Barack Obama's Nobel prize; Emperor Nero and the Olympics

By now, all of you are aware that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace prize. And all of you are aware that the prize is a joke. I found a writing of historian Will Durant, in which he described a similar "honor" bestowed upon Emperor Nero:

. . . Nero left in 66 [A.D.] to compete in the Olympic games and make a concert tour of Greece . . . . At Olympia he drove a quadriga in the races; he was thrown from the car and was nearly crushed to death; restored to his chariot he continued the contest for a while, but gave up before the end of the course. The judges, however, knew an emperor from an athlete and awarded him the crown of victory. Overcome with happiness when the crowd applauded him, he announced that thereafter not only Athens and Sparta but all Greece should be free - i.e., exempt from any tribute to Rome. The Greek cities accommodated him by running the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian games in one year; he responded by taking part in all of them as singer, harpist, actor, or athlete. He obeyed the rules of the various competitions carefully, was all courtesy to his opponents, and gave them Roman citizenship as consolation for his invariable victories. . . . . When he sang in a theater, says Suetonius, "no one was allowed to leave, even for the most urgent reasons. And so it was that some women gave birth there, while some feigned death to be carried out." . . . . Alarmed by further reports of uprisings and plots, Nero returned to Italy (67 [A.D.]), entered Rome in a formal triumph, and showed, as trophies, the 1,808 prizes he had won in Greece.

Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, 1944, pp. 282-283 (emphasis added)

Just as the Greek Olympic judges knew an emperor from an athlete, the Nobel committee knows an emperor wannabe from a truly deserving recipient.
Mark Steyn points out:

Barack Obama will have history’s most crowded trophy room, but his presidency is shaping up as a tragedy — for America and the world.

Obama has a ways to go before he equals Nero's 1,808 prizes, but give him time. Obama may yet achieve true "tragedy" faster than Nero did. We should be mindful of the lasting consequences from this administration even as we laugh at the seeming idiocy. As Durant wrote of the period immediately following Nero's accumulation of the 1,808 prizes:

Tragedy was rapidly catching up with his comedy.

p. 283

Rome would spend the next several years in alternating periods of revolt and bloody civil war, during which time Nero was deposed and assisted in suicide [Durant, p. 284]:

Many of the populace rejoiced at his death and ran about Rome with liberty caps on their heads. But many more mourned him, for he had been as generous to the poor as he had been recklessly cruel to the great. They lent eager hearing to the rumor that he was not really dead but was fighting his way back to Rome; and when they had reconciled themselves to his passing they came for many months to strew flowers before his tomb.

Durant, p. 284

Every bloated windbag of a tyrant has his sycophants and leaves a bloody legacy.

Nero

What will Obama's coin look like?

Bread and Circuses; Pittsburgh Steelers; Super Bowl 43; Dan Rooney

The Pittsburgh Steelers' participation in this weekend's Super Bowl 43 gives me an opportunity to post an item I started to write four years ago. Just before the Steelers faced the New England Patriots in the AFC Championship game in January 2005, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a story in which it repeated worn out cliches about the Steelers' success helping to compensate for the city's problems. The point was that the Steelers need to win in order to help the city residents forget the problems resulting from the loss of the steel industry.

Steelers owner Dan Rooney was quoted on the effect the game would have on the City's "psyche":

There was a piece in the paper ... about what the Steelers and this game mean to the economy, which I guess was in the high 20 millions or something," he said. "But what it didn't say and what I think is more important is what the Steelers' success really means to the city's psyche.

The newspaper summed up the City's problems and why the win would be a needed distraction:

In an era when the city's only real growth industries seem to be strip clubs, towing, and Steelers analysis, Pittsburgh's overall mood is not terribly hopeful. Since the last time the Steelers won a Super Bowl [1979], the city has gone from America's most liveable city to one of its most leaveable. Manufacturing and industrial jobs have all but dried up. US Airways, one of the region's biggest employers, is in its second bankruptcy. The Steelers' aging, blue-collar fan base today worries as much about prescription drug prices as about New England's pass defense.

If there's a place that could use the two-weeks-long jolt of adrenalin that a win today would trigger, maybe this is that place.

January 23, 2005

The newspaper and Dan Rooney missed the point. Pittsburgh's problems are far deeper than those listed above. Since the 1970's Pittsburgh has seen its steel manufacturing base mostly disappear. This disappearance has had far reaching consequences for Pittsburgh and the nation. The loss of any nation's industrial base is a grave matter. Most articles and films about the Steelers of the 1970's make a point of stating that the Steelers' success at that time was necessary to restore civic pride, unify the city, compensate for the loss of steel jobs, boost local morale and many other meaningless cliches.

