Everyone's Opinion Newsletter

Sir Winston Churchill believed that history could tell us the future and that all nations rise and fall. The magnificent Egyptian civilization lasted for 3000 years; America (1492-2009) is 517 years old. Do you wonder if we can go that far?

When Winston Churchill was a young officer in India, he asked his mother to send him a complete set of Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). Gibbon was a very thorough historian who was and still is today very much admired by people who delve into history. “There,” said Churchill “is where I learned to write those rolling phrases that would rally a nation.” Winston Churchill took history very seriously when Europe was at war.

Historically, the Roman Empire was the only superpower in history until the United States. Superpower means a nation dominant militarily, politically, economically and culturally. Rome was the first that had it all - then lost it. Babylon, Egypt, Greece, they all reached a plateau then.

Read Gibbon and learn as many facts that are as accurate about history as you can find in a book published today. How did Edward Gibbon get so enthusiastic about Roman history? As a young man, Gibbon traveled Europe and decided that he wanted to write a history of the ancient world. One day (1764) in Rome, he was sitting on the steps of what is now the San Maria Church (formerly a Roman temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus). Looking out over the Forum - then called the cow pasture, where cows and sheep grazed, he saw a few columns still standing above the ground and some ruins. He was pondering why all that grandeur had passed away and suddenly, he knew what he wanted to write.

The pages of Gibbons book, “The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire,” say that Rome declined because of its involvement with the Middle East and failure to solve the problems of the Middle East. He says that Iran, the greatest eastern power, went through a tremendous religious revival.

Julius Caesar and Augustus, two of the greatest statesmen in the world, forged a new order of peace and prosperity unequaled until the 20th century. It reached its apex in the 2nd century A.D. when the Roman Empire spanned the North Sea all the way to the Sahara and from the Moors of Scotland to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Iraq.

History shows that the Middle East countries had common allegiance to Rome, guaranteed rights and prosperity. Rome enjoyed and abused both wealth and luxury. Prosperity and peace with vast amounts of funds flowing back to Rome caused a careless attitude about liberty as long as they had jobs, plenty to eat and entertain¬ment. In today’s language it is, “Lots of influence and cable TV.”

Rome found itself absorbed in the problems of the Middle East for three centuries, all the way back to the annexation of Judea; spending large amounts of wealth, trying to build a nation, keeping large amounts of troops there that only alienated the people of the Middle East. Civil war, dwindling manpower, and expenses were a constant drain upon the Romans, so much so that it distracted them from doing other things. Other things like understanding the danger of the growing power of Germanic Barbarians along the Danube and Rhine River frontiers.

Eventually the northern barbarian soldiers would crash through the Roman frontiers in the 3rd century. The failure of the Romans to solve the problem of the Middle East, once becoming involved, provided the military, political and economic source of their collapse. It even disrupted the politics of Rome so that they emerged a bureaucratic totalitarian government still unable to solve the Middle East problem.

Most of us tend to think that was then, it can't happen now, like a historical thinking. Gibbon speaks to us who don't listen, with a very profound relevance to us in this century.

Steve

Hollidaysburg, PA

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