over the populace of Italy, which was, it turns out, the most valuable military resource in the Mediterranean.3 That picture – the foreign queen corrupting the morals of good Romans with her decadence – rightly or wrongly ends up coloring all of the subsequent accounts. Of course that in turn effects the reliability of all of our literary sources and thus we must tread carefully.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.
1. Or even just the seventh!
2. This is not to diminish the value of reception studies that trace the meaning a figure – or the memory of a figure – had over time. That’s a valuable but different lens of study.
3. It’s not all Octavian, mind. Cicero’s impression of Cleopatra was also sharply negative, for many of the same reasons: Cicero was hardly likely to be affable to a foreign queen who was an ally of Julius Caesar.
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February 18, 2024
German Counterattack in Pomerania – WW2 – Week 286 – February 17, 1945
World War Two
Published 17 Feb 2024The Germans finally launch a counterattack into the Soviet flanks, but it does not go as well as was as hoped. The Siege of Budapest comes to an end, also not well for the Germans. The Soviets have now also surrounded Breslau. In Burma, the Allies cross the Irrawaddy River, in the Philippines the fight for Manila continues, and in the Pacific preparations are underway for an American invasion of Iwo Jima Island.
01:50 The fight for East Prussia
04:08 German counterattack in Poland
07:00 Breslau Surrounded
07:57 The Siege of Budapest
09:14 Operation 4th Term in Italy
10:07 Operation Veritable Continues
11:36 Allies cross the Irrawaddy
14:43 The Fight in the Philippines
17:52 Preparations for Iwo Jima
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Does the Chieftain Fit Into … a Ford Model T
The Chieftain
Published Nov 19, 2023Filmed during a down-moment on a maintenance day at the Ontario Regiment Museum. The Model T is small and so old that I have to ask someone else at the end of the video how to drive it.
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QotD: British meals – sauces
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
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February 17, 2024
Hitler speaking – not the raging, raving maniac we all think he was
Colby Cosh on a major German academic effort to provide an authoritative digital record of Adolf Hitler’s actual speeches, rather than the highly selective snippets we in the English speaking world have seen or the “official” transcripts that were published in Nazi propaganda organs:
Adolf Hitler making a speech sometime between 1933 and 1940.
Library and Archives Canada item number 3191955.
You may have seen reports that a consortium of German research institutions has set out on a seven-year project to compile, annotate and digitize every speech Adolf Hitler gave as chancellor of Germany. The effort is being led by the Institute of Contemporary History (Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte, or IfZ), a Munich-based German government research consortium founded in 1947 to preserve the various records of Germany’s experience under National Socialism. Since that time, there has been a whole lot more zeitgeschichte in Germany, of course, so the IfZ also does a lot of work on communism, the Cold War and German reunification. It helps run important museums and historical sites, such as Hitler’s mountain retreat on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.
[…]
The co-head of the new project is Magnus Brechtken, deputy director of the IfZ and author of a landmark 2017 biography of Hitler’s pet architect and economic manager, Albert Speer. In January, Brechtken gave an absorbing German-language interview explaining the need for a contemporary, digital Hitler edition. Run that puppy through Google Translate and you’ll see that it commences amusingly with the question, “So do you have Adolf Hitler’s voice running through your head all the time?”
(This probably wouldn’t be as hellish as it sounds. Hitler didn’t really bellow like a rabid animal at his audiences for hours on end, contrary to the image of him that you and I have in our heads, and he spoke with a low, musical Austrian accent that German speakers like Brechtken seem to appreciate.)
Brechtken observes that in writing his Speer book, he spurned Domarus and went to the Sisyphean trouble of running down primary versions of relevant Hitler speeches himself. Hundreds of audio recordings of Hitler have survived in the German Broadcasting Archive in Frankfurt, and the project team has computer scientists and even linguists on board to help integrate text, sound and historians’ notes on persons, events and the context of the speeches.
No doubt the finished product will be consumed by the uglier parts of today’s German political right, and its reaction is fully predictable. Some will say, “At last, the real Hitler!”; and an equal number will say, “This whole project is a parcel of falsehoods — it’s fake Hitler!”
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Breda 37: Italy’s Forgotten Heavy Machine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 11, 2023The Breda Model 37 was Italy’s standard heavy machine gun (which meant a rifle-caliber gun fired only from a tripod) during World War Two. It was chambered for the 8x59mm cartridge, as Italy used a two-cartridge system at the time, with 6.5mm for rifles and the heavier 8mm for machine guns to exploit their longer effective range. Production began in 1937 and continued until the end of the war, with a batch being made for German use after the Italian armistice in 1943. Pre-war it was also sold to Portugal as the m/938. It remained in Italian use after the war as well, eventually replaced by the MG42/59.
