At 02:56 PM 5/21/97 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:

The US is in very real danger of reaping the same sort of maelstrom that vanquished the Romans. They were also very powerful, with tentacles reaching almost to the limits of their known world, before a combination of internal decay and dissention and reprisal from those vanquished put them asunder.

Regrettably, this depiction of the fall of the Roman Empire is incorrect. During the last period of the Roman empire in the west, the empire was both very weak, and extraordinarily brutal to its subjects, torturing to death huge numbers of people on a scale no seen again until the twentieth century. Despite this they never encountered any resistance from their terrorized subjects. Only free people , and people who recently were comparatively free, rebel. A world government would not fall until it had tortured to death such a large proportion of the population that there was enough wilderness to protect runaways, or until its technological level fell so low that its communications stopped working. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves | http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ and our property, because of the kind | of animals that we are. True law | James A. Donald derives from this right, not from the | arbitrary power of the state. | jamesd@echeque.com