THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Deriving from Classical Society, Romans were organized into the polis. The Roman polis was like the polis of Athens and the polis of Sparta. You had your rights in Rome. The polis of Athens held a lot of territory outside the city, the polis, itself. These were SUB-urban areas, areas under the control of the City, the Polis. But to vote you had to go to the polis.

This did not become too much of a problem until Rome began conquering huge hunks of territory hundreds of miles from the polis. When Saint Paul claimed the rights of his Roman citizenship, they all derived from his right TO GO TO ROME and appeal directly to the Emperor, which originally was the right to appeal to the Senate.

IN ROME.

Thus "civilization" means "city-ization," but it could also be called "polisization."

There was a long and vicious fight by the members of the Latin League for Roman citizenship. Once they obtained it, Roman citizenship began the slide into being extended in the fourth century to everybody inside Roman territory who was not a slave.

A number of Italian cities were founded as "colonies" of Athens and other Greek cities. They had a lot of citizens of the colonizing polis, but rights could be exercised inside the colony city as well as in the parental polis.

Sparta said it needed no walls, because its shields were its walls. The exception proves the rule. The polis was a fixed area within walls like Medieval castles and cities. SUBurban areas looked to the polis when invasion came, and it came very, very often. So the entire Classical Civilization developed in a DEFENSIVE mode as wave after wave of Northern Invasion swept over it.

Once the Northern Invaders took over the polis, it began to have an OFFENSIVE outlook.

Doric and Ionian invaders who took over each polis were, in the centuries following, fighting to hold their own polis, a.k.a "city-state" - though there was no other form of state in Classical Times - against other polises, poli - while simultaneously founding colonies in far-away Italy and Sicily. In the same way, European countries were fighting to stay alive in Europe at the same time that their citizens were discovering and taking colonies thousands of miles away.

But the basic Classical Civilization was based on loyalty to an area inside a wall. The last third of their history they had to develop some means of spreading that concept to an expanding set of empires. That was exactly like trying to eat soup with chopsticks.

Nobody had a tradition that was less ready to take on a giant empire than the polis system Rome inherited.

SUB Urban Chapter 2

Chapter 1 was a false start in that I had to do it to think out what I was trying to say.

Our entire worldview, derived from history, is based on that provided by Gibbon.

Gibbon history was written for his drawing room readership. So Gibbon provided a worldview that was perfect for the drawing room set and today's Mommy Professor. It said that they were the basis of all true progress and civilization. Gibbon provided a history that consisted of a look back to the heights of 1790 Britain, back across a total swamp to the Fall of a similar society, the Roman Empire, Rome, about 400 AD.

As Mommy Professor and the drawing room crowd looked back over Gibbering History, they saw that behind Rome there was another swamp, across which one could see Ancient Athens. That was a tiny peak, but behind that was another millennial swamp and behind THAT was the mountain of Ancient Egypt, rising serenely under its Scribes and Priests to the height of Ancient Rome and Mommy Professor.

You can see a perfect exposition of this in Asimov's Foundation Series. As a very young man, he took it for granted that you had to have a giant bureaucracy and state run by intellectuals for anything to be CREATED. Creation, he said, came at the height of Gibbon's Empire Phase of History, like the British Empire Gibbon lived in.

This nonsense underlies our entire worldview. As I pointed out in Chapter 1, NOTHING was invented by Egypt. And it is no accident that Gibbon talked only about the Decline and Fall, not the "RISE and Fall of Rome." He declared that Rome was a height of history that sprung up like Topsy. He had no idea how things BEGAN. He dedicated his discussion to how glorious and perfect Mommy Professor Societies could fall.

SUB Urban, Chapter 3

The point of this exercise rests on the fact that the best way to humiliate our enemies is to state what they believe in plain English.

They win by forcing YOU to explain why YOUR formula will save the world. A good respectable conservative falls for that, hook, line and sinker. YOU insist, insist, and INSIST on talking about how THEY consider the gray stone Capitol Building to be Sophisticated.

In our last exciting chapter I mercilessly described THEIR World View. Let us continue.