But these cliches and stories have gotten the story backward. In fact, the success of sports teams in our culture has distracted us from the loss of our civilization. Industry, including steel, was a cornerstone of the United States. The loss of such a vital part of our nation should have been greeted with long lasting alarm and resolve to address and reverse the problem. Instead, those most immediately affected were given "bread and circuses" at which to celebrate, while their livelihoods disappeared before their eyes. In any decaying society, bread and circuses serve the purpose of distracting the public while economic and other conditions deteriorate. Our leaders cannot handle the crises that destroy our civilization, but they can pacify the great mass of people with games.

In ancient Rome, gladitorial and other games continued up to the very end of the empire, even as the barbarians conquered Rome's provinces one-by-one:

In fourth-century Rome there were 175 holidays in the year; ten with gladitorial contests; sixy-four with circus performances; the rest with shows in the theaters. The barbarians took advantage of this passion for vicarious battle by attacking Carthage, Antioch, and Trier [provinces of Rome] while the people were absorbed at the amphitheater or the circus.

Will Durant, Age of Faith, p. 31

In our own age, we "tailgate" and play fantasy football while we bask in second hand glory everytime our NFL team wins. Meanwhile, a 900 billion dollar "stimulus" package is passed by Congress, thus eroding our credit and guaranteeing the permanent insolvency of our nation and the inevitable crash of what is left of our economy. Boomsday approaches, while our factories remain idle. The nails are being hammered into the coffin of our civilization while we celebrate another Super Bowl. The games serve the same purpose they served in the 4th and 5th century A.D. They pacify us into accepting the policies that destroy the real source of power, glory and prosperity in any civilization. Never forget that Super Bowl trophies and end zone celebrations are no substitute for factories in this regard.

The Steelers entered the decade of the 1970's never having enjoyed success in their entire 40 year history. At the same time, Pittsburgh was the steel capital of the world. By the end of the 1970's, the roles had been reversed. The Pittsburgh Steelers enjoyed a sports dynasty - having won four super bowls - while the steel industry lay in ruins. The success of the Steelers helped us accept the simultaneous loss of our nation's backbone industry. That emblem on the Steeler helmets [once the symbol of the company that Andrew Carnegie built] is now nothing but a grim reminder of a dead past. The symbol mocks us while we fool ourselves with the fantasy that we root for a "blue collar team from a blue collar town."

Praetorian Guard; Augustus; Obama

Augustus








Ever since Obama's proposal to create a civilian national defense force and his creation of the shadowy tax free foundation, the term "praetorian guard" (and worse) has been used to describe what is really going on. Here is one historian's discussion of the Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome.

Caesar Augustus was Rome's first permament emporer, succeeding Julius Caesar who was assassinated after a brief reign. Julius Caesar did not institutionalize the empire. But Augustus (taking total power circa 30 B.C.) undertook many steps to make the empire permanent. One of these steps was the insertion of the military in a permament way in Roman politics:

Further to assure order of the desired kind, and support his own power, Augustus, seriously violating precedent, kept six cohorts of a thousand soldiers each near Rome and three cohorts within it. These nine cohorts became the Praetorian Guard - i.e., guard of the praetorium, or headquarters of the commander in chief. It was this body that in A.D. 41 made Claudius emporer and began the subjection of the government to the army.

Durant, Caesar and Christ, p. 216

While Obama's proposals are a far cry from military dictatorship, all such transitions begin slowly. Neither Obama nor any of his successors will someday announce that they are imposing a dictatorship. It will happen gradually. The Roman transition was much more obvious and identifiable.

For Obama to institutionalize his election year supporters into a permanent force, using taxpayer and tax-free dollars, that will work to keep Obama or his successors in power is a subtle, yet distinctive move in the direction of empire and away from constitutional government.

Athens (4th Century); Will Durant; Plato; Aristotle; Dionysus; Philip of Macedon; parallels to 21st Century U.S.

I have recently read portions of Will Durant's Life of Greece, written in 1939. I was struck by common themes appearing in the book and our own era. These excerpts contain dire warnings for our own time. Remember two things as you read these passages:


(1) Will Durant wrote these words before our current political, economic and moral problems had fully taken shape. He was not taking sides in our current battles. He had never heard of George W. Bush. He might have anticipated, but had not experienced, the modern state of the 21st Century Democrat party. He had no axe to grind in our modern day political wars. If anything, Durant was a liberal, having left the Catholic Church due to his atheism and having adopted socialism in his youth (he had also affiliated with many of the leftist icons of the early 20th Century such as Margaret Sanger and John Dewey). Durant described the decline of ancient Athens from a purely historical perspective without anticipating how this description could be used in our century.

