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Originally Posted by floydian slip
its funny how the roman empire crumbled from the inside due to corruption and bad leadership. might history be repating itself again.
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Hold-on there, There is a lot more to the fall of Rome than that, you are taking 1200 years of history and breaking it down in one sentence.
The Romans made a choice, either to remain a free republic or be a superpower. They chose to remain a superpower and to accept the military dictatorship of Julius Caesar and his successors. Once you begin down the path of being a superpower, there is no turning back. When you become a power, you can’t just change your mind one day because you have created to much hatred toward you. You must follow that path to the end, and the Romans chose to follow it to the end. They assumed the burden and created the greatess legacy of any Empire in history. I can go on and on, but one thing a will say and a will quote it, you can make parallels.
You can look to the MiddleEast as one of the turning points,
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We are on patrol today in Iraq. Men and women of the United States armed forces in armored vehicles patrol the streets of Baghdad. They pass in the way of so many who have come before them: the Egyptian charioteers of Ramses II, the Macedonian phalanx of Alexander the Great, the Roman legionnaires of Caesar and Trajan, the Crusaders of Richard the Lion-Hearted, the legionnaires of Napoleon, the Camel Corps of Lawrence of Arabia.
All of these have come through the Middle East. Many of them have come with the best of intentions, by their lights, to bring stability, even freedom to the Middle East. All have passed away. The Middle East has been the graveyard of empires.
In the course of history, we have come to take up that burden. We live in a time as momentous as that of the American Revolution, the Civil War, the days after Pearl Harbor. In each of these watersheds in our history, we have not only taken up the burden, but we have advanced the cause of freedom.
In the American Revolution, we saw to it that a nation could be established under liberty and law. In the American Civil War, we purged ourselves of the great evil of slavery so that we could go on and become a model for the world. In World War II and the Cold War that followed, we advanced the cause of freedom so that today, more people live in freedom than at any other time in history. That is the result of America bearing this burden.
I think that September 11 is just as important a date as Pearl Harbor, and we now advance into a new and dangerous era. Think of Winston Churchill when he said how Britain set out across unknown seas, through uncharted waters towards unknown shores, guided only by the beacon of freedom. We have another guide, and that is history and the lessons of history. For the founders of our country, history was the most important single discipline that every citizen of a free republic should study.
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So, Will America follow the path the Romans took or the Path Sparta had taken??
Good read, you can take for what ever it is worth -à
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Pol...ophy/hl917.cfm
If you don’t want to read it all…..at least read Rome, Germany, and the Middle East section. It is interesting if you like Roman history.