The First Punic War began in 264 BC, lasted 25 years, and was fought between the Romans and the Carthaginians, a civilization in what is today modern Tunisia. The Carthaginians were the most powerful and prosperous force in the Western Mediterranean and North Africa, while the Romans were a growing power on the Italian peninsula. After two decades, with both sides financially and demographically exhausted, Rome prevailed. Carthage ceded Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and paid substantial reparations.
The
Second Punic War lasted from 218 to 201 BC. This is the war that saw Hannibal attack from the north, taking his war
elephants across the Mediterranean, then down over the Alps, becoming the scourge of the Italian Peninsula for
more than a decade. Across the Italian mainland, Hannibal would go from city to
city, winning virtually every engagement, including Cannae, which almost ended Rome. Rome
recovered, however, and pursued a cat-and-mouse strategy with the goal of
tiring Hannibal’s army.
In one
of history’s great mysteries, after a decade of winning almost every encounter
and with virtual free rein over most of the Italian mainland, for some reason,
Hannibal never attacked Rome to
deliver the death blow that kept the Romans awake at night. Eventually, Publius
Scipio, known to history as Scipio Africanus, would bring the war to Carthage
itself, which would lead to Hannibal being recalled.
Unable
to overcome the Roman cavalry advantage, Hannibal would be defeated, and
Carthage would sue for peace. Again, Carthage would pay substantial
reparations, concede wide swaths of land, and this time lose much of its
autonomy.
The
Third Punic War, begun in 149 BC, would be the shortest and the last. Using a
Carthaginian response to an attack by the Numidian king and Roman ally Massinissa as
a pretense, Rome declared war. Three years later, the city of Carthage lay in
ruins as the Romans destroyed virtually every structure.
This
would be final. Tired of having to fight the Carthaginians, Rome would
obliterate them. They subsumed everything the Carthaginians had, declared it
illegal to rebuild the city, and sold off its remaining population into
slavery. As intended, Carthage would never again pose a problem for the Romans.
Fast
forward two millennia, and you see echoes of one of the greatest conflicts in
history. In 1914, the Germans launched Europe into World War I. For three
years, the sides would largely battle over inches as soldiers looked at one
another across the hundreds of miles of trenches dug on front lines that rarely
moved. By 1918, the Germans were defeated and the allies—mainly France &
the UK—imposed the draconian Treaty of Versailles, which included staggering
reparations and strict military limitations.
Two decades later, Germany, once crippled by reparations and limitations on industry and its military, would launch a second world war. For the previous decade, it had slowly but consistently pushed the limits of what it was allowed to do under the Treaty of Versailles, and usually found little or no resistance. As such, Germany kept pushing until it was strong enough that the allies could do little to prevent its expansive designs. And thus began a true world war that would fully engulf half the planet, and it would take half a decade for victory to come.
Fast
forward another eighty years, and the world once again finds itself in a
crisis. A different crisis, to be sure, but one that threatens civilization
every bit as much as the two world wars.
What
crisis? Why the immigration crisis, of course. And why is it an existential
threat to civilization? Because the West has been the primary driver of the
advance of civilization around the world for the last 500 years.
The list
of things Western civilization is responsible for that are central to the world
today, while not endless, is very long. Flight, telephony, harnessing
electricity, nuclear power, plastic, television, air conditioning, automobiles,
the best of modern medicine, space travel, MRI machines, advanced agriculture,
and much more, not the least of which was virtually ending slavery worldwide.
This
Western civilization was built on Christianity, individual freedom, freedom of
speech, religion, and the press, capitalism, liberal democracy, and relatively
free markets. Other than that first foundation (Christianity), most of those
elements developed into keystones over the last three centuries.
Today,
all are at risk, and once again, the catalyst is Germany. In particular, German
Chancellor Angela Merkel. In 2015, as the leader of what was then the most
economically powerful nation in Europe, she essentially dictated that the
continent open its borders to “migrants” from Syria,
Afghanistan, and Iraq. While ostensibly humanitarian, this policy was suicidal.
Europe had been failing to integrate immigrants for
decades, and now Merkel had opened the door to the entire Third
World.
The
consequences have been extraordinary. Thirty million, mostly undocumented male,
military-aged “migrants” from the third world have inundated Europe over the last decade,
overwhelming services, straining budgets, and committing crimes.
Today,
across the West, there is a growing ideology that is anathema to free speech,
freedom of religion, free press, women’s rights, and more. And it’s violently so.
At the current rate of demographic change, native Europeans will be
a minority in Europe soon after the middle of the century, and
Western civilization will not be far behind, if it survives that long.
If it
were just Angela Merkel, we might be able to give Germany a pass, but it’s not.
The EU’s Ursula von der Leyen and the WEF’s Klaus Schwab are both also spawn of
Germany and were Merkel’s fellow travelers when she was in power—and maintained
her cancerous ideas once she left.
At the
end of the day, from giving us Karl Marx to facilitating the Bolshevik
revolution by returning Lenin to Russia,
to beginning two world wars and shepherding the current collapse of the West,
Germany has been the fount of more strife and more bloodshed over the last 200
years than any nation on the planet. And it’s not even close.
It’s
likely too late for Europe to save itself, although it’s possible that Western
civilization could survive the collapse of the place of its origin.
Nonetheless, while the odds are against it, there is hope, but it will take
drastic measures.
The West
should do to Germany what the Romans did to Carthage. Not in the literal sense
of razing it to the ground, of course. Instead, it should split it into a dozen
or more autonomous nations. Separately, these tiny states would spend so much
time trying to survive that they couldn’t lead the world off another cliff.
Sure,
you can say this proposal is insane, and maybe it is, but so too is leading the
charge to destroy the most successful civilization in history. In thrall to the
climate change hoax, Germany recently shuttered the last of its nuclear
power plants and is well on its way to collapsing its
economy.
It’s a
statecraft version of someone who wants to commit suicide and decides to take
as many others with him as he can. The West should not allow it. We know what
the collapse of Western civilization looks like: It’s somewhere between
Afghanistan and Communist China. Both spell the end of freedom and prosperity.
If the West wants to avoid that fate, the first step is to eliminate the führer
/ Pied Piper leading the way. Maybe then it will be possible to focus on saving
what’s left...
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