On the Genealogy of Romans and Barbarians

The history of the world at large is a dialectic between the East and the West. In the beginning, the proto-Indo-European tribes of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent collectively created what we commonly refer to today as “paganism”. The gods of the “West” (Odin, Zeus, El/Yahweh, “God”, Apollo, Jesus), as it were, are all descended from a common ancestor, Dyḗus ph₂tḗr. It doesn’t appear to be commonly known that all of the world’s wisdom, all of the worlds religions comes from what we like to refer to as the “Orient”, or the “East”, but it’s true. Even the culture and traditions of Ancient Greece were originally conceived of in what was then known as Anatolia, the peninsula which is now called “Turkey”.

All of the classical Greco-Roman architecture which westerners love to exalt, the poems of Homer, the forgotten city of Troy, the Greek pantheon, had their beginnings in this peninsula which is now considered to be part of the East. Thales of Miletus, who is the first-known person to have said that the world could be understood through observation, is often considered to be the father of Philosophy as we understand it today, the first empiricist, the first scientist, perhaps. A majority of what we call “western” ideas, religions, and etc. are all fallout, oral traditions from things that began around Asia, between the eastern Mediterranean and the East China Sea.

When Alexander the Great, student of Aristotle, and son of Phillip II, the assassinated King of Macedon, conquered Persia and turned it into his own empire, he did it, according to historians, to “liberate” Hellas from the control of the Persians. Now the Athenians, Macedonians, Spartans, Anatolians—who were previously under the control and oppression of the Persian Empire, who terrorized Athens and destroyed the Acropolis, who slayed King Leonidas, uniter of Greece and his 300 soldiers—had gotten their revenge. What was to be done now?

What constituted much of Greek and Roman culture, and what still lies in it’s descendants, the cultures of Europe and America, was a belief that the western world was the civilized world, that to have a liberal education, to be a philosopher, to be “cultured” as it were, was the distinction between a human being, and a non-human. When the Romans inherited the legacy of the Greeks, they took it upon themselves to create their own Empire, with a culture that was inspired by and acted as a supplement to the profound culture of the Greeks. All of savage Europe was to be subject to the civilization of the Romans. The Germans, the Britons, the Greeks, the Hispanics, the Gauls were all to become Romans, to become civilized. Everything which was outside of Roman territory, the invaders: the Goths, the Huns, and the other barbarians represented what was awful about the world, where as everything within Rome was good. This created a dialectic that has remained throughout history: A conflict between the “civilized Romans” and the “eastern barbarians”.

All of the images that we are presented with of western history create a cultural context that paints, either vaguely or distinctly, non-Mediterranean cultures with some level of primitivity or savagery. The Romans versus the Goths and their grass huts, the Romans versus the Huns who wear animal skins to battle, the Romans versus the Scythians and their matriarchal culture. The “divine” Julius Caesar. Emperor Augustus. Each civilizational innovation and deviation from the tribal past of Europe created attitudes that were hostile towards the tribes of eastern Europe and Asia. The traditions of Asia became “barbaric” and “irrational”, the inventions of Greece, the liberal arts, rationality, the “civilized” man became the tradition of the west. Not only were easterners “inhuman”, but in Greco-Roman and post-Roman societies, there were gradations of human, hence the existence of slavery. Women were very often considered to be less human or inferior to men in just about every culture in the Mediterranean besides Sparta (which is partially why other Greeks referred to Spartans as what was then the Greek equivalent of “cucks”).

The Roman concept of civilization, of humanity and it’s interactions with cultures outside of Rome served to reinforce the idea that women and easterners were less human, and that the most human thing you could be was a male Roman noble, and just about the only thing beyond that was the God-man [divinus] Julius Caesar (Perhaps another God-man with the initials JC comes to mind?). Eventually, the Romans abandoned their paganism and established “Christianity”, the Roman Empire fell and split several times and became the various predecessors to the modern cultures of Europe, and now most of us living in the west speak languages that are to various degrees influenced by Latin. So how does that bring us to today?

It is without question that every modern country in the west predicates itself upon the innovations, the ideas of the Greeks and the Romans. The “Republic”, which was an idea (which had previous manifestations as so-called “free societies” in both Greece and the Middle East) conceived of and organized by the Socratics, found it’s height in the Roman Republic, which is used as a civilizational model and inspiration for many of the societies that exist today, including the United States.