(2) This story ends badly.

In the 4th Century B.C., the Golden Age of Athens had recently ended. Athens had entered into a period of decline. Athens was beset by many problems that will sound familiar to those of us that must endure the 21st Century A.D.

First of all, decades of class warfare incited by demagogues finally took their effect on government policy [including tax policy]:

In this conflict more and more of the intellectual classes took the side of the poor. They disdained the merchants and the bankers whose wealth seemed to be in inverse proportion to their culture and taste; even rich men among them, like Plato, began to flirt with communistic ideas...finally the poorer citizens captured the Assembly, and began to vote the property of the rich into the coffers of the state for redistribution among the needy and the voters through state enterprises and fees. The politicians strained their ingenuity to discover new sources of public revenue. They doubled the indirect taxes...they resorted
every now and then to confiscations and expropriations; and they broadened the field of the property-income tax to include lower levels of wealth...the result of these imposts was a wholesale hiding of wealth and income. Evasion became universal, and as ingenious as taxation. In 355 Androtion was appointed to head a squad of police empowered to search for hidden income, collect arrears, and inprison tax invaders. Houses were entered, goods were seized, men were thrown into jail. But the wealth still hid itself, or melted away...the middle classes, as well as the rich, began to distrust democracy as empowered envy, and the poor began to distrust it as a sham equality of votes staultified by a gaping inequality of wealth. The increasing bitterness of the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided when Philip [Macedonian King] pounced down upon it...

[pp. 465-466]

The class warfare, resulting welfare state, inevitable confiscatory taxation and widespread tax evasion amounted to only one aspect of Athenian decline.

Moral disorder accompanied the growth of luxury and the enlightenment of the mind. The masses cherished their superstitions and clung to their myths; the gods of Olympus were dying, but new ones were being born; exotic divinities like Isis and Ammon, Atys and Bendis, Cybele and Adonis were imported from Egypt or Asia, and the spread of Orphism brought fresh devotees to Dionysus every day. The rising and half-alien bourgeoisie of Athens, trained to practical calculation rather than to mystic feeling, had little use for the traditional faith; the patron gods of the city won from them only a formal reverence, and no longer inspired them with moral scruples or devotion to the state. Philosophy struggled to find in civic loyalty and a natural ethic some substitiute for divine commandments and surveillant deity;...as the state religion lost its hold upon the educated classes, the individual freed himself more and more from the old moral restraints-the son from parental authority, the male from marriage, the woman from motherhood, the citizen from political responsibility...[S]exual and political morality continued to decline. Bachelors and courtesans increased in fashionable co-operation, and free unions gained ground on legal marriage...the voluntary limitation of the family was the order of the day, whether by contraception, by abortion, or by infanticide...the old families were dying out; they existed, said Isocrates, only in their tombs;...

[pp. 467-468]

As religion and demographics declined, other aspects of Athenian life changed also:

Atheletics were professionalized; the citizens who in the sixth century had crowded the palaestra and the gymnasium were now content to exert themselves vicariously by witnessing professional exhibitions.

[p. 468]

Athenian ruins


In 4th Century B.C. Athens, there was little distinction between lawyers and politicians - and little apparent distinction from our own modern politicians:

...the rhetors or hired orators who in this century became professional lawyers and politicians. Some of these men, like Lycurgus, were reasonably honest; some of them, like Hypereides, were gallant; most of them were no better than they had to be. If we may take Aristotle's word for it, many of them specialized in invalidating wills. Several of them laid up great fortunes through political opportunism and reckless demagogy. The rhetors divided into parties and tore the air with their campaigns. Each party organized committees, invented catchwords, appointed agents, and raised funds; those who paid the expenses of all this frankly confessed that they expected to "reimburse themselves doubly." (Citation omitted.) As politics grew more intense, patriotism waned; the bitterness of faction absorbed public energy and devotion, and left little for the city.

[p. 469]

1939












Durant had a way of summing up diverse elements into a powerful conclusion:

As civilization develops, as customs, institutions, laws, and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination, directness to subtly, expression to concealment, cruelty to sympathy, belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primative man passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the williness to fight subsides into a disposition to infinite argument. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistable temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

[p. 470]

And around the United States hover Islam, Mexico, etc.

