I’m not sure where I was twentyfive years ago when the Challenger space shuttle exploded slightly more than sevnety seconds into its launch, but I do remember that I felt devastated when I first heard the news. Even at age eleven I was a science fiction reader and space fan and the shuttle was supposed to be how we were going to get a proper space programme and L5 O’Neill colonies and ultimately the stars. They were not supposed to blow up! It was only much, much later that I understood how much of a kludge the shuttle was and how it was possible for Challenger to blow up. The documentary above was made by NASA in 1986, after investigations into the explosion had concluded. It tells how the shuttle exploded, but not why, what the root causes were. That would take much more time.
Justinian: Threat or Menace?
I still own Chris Y. an answer to his comments about James J. O’Donnell’s The Ruin of the Roman Empire
Hmm… Haven’t read O’Donnell’s book yet- I shall get it got for me for Christmas- so take this with a pinch of salt, but I’m unconvinced, at least by your account, that Justinian could have done better if he’d stayed out of the west. Three points occur to me off the top of my head. Firstly, what is O’Donnell’s assessment of the impact of bubonic plague on the eastern empire during Justinian’s reign. It must have been hugely economically disruptive, even if we accept it wasn’t as bad as the 14th century outbreak. If we’re talking about conserving resources for later defense against eastern powers, the plague must have been a serious setback, western wars or no.
Secondly, the book I have read recently, this one, argues that the extent to which Romanitas was conserved in the west can be overstated. Wickham tries to use written and archaeological sources together, and he argues, powerfully to me at least, that the reduction in large scale trade brought about by the removal of the large scale state meant that economic activity in the west was quite different to how it had been during even the latest period of the western empire, with all the social and political consequences you would expect.
Thirdly, we have an example of what an emperor who took security on the eastern front as his priority could achieve in Heraclius, a couple of generations after Justinian. He faced an attack from Persia and won so decisively that the Sassanid state was effectively destroyed. The effect of that was that the Muslims were able to gave the Persian empire its coup de grace and then used their territories as a jumping off point to drive the Romans out of the middle east altogether. Could anything Justinian might have done prevented that? I’d be interested to hear an argument.
I’m not trying to denigrate O’Donnell’s work, which as I say I haven’t read yet, but I do think there’s an argument that in the long run Justinian’s western campaigns were pretty much irrelevant to the larger outcome.
Thoughts?
A couple of good points there. Now O’Donnell’s focus is firmly on the Western Empire, so he doesn’t go into too much detail about anything happening in the East other than how developments there impact on the west. He mentions the plague for example, but only in passing. O’Donnell is only interested in Justinian’s foreign policy so to speak, as well as the religious aspects of his rule, which does leaves some blind spots, the economic impact of the plague being one of them. It’s a weak spot in his thesis. But that doesn’t make it entirely invalid.
To tackle Chris’ third point first, the difference between Justinian and Heraclius is that the latter’s efforts were too late: the Roman and Persian Empires had exhausted each other with centuries of (intermittent) warfare and once a new “barbarian” challenge arouse with the Islamic jihad coming out of Arabia neither was strong enough to withstand it. Had Justinian been able and/or willing to have done the same, it would’ve given the East Roman Empire enough time to recover to perhaps have been able to beat the Arabian tribes. What’s more, one of the reasons that Islam could conquer the Middle Eastern provinces of the empire according to O’Donnell was the distance between the official Byzantine Christianity and the indigenous forms of it that flourish in Syria, Egypt and the other provinces. For the Coptic Church or the Nestorites rule of Islam was no worse than rule by Byzantium, sometimes even preferable as the former had less interest in hassling them.
On the economic side of things, O’Donnell’s beef with Justinian is that his western campaigns impoverished the Eastern Empire for little gain. As Chris notes in his second point, while the collapse of the Roman Empire is overrated, the fragmentation of it into its succesor states did mean a scaling down in trade, if only because traditional trading regions were now separate states… The western parts of the old Roman Empire had always been less wealthy than its eastern core, something that only became worse after the collapse. The wars themselves didn’t help either, depressing the economies of Italy and the other reconquered parts of the western Empire even further. All of which according to O’Donnell explains why the emperor started his reign with a surplus but ended it far in deficit. And Justinian set the trend for his succesors, trying to keep and expand their western holdings, when they did not have the resources to pursue both these goals and keep the Eastern Empire safe.
Could the Roman Empire have survived for longer had Justinian stayed east? It’s hard to say, but it might have left the east, the Byzantium part of it in better shape to survive the coming of Islam. In the west, had Justinian not invaded Italy, the Ostrogothic remnant empire there as founded by Theodoric, may have coalesed into something more akin to the Frankish kingdom — every historian so far I’ve read about Theodoric and his succesors have stressed that their was no reason to assume this could not have happened had the Ostrogoths been left alone. As I said in my original post, I’m certainly not entirely convinced by O’Donnell, but found that his greatest value lay in getting a fresh point of view on some familiar events.
Oy! Paul di Filippo! S.O.D. got a message for you!
Hey, di Filippo, if you’re really so worried about the number of people on this planet:
Did you ever feel that all the world’s problems–environmental, cultural, political–could be the result of just too many fucking people on the planet? (“Fucking,” as used here, is a precisely descriptive adjective, and not a mere kneejerk intensifier.) Nobody wants to talk about this issue, since it’s too fraught with ethical conundrums: First World versus Third World, Elites versus Marching Morons, People of Color versus People of Pallor, Age versus Youth, Healthy versus Sick, Coercion versus Choice. What a minefield! And, yes, I know the “good news” about how the rate of population growth has leveled off, leaving us with a projection of “only” nine billion souls for mid-century, and even a hollowing out of certain countries like Russia, Japan and Italy. But I still say the current population level is at the root of most of our troubles.
