How can we explain how Australia, Britain, Austria, Italy, and more have gone the path of arbitrary and capricious detention and exclusion from society? The Austrian government mobilized perhaps 500 people into the streets in support of lockdown and apartheid measures, colluding with media to inflate that number by a massive factor of sixty.

The reactions to this certainly represent an extreme polarization of society. Yet in politics, there are no coincidences. So while the ruling class would prefer little resistance by some metrics, the popularization of resistance and the potentials this arena holds are also promising in elite contingency planning. Such will be our primary focus in this review.

Whichever holds the most potential and handles resistance in the best way, while carrying out some form of the underlying plan, will be the version of the plan the managers attempt to deliver for the elites.

And this presents a great danger; those still capable of thinking being demoralized by the state of humanity, and drawing eugenicist conclusions parallel to those of the elites. After all, how can the great herd of humanity acquiesce in such a way? If there is a lesson to be learned from history, perhaps it is not ‘never again!’ so much as ‘it will always happen again’.

While the state and corporate sanctioned hatred espoused by media to the unvaxed has reached an alarming temperature, the counter-narrative of blaming the ‘sheeple’ for the new age of mass house-arrest and social apartheid is also growing.

While one is situated as an overt policy of the state apparatus, the other builds popular support and has all the trappings and bearings of authenticity, people power, life, and motion.

Roman Plagues, Inflation, and Great Awakening

In 168 AD the Greek physician Galen was summoned by the synarchy of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus then ruling the Roman Empire, to provide guidance on the management of the small-pox pandemic then affecting millions, now called the Antonine Plague.

Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), French. The Plague of Ashdod, 1630. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris

Then as now, according to Sabbatani and Fiorino (Infez Med. 2009 Dec;17(4):261-75), the primary factors that led to the pandemic were underlying conditions: primarily poor sanitation and hygiene, and poor diet and access to food. A disproportionate number of Roman subjects lived in overcrowded cities, and lived at the hands of landlords, speculators, and the average life expectancy had dropped to around 25.

Then as now, all of these factors were socially constructed and were not merely ‘facts of life’ as if handed down by the gods, but rather were conditions imposed upon the great mass of humanity by an unhinged oligarchy.

Whether this plague was seen as beneficial by the oligarchy, for whom – then as now – maintenance of a declining population rate was subsidized by coordinated migration from the reaches of the empire – is a subject of debate. Did they see the unwashed rabble in the back alleys of the metropolis as useless eaters, then as they do now?

At any rate, history views the Antonine Plague as a turning point, after which came an age of inflation and division from which the Roman Empire is said to have never fully recovered. The response to the plague from Christians, with their care for the ill, is also a factor in the rapid growth of this monotheism in the empire.

Ultimately Lucius Verus would himself succumb to the mystery illness the following year in 169, and perhaps it is lessons as these which provide for us some insight into new methods of biological warfare when class war is the proscribed remedy for surplus population. If manufacturing such a contagion, it would make sense that it be no more lethal than the common cold, and that nevertheless the concentration of power and an economic regimen which also decreased lives and livelihoods could be obtained at a far smaller cost.

The Antonine and then Cyprian Plague in the 3rd century AD would together lead towards an increased mysticism, religiosity, and tended towards the rapid ascension of Christianity.

Then, as now, the scenario fuels the ‘Great Awakening’, and public embrace of conspiracy theories is at an all-time high, just as mysticism and superstitions also grew through the Roman Empire during these centuries.

Problem-Reaction-Solution, and other things unrelated to Hegel

It is said that history repeats or at the very least parallels, but rather than ascribe these to abstract and still mysterious iron laws of history or any providence directing these, perhaps instead these events return and return again because they are methods of control that work. As Marx said, when history does repeat, the first is tragedy, the second is farce.

The farce at hand today no doubt is that the plague is real and yet also nary more deadly than the flu.

As we previously discussed, it was Foucault who shows convincingly that it was the first the authorized response to the plagues, with its systems of quarantine and mass surveillance, etcetera, that gave initial impulse and inspiration towards the construction of the first modern prisons a century or so later, with its panopticon.

But in regards to the growth of mysticism, paranoia, and religiosity, we see this growing in all areas, both for and against the mandates. Common now is the paranoia around infection, when the common cold never produced this except among germophobes, or in the ritualized wearing of masks which in fact ‘do’ nothing, or rather do something other than what is being publicly explained.

And on the other side, the rapacious and gratuitous abuses by the elites whose evil knows no bounds, has led to a kind of spiritual or religious awakening against the mandate.

Naturally those managing for those in power at the very top, above and beyond mere elected politicians and public health ‘experts’, understand this ‘problem-reaction-solution’ pattern which has so far worked for them.

So in light of that fact, we are drawn to a particularly problematic notice of potential danger scribbled in Schwab’s Covid-19 book. Here we are instructed to infer from the pattern and logic of the text so far, that if the Black Mirror dystopian scenario obviously preferred by the ruling class, with its social credit system – if this does not work – then we have a fall-back plan for a sort of Handmaid’s Tale scenario.

As ridiculous at face value as such things may have sounded just a few short years ago, here we are today with open eyes and open minds, understanding precisely such scenarios and their potentials. Schwab, for his part, does anyhow.

It is there on page 167 that we find it laid out in the standard cryptic fashion, that a fundamentalist theocracy is also something that elites have thought through potential outcomes.

That’s an awfully specific outcome, to be mentioned. The social credit scenario in the Black Mirror seems much more obvious, in part because we are already now living it.

What sorts of problems would be presented so that the reaction could produce that, specifically that, as a solution?

Interestingly, we have numerous factors lining up. While we have noted previously that the population ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory popular in France and catching on in the U.S., is depicted in films like ‘Children of Men’, a common theme with that dystopia and the Handmaid’s Tale is a population and reproduction crisis.

The Geopolitics of Fiction

Perhaps it was Victoria ‘F*ck the EU’ Nuland who first truthfully articulated a shift in U.S. policy away from Trans-Atlanticism. Though, her faction still rests on this doctrine and Biden has struggled to make good on such a return to good EU relations after a stark departure during the Trump years.

But an isolated U.S. is a geopolitical factor in The Handmaid’s Tale. In the TV series version, a more thorough geopolitical situation is relayed to the audience. The premise of the story is that as the result of the overuse of GMOs with their terminator seeds, men’s sperm count rapidly declined. But because the broader crisis, it ushered in a neo-Puritan theocracy, and women were blamed for it. At the same time, the ‘war against boys and men’ theme was depicted as a problem in the U.S., the reaction to it being the formation of the ultra-conservative militant group with MRA beliefs infused with Christian fundamentalism that ultimately seizes power.

Undoubtedly, the elites prefer the Black Mirror scenario of a Trans-Atlanticist surveillance state, and indeed that it is not just a social credit state but a surveillance state is also mentioned on the same page 167 in the typical Schwabian manner. This is the method whereby the entire book can be understood, where certain kinds of ‘warnings’ are precisely the kinds of outcomes the ruling class wants. And we know this because they have actively, with tremendous gusto, pursued those outcomes for decades.

The surveillance state reference relates here to a disingenuous social-democratic nod to Shoshana Zuboff’s tome ‘Surveillance Capitalism’, mentioned also by Schwab on page 167 in connection to the dystopia warnings on the same page. Zuboff is a member of the establishment ‘temple’ in good standing, and also a member of the ‘state’.

Like Schwab, she explains the dangers of rapacious predatory capitalism while being a vociferous defender of its ethos. It may be hard for some to imagine how it’s possible to hold such positions while also selling one’s financial services to the very target of the same criticisms. But neuroticism and self-serving hypocrisy are par for the course in that world.

Schwab pretends to warn and lament that such an outcome like The Handmaid’s Tale is a possibility of certain societies like the U.S. , if they‘ mismanage’ the situation, by which we understand means ‘manage precisely as we want once the pushback forces us to’.

What do we mean here? While the Atlanticist model requires increased ideological harmony between the U.S. as Europe is instructed to ‘love’ a sort of strange cultural hybrid of intersectional ‘black struggle’ with something closer to home, cross-dressing, which a few decades ago we could simply call ‘RuPaul’.

And the U.S. is instructed to look at European ‘social democracy’ as an inspirational model, though in practice also it comes with less social and less democracy. But it is the ‘vibe’ of a state that provides welfare that matters, even as in the U.S. it doesn’t. It feels like it does when Democrats are in office.

So together there is some hegemonic ideological construct that conjoins Western Europe to the U.S., despite that spatially and economically Europe is more dependent on Eastern Europe, China and MENA.

A Swift Conclusion

There are also big pushes by some dissenting voices within the elites, who got behind Trump and may well still be behind him, that want to collapse Atlanticism all together, meaning the end of NATO but also the IMF, and so naturally those elite forces nevertheless bent on population reduction and their own preservation are looking at ways to manage the blowback as well.

For reasons beyond our scope here, Biden’s foreign policy and his attitude to the EU seems to be a clone of Trump’s. Which oddly and incredibly, lends more to the Handmaid scenario than it does Black Mirror.

Conclusively, while legal and constitutional pushes for election reform and a robust curtailment of the covid restrictions is in order, on our radar screen should be the manipulation of this resistance towards Christian theocratic aims – not because they challenge the status quo, but because they would be controlled by it.

