Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

Today I turned on the TV to find Boris Johnson being interviewed in the colleseum of all places.
When asked why his reply....
Rome thought their empire would last forever but due to uncontrolled mass migration it fell.
Jesus.  Johnson knows his classics and history better than that. Obvious lie to appeal to the shit eaters.
No Boris. Quite the opposite. It was a shortage of people that was a key factor, on the one hand due to plague which they didn't handle very well (hmm) and on the other due to the undermining of the state and privatisation of its fundamental functions (hmmmmmmm)

Let's just say you are both wrong in your emphasis. 

Its a frequent source of debate with no one answer.
But the undermining of the state from within with tax farming et al and then the plagues killing off huge numbers of people shattering the already flimsy economy are the two best explanations.
The barbarian invasions are massively overrated  with blaming them being like blaming Gavrilo Princip for WW1. Technically they were the spark but they didn't setup the bonfire.

[Sheilbh]

In the context of what he was saying (and had apparently already told journalists on the plane), I'm not sure the historical analysis is the key point:

"If you increase the temperatures of the planet by four degrees or more, as they are predicted to do remorselessly, you'll have seen the graphs, then you produce these really very difficult geopolitical events," he told Channel 4 News.

"You produce shortages, you produce desertification, habitat loss, movements, contests for water, for food, huge movements of peoples. Those are things that are going to be politically very, very difficult to control.

"When the Roman empire fell, it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a dark ages, Europe went into a dark ages that lasted a very long time. The point of that is to say it can happen again. People should not be so conceited as to imagine that history is a one-way ratchet.

"Unless you can make sure next week at Cop in Glasgow that we keep alive this prospect of restricting the growth in the temperature of the planet then we really face a real problem for humanity."

[Richard Hakluyt]

Climate change has certainly been advanced as an important factor in the decline of the Roman empire. Johnson's main point seems fair enough to me.

Though I agree with the Queen https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58923924

[garbon]

Who gives a fuck what he said given it is all just empty rhetoric?

[Tamas]

Who gives a fuck what he said given it is all just empty rhetoric?

Indeed.

[Syt]

Who gives a fuck what he said given it is all just empty rhetoric?

Well informed people probably won't. I doubt they're in the majority, though.

[Sheilbh]

I mean there's a 2,000 page policy document on Net Zero with tens of billions of spending and he is hosting Cop26. So it isn't just rhetoric it has an impact.

It might not be enough - but just by being in power Johnson's more than just rhetoric. He hosts things like Cop, his government passes a budget every year etc. plus all of the decisions along the way.

[Tamas]

I mean there's a 2,000 page policy document on Net Zero with tens of billions of spending and he is hosting Cop26. So it isn't just rhetoric it has an impact.

It might not be enough - but just by being in power Johnson's more than just rhetoric. He hosts things like Cop, his government passes a budget every year etc. plus all of the decisions along the way.

Yes but he has been in the public eye for decades, it is well proven and documented that what he says, writes, or signs, has absolutely no bearing to facts, truth, or what he will do tomorrow.

[garbon]

I mean there's a 2,000 page policy document on Net Zero with tens of billions of spending and he is hosting Cop26. So it isn't just rhetoric it has an impact.

It might not be enough - but just by being in power Johnson's more than just rhetoric. He hosts things like Cop, his government passes a budget every year etc. plus all of the decisions along the way.

Yes but he has been in the public eye for decades, it is well proven and documented that what he says, writes, or signs, has absolutely no bearing to facts, truth, or what he will do tomorrow.

Indeed.

[Syt]

I guess someone stole Boris's mask.

[Savonarola]

I guess someone stole Boris's mask.

While he was sleeping by the looks of it.  At least they didn't draw a mustache on him with permanent marker.

[Syt]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/01/boris-johnson-fall-rome-immigration/

Boris Johnson's Roman Fantasies

Blaming the fall of Rome on immigration is an old, wrong, and dangerous idea.

