tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4236695365244926782.post2169156499933121266..comments2023-09-16T03:06:44.703-07:00Comments on III Percent: Brexit & the coming European WarUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4236695365244926782.post-77288860638493970802016-06-25T17:40:58.282-07:002016-06-25T17:40:58.282-07:00I know, I'm long winded. I apologize. But pl...I know, I'm long winded. I apologize. But please take with you this simple axiom of history - <br /><b>Things which take the same forms, tend also to follow the same paths...to the same conclusions.</b><br /><br />Or, as Dickens put it, in 'A Tale of Two Cities', <i>"Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrels carry the day’s wine to La Guillotine. <b>All the devouring and insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in one realization, Guillotine.</b> And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror.<br /><br /><b>Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.</b></i>"<br /><br />The 'crushing by hammers' being the oppression of the common folk, and the 'sowing of rapacious license' being that blatant posture of presuming ones self above the Law, as elites have ever been wont to do, whenever given the slack to do so. <br /><br />And the ironic twist being that, whatever rapacious license the elites have taken for themselves, they ultimately give unto those they oppressed; and the circle of life is completed when those elites are suffered to succumb to the very same rapaciousness, being trodden under foot in the streets in repetition of the grand struggle; of great evils against petty evils, each unfamiliar with it's own place amongst men, and ever feeling the urge to exchange, if only for a moment in time, the common for the exalted, and vice versa...<br /><br />By such means does every evil circulate throughout the world.<br /><br />WE HAVE BEEN WARNEDAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4236695365244926782.post-26965171706756796642016-06-25T13:41:49.142-07:002016-06-25T13:41:49.142-07:00Peak-EU arrived in 2008~9; the expansionist impuls...<b>Peak-EU</b> arrived in 2008~9; the expansionist impulse crushed by the reality of the global financial meltdown. Those idiots pushing to get Ukraine and Belarus to join NATO are failing exactly as Severus did - either they fail to see that the tide is going out on the EU, going out on NATO, going out on centralization in every form; or more likely they *refuse* to accept that the tide is going out, and carrying their vain aspirations with it.<br /><br />As with Severus, so with Merkel, and Juncker, and the rest of the present batch of obstinate fools who would be Emperor.<br /><br />But, while Severus was not wise as Emperors need to be, he was not purposefully cruel to his own subjects. Alas, it was not so under his son, <i>Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Augustus</i>, more commonly referred to by his subjects as "Caracalla" (literally, the hooded one). Marcus Aurelius was far more ambitious than his father, but shared his father's blind spot where the underlying impulses of the times and society were concerned. <br /><br />And while Severus suffered his Royal frustrations upon himself, his son 'Caracalla' dispensed every bit of his frustration upon the people of his empire, and thus elevated himself from <i><b>tyranis ignoramus</b></i> to the heights of a total <i><b>Tyranis Odibilis; Atrociter Trucidatoris</b></i>. That is, a hateful tyrant, possessed by murderous rage. <br /><br />Murderous, and prone to engage in the ugliest past-time of monarchs: <b>Royal Torture</b> - that is, employing professional torturers <i><b>explicitly for his own personal entertainment. </b></i><br /><br />Sometimes he would have it done in public, as a warning to his enemies; but he was just as prone to have it done in private, where he need not worry about offending the sensibilities of the Roman psyche, and having a crowd boo'ing and jeering when it got too ugly, or ran too long...<br /><br />My point? <b><i>Europe is due for a Caracalla... and it will get one, because that is the thing about those irresistible tides of history; </i>they're irresistible.</b> <br /><br />History *will* find some exceptionally ambitious and spiritually ugly tyrant, and make of him "Emperor for a Day"... or more likely a decade or two. And all of Europe shall suffer the justice of small minds and sour faith, until it can suffer no more...<br /><br />Who cares, it's just Europe. Right? Well, we are here discusing the dissoloution of the EU, or in other words, the United States of Europe; and <b>that is another funny thing about history - <i>things that take the same forms, tend to follow the same paths.</i></b> <br />So as the EU tried to be like the US, and now the US is trying to be like the EU; and <i><b>thus are both sealed to the same fate.</b></i><br /><br />WE HAVE BEEN WARNEDAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4236695365244926782.post-10573132533189553822016-06-25T13:23:36.793-07:002016-06-25T13:23:36.793-07:00BREXIT was the right answer, to a problem which ne...BREXIT was the right answer, to a problem which never should have been created <br /><br />in the first place. Understand: every dictator since Rome fell, has dreamed of <br /><br />a "United Europe" in one perverse form or another - it is the stuff tyrannical <br /><br />wet dreams are made of. But the practicality of a "United Europe" has no more <br /><br />virtue today, than it did in the days of Emperors Trajan or Septimus Severus.<br /><br />And while the empire peaked under Trajan, most of it was not his doing, and <br /><br /><i>Imperator Caesar Nerva Trajanus Divine Nervae, Filius Augustus</i> was wise <br /><br />enough to recognize and ride the wave of his day, which was still expansionist <br /><br />and favored centralization. <br /><br />Alas, the cancer of corruption was already in the bones of Rome, and a scant <br /><br />century later, when Septimus Severus seized power, the tide was going out on <br /><br />empire, was going out on centralization, was going out on building new things. <br /><br />But <i>Lucius Septimius Severus Augustus</i> didn't see that the tide was going <br /><br />out - he had no sense of it, and because he fought to expand that which was in a <br /><br />natural and irresistible state of contraction, his rule was not a smooth or easy <br /><br />one - for him or his Imperial Subjects. <br /><br />I'm not saying that Severus was a bad emperor - as Emperors go he was actually <br /><br />not that bad a lout - but he failed in the prime essence of being an emperor: <br /><br />reading the subtle but inevitable movement of society and the times of his age, <br /><br />and saddling that subtle impulse, breaking it and riding it.<br /><br />Today, Europe resembles very much Severus'es Empire - corruption is everywhere, <br /><br /><i>the memory of the easy prosperity which accompanies an empire on the rise was <br /><br />still fresh in the minds of Severus and his subjects, <b>but the </b></i>fact<i> of <br /><br />it had already gone stale.</i> Such it is, in Europe today. <br /><br />---CTD---Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com