The author can be reached at FindMeFlores@gmail.com

The Roman Empire fell because it did something the author doesn’t approve of. And the American Empire or Putin’s Russia or Communist China will fall because they also do what the author dislikes. It’s a fun trope and you see it all the time. It’s easy to do and lets the author pretend to be the edjamakated sort of fellow who can use Pompey, Pluto and Plato in a sentence rather than a hack re-wording the latest instructions from the Military-Industrial-Media-Complex. Now that the American Empire has been defeated by its allies over Nord Stream and by its enemies in Afghanistan, we can expect to see a lot more of it.

But exactly when did the Roman Empire end? We need a date so we can blame that end on that thing that we dislike. Edward Gibbon wrote a rather large book about its decline and fall: it begins in the 200s and ends in the 1400s. That’s 1200 years of declining and falling; hard to find a single cause in all that.

The end of the Roman Republic – that’s an easier thing to date. Most would agree on the date at which Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus became supreme after the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra in 30BP. But even that becomes hazy when we take into account the Roman pretence that Rome never changes even while it’s changing. And the issue is further complicated by the Romans’ love of great antiquity which meant that they never stopped doing something that they had once done. So the ancient priesthood of the flamines with their curious costumes and taboos endured; the Sibylline Books, lost but then restored, were consulted even into the Christian period; they honoured geese and punished dogs; the sacred fire burned; the lowering of the flag stopped the trial. So, no matter how cataclysmic the crisis, at the end, the Republic was once again “restored” just as it was. And that is what Octavianus claimed to have done – consuls, the Senate, praetors and all the rest remained but he, now named the August One, was merely the first man in Rome. He had restored the Republic. And we will see this throughout: whatever happens, nothing has happened; the pretence is kept up.

410. That’s the date it ended. The Visigoths, under Alaric, sack Rome. But Rome isn’t the capital of the Empire nor even of the Western Empire at this time. And Alaric, who had been a Roman soldier, is seen by many as unsuccessfully seeking a formal position inside the Empire. But the date is significant because, among English-speaking historians, it is probably the origin of the notion that “the Roman Empire fell” at some definable time. Roman Britain seems to have been generally prosperous and peaceful (with some friction north of the Wall) for three centuries until the middle of the 300s when sea raiders and northerners combined to shake its security, a general then took many soldiers to the continent in an unsuccessful bid for the crown and the last soldiers left in the early 400s to defend Rome. This left the Romanised (and Christianised) British to the mercies of the raiders. Little but legends survive from this time; this is the era of Arthur: but was he in Cornwall or the Borders? did he even exist? was he Roman, Briton or Sarmatian? king or war leader? Libraries are full of books of speculation; no one knows and archaeology doesn’t help. Gradually the Britons were pushed out and Saxons settled what was now called “England”. Recorded history picks up again in the 700s when the Saxons become Christianised. So in Roman Britain, there certainly is a “fall” in the early 400s, followed by a three-century “dark” age, followed by a gradual growing of the “light” as Christian Saxons struggle against a new round of pagan raiders from the seas. Here, the Roman Empire did “end”. But not for any moralistic reason – the legions left and Britannia was a juicy target.

The history on the Continent is quite different. Barbarians, yes, but always pretending to rule by permission of the Emperor in the East and seeking a Roman-style title. Henri Pirenne’s researches make this clear. Take, for example another “end date” – 478. The last Western Emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a name ironically combining the founders of Republican Rome and Imperial Rome) is overthrown by the barbarian Odoacer. But Odoacer is careful to seek authority to rule from the Emperor in Constantinople and to consult the Roman Senate. So the pretence of the unchanging Roman Empire is kept up. And this kept on – a barbarian king, formerly a soldier of the Empire, would take power and the Emperor in the East would appoint him to some Roman position and he would be king of his people and an official in the Empire. Marius is Consul seven times, Sulla appoints himself Dictator, Caesar becomes Dictator for life: it’s all perfectly Roman and in accordance with the Twelve Tables. Given a little twisting of the rules. Which now become the new rules.

Of course it’s pretence and of course each iteration is a blurred copy of the last. But it’s a continuous process and one cannot find – except by making some arbitrary decision – a moment at which one thing ends and another begins. An important moment in the Western Empire comes when Charlemagne declares himself Emperor of the West. Crowned by the Bishop of Rome without reference to the Emperor in the East. That’s a split; but it’s all done in Latin, it’s all Christian and it’s still calling itself the Roman Empire headed by the Imperator Romanorum. Charlemagne even referred to himself occasionally as Augustus and claimed to have renewed the Empire. So 800 marks a moment to be sure, but there’s still something in the west calling itself the Roman Empire and it’s not entirely fanciful to do so.

The Holy Roman Empire existed until 1806. That’s another thousand years after Charlemagne created it and by 1806 there’s no doubt that Caesar Augustus would recognise nothing in it – but how much would he have recognised in Constantinople in 600? Certainly some time in those thousand years the (Western) Roman Empire ceased to have any content beyond the name. But one cannot find a “moment”: it just faded away over time until nothing was left but the name and Bonaparte – having just made himself emperor in a ceremony redolent of Rome and Charlemagne – puffed the last bit of dust away.

Meanwhile in the East the Empire continued. Its hold on the Western Empire waxed and waned but by the 800s had disappeared in form and in reality (although it kept Venice). But it certainly endured in the East; rich and powerful. What did it in was the century of destructive war with the Persian Empire beginning in the early 500s which so weakened the two that they were unable to resist the Muslims. By the mid 700s, Islam ruled over Roman Africa, Egypt, Spain, most of today’s Middle East and the Persian Empire itself. The Eastern Roman Empire was left with the Balkans and Anatolia. Over the subsequent seven centuries, Islam, which never lost its desire to rule over “The City“, ate more and more until the Empire was reduced to the bounds of the city itself and, when it fell in 1453, that was the end. And that’s the date Gibbon picked.

So, when did the Roman Empire “fall”? There isn’t any date – unless you take 1806 or 1453 – and therefore there isn’t any “cause”.

So the next time – and that time will be soon – you read someone pontificating that the Roman Empire fell because it did something he doesn’t approve of and the USA or Russia or China is doing the same – smile. It’s just gas and persiflage.

(The fall of the Republic, on the other hand, could be framed as the inability of a smallish city state to deal with an expanding empire, the strain of the need for large armies and foreign garrisons, greed and ambition fed by the tremendous inrush of loot, the impoverishment of many ordinary citizens. You don’t often see that comparison, but here’s one: Donald Trump as Tiberius Gracchus; “farcical” sneers the reviewer – well it is the NYT. All I can say is that there is a certain parallel and wait till he meets Cataline and Clodius!)

Andrew LATHAM

Before March of this year, few probably thought disease could be a significant driver of human history.

Not so anymore. People are beginning to understand that the little changes Covid-19 has already ushered in or accelerated – telemedicine, remote work, social distancing, the death of the handshake, online shopping, the virtual disappearance of cash and so on – have begun to change their way of life. They may not be sure whether these changes will outlive the pandemic. And they may be uncertain whether these changes are for good or ill.

Three previous plagues could yield some clues about the way Covid-19 might bend the arc of history. As I teach in my course “Plagues, Pandemics and Politics,” pandemics tend to shape human affairs in three ways.

First, they can profoundly alter a society’s fundamental worldview. Second, they can upend core economic structures. And, finally, they can sway power struggles among nations.

Sickness Spurs Rise of Christian West

The Antonine plague, and its twin, the Cyprian plague – both now widely thought to have been caused by a smallpox strain – ravaged the Roman Empire from A.D. 165 to 262. It’s been estimated that the combined pandemics’ mortality rate was anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the empire’s population.

While staggering, the number of deaths tells only part of the story. This also triggered a profound transformation in the religious culture of the Roman Empire.

On the eve of the Antonine plague, the empire was pagan. The vast majority of the population worshipped multiple gods and spirits and believed that rivers, trees, fields and buildings each had their own spirit.

Christianity, a monotheistic religion that had little in common with paganism, had only 40,000 adherents, no more than 0.07 percent of the empire’s population.

Yet within a generation of the end of the Cyprian plague, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the empire.

How did these twin pandemics effect this profound religious transformation?

Rodney Stark, in his seminal work The Rise of Christianity, argues that these two pandemics made Christianity a much more attractive belief system.

While the disease was effectively incurable, rudimentary palliative care – the provision of food and water, for example – could spur recovery of those too weak to care for themselves. Motivated by Christian charity and an ethic of care for the sick – and enabled by the thick social and charitable networks around which the early church was organized – the empire’s Christian communities were willing and able to provide this sort of care.

Pagan Romans, on the other hand, opted instead either to flee outbreaks of the plague or to self-isolate in the hope of being spared infection.

This had two effects.

First, Christians survived the ravages of these plagues at higher rates than their pagan neighbors and developed higher levels of immunity more quickly. Seeing that many more of their Christian compatriots were surviving the plague – and attributing this either to divine favor or the benefits of the care being provided by Christians – many pagans were drawn to the Christian community and the belief system that underpinned it. At the same time, tending to sick pagans afforded Christians unprecedented opportunities to evangelize.

Second, Stark argues that, because these two plagues disproportionately affected young and pregnant women, the lower mortality rate among Christians translated into a higher birth rate.

The net effect of all this was that, in roughly the span of a century, an essentially pagan empire found itself well on its way to becoming a majority Christian one.