Most of today’s liberal republics, the French Republic, the republic of the United States, the various republics of Europe which are mostly if not all founded upon the deaths of or de facto abdications of kings are a result of a process that began in the Middle Ages of the rediscovery of the works of Greeks like Aristotle by philosophers, intellectuals and poets such as Thomas Aquinas and Dante Alighieri, resulting in western cultural movements such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Even Russia, which is today under socio-economic assault by the liberal, civilized hawks of the west was at one point a victim of westernization and Enlightenment by Peter the Great, who ruled the Russian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the establishment of the United States of America and the 1st French Republic came, along with the immortal, cancerous Roman idea of “civilized people”, a sweeping rejection of the imperialist autocracies of Europe. European people would become more individual; they were granted rights, they could vote. Eventually people of non-European descent living in the west would be [legally] considered human, having the same constitutional “rights” as everyone else. The French and American concepts of liberalization spread throughout Europe, and eventually the Empires’ desire to control the peoples of Asia and the indigenous peoples of the Americas would fade after many long, hard battles. The colonization of Mexico, the colonization of India, the Century of Humiliation would become for western elites things of the distant past, of a bygone age.

However, with the rise of communism and fascism in the 20th century came various threats to the emerging liberal world order. When the communists and liberal capitalists defeated Nazi Germany together in World War II, they drew a line across Europe as to where the civilized, individualist liberal cultures of the west, and the communist, collectivist autocracy of the USSR, and the later communist autocracies of SEA and East Asia were going to be. This conceptualization wasn’t very different in nature from the former Roman cultures’ conception of the tribal peoples outside of Rome, and neither was it very different culturally (individualism/collectivism distinction). Variations in distance as well as influence from cultures outside of Europe (such as the Berbers and Moors) have played a part historically in determining the degree to which peoples across Eurasia have been familiar with individualist and collectivist concepts and incorporate them into their culture. This is partially why communism has only ever existed outside of Europe, and what distinguishes “European” countries like Spain or Germany, from countries like Russia, and why Russia is not European. Cuba is a collectivist culture, China is a collectivist culture, Russia is a collectivist culture, Korea is a collectivist culture, and Vietnam is a collectivist culture. Part of what inspires communist revolutions is the tribal mindset, the idea of a community, of a collective as distinct from the individual that is inherent to communist ideology. In individualist cultures there is a latent anarchism which prizes the individual over the community that does not allow for a communist revolution to thrive.

On the topic of Nazi Germany, it should be said that nobody seems to understand how to characterize fascism, the nature of fascism or what it represents. Throughout the iconography of the Nazi regime, we see the combination of an appropriation of distinctly Northern European/vaguely Eurasian historical symbols (the wolfsangel, runes, swastikas, etc.) and the architecture, the salute, the general aesthetics, and the rest of the cultural chauvinism and symbols (such as the eagle) of the Romans. The Nazi Regime was not all “Germanic” in nature. What it represented, at least partially if not mostly, was the Empire of Rome. Hitler in all of his authority was not merely the Fuhrer, but the Caesar of the third Reich (recall the First Reich, the Holy Roman Empire). Fascism itself is western chauvinism, or is at the very least inspired by western chauvinism, such as was the case for imperial Japan.

So how does that bring the world to it’s conflict today? The history of the 20th century is complex, and we probably understand it better than we understand any century that has occurred thus far, although there are a lot more obstacles to understanding what is going on because of the nature and manipulation of media, propaganda and the involvement of the intelligence communities and their psychological operations. Everyone is carefully observing a hyperreal war in a world that is post-truth and post-reality. The vast majority of the liberal west has been lead to believe that Russia and China are the aggressors, and that what they, with their “oligarchies” and their communism, and their “totalitarianism” represent is a threat to the autonomy of western people. The vast majority of the global south have been lead to believe that the US and NATO are the aggressors, that the US and NATO are fueling another Nazi regime in an opportunist attempt to aggravate Russia and justify actions that will decapitate Russia and preserve the advancement and supremacy of European liberal democracy and globalism. The rise of the English language, the spread of American companies, social media, concepts, ideas throughout the world; what it all represents is the liberalization of the world, the imperialism of America, which predicates itself upon the government and values of the Roman Empire.

The war that Vladimir Putin and Russia are fighting, the work that Xi Jinping and China are doing to build a new world economy and order are more than just ahistorical deviations from Fukuyama’s “end of history”. What it represents is a fight against, and hopefully, eventually, the end of the chauvinistic and racist legacy of Rome. Who are the Huns, the Goths, and the Scythians of today? The communists, the workers of the world, the so-called “uncivilized people”, the barbarians, the Global South. Who are the Romans? The globalists. The “civilized” and “enlightened” westerners. The western oligarchs. The liberal capitalists. What is our goal, we impassioned, compassionate, free spirits, lovers, and cultured people of the world? The liberation of the subjugated peoples of the world. In other words, the fall of Rome.