Saving the Remnant, Part V
A podcast with Stephen Heiner and Thomas Fleming on the Fall of the Western Empire, the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, and the enduring legacy of the Roman Empire.
Category: Fleming
From Abraham to Napoleon: 4000 Years of Ethnic Conflict, Part I
This seems a good time to republish revised version of an essay from the book Peace in the Promised Land, published in 2005. I am by no means an expert on most of the periods discussed, but I have tried to grapple with the sources and with modern scholarship.
Herodotus, Book I
What is important to note in this first bit of history is his willingness to give different accounts and explanations and to allow readers to make up their own minds. It is not that he does not have opinions that he freely expresses, and he certainly, by an artful narrative style, leads us in one direction or another, but the final judgment is left up to the reader. Would we had such a writer to day.
Take Five News: Short Takes on The Descent Into Savagery
State mandates on COVID, Biden’s take-over of the Supreme Court, Thug shootings, What to do when civilizations collapse,
Debunking American History, Part IV: The Second American Revolution
The United States were in origin a confederation of American republics, ruled for the most part by their own constitutions and laws and whose member states were bound in a contract of union with very strict limits. Between 1776 and 1860, the complex and republican system was devolving–by a sort of political entropy–into a simpler system that concentrated more and more power at the top.
Debunking American History, Part III: Making the Republic
What Franklin and the others knew is that a republican government is an exercise in human optimism, and patriotic republicans must be engaged in an unremitting struggle against that human entropy we used to know as original sin.
Debunking American History, Part II: Who We Were
The older textbook view of our history (whose most idiotic version goes by the name “American Exceptionalism”) is that the American colonists were a rare breed of individualists, cut loose from the traditions of old Europe, who came to New World seeking religious liberty.
Take Five: Deconstructing the News
Impromptu responses to the Ukraine crisis, Israel and Iran, the first transgender cabinet secretary, the most recent shooting in Minnesota