Plague of Justinian & Fall of Rome

The plague of Justinian, named after the Roman emperor who reigned from A.S. 527 to 565, arrived in the Roman Empire in A.D. 542 and didn’t disappear until A.D. 755. During its two centuries of recurrence, it killed an estimated 25 percent to 50 percent of the population – anywhere from 25 million to 100 million people.

This massive loss of lives crippled the economy, triggering a financial crisis that exhausted the state’s coffers and hobbled the empire’s once mighty military.

In the east, Rome’s principal geopolitical rival, Sassanid Persia, was also devastated by the plague and was therefore in no position to exploit the Roman Empire’s weakness. But the forces of the Islamic Rashidun Caliphate in Arabia – which had long been contained by the Romans and Sasanians – were largely unaffected by the plague. The reasons for this are not well understood, but they probably have to do with the caliphate’s relative isolation from major urban centers.

Caliph Abu Bakr didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. Seizing the moment, his forces swiftly conquered the entire Sasanian Empire while stripping the weakened Roman Empire of its territories in the Levant, the Caucasus, Egypt and North Africa.

Muslim forces of the Rashidun Caliphate captured the Levant – a region of the Middle East – from the Byzantine Empire in A.D. 636. (Wikimedia Commons)

Pre-pandemic, the Mediterranean world had been relatively unified by commerce, politics, religion and culture. What emerged was a fractured trio of civilizations jockeying for power and influence: an Islamic one in the eastern and southern Mediterranean basin; a Greek one in the northeastern Mediterranean; and a European one between the western Mediterranean and the North Sea.

This last civilization — what we now call medieval Europe — was defined by a new, distinctive economic system.

Before the plague, the European economy had been based on slavery. After the plague, the significantly diminished supply of slaves forced landowners to begin granting plots to nominally “free” laborers – serfs who worked the lord’s fields and, in return, received military protection and certain legal rights from the lord.

The seeds of feudalism were planted.

Black Death of the Middle Ages

The Black Death broke out in Europe in 1347 and subsequently killed between one-third and one-half of the total European population of 80 million people. But it killed more than people. By the time the pandemic had burned out by the early 1350s, a distinctly modern world emerged – one defined by free labor, technological innovation and a growing middle class.

Before the Yersinia pestis bacterium arrived in 1347, Western Europe was a feudal society that was overpopulated. Labor was cheap, serfs had little bargaining power, social mobility was stymied and there was little incentive to increase productivity.

But the loss of so much life shook up an ossified society.

Labor shortages gave peasants more bargaining power. In the agrarian economy, they also encouraged the widespread adoption of new and existing technologies – the iron plow, the three-field crop rotation system and fertilization with manure, all of which significantly increased productivity. Beyond the countryside, it resulted in the invention of time and labor-saving devices such as the printing press, water pumps for draining mines and gunpowder weapons.

The Black Death created massive labor shortages. (Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

In turn, freedom from feudal obligations and a desire to move up the social ladder encouraged many peasants to move to towns and engage in crafts and trades. The more successful ones became wealthier and constituted a new middle class. They could now afford more of the luxury goods that could be obtained only from beyond Europe’s frontiers, and this stimulated both long-distance trade and the more efficient three-masted ships needed to engage in that trade.

The new middle class’s increasing wealth also stimulated patronage of the arts, science, literature and philosophy. The result was an explosion of cultural and intellectual creativity – what we now call the Renaissance.

Our Present Future

None of this is to argue that the still-ongoing Covid-19 pandemic will have similarly earth-shattering outcomes. The mortality rate of Covid-19 is nothing like that of the plagues discussed above, and therefore the consequences may not be as seismic.

But there are some indications that they could be.

Will the bumbling efforts of the open societies of the West to come to grips with the virus shattering already-wavering faith in liberal democracy, creating a space for other ideologies to evolve and metastasize?

In a similar fashion, Covid-19 may be accelerating an already ongoing geopolitical shift in the balance of power between the U.S. and China. During the pandemic, China has taken the global lead in providing medical assistance to other countries as part of its “Health Silk Road” initiative. Some argue that the combination of America’s failure to lead and China’s relative success at picking up the slack may well be turbocharging China’s rise to a position of global leadership.

Finally, Covid-19 seems to be accelerating the unraveling of long-established patterns and practices of work, with repercussions that could affet the future of office towers, big cities and mass transit, to name just a few. The implications of this and related economic developments may prove as profoundly transformative as those triggered by the Black Death in 1347.

Ultimately, the longer-term consequences of this pandemic – like all previous pandemics – are simply unknowable to those who must endure them. But just as past plagues made the world we currently inhabit, so too will this plague likely remake the one populated by our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

 The Conversation via consortiumnews.com

Claudius also heavily interfered with the judiciary, often involving himself in specific legal cases. He took over the role of censor, the powerful judicial authority who had control over the census, public morality, and government finances. Claudius maintained a virtual veto over all other Roman magistrates.

Claudius also issued numerous edicts, sometimes as many as twenty per day. The edicts were the “tweets” of that era. They dealt with everything from promoting yew juice as a cure for snakebite and, according to some historical tracts, permitting public flatulence in order to maintain good health. One of Claudius’s fondest pursuits was engaging in opulent feasts, at which gluttony and drunkenness was the rule of the day. Seneca the Younger wrote that the very last deed of the dying Claudius, whose gluttonous ways resulted in his having severe intestinal problems, was to make a failed attempt to pass wind.

The emperor championed major public works projects, including canals and tunnels. Although construction would fall to a later emperor, Hadrian, Claudius, as the Roman conqueror of Britain, realized that a fortification had to be established between the Roman province of Britannia and the restive Celts of Scotland. Under Hadrian, a 73-mile wall was constructed between the Roman possessions in Britain and the “barbarians” of the north.

Claudius relied on Roman soothsayers to guide his decision-making. These soothsayers, known as haruspices, had been in existence since the pre-Roman Etruscan era.

The foibles and peculiarities of Claudius were likely known far beyond the Roman Empire and its tributary states. One of the missions of diplomatic and military emissaries were to provide intelligence on the emperors and kings of powerful entities. Therefore, leaders as far away as China, Parthia (modern Iran), Araba (modern northern Iraq), Dacia (modern Romania and Moldova), Quadi (modern Moravia), Divi and Serendivi (modern Maldives and Sri Lanka, respectively), Cerobothra (modern Kerala and Tamil Nadu), Aksum (modern Ethiopia), and other kingdoms in Asia, Africa, and northern Europe.

Why is Claudius relevant today? Claudius’s excesses and abuses of power contributed to the ultimate fall of the Roman Empire, which continued to maintain some vestiges of the even greater Roman Republic. Claudius’s predecessor, the bloodthirsty tyrant Caligula, and successor, the bloodthirsty and inept Nero, would, together, help seal the date of Rome.

Donald Trump exhibits many of the traits of Claudius. Trump revels in banquets at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, the abode of billionaires. Trump’s gluttony, infidelity, fits of rage and frequent inability to pronounce words, crudeness (as exhibited by his recent re-tweeting of a YouTube fart joke video), fanciful projects like the U.S.-Mexico border wall, the U.S. Space Force, ignoring the legislature and judiciary, reliance on “soothsayers” at Fox News, issuing daily “edicts” via Twitter, and interference with public finances, immigration, and the census would have all been cheered on by Claudius.

Like Claudius, Trump has become the laughingstock of the world, regardless of whether he commands a sizable military force armed with nuclear weapons. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Trump’s emissary, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, himself a clownish ideological doppelganger of the U.S. president, gave a speech that earned not one second of applause from the audience of world leaders, diplomats, and military officers.

It is one thing to steer the United States away from what President George Washington warned the young country against in his Farewell Address: “a permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.” Washington’s sentiment was echoed by President Thomas Jefferson in his presidential inaugural address, in which Jefferson called for “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations-entangling alliances with none.” Washington and Jefferson were students of classical history, so the idiosyncrasies of Claudius would have been well known to them. Both presidents would have been aghast at their successor, Trump, slamming down the telephones on at least two foreign leaders, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

To be sure, every foreign ministry and intelligence agency in the world have collected requisite information on Mr. Trump and the less-than-stellar members of his administration. World leaders likely peruse such information with a combination of amusement and bewilderment, just as ambassadors and emissaries reported on the antics of Emperor Claudius to their kings and emperors.

Historians of the future will undoubtedly write about the scene at the 2019 NATO summit at Buckingham Palace in London, at which Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte, and British Princess Anne were caught on video laughing about Trump’s latest faux pas, a long and drawn out Trump press conference with Macron that ran late because Trump was jabbering on about meaningless drivel.

While addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2018, the entire assembly hall broke out in laughter as Trump, once again, made a buffoon out of himself at the very same podium where such eloquent speakers as Pope Francis, Emperor Haile Selassie, Jawaharlal Nehru, Charles De Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, Kwame Nkrumah, Corazon Aquino, Dag Hammarskjold, Salvador Allende, Lester Pearson, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hugo Chavez, Nelson Mandela, Harold Macmillan, Joao Goulart, Urho Kekkonen, Norodom Sihanouk, Sukarno, Josip Broz Tito, and many others. To be sure, there were other circus clowns who have appeared before the world body – Grenada’s Prime Minister Eric Gairy and his urging the UN to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects and the “Bermuda Triangle” approaches the inanity of Trump’s carnival sideshow at the UN.