The conditions about which Durant wrote ended when Athens was conquered by the Macedons later in that century. Athens could no longer resist foreign enemies. Its economy was weakened by taxation, its population depleted and demoralized by Athens' own sexual revolution and its civic life destroyed by political activity in which Athenians regarded each other with more hostility than any foreign enemy. Athens would disappear (and with it its contributions to art, science, literature, etc.) as it was absorbed into the Macedonian empire of Philip and Alexander. While the Macedonian empire would briefly rule the known world, it, too, ultimately ended as Greece, itself, would disappear from the world map for 2000 years.

Moral decay, high taxes, redistribution of wealth, government programs, class warfare, etc. have consequences. Those consequences last far beyond the temporary political advantage that one faction may gain in the present. Future archeologists may find names like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, the Clintons or John Edwards in the ruins of our civilization. But those names and their "achievements" will pale in comparison to the story of our own decline and its consequences.

The War of the World; Niall Ferguson; PBS; The 100 years war.

The PBS documentary "The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century" has generated some controversy this week, as conservatives have been critical that the documentary has attacked American war efforts in WWII. The documentary has been criticized for attacking America's alliance with Stalin.

I saw the first part of this series last night. Part I did not include most of World War II. Part I takes the viewer from the beginning of the 20th century through the beginning of WWII.

So far, the documentary has been somewhat instructive. The documentary was critical of the Bolshevik revolution, especially the brutality of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. The documentary pointed out that the Bolsheviks did not control the territory outside of the Russian cities for some time after the Bolshevik revolution. The narrator indicated that opposition forces were on the verge of deposing the Bolsheviks when the Bolsheviks reversed the course of the war by using "terrorist" tactics on their own people, including soldiers and farmers.

This harsh treatment of the Bolshevik revolution would never have been allowed in the western MSM/DNC when the Soviets still controlled Russia. I had heard of some of these facts, but never in a television documentary.

The documentary also spent a great deal of time on the Turkish persecution of Armenians and Greeks in the immediate aftermath of World War I. While the documentary did not explicitly point out that this persecution constituted muslim persecution of Christians, the existence of this story on PBS is new and significant.

The main point of Part I was the length of the wars of the 20th century. "The War of the World" views the 20th century wars as a 100 year war. The narrator deals with these wars as a continuation of the same war. For too long, we have tried to analyze these wars separately. In doing so, we miss the real causes of the wars. Authors analyze the pros and cons of World War II in a vacuum, thereby missing the real culprits, such as the rise of totalitarianism worldwide over a 20+ year period prior to the War and continuing well beyond the War's official "end." I have always believed that World War II was the hottest part of the Cold War, during which (and immediately afterward) the Soviets made their biggest territorial gains. We will see how the documentary treats that subject in Parts II and III.

The documentary analyzes the 20th century wars as part of a continuing battle between East and West. Will Durant's eleven volume series on the history of civilization does the same thing - and even traces the East vs. West conflict back to the Trojan War (circa 1100 B.C.). By using the East vs. West analysis, the currect conflict involving Islam (as well as issues relating to China) make more sense. The Cold War makes more sense when we see that its roots go back to World War I - instead of merely to the Berlin Wall or Korea.

Part I was deficient in that the author appeared to be too rooted in socialism, including fawning attention to H.G Wells. But this is to be expected on PBS (and almost all television in general).

The author also could have easily tied WWI to the financial crises of the 1920's and 1930's. The connections definitely exist and would prove the author's point even more strongly. The timeline runs basically as follows: (1) World War I and the financial bubble that paid for it led utlimately to the financial collapse in the West that we refer to as the Great Depression (1929 - ?) (the collapse began earlier in Europe). (2) The economic upheaval of the 1920's and 1930's in Europe and the West led to the rise of Hitler and Japanese expansion, which the remaining powers did not have the will to resist (due to the economic upheaval) until it was too late to avert another war. When combined with the rise of Soviet Russia (a direct result of WWI), the perfect storm was created.

For more on the effect of the bubble and its roots in WWI and its consequences in the Great Depression, see Garet Garrett's "The Bubble that Broke the World."



See "America's Great Depression" for a detailed discussion of how the bubble led to our own depression.



Both of these books hold implications for our current economic situation.

While the PBS documentary misses that point, the pros outweigh the cons thus far. "The War of the World" can be a beginning point for a greater understanding of the past 100 years.
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Part II of War of the World

Quote of the day - Will Durant

Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.

Will Durant

Quote of the day - Will Durant

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant

Quote of the day - Will Durant

When people ask me to compare the 20th century to older civilizations, I always say the same thing: "The situation is normal."

Will Durant