It was in Rome ahead of this year's G-20 summit that aspiring classicist Boris Johnson, Britain's prime minister, decided to lay down another of his misguided visions of history. "When the Roman Empire fell," he said while traveling to the Italian capital last week, "it was largely as a result of uncontrolled immigration. The empire could no longer control its borders, people came in from the east, all over the place, and we went into a Dark Ages."

Ostensibly, this was meant as a warning against the pitfalls of inaction in face of the climate crisis. In fact, this is a well-established far-right trope, rooted in a weaponized narrative of the "fall of Rome" that has little to do with what historians know about it. Johnson is reproducing a xenophobic and dangerous vision of history.

There are many legitimate historical theories that try to explain how the Roman Empire transformed, over the course of a few centuries, into a group of successor polities ranging from the kingdom of the Franks to the Byzantine Empire that saw themselves as heirs of Rome. Others, from the Ottomans to the Romanovs, would envision themselves as such in the future. Historians assign different weight to societal or economic factors and argue over the degree of continuity or decline. The so-called fall of Rome was a complicated, multicausal affair.

In political rhetoric, though, Rome's fall is a simple affair. Johnson is not the first to try and, sadly, definitely not the last. Historians have had to refute those narratives over and over again. The notion that decadence—of whatever stripe suits the argument being made—and "barbarian" incursions caused the fall is so powerful it was a rhetorical trope even before the Roman Empire in the West disappeared. By the beginning of the 5th century, Christian authors such as Jerome used the real and purported crises of their time for their own means.

The narrative pushed by the political right for a very long time is actually rather simple: A time of transformation is seen as a series of calamities, caused by the weakening of the morals of a dying empire that was run to the ground by hordes of invading barbarians. Most recently, during the civil war in Syria, this became a crucial pillar of the narrative that Syrian migrants were coming to destroy Western Civilization. Europe will fall just like the Roman Empire did, right-wing writers argued.

A historian would tell Johnson that, first of all, there was never a "fall" of the Roman Empire. In the West, over the course of over a century, the Christian empire fragmented into a series of successor states that continued many elements of Roman bureaucracy and societal order. In the east, the Roman Empire continued up until 1453, over which time it adapted into a very different form of state, known to us as the Byzantine Empire, whose inhabitants kept calling themselves "Romans."

At the same time, from the middle of the 7th century a different successor, the Islamic Caliphate, conquered large parts of Roman territory, named themselves as Roman emperors on their coins, and continued many if not the majority of the Roman Empire's features, including taxation, urban life, and bureaucracy.

In fact, the upheavals of the 5th century, the most popular of the supposed falls of Rome, were mostly civil war. High-ranking aristocrats wrestled power from each other, leading armies consisting of soldiers labeled either "Roman" or "barbarian." Modern research shows it was often difficult, if not outright impossible, to distinguish between the two. When it did come to invasions—like the Hunnic incursion in 451—things were far from clean-cut. When the Roman general Aetius forced Attila to retreat, he led a force of Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians. Attila led Huns but also other Goths, Franks, and Burgundians. If anything, the integration of various groups from beyond the military borders kept the Roman army going at all.

Moreover, modern scholarship tends to see those incursions less as a cause and more of a symptom of the fading out of this particular form of Roman state in the West. After the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain, for example, life was surprisingly peaceful, and Rome's successors adapted many elements of Roman life and government such as titles, infrastructure, and documents. Were there wars and invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries? Yes, and the horror recorded by many who lived through them was real and painful. But it remains contentious if this was a period more violent than, for example, the crisis of the 3rd century.

The very notion of the Dark Ages that supposedly followed the fall of Rome is rooted in trying to gloss over the failings of the present. In fact, historians have challenged the very notion of decline between the 3rd and the 7th century and championed a very different view of this epoch, calling it Late Antiquity. It was a period of unique cultural production, a gilded age of Latin literature, and a time of great innovation. Some of the best-known cultural icons spur from that time. St. Augustine wrote in the 5th century. The great church of Hagia Sophia was built in the 6th century, and the Corpus Juris Civilis, a foundation of many legal systems to this day, was compiled then. The Quran was put together in the 7th century.