In 2012, close Trump friend and comrade-in-corruption Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, displayed a cartoon drawing of a fizzing bomb fuse to illustrate to the General Assembly how close Iran was to possessing a nuclear bomb. The gambit was a propaganda victory for Iran, which only had to point to Netanyahu’s antics to prove its case that it was not developing a nuclear weapon. In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, trying to outdo his friend Trump, delivered a racist speech in which he targeted Brazil’s indigenous tribes of the Amazon with his vitriol.

In his 1934 novel about Claudius, “I, Claudius,” Robert Graves depicts the emperor of Rome as someone who, upon becoming emperor, has a choice between restoring the old Republic and ruling as a benevolent leader or becoming a mad monarch. Claudius chose the latter. Trump, who is not a student of history or knowledgeable about literature, except for a book of Adolf Hitler’s speeches he once kept by his bed, has become a latter-day Claudius, “I, Trumpius,” as it were.

Livy

It seems quite evident to many that the United States has been consumed by the same ambition and thus fate with that of the Roman Empire. That one of the most notorious periods in history for its extensive imperialism, corruption and barbaric slavery are the blueprint for what the founding fathers used in forming the moral constitution of the United States, and thus it has been rotten to its core from its very inception.

There is no doubt that the United States is acting in accordance with that of an empire presently.

However, from this alone, we cannot confirm whether it is in fact her founding constitution which is at fault or rather, her abandonment of her constitution which has led her to this monstrous outcome.

It is true that the founding fathers of the United States were very much influenced by Rome, but for those who have some knowledge on the history of that titan of an era, they would know that Roman history consists of three phases; that of the kingdom, the republic, and the empire. The period of empire was its most corrupt and malevolent, but what defined Rome’s characteristics before this? Was Rome actually something noble and honorable once? Which period were the founding fathers influenced and inspired by? Is the United States doomed to repeat the collapse of the Roman Empire? We will discuss all these questions here.

What Defined Rome before it Became an Empire?

Rome was founded in 753 BC as a kingdom, though much of the details around this partake in legend, it suffices for our purpose here that she was founded by Romulus who ruled until 717 BC. Numa Pompilius who would rule as king for the next 43 years, was a very wise king and founded the laws and governmental institutions that Rome would use for most of her existence. It should be noted that during this period, the kings were not chosen by bloodline but rather through a voting process by the senate, yes, there was already a senate formed during the period of kings.

Servius Tullius would become Rome’s 6^th king and would rule 43 years until the day that his own daughter, whom he had marry to one of Tarquinius’ sons (Superbus), conspired together to brutally murder Servius in his elder years in a terribly bloody public spectacle and usurp the throne. Servius’ body would then be run over by his daughter by horse carriage causing an even further grisly scene, and the street would be known afterwards as Vicus Sceleratus (street of shame, infamy). Superbus would earn his nickname, meaning ‘proud’ or ‘arrogant’ due to his refusal to bury the body of Servius. And Servius would be known as the last of the benevolent kings.

Tarquinius Superbus would rule for 26 years and would be the last of the kings. He, not surprisingly, was very unpopular with the Roman people and senate, ruling as a cruel despot. This hatred for Superbus would find its snapping point when one of Superbus’ sons, Sextus raped a nobleman’s wife, named Lucretia. Lucretia was so humiliated and felt so dishonored by this act that once she had relayed the message to a group of four high-ranking men she stabbed herself in the heart with a dagger. Junius Brutus was one of the men present during this scene, and Livy writes that as soon as Lucretia had committed suicide, Brutus rushed over to her, plucked the dagger out of her breast and raised it, swearing the end of the Tarquin kingship.

Junius Brutus was able to quickly organise a gathering within the city where he exhorted the Roman people to rise up against the tyrant king. The people would support this and vote for the deposition of Superbus and the banishment of him and his entire family. Junius Brutus then gathered the people of Rome to swear an oath that they would suffer no man to rule Rome ever again, and as per Livy, the Roman people desirous of liberty would vow from that point on no longer to be swayed by the entreaties or bribes of kings.

A Republic is Born

If Superbus had been a just king, the crime against Lucretia would have been presented to him to act as judge over and he would not have been punished for the crime of his son, but this was not done. It was not done because it was known that Superbus had no respect for a law benefitting the general welfare of the people but rather only knew his own personal law, and this is what the people could no longer suffer under.

The largest change which transformed Rome from a kingdom into a republic would be the replacement of the king with two consuls, who would be voted in by the Roman citizenry and would only have a one year term. This was done to dissuade anyone from desiring to rule indefinitely and from abusing their powers for personal gain and thus was to protect against the corrupting lust for unbounded power seen during the age of kings from their sons.

Junius Brutus would be one of the first consuls of two, in replacing the king of Rome. During his term, Brutus had to act as judge over his sons who had committed treason and sentenced them to death, for which he witnessed their executions, something that was expected of the consul. This is not to say that Brutus was a cold man, but rather that he treated his sons with no additional favour, and judged their punishment for their crimes as he would have done for anyone else. It was because of this reputation for upholding honor that Brutus became a hero in Roman history; that he not only overthrew a tyrant king and helped establish the republic, but that he embodied the noble qualities it was to represent and that nobody was above the law for the general welfare of its people.

The Roman Republic would exist from 510 BC to 27 BC, however, before we go further I would like to point out a few parallels from another time.

His Majesty Hath Cast Them Off

On June 12, 1630, after a voyage of 76 days, four ships with 800 passengers, under the command of John Winthrop, anchored in Massachusetts Bay. With more ships on the way, he was soon to preside over nearly 20, 000 colonists by 1650.

Why were so many Europeans willing to take the risk of such a long voyage to a land that they knew hardly anything about and with no assured prospects? A major factor was that Europe had been experiencing almost ongoing warfare since the hundred years war and was presently experiencing the thirty years war, thus poverty, famine and pestilence ran rampant and the death rate was horrifying. There was no future for most people in Europe, which had descended into such chaos that its continued existence was really not certain.

It was recognised that one of the core reasons for Europe’s descent into madness was the unreliability of its kings, being concerned more for their personal welfare than that of their people.

Faced with constant threats by King Charles I of England to remove the rights he had accorded the colonists under the Massachusetts Bay Charter to establish a town, Winthrop replied back that if such a thing were to occur, “the common people here will conceive that his Majesty hath cast them off, and that hereby they are freed from their allegiance and subjection [to the Crown], and thereupon will be ready to confederate themselves under a new government.”

The New England Confederation would be established in 1643 and John Winthrop was elected its president. Its Articles of Confederation served as the first step toward realizing a new nation under constitutional rule. Historian Graham Lowry recounts in How the Nation Was Won: America’s Untold Story (1630-1751) that Benjamin Franklin would later cite these articles to the French government during the American Revolution for their support.

The Massachusetts Bay colonists had made their stand against the British Monarchy and were ready to face the consequences, from this point on, they would be the shapers of their own destiny.

A Republic if You Can Keep It

For a little less than 300 years (5^th to 2^nd century BC), the Roman Republic had succeeded in upholding the oath that the people swore with Junius Brutus. And though it would be confronted with challenging times, additional heroes would follow after, such as Quinctius Cincinnatus, who became a legend not only in Roman but in American history as a representation of the ideal Roman virtue; as a man who had received absolute power in order to defend Rome at a time of crisis, and when his duty was complete and Rome was saved, returned the pre-existing political order and resumed a life as a citizen farmer.

Though Rome was in warfare for most of its existence, it should be noted that everyone was in warfare and to not be at war was not an option during these times. However, during this period, Rome treated for the most part its captured cities well and formed a sort of commonwealth to which their citizens, as Livy confirms, had pretty much equal rights to those in Rome, in fact they were called Roman citizens which was not a term taken lightly. Slavery also existed in Rome, however, slavery unfortunately was prevalent in every major civilization of the time, including within Sparta, Athens, and Egypt. The point being that Rome, unlike its counterparts, did offer its citizenship to foreigners rather than death or slavery.

It was only by around the 2^nd century BC that Rome started to develop core fundamental problems that would lead to extensive corruption and civil unrest. They would never fully recover from this and it would spell the end of the republic in 27 BC. One factor to this, were that militaries were led by their generals for longer periods of time as military campaigns became longer distances from Rome, and elite military groups started to form who held more allegiance to their General than to the Republic. This is what made the power of Caesar and the existence of the two triumvirates possible. In addition, slavery became much more prevalent, the treatment of their slaves much more barbaric, and thus the gladiator games became popular (which only started end of 3^rd century BC). The gladiator games would be a terrible corruption on the people, and Spartacus would lead a successful rebellion for two years in response to this inhumanity in 73-71 BC.

Despite this fall from grace, many Roman heroes fought against this trend of corruption, such as Cato the Elder, Scipio Africanus, Cato the Younger and Cicero. Marcus Brutus thought it was in his destiny to return Rome to a republic when Caesar had seized it and crowned himself a king, just as his ancestor Junius Brutus did. However, Marcus did not learn from Junius’ example. The death of Caesar did not return Rome to a republic but rather sealed its fate to be ruled again by the whim and folly of kings, and the age of empire was born.

