Collapse of Rome Similarities with USA?

When you hear people say, "Dennis, that could never happen here!  This is America!"  Remind them that Romans said the exact same thing after they had ruled the world for centuries.

Not let's look at some of the similarities that existed in Rome right before it collapsed and plug them into what you see happening in America today.

Great Wall of China

By 220 A.D., the Later Eastern Han Dynasty had extended sections of the Great Wall of China along its Mongolian border. This resulted in the Northern Huns attacking west instead of east. This caused a domino effect of tribes migrating west across Central Asia, and overrunning the Western Roman Empire.

Open borders

Illegal immigrants poured across the Roman borders: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Franks, Anglos, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Rugians, Jutes, Picts, Burgundians, Lombards, Alans, Vandals, as well as African Berbers and Arab raiders.

Will and Ariel Durant wrote in "The Story of Civilization" (Vol. 3 – Caesar and Christ, Simon & Schuster, 1944, p. 366): "If Rome had not engulfed so many men of alien blood in so brief a time, if she had passed all these newcomers through her schools instead of her slums, if she had treated them as men with a hundred potential excellences, if she had occasionally closed her gates to let assimilation catch up with infiltration, she might have gained new racial and literary vitality from the infusion, and might have remained a Roman Rome, the voice and citadel of the West."

Loss of common language

At first immigrants assimilated and learned the Latin language. They worked as servants with many rising to leadership. But then they came so fast they did not learn Latin, but instead created a mix of Latin with their own Germanic, Frankish and Anglo tribal tongues. The unity of the Roman Empire began to dissolve.

The welfare state

"Bread and the circus!" Starting in 123 B.C., the immensely powerful Roman politician Gaius Gracchus began appeasing citizens with welfare, a monthly handout of a free dole (handout) of grain.

Roman poet Juvenal (circa 100 A.D.) described how Roman emperors controlled the masses by keeping them ignorant and obsessed with self-indulgence, so they would be distracted and not throw them out of office, which they might do if they realized the true condition of the Empire: "Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions – everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses."

Juvenal continued: "Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce; and everyone would shamelessly cry, ‘Long live the King.' … The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them."

Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote: "The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers which bread and circuses can never appease."

The Durants wrote in "The Lessons of History" (p. 92): "The concentration of population and poverty in great cities may compel a government to choose between enfeebling the economy with a dole or running the risk of riot and revolution."

In "The Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe" (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 39), one Roman is recorded as stating: "Those who live at the expense of the public funds are more numerous than those who provide them."

Violent entertainment

The Circus Maximus and Coliseum were packed with crowds of Romans engrossed with violent entertainment, games, chariot races, and until 404 A.D., gladiators fighting to the death.

Gerald Simons wrote in "Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe" (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 20): "In the causal brutality of its public spectacles, in a rampant immorality that even Christianity could not check."

Church lost its role as conscience

Richard A. Todd wrote in "The Fall of the Roman Empire" (Eerdmans' "Handbook to the History of Christianity," Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Co., 1977, p. 184): "The church, while preaching against abuses, contributed to the decline by discouraging good Christians from holding public office."

Exploding debt and coinage debasement

Rome was crippled by huge government bureaucracies and enormous public debt. Rather than curb out-of-control government spending, Roman emperors decided to debase coins by mixing them with cheaper base metals. This devalued their monetary system and caused exponential inflation.

The Durants wrote in "The Lessons of History" (p. 92): "Huge bureaucratic machinery was unable to govern the empire effectively with the enormous, out-of-control debt."

In "Great Ages of Man – Barbarian Europe" (NY: Time-Life Books, 1968, p. 20), Gerald Simons wrote: "The Western Roman economy, already undermined by falling production of the great Roman estates and an unfavorable balance of trade that siphoned off gold to the East, had now run out of money."

Rolf Nef of Global Research wrote on Jan. 15, 2007, "Falling Empires and their Currencies" (www.globalresearch.ca): "When empires fall, their currencies fall first. Even clearer is the rising debt of empires in decline, because in most cases their physical expansion is financed with debt. … The common thing is that the currencies of each and every one of these falling empires lost dramatically in value. … The Roman Empire existed from 400 B.C. to 400 A.D. Its history is the history of physical expansion, like the history of almost all empires. Its expansion was driven by a citizen soldier army, paid in silver coins, land and slaves from occupied territories. If there was not enough silver in the treasury to conduct a war, base metals were added to coin more money. That is to say, the authorities debased their currency which presaged the fall of the Empire. There was a limit to the expansion. The empire became over-stretched, running out of silver money, and eventually went under, overrun by barbarian hordes."


Richard W. Fisher, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, remarked before the Commonwealth Club of California, San Francisco, California, May 28, 2008: "We know from centuries of evidence in countless economies, from ancient Rome to today's Zimbabwe, that running the printing press to pay off today's bills leads to much worse problems later on. The inflation that results from the flood of money into the economy turns out to be far worse than the fiscal pain those countries hoped to avoid."

Here;  http://www.prophecynewswatch.com/article.cfm?recent_news_id=1549

When people don't know history...they are bound to repeat it.  And MOST Americans have little knowledge and little care of world history.

When you see the billion dollar stadiums going up in every city across the country to worship our football, baseball, basketball and hockey heroes and you see the "free bread" being handed out to millions of welfare recipients many of whom REFUSE to work...it is eerily similar to what happened in Rome before they imploded.