A Time Of Fear

Terror Drives Them Westward: Syrian refugees trudge the dusty roads of Serbia en route to "Angela's" country - Germany. It is impossible to view the great throngs of migrants, piling up like driftwood against the newly-erected fences of the European Union, and not recall the Great Migration of uprooted peoples into the Western Roman Empire between 300-800 AD.

 

IT WAS A TIME of fear. People cast worried glances to the East, where rumour reported whole peoples on the move. Travellers said they were fleeing in terror from men who laid waste to villages, towns and cities without scruple or regret. Women, children, the temples of the gods: none were spared. Military commanders looked to the strength of the Empire’s defences: to the mighty walls and high gates that had stood for so long – and they wondered.

 

Between 300 and 800AD successive waves of migrant peoples beat against and washed over the borders of the Western Roman Empire. During these turbulent centuries, the component peoples of the “Great Migration” laid down the ethnic foundations of modern Europe. Some of its most powerful nations still bear the titles of these “Dark Age” migrants. The Frankish tribes settled in what is now France. The Angles gave their name to England. Rome’s empire, however, did not endure. The West fell.

 

It is impossible to view the great throngs of migrants piling up like driftwood against the newly-erected fences of the European Union and not recall the Great Migration. Impossible, too, not to imagine the panicky communications between all those provincial governors and the Emperor’s servants back in Rome. “What are we supposed to do with all these people! Should we feed them – or slay them?”

 

Rome’s answer, then, was the same as Chancellor Angela Merkel’s, now: “Let them in.” Like the ranks of Rome’s fourth century legions, the ranks of Germany’s industrial workers have been thinning of late. Dangerously low birth-rates dictate that the Empire of Porsche and Mercedes Benz admit as many auxiliaries as it can lay its hands on.

 

No doubt the bureaucrats in Rome, fervent believers in the Empire’s ability to make loyal Roman citizens out of the most unprepossessing of barbarian material, reassured their provincial governors that all would be well. These Goths were doughty warriors, they said. Properly trained they would ensure that the Emperor’s legions remained invincible.

 

Chancellor Merkel is equally upbeat. The upwards of a million refugees pouring across Germany’s borders from the civil war in Syria, and all those other great concentrations of misery along the North African coast, will soon be made into “Good Germans”. In the coming decades, the Fatherland’s complexion may grow a few shades darker, but Germany’s culture will survive unscathed.

 

The Romans’ optimism was misplaced. The migrant peoples admitted to the Empire may have swelled the legions depleted ranks, but they were never accepted as equals by “real” Romans. In the years ahead, ethnic rivalries would erupt into riots: blood would be spilled; hatreds flare and burn. The legions, increasingly composed of “barbarians”, would hear of these massacres, and the Emperor’s military resources would haemorrhage like an untended wound. In 410AD, the Visigoth chieftain, Alaric, sacked Rome. Saint Jerome, hearing the news in far off Bethlehem, lamented: “The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”

 

Alaric's Visigoths conquer Rome 410 AD.

 

Chancellor Merkel’s confidence may be equally misplaced. As the so-called “Summer of Smiles” – during which trainloads of exhausted refugees were met by Germans beaming with love and goodwill – gave way to Autumn gales and cold driving rain; and the refugees’ tent cities began springing up outside quiet German villages and towns; anti-immigrant demonstrators started appearing in the streets. The German people would appear to be much less confident of their assimilationist capacities than their increasingly unpopular Chancellor.

 

Forty years after the sack of Rome, Visigoth and Roman fought side-by-side on the Catalaunian Plains of Western Gaul against Attila and his Huns. It was from such fierce Asiatic tribesmen, the Huns especially, that so many of the peoples who joined the Great Migration were fleeing. By combining their strength, and defeating Attila, the Roman general, Flavius Aetius, and his Visigothic ally, Theodoric, were able to give the civilised communities of the Western Empire a few more decades of security and stability.

 

Modern day equivalents of Attila's Huns - Soldiers of the Islamic State.

 

How sad it is that the modern-day equivalents of Flavius and Theodoric – Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin – cannot emulate their predecessors’ success by putting aside their differences and combining their strengths against the modern-day equivalent of Attila the Hun – Islamic State and its army of jihadis.