The people of Rome had forgotten their liberty and thus foolishly forsook it. If they could have only foreseen the monstrous tyrants they would unleash on themselves, such as; Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, they would have shuddered at the thought and done everything in their power to fight and return the republic to its original principles. Their folly would not only prove to be the doom of Rome but that of much of the world for centuries after.

Ben Franklin would state at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in response to a question as to what form of government had been formed, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin was entirely aware of the failure of Rome as a republic and it was never meant to be a literal model for the American Republic. However, that said the upholding of any republic would ultimately be subject to the moral condition of that society. The right of sovereignty meant the responsibility to uphold its integrity, the people would no longer have a king to blame but themselves if they were to squander this freedom.

Fortune favours the….

So what are we to take from all of this? Though Roman history is much too large to cover within this one paper, if you read either Livy or Machiavelli’s review of this history, it is undeniable that the Roman Republic did originate from an honorable and noble view of mankind, its execution was left wanting at times but it strove for most of its earlier existence for these ideals.

In addition, the Roman influences that inspired the founding fathers of the American Republic were based on these very evident principles to uphold liberty above all else. The Americans wished nothing more than to be free of the subjugation of monarchical rule and were willing to go to war with the most powerful empire in the world to win their liberty from it.

Though slavery was a mark that the United States had to battle with, it is important to acknowledge that this did not originate from within its self-conceptualisation but rather was a mark that was carried forth from Europe. A whole book could be written debating whether the founding fathers truly meant all men were born equal and free, suffice to say that when it came to a head during Lincoln’s time and a civil war erupted, there was a stand for the liberty of all.

For those who are uncertain whether the origin of the U.S. is indeed a noble and good one, I would bring forward that the Russians deemed it so. It would be stated by Czar Alexander II that if Britain and France would have intervened in America’s civil war for the side of the Confederates, that Russia would have considered this a casus belli and was willing to go to war with Britain and France over the matter. For the reason why, refer to my paper on this. It is thus undeniable that Russia deemed the continued existence of an intact United States rather important.

Though the U.S. would be in an internal conflict with itself as to which identity it would ultimately choose, it is important to recognise that there were indeed many engaged on the side for the emancipation of all people and access to a decent standard of living. Frederick Douglass, born a slave but amongst the most free as a man, understood that the preservation of the country during the civil war needed to occur before and not after equal rights and became opposed to the Abolitionists over this matter. He saw what the power of the machine tool industry in Massachusetts could accomplish in comparison to the brute slave labour of the south and understood that slavery would not be able to compete with the North’s offer and economic boom.

Lincoln had succeeded in preserving the country, however, he would not be allowed to continue into a second term and was assassinated in 1865. This was followed by a number of additional assassinations of American presidents: Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Harding in 1923 (from a very suspect food poisoning). FDR would pass away in office in 1945, and after a questionable decision to replace his former VP Henry Wallace with cardboard cut-out Truman, the United States was set on a course that caused her to abandon what she had first set out to accomplish.

By 1961, President Eisenhower would warn of a lagoon creature that had been created in the post WWII world, the military industrial complex, as something that had gotten out of control and would threaten the liberty of Americans and the world. That the United States, who had before then a citizens army, had now elite full-time military units that were only growing in size, who only knew the life of a soldier opposed to a constant enemy.

The United States would suffer one more assassination of a president in 1963, and now here we find ourselves today, in perpetual war.

Is it too late to turn around?

Machiavelli said, that if a system is corrupt it depends on two things as to whether it will be doomed to collapse or not, firstly whether it was always corrupt or had become corrupted and secondly if the people were past a point of salvation. If the system was good at its origins, and the people had some imprint of that remaining, there would be hope that that system could still turn itself around. And therefore I say, there is still a chance. A chance not just for the continual existence of the U.S. as something good but that the rest of the world need not risk getting pulled down along with it in the case of a collapse.

There is a stirring amongst a number of people within the United States, they have had enough with war. There is growing disdain for the present corrupt structures of their system and a growing support for those who wish to enforce peace. Tulsi Gabbard is an inspiring response to this corrupt age, and she has been succeeding despite the sabotage and attacks she has undergone from mainstream media and her very own political party.

The predictable rise and fall of empires is not based off of a cyclical formula that we are condemned to repeat for the rest of our existence. We do have the capability, if we have the will, to break out of this shrinking room and enter a new paradigm, namely, the Eurasian Economic Union and the New Silk Road.

“For where men have but little wisdom and valor, Fortune more signally displays her power; and as she is variable, so the states and republics under her influence also fluctuate, and will continue to fluctuate until some ruler shall arise who is so great an admirer of antiquity as to be able to govern such states within a republic so that Fortune may not have occasion, with every revolution of the sun, to display her influence and power.”

Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy

This is of course very disturbing news indeed.

What is just as disturbing is that it is seemingly all up to the children around the world to take matters into their own hands, since all adults have apparently become the equivalent to the walking dead, with children being the supposed organisers behind these immense marches across Europe, Canada and the US, to save the planet from total annihilation. This regard for the adults in the west and their seeming encouragement of this regard of themselves is very disappointing, but hardly surprising when you realise that many of them are from the ‘Make Love Not War’ live in the moment movements from the 60s that used as one of their main slogans “Never trust anybody over 30”. Interestingly, these are the parents of the dejected youth of today, who seem to have all taught their children the same lesson: don’t trust adults. Apparently something really terrible happens to you once you turn 31 and either you have to accept the fact that you are now analogous to a sack of potatoes or maintain a 20 something year old mental state for your entire life in order to stay “relevant”.

‘Forever young’ justice warriors such as Jane Fonda are a model for us all on how to never mentally develop past the age of 30. At the age of 81, Jane has made the vow to get arrested once a week for 14 weeks until she has to film her tv show ‘Grace and Frankie’, where at that point she will have fulfilled her part in making the world a better and safer place and will have earned her entrance into sainthood. As Jane stated in an interview with Washington Post, “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis…We have to behave like our houses are on fire”. Jane apparently has a strange understanding of what she would do if her house was on fire since she continues to fly frequently and supports the eating of meat, the two top “no-no’s” from Greta. Regardless, Jane is on a mission to send a message to everybody else that even though she does not follow what Greta asks, if others also do not, we will all die horrible deaths in 11 years. After all, Jane will be 92 at that point…but with the mind of a forever young 20 year old.

As Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, put it, “If we don’t work together, we are going to die together”. Bone-chilling words to be sure. The way things are going we might end up seeing baby boomer NATO Defense Ministers holding hands singing “We Are the World”, wait…that already happened in 2015.

However, it is no longer good enough to distrust anybody over 30, and those now leading the charge are just entering their teens since people in their 20s are becoming part of ‘the problem’ and are just not willing to do enough to save the planet. In a world that up until recently was obsessed with whether someone had a PhD title before they could make any public statement on the climate change subject, now could care less about academic titles and don’t even require a high school diploma to dictate world policy. Why? Well, because “all the science is already in” on climate change and now it is just about getting action done and since adults have been the problem that has got us to where we are today, it is only fitting that the children take matters into their own hands…right?

Before we dare to answer that question I thought I would share some interesting periods in history that may help provide a new perspective about the current situation we find ourselves in. Bare with me, I am past 30 years in age.

The Art of Prophesising

On January 23, 2019 Greta made the prediction: “The date is January 23, 2031. The world has just ended. No humans are left on the planet once known as ‘Earth’ ”.

Have we really come to a point where we are at the brink of the end times? I have spoken with a great many people who believe this to be the case. Whether they believe it will be in 11 years or 50 years, the consensus among the many is that we are certainly approaching the end of the world, something that used to be associated to the crazy guy who pulled out all his teeth so they could no longer hear his thoughts, holding up the sign “The End is Nigh” and babbling apocalyptic lines from the Book of Revelations…now the majority of us would look at that guy and say “You know, I think he has a point.”

But in all seriousness, are we truly living in the darkest period of humanity’s existence?

I will come back to that question because I truly do not take it lightly, but it should be known that there is not only a long list of false prophecies for the end of the world that had massive followings throughout history, but there are a lot of parallels to those periods and to that of our present day.

In 1345 the biggest financial collapse of history hit Europe. Food became increasingly hard to come by and water sanitation could not be maintained. It was not long after that the plague, carried by ships travelling from Asia, consumed a vulnerable Europe. During this time, many cities suffered up to a 50-70% mortality rate, killing much of the very young and old.

Many thought this to be the end of the world. There was no seeming solution to the problem and many believed that they were either being punished or had been abandoned by God, and since their condemnation seemed certain, took the path of living in the most hedonistic lifestyles imaginable as death and despair surrounded them. Others tried to buy their entrance into Purgatory with “indulgences” issued by the Church (somewhat reminiscent of today’s purchasers of carbon offsets). The basic idea was that one could reduce the amount of punishment one would undergo for committing a sin in exchange for money. This gave individuals, who could afford it, a way to partake in this end of world orgy-fest while avoiding their soul’s eternal damnation, or at least so they were told.

Others took matters a little more into their own hands to make it right with God. They set out onto the streets whipping themselves profusely. It was thought that if they punished themselves God would spare them from the plague, while others who had already contracted it thought it would move God to take the sickness back. These were known as the Flagellants, and they had a very large following. Later on they would blame the Jewish people for God’s wrath and resorted to the slaughter and burning alive of these groups of people in the hope that God would finally relent.

