Happy New Year To All Those Worthy Of My Affection And, Or, Consideration. (Such as those kind enough to comment on this site!)
The tradition of celebrating the Winter Solstice as the start of the year, complete with cut fir trees and gift giving goes all the way back to Ancient Greece, and thus, by osmosis, to Rome (Zoroastrians, thus Iranians, celebrate the New Year in Spring). The Romans were a bunch of dung plastered peasants educated by the Etruscans to the north and the Greeks of Magna Grecia to the south. In the end, Rome got “renovated” by the Franks.
The Franks Renovated The Empire, Wiping Out Other Invaders.
Early on, Roman peasants learned to learn. The first thing the Romans learned was that big time plutocrats such as Etruscan lords and Tarquinus Superbus, the last formidable king of Rome, were the ultimate enemy.
The Romans also learned that much less rich aristocrats (“the best who rule“) could be crucial to a revolutionary public-thing (res-publica). The natural conclusion was to make a “mixed” constitution, where the People would make the laws and the Senate (held by the aristocrats) would give “counsel” (“Senatus Consulte”). To avoid plutocracy, kings were strongly hated in Roman culture. Moreover, wealth was confined to the equivalent of a few millions dollars. Having more was, just, unlawful.
All this changed completely when, after the catastrophe of the Second Punic war, when much of the old ethical aristocracy was killed in combat, avaricious plutocrats broke down the anti-hyper wealth law, and took over. Under the Principate (=Early Roman empire, the weird contraption set-up by Augustus, officially a republic, but also a dictatorship), a Senator with a yearly income of only two million dollars, was viewed as poor.
In truth the Decline and Fall of Rome all started when the Gracchi tried to force the plutocrats to obey Rome’s anti-plutocracy laws from the Fabian era (around 380 BCE). Rome suffered horribly from plutocracy after more than 5,000 Gracchi and their supporters got killed. This was followed by Sulla’s dictatorship, two generations later.
The horror went on, until it turned into full degeneracy, civilization and population collapsing. Finally the Franks got control in the West, between 400 CE and 507 CE, and put an end to the collapse… Where it is more important to end it, that is, militarily. The Franks, being German, were much more equalitarian, so they stopped the plutocratic implosion of civilization.
However Frankish control was quintessentially Roman control. The Imperium Francorum was just a rebirth of the early principles of Rome. It’s not just that the Franks, or their law, spoke Latin. Or that they were put in charge of the defense of a huge chunk of the empire in 400 CE. Quintessentially, the Franks lived like the early Romans, like farmers, albeit on a much larger area. This facilitated the anti-plutocratic spirit of the Imperium Francorum. To boost their numbers, the Franks showed even more tolerance than the Romans. By 600 CE, everybody was a Frank. A few decades later, slave trading was made unlawful.
By 800 CE, the Roman empire had officially been “renovated” (Renovatio Imperii Romanorum, and had just one emperor, from Northern Spain to Northern Germany, and Armorica to Constantinople: Carlus Magnus, Charlemagne (Constantinople was under a local regency at the time).
This is the simplest fact. Yet, for ideological reasons, it’s ignored. What are those reasons? They have to do with the exploitative spirit of the “West Country Men”. Admitting that the Franks reconstituted Republican Rome, complete with public government imbued with public service, and were astoundingly successful that way, is the exact opposite of what (Wall Street inspired) plutocrats want people to believe.
After being “renovated”, the empire fragmented. It became an empire of fragments. Yet, even in this highly fragmented state, the empire proved impossible to conquer (differently from say Ancient Rome, Oriental Rome (“Byzantium”), China, or India)… To this day.
Indeed, look for example at the Huns: they got to Orleans and Toulouse. However, in both cases, they were severely defeated for this insolence. Their descendants the Mongols got to Hungary, and even the Adriatic. However, they suffered heavy losses, and, by fear of the Franks, went no further. Tellingly, they made a long term alliance with said Franks.