 

What other means is there of stemming the human tide lapping at Europe’s borders? The West looks down from its crumbling walls – and it wonders.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 23 October 2015.

The Rise & Fall of Anglophonia

The Good Old Firm: Anglophonia, led by the USA, dominates the planet. But the reckless greed of its elites and the moral bankruptcy of its neoliberal creed offer little hope of its longevity as a global hegemon.

THERE WAS A TIME when membership of the Anglo-Saxon Club was a good thing. The powerful ties binding the United States of America to the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the envy of other states. No matter how strategically important these nations might be to the security of Anglophonia, they could never hope to enjoy the familial intimacy of its member states.

The linguistic, cultural, historical and economic affinities animating the Anglo-Saxon powers ultimately cohered into a global hegemony of unprecedented reach and power. With the eventual collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989-91, Anglophonia found itself bereft of serious ideological rivals. The New World Order spoke English – with an American accent.

But Anglophonia’s triumph – codified in the neoliberal economic prescriptions of the so-called “Washington Consensus” – turned out to be rather hollow.

The Cold War had disciplined Anglophonia’s ruling-class in much the same way as the long struggle against the rival city-state of Carthage had disciplined the wealthy Patricians of Ancient Rome. Without a common foe to enforce a high level of social cohesion and equity, the elites of both world empires felt free to loot their national treasuries and vitiate the political and economic rights of their – now burdensome – lower orders.

In the case of Anglophonia, this “revolt of the elites” (to borrow Christopher Lasch’s striking terminology) is readily tracked by calculating the share of pre-tax household income received by the top 1 percent of Americans between 1917 and 2011.

Immediately prior to America’s entry to World War I, the top 1 percent commanded just under 18 percent of pre-tax household income. Their share fell about 3 percentage points during the war, but by 1929 it had soared to an astonishing 20 percent.

From the 1930s to the 1970s, however, the fortunes of the top 1 percent changed dramatically as the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s “New Deal”, World War II and the fiscal exigencies of the Cold War relentlessly reduced their share of America’s wealth. The nadir was reached in 1972 when the top 1 percent’s share fell to just 7 percent of pre-tax household income.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 the revolt of the elites began in earnest. Between 1985 and 1989 (the year the Cold War ended) the wealthiest American’s share of pre-tax household income leapt from 9 percent to just under 13 percent. By 1999 it stood at 16 percent and by 2005 it had reached 18 percent. Today, the top 1 percent of American households commands the same 20 percent share of pre-tax income as 1929.

These bare and brutal statistics chronicle the steady growth and sudden collapse of social equity in the United States. But the whole sorry saga of union-busting, deregulation and privatisation has, from the late-1970s to the present, facilitated the elites’ reclamation of economic and social pre-eminence throughout Anglophonia.

To preserve at least the façade of democracy while they re-construct the plutocratic order of the 1920s the elites have been forced to hollow out the core institutions of the social-democratic culture that did them so much damage. The trade unions were the first to go, closely followed by the universities (at least in their guise as critic and conscience of society). Their most important conquest, however, has been the news media. Like the circuses of Ancient Rome, the Anglophonian news media is designed to inflame rather than inform.

If you would like to see the future – watch Fox News.

Not even science is exempt from the relentless partisanship of Anglophonia’s plutocrats.

As recently as 2007 just over 70 percent of Americans told pollsters that they accepted anthropogenic global warming as a scientific fact. Canadian social critic, Naomi Klein, found that by 2009 only half America held that view.

The same phenomenon is visible in Australia, where the most recent surveys show less than half the population believing in global warming. Ask these climate-change sceptics why, and they reply: “Because global warming is a socialist plot to redistribute wealth”.

This is the price plutocracy is forced to extract from the societies it feeds on. Neoliberal dogma is to Anglophonia what Christian dogma was to Rome: the ideological vector of its intellectual and cultural disintegration.

English will probably remain the lingua franca of the Twenty-First Century, but increasingly it will be spoken with a Chinese or Brazilian accent.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 February 2011.