Another interesting period to take note of was during the Roman Republic. One of the most illustrious positions that one could hope for, outside of being Consul, was to be an Augur. This was an incredibly prestigious position within the Roman government that was usually assigned for life. An Augur was basically the interpreter of ominous and fortuitous signs, which included interpreting animal entrails (considered an exact science at the time), behaviour of birds and so forth to dictate future policy of the Republic.

There was also the period between the 4^th and 5^th Crusade known for its ‘Child Crusaders’. According to George Zabriskie Gray’s research on this subject, in 1212 a twelve year old boy named Stephen, from the village Cloyes in France claimed he had been selected by God to lead a Crusade of Children to rescue the Holy Land. He would recruit 30, 000 children to join him. Around the same time, a 10 year old boy named Nicholas, from Cologne, would also begin to preach and recruit children for the same mission. He too claimed that he had been selected by God and recruited a following of at least 20, 000 children. What little is known of the fate of these children is that the majority of them died of either starvation, were murdered or sold into slavery. Of the few thousand that actually set sail for Palestine, it is not known what happened to them, but only that they never arrived to the Holy Land.

And the list of examples goes on…

In Praise of Folly

So what is the point of all this? I think it is useful for us to have a memory of our past folly. And I think we are in the greatest danger of committing folly when we forget the foolish whims and beliefs of the past that were not just based on religious misconceptions but also on misconceptions of what passed for ‘science’. I think it is very dangerous when a population cannot even remember its recent ecstasies in folly in end of world prophecies such as the Y2K scare only 20 years ago, with a massive following of believers who were prepared for end times. This was a subject that was constantly being talked about on mainstream media and even by the governments of countries, President Clinton being no exception.

I think it is also very dangerous when there are absolute statements made such as “all the science is in” on a subject. Climate science is a relatively new science, and an extremely complicated one with many unknown variables. It is interesting that a group of scientists in this field have claimed that they know everything there needs to be known on this subject, when I don’t think we can say that for any other subject in the sciences to this date. Either climate science is far more simple than we thought or we are skipping steps.

What is also concerning is that although this grouping of climate scientists speak with such certainty about what the climate will be 10 years from now and what is influencing it, they are still unable to accurately predict the weather 2 weeks from now (let alone when a cold or hot front will be entering a region months or years from now). Meteorologists admit that their forecasts are at best an “educated guess” from measurements they take in change of atmospheric pressures. This does not even take into account the role of the Sun, which is an obvious contributor to global climate cycles, nor other factors within our galaxy such as supernova emissions of radiation and cosmic rays. Yet despite this lack of understanding we can be certain that climate scientists can with confidence predict the climate trend of the WORLD 10 or even 50 years from now!

We are told that the climate is completely chaotic now and unpredictable but moving towards a measurable point in the future. This confident prediction is being calculated by super computers. Computers that are ultimately limited to their programs’ parameters and variables. It is claimed that these computers can ‘learn’, can ‘problem solve’, but it still is operating within a human-made program and is thus limited to the assumptions of that program. A computer cannot decide to start taking into account the Sun’s role in climate change for instance. It does not even have a concept of what the Sun is. There seems to be an almost mystical faith being put into these super computers, likened to a shaman who shakes a bag of bones and dumps its contents out to form some random pattern that somehow will reveal our fate.

How can a computer have all the answers when we don’t even know all the variables let alone how they interact in order for it to calculate the outcome years from now? Well the answer is we obviously can’t. It is not an accurate prediction. Just like the Y2K scare.

I would further add that when a movement forms vehemently asserting that the end of the world is nigh, that is a reflection of the breakdown of that society. It is a reflection that the people of such a society no longer have faith in that society’s fitness for survival. I think it is no coincidence that the leading nations supporting the prophecy of Greta are largely first world western countries, countries that at one time enjoyed the highest standards of living but now are experiencing decay and economic collapse.

There are already answers to the clean energy crisis. Namely nuclear power, with fission power (and soon fusion) not only being the cleanest forms of energy but by far the most efficient and most powerful source of energy human civilization has ever had access to, making actions once impossible turn into the possible, such as long-distance space travel. The technology of the plasma torch has the capability to break down matter into its ionic components, this means that landfills could be cost-effectively broken down into their elemental forms which would thus turn them into resource mines. It is a wonder that those who seem to care so much about solving these problems never seem to bring up these very evident solutions.

So how did European civilization ultimately survive the mayhem of the Black Death? Fortunately there were those who did not believe that this was the end of the world and sought to not only rebuild but improve upon the conditions of the past. They did not believe that people needed to resort to some form of supplication to avoid the end of the world (somewhat reminiscent of today’s concept of all humans being innately polluters who must repent and minimise the negative effects of their mere existence). Rather those that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages believed that the avoidance of the end of the world could only come about through human intervention, which had the highest capacity for the good and depended on scientific discoveries that could only be brought about through the creative imaginings of an optimistic human mind.

In addition to over fifty people being killed in mass shootings in the US and three US soldiers being killed for no reason at all in the Afghanistan quagmire, this August has seen more winning over of the US military by President Trump who has embraced some of the Roman dictator’s more obnoxious peculiarities, not least the practice of stacking the Supreme Court with ultra-right wing bigots and an overwhelming desire to interpret and wield both national and international laws in his own peculiar fashion.

There was yet more provocation of China by the Pentagon which ordered the Navy to carry out yet another “freedom of navigation” operation in the South China Sea on August 28. The spokeswoman of the US 7th Fleet said that “US Forces operate in the Indo-Pacific region on a daily basis, including in the South China Sea. All operations are designed in accordance with international law and demonstrate that the United States will fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”

During an earlier provocation, on 6 August, when the nuclear-armed aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan carried out air operations in the South China Sea, US Admiral Karl Thomas declared that “We just think that folks should follow the international law and our presence allows us to provide that security and stability in the background for these discussions to take place.”

The “international law” referred to by these people is based on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, which details the “legal status of the territorial sea, of the air space over the territorial sea and of its bed and subsoil” but what is never mentioned by the Pentagon or the Western establishment media is that the United States has not ratified the Convention. As The Diplomat pointed out in regard to this contemptuous dismissal of international law, “the national interest has fallen victim to the confessional nature, the hardened doctrinarism, of modern American politics.”

But this doesn’t matter, so long as US Navy guided-missile warships can roam over the backyards of nations half a world away from Washington while the US National Security Adviser, John Bolton, tours Russia’s borders to further whip up anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.

It was not coincidental that Bolton’s trot around Russia took place immediately before a meeting in Berlin of senior diplomats from Ukraine, Germany, France and Russia intended to prepare for substantive discussions aimed at reducing tension and furthering dialogue. This type of gathering does not attract Washington’s approval, for it is in the best economic interests of the Military-Industrial Complex to maintain tensions, discourage dialogue and concentrate on flooding the world with expensive US weaponry.

It was ironical and even amusing that, as reported by Radio Free Europe, when Bolton went to Moldova he declared that “The United States believes very strongly in the sovereignty and independence of Moldova. It’s up to its citizens to decide what its future will be, not to outside influences” — because Bolton’s aim in the region and elsewhere in the world is exactly that : to influence countries to favour the United States against Russia and China.

The Washington of Trump Augustus continues to do its utmost to berate and intimidate Russia and China with the aim of portraying them as being intent on the world domination that is so obviously being exercised by the United States which has “established more than 400 military bases on every continent except Antarctica.” Yet Trump and his pliant Senate and other eager followers are ever-ready to find exciting new challenges, the most recent one being Space, where, according to Emperor Trump, there are problems.

On 29 August he announced that “We’re gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the United States Space Command. It’s a big deal. As the newest combatant command, SpaceCom will defend America’s vital interests in space — the next warfighting domain. And I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody. It’s all about space… SpaceCom will boldly deter aggression and outpace America’s rivals, by far.”

How aggression is deterred “boldly” by someone at a desk tapping a keyboard is not revealed, but Trump imagines this to be so, and was eloquent in his declaration that “From our nation’s first days, America’s military blazed the trails and crossed the frontiers that secured our nation’s future. No adversary on Earth will ever match the awesome courage, skill, and might of American Armed Forces” even if they’re only pressing buttons.

Then the US Air Force notified the world that it had deployed “a task force of B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, airmen and support aircraft to RAF Fairford in England. The task force is from the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. During the bombers’ deployment, the airmen will conduct theatre integration and flying training, including joint and allied training in Europe, to improve bomber interoperability”

The deployment was headlined in Britain’s Express newspaper as “Russia threat: US B-2 bombers arrive in the UK after latest Russian jet incident.” The paper continued that the bombers had been sent “as the US shores up defences in the UK against a backdrop of Russian sabre-rattling . . . the arrival of the bombers will send a signal to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin just days after RAF Typhoon fight jets were scrambled to intercept Russian aircraft approaching British airspace earlier this month. The Royal Air Force said the jets were dispatched after two Tu-142 Bear bombers were spotted approaching UK airspace.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said Russia was ‘determined to push international norms and to test the UK’s resolve’.

This rubbish was put in perspective by the RAF which stated that “At no point did the Russian aircraft enter UK territorial airspace.”

Of course they didn’t. They were on a routine training flight and had no intention of going anywhere near the UK. But Western media outlets seize every opportunity to try to convince the public that Russia has mounted a campaign of “sabre-rattling.”