The Breda 37 is a durable, reliable, and overall very good design. It uses 20-round feed strips, with the quite unusual feature of placing fired cases back into the strips rather than ejecting them out of the gun. It is a relatively unknown gun today, but this is not because of any inferiority on its part.
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QotD: Lessons for today from the decline of the Western Roman Empire
Luttwak has a charmingly racist bit about how some client states have the IQ and sophistication to understand the true nature of the arrangement, while others are too dumb or barbaric to remember who’s boss without having their faces regularly rubbed in it. In the Roman case, the former camp contained the various Hellenistic kingdoms in Asia Minor and the Levant, who didn’t need legionaries standing around and supervising them, because they could imagine the existence of those legionaries and what they would do to them if provoked. The latter camp included many of the Germanic tribes, who tended to forget their place if the legions weren’t garrisoned within eyeshot, and even then would rise up in fruitless rebellion every couple of generations. We can make this marginally less racist by positing something more like a spectrum of how tolerable the client arrangement was, and consequently a spectrum of how coercive it had to be. The Greeks were relatively compatible culturally with the Romans, and the warrior spirit of their ancestors had been sufficiently sanded down that they didn’t mind being told what to do. The Germans were more foreign, and also retained the barbarian’s yearning for freedom, so a careful eye had to be kept on them.
A true cynic might think that there was something similar going on with America’s imperial dependencies … sorry, with America’s “allies”. There are no American garrisons in Canada, because the Canadians are culturally-compatible, and also because they’ve been thoroughly cowed and do not dream of an independent national destiny. But look overseas, for instance at some of our Middle Eastern “allies”, and you will see a situation more analogous to the Germanic tribes. What a coincidence that these same “allies” host a much heavier American military presence! Even here, however, the situation isn’t strictly coercive, and insofar as it is, the coercion is mostly outsourced to local elites. Those elites, in turn, can mostly be handled with carrots: the imperial power subsidizes their trade and security arrangements, not to mention keeps them in charge of their respective countries! The Romans commonly rewarded loyal clients with citizenship and a cushy sinecure for a job well done. It would be rude of us to do otherwise.
Maybe this was already obvious to everyone else, but reading the “rules-based international order”1 as a concealed hegemon/client system feels a bit like having the skeleton key to understanding current events. Like why do European countries so often act in ways contrary to their own economic or geopolitical self-interest, but consonant with America’s interest? How do the political and business elites of these countries maintain such an impressive unified front in the face of popular discontent? Why do the rulers of all these very different countries have seemingly identical tastes, worldviews, and mannerisms? What is the meaning of “populism,” and why do people treat it like it’s a single, consistent thing, despite the fact that “populist” parties in different countries often seek diametrically opposite policies?
Just pretend, imagine with me, that these European “allies” are client kingdoms. They are permitted a certain amount of latitude, but when the chips are down they do not have an independent foreign policy. Their ruling classes are client rulers that administer certain territories, and there is tacit agreement with the imperial overlord on what they may and may not do. Over time, the client rulers identify less and less with their countrymen, more and more with their counterparts in other client states, and most of all with the distant metropole, whose social approval they desperately desire. The “populists” are simply the anti-imperial party, in whatever country. The thing the “populists” have in common is a desire to be free of the suffocating imperial embrace,2 but they all have a thousand different stupid ideas about what to do with that freedom. This includes the “populists” in the United States itself, by the way. The American Empire is called that because it started here, but it has long-since burst free of the host in which it incubated, and the rot of our own political institutions can be understood as our transformation into the biggest client kingdom of them all.
None of what I’ve said above is meant to be a value judgment. I think many people resist the notion that America is an empire because empires are “bad” and we’re obviously the good guys. But others, including myself not too long ago, resist it because we have an overly-simplistic notion of what an empire looks like, especially what it looks like from the inside. Empires exist on a spectrum — America’s subjects certainly have more ability to act independently than Rome’s did. But many empires also go to some lengths to conceal their true nature. Around the time of the birth of Christ, the official story in many of the lands ruled by Rome was that Rome was merely their largest trading partner and a staunch military ally. Some of them might even have believed it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.
1. The rules-based international order which has no rules, isn’t based, and opposes order.
2. They may also have in common the payments made to their bank accounts by the empire’s enemies.
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