teenagers in Ancient Rome: You are all hateful bigots, this is ***476*** and the barbarians just want to have the benefits of our empire!
This is an insult to Rome. They were far more accepting of foreigners and foreign customs than us today. They would add foreign Gods to their pantheon, and adopted nearly every culture and custom they came across.
Most of the foreigners they were surrounded by in a religious sense were also pluralistic and accepting of synthesis. The Romans completely rejected, mass-murdered and destroyed the temple of the one group that were not like this because they constantly tried to rebel, subvert and mass-murder Romans, partially due to their unbending religious beliefs. Ooh sounds familiar!
Outside of religion the Romans certainly DID NOT ‘adopt nearly every culture or custom’… tell that to the Celts, Iberian peoples, Carthaginians, Numidians and others whose cultures they destroyed and amalgamated into a Romanised mould.
What the fuck are you on about? In no way, shape or form was Rome insular. Yes, the Empire whose sword was Iberian, whose arches were Etruscan, whose armies were modeled after the Greeks, then Celts, then Parthians, the Empire that gave citizenship to everyone, regardless of origin, yeah, they were really insular and racist.
“Mass murder” they wiped out fortresses and armies that resisted, but otherwise the Romans were tolerant of the Jews and would often patronize them and their ceremonies, especially when it would piss of the Greeks. Yup, even the Christians were so persecuted that you could find Christians in the imperial court of Diocletian.
They didn’t destroy cultures you fuckwit. Coloniae and municipia mostly kept to themselves in a sea of “barbarism”. The locals were not forced to adopt Roman language or customs. (Tacitus, Agricola, also see
L.A. Curchin, Roman Spain: Conquest and
Assimilation.) In time they would voluntarily adopt things that they liked, but there was no official practice of forcing anything upon conquered peoples, besides taxes.
The post wasn’t alluding to war practices, it was trying to make a half baked implication on Roman immigration policy. Rome in no way was anti-immigration. If they were, they would have been stamped out by more numerous enemies like the Etruscans or Samnites. Rome was always marked by a willingness to incorporate people and nations into their empire. Hell, they were willing to provoke a war with Carthage in order to adopt Saguntum into their empire, weren’t they?
You’re half right, the Romans didn’t adopt everything they came across – they didn’t have any of the racial superiority of the Greeks. In Athens, you couldn’t be a citizen unless you were of “Athenian blood,” you could work and live in Athens, but you couldn’t own property, vote, or marry an Athenian woman. The Athenians were so worried about foreign blood they locked their women up on the second floor of their houses to prevent interbreeding. Meanwhile the Roman Edict of Caracalla declared that all free men in the Empire were full Roman citizens, regardless of origin. By the 2nd Century CE, around 50-60% of Senators were non-Italian. (M. Hammond, “Composition of the Senate, A.D. 68-235”)
In fact, the only culture or ethnic group the Romans were openly hostile to were the Greeks. Graeculus was a pejorative that the Romans used to describe anything corrupt and excessive. The Romans considered their own origin as that of rusticitas, i.e. they thought of themselves as barbarian. (N.K. Petrochilos, Roman Attitudes to the Greeks.)
Romanization was a two-way street, the Romans had no working practices that enforced anything near resembling Roman ethnic or cultural superiority.
I’m really at a loss as to how you can be so fucking daft. Multiculturalism was the the defining aspect of Roman conquest, and the primary reason they’re the longest lasting empire in Europe. It only took 150 administrators to look after 60 million citizens in the 2nd Century (K. Hopkins, “Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire”). Subjects of the Empire were happy to be part of the Empire because they got citizenship without being forced to give up who they were.
So honestly, go fuck yourself. The Romans will not be used as an excuse for modern racism and insularism.
Hey I haven’t read all of this but in case you are interested there is a paper issued by Waseda University of Japan, “Multiculturalism and the Roman Empire,” penned by Kim Kyung-hyun. It does not only talk about multiculturalism itself but also draws a parallel with diversity in America.
Timothy Snyder sounds more like an author of speculative fiction than a professor of history at Yale, as he sketches the broad strokes of not-too-distant land grabs by an industrialized China, who needs additional agricultural land to feed its populace, and might therefore follow Hilter’s path toward Lebensraum:
Climate change has also brought uncertainties about food supply back to the center of great power politics. China today, like Germany before the war, is an industrial power incapable of feeding its population from its own territory, and is thus dependent on unpredictable international markets.
This could make China’s population susceptible to a revival of ideas like Lebensraum. The Chinese government must balance a not-so-distant history of starving its own population with today’s promise of ever-increasing prosperity — all while confronting increasingly unfavorable environmental conditions. The danger is not that the Chinese might actually starve to death in the near future, any more than Germans would have during the 1930s. The risk is that a developed country able to project military power could, like Hitler’s Germany, fall into ecological panic, and take drastic steps to protect its existing standard of living.
How might such a scenario unfold? China is already leasing a tenth of Ukraine’s arable soil, and buying up food whenever global supplies tighten. During the drought of 2010, Chinese panic buying helped bring bread riots and revolution to the Middle East. The Chinese leadership already regards Africa as a long-term source of food. Although many Africans themselves still go hungry, their continent holds about half of the world’s untilled arable land. Like China, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea are interested in Sudan’s fertile regions — and they have been joined by Japan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia in efforts to buy or lease land throughout Africa.
Nations in need of land would likely begin with tactfully negotiated leases or purchases; but under conditions of stress or acute need, such agrarian export zones could become fortified colonies, requiring or attracting violence.
Connecting the dots: Africa becomes a huge agricultural colony of an industrialized China, land that they would depend on, and compete for against other powerful and wealthy nations. And those annoying Africans, trying to eke out a living at the margins? We know how this story ends.
When mass killing is on the way, it won’t announce itself in the language we are familiar with. The Nazi scenario of 1941 will not reappear in precisely the same form, but several of its causal elements have already begun to assemble.
It is not difficult to imagine ethnic mass murder in Africa, which has already happened; or the triumph of a violent totalitarian strain of Islamism in the parched Middle East; or a Chinese play for resources in Africa or Russia or Eastern Europe that involves removing the people already living there; or a growing global ecological panic if America abandons climate science or the European Union falls apart.
“The Companion app, created by five students from the University of Michigan, enables users to request a friend or family member to keep them company virtually and track their journey home via GPS on an online map.
Those contacted then receive an SMS text message with a hyperlink in it that sends them to a web page with an interactive map showing the user walking to their destination. If the user strays off their path, falls, is pushed, starts running, or has their headphones yanked out of their phone, the app detects these changes in movement and asks the user if they’re OK.
If the user is fine, they press a button on the app to confirm within 15 seconds. If they do not press the button, or a real emergency is occurring, the Companion app transforms the user’s phone into a personal alarm system that projects loud noises to scare criminals from the scene, and gives you the option to instantly call the police.
On top of calling the police and alerting their chosen companion, users can also select an “I am nervous” button in the app, which tells the app where and when they feel unsafe. Companion’s creators said that in just one week after launching the second version of their app, they collected 500 incidents where students across multiple university campuses felt unsafe.
The team plans to collate this data and provide the information to campus security so that they can be aware of areas where trouble might occur, and, in the future, users will be able to specify why exactly they feel unsafe. “Many people aren’t even aware that their school has a campus safety department. In future, people can specify what makes them nervous and why, and we hope to open a dialogue between campus safety departments and students,” said Ernst.”
Waiting for Winter 