Wauck always finds these gems.
...These plunderers of the world [the Romans], after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor; unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace....--Tacitus, quoting Calgacus
Wauck found that in a column by Bryan Caplan, who goes on to observe:
...I can just imagine the Romans explaining that the slaughter was a small short-run cost dwarfed by massive long-run benefits. I’m skeptical, but don’t know enough about pre- and post-Roman Britain to speak with confidence....
Such as the benefits derived from the VietNam war, or the current Dance Macabre in Ukraine, right?
Had a brief conversation with a fellow this afternoon during which convo we could have simply quoted Christopher Dawson and then stared at each other.
...Dawson saw the present age as one similar to that of Augustine or Ignatius, and in need of saints who have the vision to lead the faithful into the next era. The Western world. he thought, was facing another of its cultural discontinuities that displace the old order and usher in a new social realm. The question that remained, for Dawson as for Eliot, was whether this new era was to be Christian or a new civilization which recognizes neither moral laws nor human rights....
"Moral law"?
Pish-Posh. We have money, right?
Lest you forget Your Russell Kirk post from
ReplyDeleteMonday, April 11, 2011
Russell Kirk and the Bishop
-Greg
Here it is:
ReplyDelete...It was at York that the dying Septimius Severus, after his last campaign (against the Scots), was asked by his brutal sons, Geta and Caracalla, "Father, when you are gone, how shall we govern the empire?" The hard old emperor had his laconic reply ready: "Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter." There would come a time when the soldiers could not be paid, and then civilization would fall to pieces. The last Roman army in Italy-it is said to have been composed entirely of cavalry- fought in league with the barbarian general Odoacer against Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, in the year 491; on Odoacer's defeat, the Roman soldiers drifted home, nevermore to take arms: the end of an old song Only the earlier stages of social decadence-seem liberating to some people;...
And this post also
ReplyDeletehttps://dad29.blogspot.com/2007/06/russell-kirk-on-ideology.html
Kirk contended that ideology is a type of religious dogmatism in a political context, and one completely inconsistent with a conservative outlook. It eliminates the nuances and shades of gray that exist in actual political or social life.
“For the ideologue, humankind may be defined into two classes: the comrades of Progress, and the foes attached to reactionary interests,” who are not only incorrect but who must be destroyed.
The proponent of ideology “resorts to the anaesthetic of social utopianism, escaping the tragedy and grandeur of true human existence by giving his adherence to a perfect dream-world of the future. Reality [the ideologue] stretches or chops away to conform to [a] dream-pattern of human nature and society.” Because ideology is a replacement religion, when injected into the public sphere it makes politics, at least as Kirk defines it, impossible.
Didn’t the Zionist just turn Palestine back into a desert again?
ReplyDeleteThe last Roman Army composed entirely of Cavalry……….
ReplyDeleteHmm
Perhaps the fate of those 600,000 Ukrainian Christian men that were offered up as cannon fodder and slaughtered by Russia were not “
help to explain The non existence and absence of the “not Calvary” for Septimus Severus…..
Yes History indeed does rhyme and repeat.