One voice of sanity in the West, French President Emmanuel Macron, said on 27 August that Europe should reach out to Russia and avoid the hideous confrontation of a new Cold War that is so desired by Washington’s Finest. In a speech following the August G-7 Summit he made clear what policy Europe would be wise to follow as regards relations with Russia, and France 24 recorded him as saying “Pushing Russia from Europe is a profound strategic error.”

He then made the sensible observation that “The European continent will never be stable, will never be in security, if we don’t pacify and clarify our relations with Russia.”

This is a strikingly important pronouncement by a major Western leader, but it wasn’t mentioned in Washington — or by any of Washington’s news outlets. The reason for its being ignored and cast into the dungeon of unpalatable truth is quite simple:

Trump Washington is up against the World.

The Akkadian Empire is often regarded as the world’s first empire, reaching its peak between the 24th and 22nd centuries BC, some 4,400 years ago.

It was in the Middle East, home of quite a few empires over the millennia. It began with King Sargon, who, having succeeded at conquering his neighbours in Babylonia, decided to expand further into Syria and Canaan.

King Sargon established a fad that has remained until the present day. In any era since his time, there have been those nations that, having had initial successes at conquest, couldn’t resist the temptation to “have it all.”

Each, in turn, had occasion to learn why this is not the most sensible objective for a nation to pursue.

The Roman Empire collapsed, in part, because it attempted to gobble up as much of the known world as possible and found that, once another civilisation had been conquered and looted, a military and other resources were then necessary to maintain control. Rome learned too late that, whilst conquest is often profitable, maintaining a conquered land is a liability.

Over the millennia, history has seen many empires come and go. By the time of the Spanish Empire (peaking in 1521–1643), kings had a rough idea of how very big the world was and recognized that controlling it all was quite a task.

This did not, however, stop ambitious leaders. Every century has seen its Genghis Khan or Napoleon, whose desire for conquest was insatiable. Repeatedly, such leaders came to a bad end, specifically because they tried to bite off more than they could chew.

Britain owned the nineteenth century, with colonies worldwide, but today, we British eat humble pie, as we were eclipsed due to excessive warfare and government spending.

Then the US owned the twentieth century, not only colonizing parts of the world, but seeking to police the rest of it.

This began in 1899. Future President Theodore Roosevelt stated publicly that “Peace may come only through war.” He asserted that the US military was an “international police” and that he, as president, had the right to order invasions to enforce America’s Manifest Destiny. During his presidency, he did such a good job at his invasions that, in 1906, he was the first US President to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

And so it has continued since then. Successive presidents have cherry-picked countries that needed invading – often with the justification that it was “to make the world safe for democracy” – a phrase coined by Woodrow Wilson’s spin doctors to support America’s involvement in World War I.

In more recent decades, the US, under George Bush, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Under Barrack Obama, the US invaded Syria and Libya. And, today, sabres are being rattled at Iran on an almost weekly basis. (I’ve long felt it likely that World War III would begin at the Strait of Hormuz.)

And to maintain a geographic balance, the US government dispenses weekly notices to the media of the growing need for aggression in Venezuela and North Korea.

Why? Well, just like King Sargon, the US military interests are ever-conscious that there are still a few countries out there that are not US-dominated. As can be seen in the map above, the US has a military presence in all the countries that are coloured pink.

The US has some 800 military bases and has military personnel deployed in 177 countries – a total of 1.3 million troops. In addition to these bases, there are numerous “lily pads,” or mini-military bases. Such bases generally house weaponry and supplies, at the ready for larger troop deployments.

Further, the US has a host of “militarily active advisors” and “peacekeeping forces” deployed across the globe.

No surprise then, that the US tends to work towards the day when 100% of the world has US military boots on the ground.

For example, that grey collection of islands on the map, just above Norway, are the Svalbard and Jan Mayen islands. Although they’re presently inhabited by Russians and Norwegians, are in the Arctic Circle and have virtually no value, when US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Svalbard in 2018, he saw it as a good site for a US base, saying, “Certainly America’s got to up its game in the arctic. There’s no doubt about that.”

At present, the cost of the military takes up 54% of all federal discretionary spending – $598.5 billion per annum. For the taxpayer, this means that, if the US were to cease to see itself as the world’s policeman, his taxes could be drastically reduced and his family’s economic wellbeing could be enhanced dramatically.

But the US government would consider this type of thinking as inviting disaster, as it’s assumed that the US would be in great danger from foreign aggression, particularly from Russia (which has only one military base outside its borders) and China (which has none).

Indeed, Colorado Senator Cory Gardner has co-sponsored a bill that seeks to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. He has said, “Putin’s Russia is an outlaw regime that is hell-bent on undermining international law and destroying the US-led liberal global order.”

Them’s fightin’ words. Senator Lindsay Graham, a co-sponsor, has said, “Our goal is to change the status quo and impose meaningful sanctions and measures against Putin’s Russia.”

John Bolton has characterized Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as “a troika of tyranny,” one that must be subjugated.

What do all these countries have in common? Only one thing: They do not presently come under the thumb of the US military.

Either the US military and its representatives in government are spoiling for war, or they fail to understand that their persistent careless threats to other sovereign nations is equivalent to a declaration of war against them by the US military.

Considering the enormous head of steam that the US government is building up toward these countries, it would be surprising in the extreme if the world did not find itself in a state of world war in the not-too-distant future.

The US Empire, like its predecessors throughout history, is about to bite off more than it can chew and the world will pay the price.

internationalman.com

International Man: Economically, politically, and socially, the United States seems to be headed down a path that’s not only inconsistent with the founding principles of the country but accelerating quickly toward boundless decay.

The word “decadence” is often associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, which became morally corrupt—its people lazy, wasteful, and lacking discipline. Many observers have pointed out the US is similarly becoming decedent. How do you see it?

Doug Casey: There’s no question about it; the culture in the US is changing. Where to start? It’s a book-length subject. One thing that absolutely amazes me is that the term “cultural appropriation” has become a buzzword for a lot of people today. The concept is actually completely insane.

It’s bizarre—perverse, really—that the people doing the most whining about cultural appropriation by Americans don’t actually have worthwhile cultures themselves. The fact of the matter is that the only culture in the history of the world that amounts to anything is that of Western civilization. The West has given all of humanity concepts like freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, free markets, individualism, science, and rationality. In addition, the West has created almost all of the world’s great music, literature, architecture, and philosophy

People trying to make cultural appropriation on the part of Americans into a scandal are basically scam artists and race hustlers. I’m talking about blacks who are outraged about white women wearing African earrings. Or Hispanics picketing a couple of white girls who set up a taco stand after visiting Mexico.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Spanish-speaking world south of the US border. Other than quaint sombreros, some local food, and some basically primitive handicrafts, they don’t have a culture that’s worth anything.

That’s absolutely true of Africa. Africans should be eternally grateful to the West if, when da Gama was rounding the Cape in the 15^th century, he’d just thrown out a wheel. But he would have also had to throw out an instruction book. But nobody could read it, because the entire continent south of the Sahara was illiterate.

This is true of most of the primitive world. I hesitate to say “developing world” because development is solely due to imported capital and expertise. If that inflow stops, Africa could go back to the bush, with mass starvation.

The only cultures in the world that can compete with Western civilization are those in the Orient. But what do they have? Frankly, not much, apart from Taoism, Zen, yoga, martial arts, and some great cuisines. Some things of value but not much by comparison to the West.

The fact that Westerners are ashamed of their culture is a sign of the collapse of the West. Most Europeans and Americans are so intimidated by these people squalling about ridiculous things that they don’t even try to defend themselves.

Instead, they agree with their attackers, stick their tails between their legs, and wander off. I don’t doubt Americans will agree to pay “reparations” to blacks for slavery. It’s an absurd concept, about as ridiculous as the English paying me reparations because of what they did to my ancestors in Ireland 200 years ago.

In fact, the Africans exported to the New World were the lucky ones. Their descendants have a standard of living and opportunities 10 or 20 times greater than those still on the continent.

But the fact these things are even discussed is a definite sign of the collapse of the West. It’s very much like what happened in the late Roman Empire.

When Rome was in its ascendancy and at its height, the leaders of Rome were all native Romans or at least native Italians. If they were born in other parts of the Empire, they were of Roman culture and had Roman names and Roman values. They had a stake in their civilization.

But as time went on, all of this started changing.

By the time the barbarians invaded the Empire wholesale—starting with the battle of Adrianople in 378 AD—the handwriting was already on the wall. Within 30 years, the barbarians controlled the entire Empire.

The old political structure had completely collapsed. Native Romans were leaving the Empire, going to barbarian lands, to avoid onerous taxation. The currency was worthless. The economy was in a shambles. The military structure had completely collapsed. None of the soldiers were Italians; they were all barbarians hired as mercenaries. Likewise, here in the US, few Americans in the diminishing middle class want to join the military. The city of Rome itself was sacked in 410 AD and it never really recovered.

International Man: Economically, the US government continues to spend ever-increasing amounts of money. In 2018 alone, the federal deficit was $779 billion—a $113 billion increase from the year before. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are falling over themselves to offer new government freebies that could pay for college, medical care, and the list goes on.

How does this play into the theme of US decadence?

Doug Casey: Well, whether you’re an individual or a family or a country, when you live above your means, you’re almost by that very fact decadent. You’re not planning for the future.

