“Thus shall ye say unto them, The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens.”
Jeremiah 10:11 [KJV].
“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Moral decay contributed to the dissolution [of the Roman Empire]. The virile character that had been formed by arduous simplicities and a supporting faith relaxed in the sunshine of wealth and the freedom of unbelief; men had now, in the middle and upper classes, the means to yield to temptation, and only expediency to restrain them. Urban congestion multiplied contacts and frustrated surveillance; immigration brought together a hundred cultures whose differences rub themselves out into indifference. Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed. The greatest of historians held that Christianity was the chief cause of Rome’s fall.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [the greatest of historians is of course Edward Gibbon - but it is not immediately obvious that Christianity caused any of the things Durant just listed including unbelief or sex running riot]
Because of the infamous crowded, dirty, rowdy streets of Rome, and tendency of cheap shoddy apartment “insulae” buildings to collapse, and people throwing solid or liquid objects out upper-storey windows “All in all, he [Juvenal] thought, only a fool would go out to dinner without making his will.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest appearance on Rebel News I discuss Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to embrace evil in the Middle East with Ezra Levant.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Mark Carney’s decision to side with Hamas was a classic example of political rhetoric that was meaningless, dishonest and sinister at once.
“The biggest mistake was for the prime minister to fly down to Mar-a-Lago to supplicate with the new POTUS before he was even installed. It was like something straight out of the Middle Ages: Spare my people, good Lord.”
“A Failure of Imagination” by Sean M. Maloney in a guest post on Terry Glavin’s “The Real Story” substack January 25, 2025, underlining how people use “Middle Ages” or “Medieval” as the most extraordinarily vacant all-purpose insult. Including not being aware that feudalism created a degree of enforceable rights for ordinary people unprecedented in human history.
“In methods, tactics, and instruments of war, Germany took the initiative in 1914. The war was to bring a revolution in the European spirit and, as a corollary, in the European state structure. Germany was the revolutionary power of Europe. Located in the centre of the continent, she set out to become the leader of Europe, the heart of Europe, as she put it. Germany not only represented the idea of revolution in this war; she backed the forces of revolution everywhere, whatever their ultimate goals. She helped Roger Casement and the Irish nationalists in their struggle against Britain, and shipped Lenin back to Russia from Switzerland to foment revolution in Petrograd. What was important above all for Germans was the overthrow of the old structures. That was the whole point of the war. Once that had been achieved, the revolutionary dynamic would proceed to erect new structures valid for the new situation.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era