War re Ukraine: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Sun Mar 19 20:03:58 PDT 2023


Are We The Byzantines?

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/15/are-we-the-byzantines/

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.

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge
Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and
renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa
Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years.
Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted
into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to
follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern
Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more
than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from
Western Europe to the besieged city.

In fact, 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade
had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied
Christian City of Constantinople.

Then they ransacked the city and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a
half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.

The 14 th-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.

Meanwhile they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who
systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century
Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.

The Sultan Mehmed II grandly announced the Ottomans were now the real,
the only world power. Ascendent Ottoman armies would eventually move
on to the very gates of Vienna in an effort to rule all the lands of
the ancient Roman empire.

We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.

Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the
world’s preeminent civilization.

An ascendent China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans. Beijing
believes that the United States is decadent, undeserving of its
affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past—and very
soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.

Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.

Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders,
and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.

Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the
fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.

America prints rather than makes money, as its banks totter near bankruptcy.

Americans similarly believe they are invincible without ensuring in
reality that they are. Our military is more worried about being woke
than deadly.

Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager
to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to
create.

Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel
culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as
the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of
the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.

The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.

So far neither have Americans.


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