Gibbon and Mommy Professor say there was this Roman Empire that did not change at all from the time it Civilized Europe until its Fall when the capitol moved to Constantinople. This is not stated, but it is implied on a level of subtlety that makes Attila look like a wimp.

As Brown points out, this image of a consistent drawing room Empire has cracks the size of Mount St. Helen's.

A small contrast: Trajan died in bed, but about the end of the third century began a string of Emperors whose average life span was about two years.

Brown, having discussed the incredible fraud of Classical Sculpture, talks about The DISAPPEARANCE OF THE MONEY ECONOMY in the third century. In the third century coins that had been the normal units of exchange throughout the Classical Age, disappeared. The Roman Army accepted goods as pay, routinely.

The smooth continuity we think of as Roman collapsed completely. In this period we substitute the smooth continuity of the Pure Christian Faith.

During this period there was a fight over who was to be the next Pope. The backers of one claimant trapped the backers of the other in a building and killed them.

Then there is the little matter of Sunday. Sunday derives from Constantine's religion, Mithraism. In Sol Invictus was the mantra of that faith. "the Sun, Unconquered." And December 25, the birth date of Mithras became what we call Christmas.

None of this actual history jibes with the smooth continuity on which Asimov based the Foundation Series. Captain Kirk and Spock, both Jews, found Fundamental Christians who were fans of the show disturbing. Those fans were very concerned that both of the actors were going to Hell.

Hence the Star Trek episode that showed how, if it had not been for Christianity, Roman slavery would have continued into the present day. "Ah," said Kirk, "To see it happen again."

Everybody went "Goo!" except me.

Having a frontal lobe is a real pain.

SUB Urban, Chapter 4

What REALLY happened in Rome?

Our history today presents us with a British Empire type of Rome where barbarians were tamed and civilized by the legions and a sort of British upper class ruled until Rome "fell" and the legions withdrew and the barbarians went back to slaughtering each other and everything stagnated until the Renaissance revived Classical Learning and we began to crawl back to the heights.

Our history says the monasteries preserved all real learning through that stagnant millennium or so of NOTHING.

This is as true as the idea that the Capitol is Classical Architecture. All this looks ridiculous if you STATE it SIMPLY. But if you get lost in details, and they will try HARD to get you off on proving your historical knowledge, their whole house of cards is irretrievably damaged from the get-go.

Let me give you another example of how desperate history is to keep this image.

The Romans didn't have soap. Since accepted history implies that they invented bathing, this is potentially embarrassing. Just as Egypt got the wheel from the Hyksos and iron from the Hittites, the Romans got soap from the Gauls. This implies that the barbarians were familiar with bathing.

One history I was reading mentioned this once. It said that soap "originated in ROMAN Gaul."

Things jump out at me that others don't even notice. The Gauls had had soap long before the Romans got there. Why specify ROMAN Gaul? Because that preserved the myth. Only under the leadership of Rome, this implies, the Gauls started bathing and developed soap.

When the white mummies were founding China, they were wearing a weave which professional history had declared was invented a thousand years later in the Middle East.

You can't build any decent worldview on nonsense like that, and history is what our worldview has to be based on. This is not theoretical stuff. It is critical.

Our discussion of history must be an attack. We must cut out the ingrown cancer our thinking starts with. You must present this as laughable and you must keep it SHORT.

First of all, the whole structure on which both Enlightenment atheists and Christians have built is hogwash, just as the whole Wordist viewpoint on which Marxists and evangelical "Christians" base their worldview is hogwash.

In the midst of the quiet, civilized, consistent life of Rome on which Gibbon based his view, Wordist "Christians" built THEIR historical myth. They were a tiny band preaching a religion that lived entirely in the Holy Land. Paul preached that this Jehovah person was the unknown god they had a monument to in Greece.

Anyone in Rome who had not heard of Jehovah was on life support. After I had been pounding for years on Brown's estimate of seven million Hellenic Jews in Rome, a TV documentary actually mentioned that about a tenth of the Roman population was made up of Hellenic Jews.

These seem to be the "Greeks" discussed at such length as fighting "Jews" in the New Testament. "Jews" are no longer the heroes in the New Testament. Josephus, the famous historian of the first century, was a HELLENIC Jews.