But the US government’s debt and reported deficits represent only current cash outlays, not obligations in the form of future spending. If the deficits were represented with accrual accounting—which is what businesses have to do—the annual deficits would probably be more like $3 trillion.

Not to mention that interest rates are artificially suppressed to about 2% in the US. At more normal levels of, say, 6%, the annual deficit would be about $800 billion higher. So the financial situation is actually much, much worse than it seems.

On top of all this is the fact that these deficits come during a time of supposed recovery. But the “recovery” has been ramped up by creating trillions of new dollars and allowing people to borrow at effectively negative interest rates, certainly after inflation. This is all very decadent.

Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. That’s not the attitude of a rising civilization.

The opposite of “decadent” is to be constructive, disciplined, forward-thinking, and self-respecting. You produce more than you consume and save the difference.

That’s exactly the opposite of what Americans are doing today.

We’re completely decadent.

Small comfort that the Europeans are even worse off than we are.

International Man: On an individual level, Americans are living beyond their means. Many Americans have less than $1,000 in savings.

What does this say about a society?

Doug Casey: It augurs very poorly.

The average American is one paycheck from not being able to pay his rent. When the distortions that have been cranked into the economy over just the last 10 years unwind and the economy as a whole goes downhill again, there are going to be millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Many millions more are going join the 42 million Americans now living on food stamps.

The social repercussions of this are predictable.

The population will get angry; many will go into the streets and riot. They’re going to vote overwhelmingly for some politician who says that he—or quite possibly she—can cure all their problems by giving them free stuff stolen from rich people.

In a way it’s understandable, because the fact of the matter is the rich have indeed been getting richer at an accelerating rate.

Why?

Because they’re the ones that get to stand next to the firehose of money that’s coming out of Washington. They get it first; they get most of it. It’s another sign of a society in decline: the dominance of cronies. That creates a lot of class antagonism.

It’s going to explode and be really ugly. Perhaps one thing keeping a lid on the situation is the huge number of Americans on psychiatric drugs: Zoloft, Prozac, and a hundred others. Perhaps millions of others don’t care as long as their internet connection enables them to play video games.

International Man: Aside from the financial aspect of decadence, what is happening culturally and intellectually in the United States? For example, many Americans are rejecting biological facts in favor of the politically correct fad of the day. Is this a sign of decline?

Doug Casey: The PC types say there are supposed to be 30 or 40 or 50 different genders—it’s a fluid number. It shows that wide swathes of the country no longer have a grip on actual physical, scientific reality. That’s more than a sign of decline; it’s a sign of mass psychosis.

There’s no question that some males are wired to act like females and some females are wired to act like males. It’s certainly a psychological aberration but probably has some basis in biology.

The problem is when these people politicize their psychological peculiarities, try to turn it into law, and force the rest of the society to grant them specially protected status.

Thousands of people every year go to doctors to have themselves mutilated so that they can become something else. Today they can often get the government or insurers to pay for it.

If you want to self-mutilate, that’s fine; that’s your business even if it’s insane. To make other people pay for it is criminal. But it’s now accepted as normal by most of society.

The acceptance of politically correct values—“diversity,” “inclusiveness”—trigger warnings, safe spaces, gender fluidity, multiculturalism, and a whole suite of similar things that show how degraded society has become. Adversaries of Western civilization like the Mohammedan world and the Chinese justifiably see it as weak, even contemptible.

As with Rome, collapse really comes from internal rot.

Look at who people are voting for. It’s not that Americans elected Obama once—a mob can be swayed easily enough into making a mistake—but they reelected him. It’s not that New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio once, but they reelected him by a landslide. All of the Democratic candidates out there are saying things that are actually clinically insane and are being applauded.

International Man: In fact, in the recent Democratic debate, candidate Julián Castro even mentioned giving government-funded abortions to transgender women—biological men. It received one of the loudest bouts of applause from the audience.

That’s not to mention that two other candidates spoke in broken Spanish when responding to the moderator’s questions.

Doug Casey: As you said, it got a lot of applause.

US presidential candidates speaking in Spanish would be very much like an ancient Roman addressing the Forum in Gothic, not Latin. It’s all over for a culture when it starts using the language of its conqueror. In a restaurant here in Aspen, the owners have a sign in Spanish that refers to the progress of the Reconquista—the recapture of the American Southwest from the Anglos. Perhaps someone will speak Arabic in the next debates.

I hate to sound defeatist, but it’s all over for what was once known as American civilization. The celebrity of AOC is indicative. How else could a 29-year-old Puerto Rican waitress, poorly educated and not very bright, set the political tone for the whole country?

International Man: Is America’s late-stage decadence a product of its political and economic decline or vice versa?

Doug Casey: The decadence we see all around us is arising from every source. Cultural, economic, and political. Cultural decline is the most basic area. Massive immigration of people with different cultures, languages, and religions guarantee it. Especially if they’re coming because of free benefits. Many actually despise traditional American culture, as well as holding the current culture in contempt.

Their views are then reflected in a corruption of the politics. We see that with the apparent acceptance of the Squad—although I prefer to call them the “Gang of Four.” Politics engenders economic distortions. Part of the problem is that politics completely dominates the economy today.

For Trumpers to think that building a wall is going to change things is naïve. A wall will be about as effective as a kid’s sandcastle on the beach to hold back the waves.

The barbarians are already within the gates.

internationalman.com

He got there by stabbing both his predecessors David Cameron – an old Eton and Oxford supposed friend – and Theresa May, who generously (and idiotically) revived his career by appointing him to the second highest position in the state.

BOJO’s political skill beyond superficial charm therefore has been in backstabbing, lies and treachery – traits worthy of the mad Roman emperor Caligula. Indeed, compared to BOJO, Caligula looks good.

BOJO inherits three years of deadlock in the UK’s remorseless slow crawl towards a no-deal Brexit – an exit from the European Union without any negotiated deal with Brussels that threatens to inflict the worst suffering and upheaval on his own country since the civil wars of the 17^th century.

Yet BOJO, as the world now knows worships Winston Churchill and has ridden the Churchill Myth to power in No 10 Downing Street.

But in reality, the truth is the awful opposite, BOJO, as he is widely known is no Churchill who himself was summed up by his own deputy prime minister Clement Atlee as “50 percent genius, 50 percent bloody fool.” BOJO is a bloody fool all the way through.

In fact, Johnson’s entire career track record of zero achievement and endless failures and bungles consistently proves he is not Churchill but an “Anti-Churchill” – doomed to destroy and make a mockery of everything Churchill stood for. (Just as Theresa May made a mockery and demolished all the achievements of Margaret Thatcher).

Churchill by 1940 when he finally became prime minister at the age of 65 had already accumulated one of the most impressive – and controversial – records of any leader in Britain’s long history. He had run all three departments of war –the Navy, Army and Air Force. He had served five years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or finance minister and been an enlightened reforming young home secretary (interior minister). As colonial secretary he had administered directly the largest empire in human history. He ran Britain’s entire armaments industry with conspicuous success during the final year of World War I. Before World War I, he even stole the oil reserves of Iran for Britain for 40 years.

Johnson by contrast had zero impact as an empty figurehead mayor of London and is universally agreed to have been a lazy, utterly incompetent foreign secretary who totally bungled Britain’s crucial exit negotiations with the European Union. No Churchillian record of achievement there.

Churchill was also an experienced combat soldier who had fought bravely, if recklessly in combat in colonial wars in Africa, the Americas and Asia and had served in the front lines of the trenches during World War I. He had ridden in the last cavalry charge of the British Army, helped design the tank and was an architect of the Royal Air Force.

Johnson has never seen a single shot fired in anger. He is inexperienced and untested with all the hollow, armchair bravado of the Phony Tough.

Churchill was deeply prone to depression and I believe was strongly bipolar (This is never acknowledged about him, but the pattern of behavior is very clear). However, he was enormously self-confident to the core of his being and genuinely brave.

Johnson is not brave. He is at best still utterly untested at age 55. He has never had a gun pointed at him by a man who would shoot it. Unlike Churchill, who was happily married for 57 years, Johnson’s two marriages lasted only a single decade between them. He has no emotional stability or solid foundation whatsoever.

Churchill at least did have steel in his character and never to the end of his life worried for a second over the hundreds of thousands of men he sent to their deaths at Gallipoli, Anzio, Rhodes, Norway, the entire Italian campaign, Malaya and so many other notoriously bungled campaigns. Johnson by contrast is an untested big bag of soft blancmange.

Indeed, Johnson, who has done his share of Russia-baiting and cheap demagoguery seems fated to make the notorious Roman Emperor Caligula look good and rehabilitate the little lunatic nearly 2,000 years after his assassination.

Caligula after all only declared war on Neptune, god of the seas and ordered his mighty legions on the shores of modern France and Belgium to collect sea shells as war trophies. The Roman legions therefore suffered zero casualties. This was far superior to Johnson’s likely running the risks of provoking full-scale war with Iran and even Russia.

Caligula killed a handful of Roman senators but the Roman Empire flourished for another two centuries in all its grandeur after his death. With Scotland on the brink of demanding full independence and Northern Ireland and Wales likely to follow, Johnson looks fated to preside over the disintegration of the United Kingdom – a political entity that flourished for more than three centuries until he came on the scene.

After a few months of BOJO’s chaotic, bungled twists and turns, the British people may well be calling to bring back Caligula: Compared to BOJO, he wasn’t so bad after all.