S.O.D. has the solution for you:
You first.
On a more general note, I agree with Lenny when he notes that overpopulation angst looks suspiciously loe bog standard capitalist propaganda about useless people, scroungers, dole scum, only on a global scale. The idea that our problems are unsolvable because there are too many people fecklessly breeding and hence natural resources are running out, is very convenient for those who have hogged the greater share of our world’s riches, while it lets the rest of us off the hook as well. No point in trying to change the world if everything you’re going to do is going to be swamped by the endless hordes of poor brown people. If there are too many people in the world and no matter how you divide its wealth the majority of people will remain poor and miserable, that means I don’t have too feel guilty about my own comfortable middle class lifestyle, or bother my betters about the far greater wealth they have amassed. It’s the sort of propaganda that does well with well meaning liberals and leftists, intelligent enough to see how difficult it is to change the system, but not intelligent enough to see through the fallacies of the overpopulation myth. It’s been that way ever since Malthus and sadly, science fiction has often been at the forefront of this propaganda effort, from “The Marching Morons” to Ideocracy.
Young “cons” indeed
SEK points at and mocks a couple of young tools doing “conservative rapping” and includes their video, which is as excruciating as you imagined when you read “conservative rapping”. But that’s not important right now, what I found interesting was the shirts these two douches were wearing, as seen in the screenshot above. Because I’m sure they think they’re wearing the symbols of two iconic conservative superheroes, when in fact both Superman and Captain America can best be described as FDR Democrats. Superman spent his first appearances fighting wifebeaters (Action Comics #1), crooked businessmen and war profiteers (#1 and #2), not to mention mine owners who put profit before safety (#3). Not to mention that he’s either an illegal immigrant or America’s most famous anchor baby, depending on whether he was born on Krypton or only when his little rocket hit Kansas and spent most of the sixties, seventies and eighties as duly deputised police officers of the United Nations, together with his cousin Supergirl!
Captain America on the other hand is the textbook example of the premature anti-fascist, knocking out Hitler on his first appearance, in March 1941, has been consistently portrayed as a proper liberal, other than in Mark Millar’s revisionist imaginations, in the seventies saw that the head of the fascist Secret Empire was none other than Nixon a high public official, got desillusioned with America and went all Easy Rider, while in the eighties had to deal with a Reagan inspired challenger to his role who ultimately couldn’t cope with it.
All in all, two quite odd choices to wear for two such conservative stalwards.
The Deep State
The Deep State is an idea that originated in Turkish leftwing circles, as leftwing activists in the seventies and eighties started to notice the links between the army, police, judiciary, certain political parties, organised crime and the intelligence services and how these various interests groups worked together to block unwanted democratic developments like the election of leftist parties and politician or later, the rise of political Islamistic parties. The Deep State has supposedly apolitical organs of the state working together with extra-governmental and even criminal or fascists groups to pursue their own political agenda, while keeping up the appearance of a democracy, through a largely informal network of likeminded people in positions of power both within the state as outside of it, sometimes even working against the interests of their own government.
Through it was first articulated this way by Turkish leftists, the idea of such a “deep state” is not unique to that country of course. As made clear by Watergate, the Lockheed Affair or the Gladio Network and other such scandals, deep state structures can be found in any western democracy, especially in its intelligence services. It’s inevitable. Those who join institutions like the army, police or secret services are more likely than not to have rightwing sympathies and especially in the higher echelons of such a service, contempt for “fickle politicians” is almost bred into them, as any Tom Clancy novel shows. Combine that with an outlook that’s designed to see reds under every bed and is professionally pessimistic when estimating threats and the temptation to do something about these threats must be high. All this doesn’t really need men in suits around a big table in some smoky backroom, though I’m sure some such scenes will have happened, just people of similar backgrounds and political opinion informally helping each other against a common enemy. The people at the top don’t really need to do anything, just turn a blind eye to what their subordinates are doing.
A perfect example of such a Deep State conspiracy is the current News of the World phone hacking scandal. You have journalists hacking the phones of mainly leftwing politicians, as well as the usual celebrity suspects in the service of finding sleaze to splash on the frontpages of rightwing newspapers and in Scotland Yard, a police service that is a) highly politicised already and b) is strangely reluctant to investigate these crimes or even inform victims that their phones had been hacked, to the point that even Gordon Brown had to ask if he had been a victim. Meanwhile Andy Coulson, the ex-editor of the News of the World, who had to resign back in 2007 when one of his journalists had been convicted of phone hacking, was deemed respectable enough to become and remain David Cameron’s spin doctor until he was scapegoated this weekend.
The mainstream spin on this is that this is all an awful example of Rubert Murdoch’s grip on the UK’s political classes but that since all newspapers are complicit, do not expect much to change. And sure, perhaps ninety percent of such hacking is just done for crass commercial interests: getting the scoop on the next Royal scandal, digging up dirt on the newest X-Factor celebrity, “getting” yet another MP playing hanky panky with somebody else’s husband, a rubber suit and a large orange and so on. This is bad enough, but it is also the perfect instrument for the intelligence services to keep a tap on “enemy” politicians. No need to set up your own, risky surveillance programme if you can get friendly journalists to do it for you. These services have long had ties with the more respectable British newspapers (see e.g. Spycatcher) anyway and the illegality of such phone taps, as well as the expertise needed to get that bit of hacking done (not always very great, admittedly) means that the papers won’t look too closely at who’s helping them get their material and sharing it either — one hand washes the other.
It’s not surprising then that Scotland Yard has been reluctant to look too closely into the phone hacking allegations, other than when they’re forced to through the courts. They have every reason not to.