Book Recommendation: The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins
The Fall of Rome was recommended to me by a friend who had read my book, The Coming Collapse of the American Republic: and what you can do to prevent it. Dr. Ward-Perkins has done truth and scholarship a service with this short book, doubtless at some discomfort in modern academia. He is scrupulous in research and in not going beyond the extant evidence, but he dispels the PC notion that Romans welcomed the barbarians and together they fairly-peacefully transformed Europe—presumably laying the foundation for today’s early-retirement, high-vacation E-utopia. I have a master’s in history, but am far more of a dilettante than a scholar in the field, so I found the fact-base focus on the distribution of high-quality Roman pot shards as opposed to infantry tactics in key battles a bit dry. But Dr. Ward-Perkins draws many compelling factors together. His description (p136) of how specialization contributed to the collapse of living standards and population when the decline and fall forced people to a localized, subsistence economy was frightening. Most Americans are ill-prepared to survive in such a world, where our highly-compensated, specialized skills will be of little use, and I fear that it may well be coming. But, as he points out in his chilling closing, people in the late Roman Republic could no more imagine that things wouldn’t go on forever as they always had, than most citizens of the West can today. Both Europe and America have been invaded, if you will, by people from—in the PC phrase—less complex cultures. While they carry no battle axes (unless sold to them by the ATF, I suppose), neither are they met by the Legion’s shield-wall, short swords and pila. I suspect that Dr. Ward-Perkins looked on the recent riots in Britain and realized that the UK, Europe and America have created homegrown Visigoths and Vandals in our cities. I fear this is not so much an interesting book about the past as a picture of our future.