By comparison, the Mongols conquered China, and established a durable dynasty, the Yuan, after toying with the idea of … eradicating China. Similarly the Manchus conquered China.
Observe the contrast between the Imperium Francorum and Late Rome: by 400 CE, the Franks were put in charge of defending the limes (= frontier) in the North West empire (Gallia, Germania Inferior, Germania Superior). However in 406 CE, a huge Germanic coalition galloped across the frozen (!) Rhine, surprising the Frankish army that had mauled them in years prior.
The consequence of that invasion was that the Western empire fell militarily, and, from there, demographically and economically (the Vandals cut off the Western Mediterranean, and Rome’s food, after conquering Africa).
The Franks though, had lost a battle, but not the war. By 507, at the battle of Vouille’, the Franks, army of Rome, destroyed the Goths, something the Romans had been unable to do for the previous 250 years. The same Goths that had humiliated conquered and devastated the city of Rome itself, 97 years earlier.
The regime that the Franks put in place reconstituted Rome fully by 800 CE (and more). By 1204, the Franks actually broke the “Oriental Roman empire”, by conquering Constantinople (that was the real fall of Constantinople: 1453 was just the final nail in the coffin).
By 1066 CE, the Franks had reconquered Britain. French (and thus, English), is little more than degenerated, simplified and Germanified Latin. The basic framework of law, in the West and at the UN, is technically Roman, but in the spirit of the Lex Salica of the Franks. So we can safely say this: the Greco-Romano-Franco-German imperium is still in power, and that power is worldwide.
What of the Hebrew god, in all this? I was reading a 2013 book by an American historian, who claimed that the Hebrews taught the West… equity, equality. Thus that clown demonstrated that some historians had paid for the grossest propaganda.
In truth, it’s the Greeks, the Romans and the Germans who came up with these concepts of equality and justice. Social policies, like welfare, were invented, and implemented, in Athens, and especially Rome.
Verily, it is rather the other way around: the Hebrew god’s monstrosity was a huge part of the Decline and Fall of Rome. Don’t look at me funny: I did not invent the idea. The Cathars (from the Greek catharos, pure: the original Puritans!), came up with the idea in the Twelfth Century (probably building up on the ideas of Abelard and his admirers and students). It was their main idea. The Cathars considered that the Hebrew god was, actually, the devil, and the Old Testament even worse than Hitler’s Mein Kampf (if you will forget the anachronism).
The Church of Jesus Christ and the latter days religious terrorists took that very badly, and killed millions of innocents to eradicate Protestantism (and Judaism too). So much for the Hebrew god.
Jesus was born sometimes in Spring, the early Christians believed. Yet, when the “Founding Fathers of the Church” a trio of fascists flourishing by 400 CE discovered that there was no way that they could eradicate the Greco-Roman Winter Solstice celebrations, they moved Jesus’ birth to the solstice. (In the same spirit, much of Christianity was just stolen from other religions). Now Christianity survives mostly in the religion of the Saracens (that Islam was a form of particularly dangerous Christian cult was the diagnostic of the Frankish intelligence in the Seventh Century, when the Franks got ready to stop the fanatical armies that had embraced that cult).
Rome never fell. Rome just metamorphosed into the most advanced form it needed to survive.
Patrice Ayme
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Note: It is amazing how ignored the Franks are, because they are the direct junction between the Greco-Romans and us. There is no other junction. No just this, but the Franks surpassed Rome around 1,000 CE in some crucial ways (food production: heavy ploughs, better agriculture, beans, sustainable energy from wind and water mills, etc.).
The Franks (meaning free or ferocious) were actually a confederation, a sort of mini EU of the time, armed to the teeth, that appeared among Germans in a zone of heavy Roman influence. Unknown Romans(?) or other intellectuals had a heavy influence on them, as their Latin written law was much more advanced than the Roman one (more lenient). Initially they talked a sort of Old Dutch. Then switched to Latin.
The fact that the Franks are ignored by conventional historians is a testimony to their lack of scholarship, and servitude to a plutocratic agenda with a twisted mind of its own.
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 