But all of those six million Hellenic Jews, a tenth of the entire population, simply disappear from history, WITHOUT COMMENT, as Christianity rises.

The disappearance of THAT six million Jews is not discussed. There are no memorials to them, but there could be a very important connection between the two disappearances of a major portion of the population which was Jewish.

It turns out that Madeleine Albright's parents were Jews who, under the Nazis, simply stopped being Jewish. It turns out that gubernatorial candidate Allen's family were also Jews who decided, under the Nazis, not to be Jews any more.

Let us make an observation no one else is allowed to make. Statistically, it seems improbable that the only Jews in Nazi Europe who simply decided not to be Jews any more were the parents of the American Secretary of State and a candidate for governor in Virginia.

What happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany is probably what happened to the Hellenic Jews when THEY disappeared from history. To protect the Holocaust Industry, you have to lock up a historian in prison if he says the Nazis only killed three hundred thousand Jews.

History interrelates.

History is IMPORTANT.

SUB Urban Chapter 5

What we say here interrelates.

I discussed the weakness of the polis. The Christians did not destroy the unity of Rome and the old gods. By the end of the first century, few in Rome took the old gods seriously. As more and more people outside Rome were given Roman citizenship, the polis went the way of the old gods.

The polis was replaced by the Wordist "salvation cults."

By the second century, there was no Rome. Into the vacuum came the salvation cults, from Isis to Hellenic Judaism. For a century, Emperors died off like flies. From the long rule of Augustus the Empire fell into a straight battle for power.

MONEY, the coins that had been the basis of the Classical economy, fell into disuse.

If MONEY disappeared as a medium of exchange in America and presidents started living a few years or a few months we would consider that it had become a different society Not so the history of Rome.

What we call "Rome" is considered the same thing until the city was actually conquered and burned. Only THEN do we see a problem in this smooth continuity.

Then Constantine appears. He establishes the Christian religion, but he makes Sunday, the Mithraian Sabbath, into the Christian Sabbath. This doesn't fit so it is ignored.

So the Da Vinci Code declares that a collapse of true Christianity by the unilateral action of Constantine. Expanding on Brown, what I see here is a straight set of political compromises.

History concentrates entirely on the only two forces we see today, because their memory is still with us. Those two forces are the unified entity we call the Roman Empire and a unified and pacifistic Christianity.

The enormous power Mithraism, dominant in the Roan Army, becomes just another little bump that true Christianity overcame. The overpowering Persian Empire, which towered over Roman politics at the time, is totally ignored. The three priests of Mithras become Black, an oriental, and a white man who are "Wise Men."

What I see is a succession of men taking on the title of Emperor. I also see a parallel to this title in the Holy Roman Empire, where the title of Emperor meant something when the guy elected was sixteenth century Charles who also ruled Spain and other vast powers independently.

In other words, the title Emperor didn't mean much in itself. It meant a lot to a Constantine who also had enormous REAL forces OF HIS OWN. If you wrote a history of the Holy Roman Empire declaring Europe was actually ruled by who ever held that title, you would be laughed at. But that is our history of Rome.

No one notices that the power of this so-called Rome died with the old religion and the polis. So what WAS the loyalty that replaced it? The powers that really replaced it became what we call, with the sole exception of Christianity, the "cults."

Our picture of this time totally ignores the "cults." But to Constantine the "cults," like the giant Persian Empire, were the power realities of his day. Our "History of Rome" ignores them all.

The situation was not all that different from what we face today. The old Constitution is gone, replaced by Marxists, Moral Majorities, race-mixers, Environmentalists, all sort of propositional groups, each of which is a cult, Politics today has nothing to do with the American unity based on blood, it is simply a balancing of different cults.

That was what Augustus saw when he made laws requiring the Roman upper class to have children. He probably didn't see it so clearly, but he was trying to save the polis. Three centuries later, Julian the Apostate tried, by a weird revival what he saw as the Old Religion, to revive the polis and overthrow Christianity.