There is a particular paradox with how the far-right looks at the concept of the Dark Ages. On the one hand, they lionize the manly barbarians held up by 19th-century European nationalists as their ancestors, and on the other they see migrants as the greatest danger to the Western way of life and compare them to the hordes who supposedly brought down Rome. Many English nationalists like to praise their "Anglo-Saxon" spirit and at the same time warn against the incoming tide of migrants. What they praise is what they fear the most.

The Roman Empire did not control its borders in a sense that Johnson wants us to imagine. The limes, Rome's boundary, was heavily fortified at points—but it was mostly not a border wall but rather a mixture of a symbolic power projection and exchange infrastructure. People moved across the border all the time, traded, and settled on both sides. A complex system of subsidies and diplomatic maneuvering helped to preserve a lucrative equilibrium. Groups from over the border were sometimes settled inside the empire.

The size of those settlements is often widely overstated. Groups like the Visigoths numbered in tens of thousands at best, entering an already multicultural and multilingual empire with a population in the tens of millions. Those groups were not coherent ethnic clusters. A vast majority of them were settled as foederati—groups receiving tax revenue and sometimes land in exchange for defense and administrative duties, a practice that predates any fall of Rome by almost two centuries.

Johnson likes to boast of his classic education. He may have been aware of how bad this history is—but chose to play with this far-right vision because it suited him. This is "radicalizing conservatism" that uses far-right rhetoric to create its own narrative of confrontation.

There is also another implicit notion here. In Johnson's staunchly Eurocentric vision, the Roman Empire was the force of good, the beacon of civilization and progress that brought enlightenment to the thankful peoples it conquered. The migrating barbarians destroyed this civilizing enterprise. Johnson implicitly likens the U.K. and its predecessor, the British Empire, to the Roman Empire, playing on a particularly nasty version of imperial nostalgia that tries to excuse the crimes of colonialism.

But while the Roman Empire brought extraordinary works of art, literature, and architecture, some of which we can still admire today, it was still an exploitative slave state in which vast parts of society were unfree or lived in poverty. The truth is that for many, the withdrawal or transformation of the Roman state apparatus meant relief and not a catastrophe. At the same time, the Roman Empire (as the very notion of "empire" suggests) was a multicultural, multilingual state in which immigrants were a constant feature. To see this in black-and-white terms is absurd.

Does this mean that the individual accounts from the 5th century telling us of violence and destruction are not true? No, and we should not ignore them. But they need to be read as narratives about the past and present of those who put them down, written for a particular purpose. Historians keep on discussing what caused the process of transformations that we now call the fall of the Roman Empire. Was there violence? Yes. But not uniformly.

The image of hordes of barbarians destroying the empire is a fundamentally racist trope. These are right-wing apocalypse fantasies about the foreigners who lurk beyond the (ever difficult to define) borders of the nebulous Western civilization ready to replace the true Westerners. To pander to those fantasies and to stoke the hatred that they fuel is not just irresponsible—it is outright dangerous.

[viper37]

The image of hordes of barbarians destroying the empire is a fundamentally racist trope. These are right-wing apocalypse fantasies about the foreigners who lurk beyond the (ever difficult to define) borders of the nebulous Western civilization ready to replace the true Westerners. To pander to those fantasies and to stoke the hatred that they fuel is not just irresponsible—it is outright dangerous.

After the Romans became Christians, they lost the #1 entertainment feature of the Empire.  Non circenses, no happy populace.  The Goths, frustrated from travelling so far and seeing nothing rebelled against the Romans and became Vandals that finally sacked Rome.

[The Larch]

Jacob Rees-Mogg's take on the current UK - France situation:

@Jacob_Rees_Mogg

The French are always grumpy in October, the anniversaries of Trafalgar and Agincourt upset them.

I'm pretty sure that Agincourt is exactly what the French fishermen all have in their minds right now.

[Josquius]

Yeah. The idiot crowd is really creaming their sheets over this one. They've been excited about it for longer than most people even noticed there was a dispute.
Last week my cousin out of nowhere randomly started going on about how he hates Macaroon. :/