Brown, in The Might of the West, 1963, gets part of this. Brown details the fact that, in the new society called Rome, what we would call nations existed in the form of cults. These were the political realities with which Constantine dealt. They were the realities real Roman politics had dealt with for a century or more.

Nothing that was taken for granted by Constantine has any place in our history of "Rome." It is moot question whether he would have laughed harder at our idea of "Roman politics" or our idea of Roman statues.

Shari:

"I have also heard the centuries immediately following the burning of Rome called "the dark ages."

- Shari

BW:

I have problems with Brown on that. In order to buttress his concept tat the West was a totally new thing, he says that period in the West was like newborn, totally sunk in darkness. He is better than the average historian because he says that in the Dark Ages we lost BOTH our Roman AND our Germanic Civilizations. Unlike the average historian, he admits that there WAS a Germanic tradition.

For the average historian, the Dark Ages reflected a lack of SCRIBES. So accepted history says the Dark Ages were when we LOST the Civilization of Rome, where there were scribes. I was stunned to discover that Icelandic sagas talked about Attila the Hun. We had recorded history.

Accepted history tells us that the only writing in Northern Europe during the Dark Ages was the few runs we find on rocks. To one who gives a little THOUGHT to history, a group limited largely to me, this presents an odd picture. The rock-runes were highly complex. Since writing then, everywhere, did not separate words, the runes were drawn in artistic dragon shapes and so forth.

But there was no runic writing anywhere ELSE.

So here is the e odd picture: These rock rune writers wrote in highly complex designs, but they never wrote anything ELSE. That's quite an accomplishment! None of them ever had to PRACTIVE writing, they just carved away in fluency from the word GO.

Now THERE is an example of Nordic Superiority gone wild!

It seems a little more plausible to me that runic writings were destroyed.

Which means there WERE scribes?

We are told that the first representative government was in Iceland. It so happens that Iceland was peopled largely by those who were escaping from the first Christian King of Norway, Harold. Like the run-writers, history says that they INVENTED representative government when they hit shore there.

We are told that DEMOCRACY was invented by the Greeks, who gathered in their thousands and shouted to each other. This was not representative. ALL citizens were there. Icelanders hit the cost and invented the process of electing people.

When I was coming up, that was as much a fact of history as the idea that no one wrote runes except on rocks and that the idea of Nordics settling America was a laughable myth.

It is more likely that we did not HAVE dictators and the Icelanders escaped from Harold's new kingship and established the form of government they had had long before Athens was founded.

No kings, no emperors, and scribes were not dominant. That is a Dark Age accepted history.

LAWRENCE Brown's Basic Point

To ME, and maybe not to him, Brown made a point I cogitate about.

I read the Da Vinci Code and realized that accepted history still obsesses on Constantine. In the Code, he was supposed to have unilaterally changed the whole Church and made it wholly male-dominated. That reflects the usual accepted history doctrine that there was a united Church that was perverted when Constantine saw those words, not a Cross, in the sky.

But one man didn't do all that, whether in accepted history or in the Da Vinci Code. My thesis, which is open to correction, is that Constantine was practical politician of his own time.

I stressed the importance of realizing one's POINT OF VIEW. Brutus is right that Brown was an engineer and a mathematician, so he looked at things from that standpoint. That is an important observation.

My background is power politics, so naturally I look at things that way.

What Lawrence made me look at was the historical PROCESS that Constantine was dealing with. "Rome" didn't FALL. What was ROME became two distinct societies. History does not even recognize that the Levantine Civilization that included the Eastern Mediterranean for so long was "Great Civilization" unto itself.

In Levantine Civilization, what we see as the religious groups were the actual nations. When a people became Moslem, they wrote in Arabic script. The Jews wrote in Hebrew script, including the ones who became Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew characters. As Russia shows us, the Orthodox Christians wrote in Cyrillic.

The West, contrary to accepted history, did not languish in unbathed barbarity until the rediscovery of Classical Literature gave us a Rebirth. We became the West. We were a separate entity from Mankind in general.

This is one of the most important transitions in history from ANY point of view. It was the origin of not one, but TWO "Great Civilizations," even if you discount the special importance of the West.

And it is totally ignored.

We have a giant hole to fill in history. It should be fun.