By ART CHANCE
Those of us who’ve had Western Civilization courses know “The Goths” as a group of Germanic tribes and clans that pressed against the northeastern border of the Western Roman Empire from the Second Century CE.
After the First Century, the Romans didn’t try to expand the Empire’s northern border beyond the Rhine and Danube Rivers, although they made forays into Germanic, Persian, and other lands if threatened or attacked.
The Romans considered all non-Romans to be barbarians (foreigners), but after centuries of contact with the Romans the “barbarians” near the borders of the Empire were as “Roman” as the Romans, both culturally and commercially.
Ultimately, the Romans extended citizenship to many who had once been considered barbarians. Despite movie mythology, the barbarians didn’t come into Roman territory to destroy it; they came to own it or take its valuable goods. As the Western Empire weakened in the Fourth and Fifth centuries the invasions did become occupations as the Romans became less and less able to hold and defend their provinces.
All the various Germanic tribes that threatened the Roman Northern frontier can generally be grouped into the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths, the eastern and western Goths. “Goths” is a lot simpler than trying to remember all those tribal and territorial names. Over a couple of centuries the relationship varied from cooperation and assimilation to outright warfare, as aggressive leaders rose to the fore among the Goths.
The Goths traded with the Romans and provided troops for the Roman armies. Gothic armies fought alongside Roman armies to defeat Attila the Hun, and that brings us to the root of this story; as the Huns pushed against the Goths, the Goths moved into Roman territory.
The Romans resisted and the Goths rendered them some humiliating defeats, notably at Adrianople in northern Greece where they killed a Roman Emperor. Ultimately, the Goths rebelled against Roman authority and conquered much of Gaul (France), effectively all of Hispania (Spain and Portugal), and all of Roman Africa.
Finally, they invaded Italy itself and conquered and sacked Rome, which had been inviolate for almost a millennium. The loss of Roman Africa, the bread basket of Rome, is what ultimately led to the economic and administrative collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
How does the history of the Roman northeastern border, the Rhine and the Danube relate to the U.S. southern border today?
We have had a long and often contentious relationship with Mexico. We have fought two open wars with Mexico. Although the war for Texas independence wasn’t legally a war between the U.S. and Mexico, the combatants were mostly U.S. settlers living in Mexican Texas and the Mexican Army.
We fought a real state v. state war with Mexico in the 1840s, in which we took most of what is now the Western U.S. from them. As late as the early 20th Century, we invaded them with large U.S. military units. Along the way we traded with them, married and interbred with them, allowed, and even enticed them into the U.S. to work. We vacationed with them, and many of them assimilated into our culture and became citizens or permanent, if illegal, residents.
Now, at the invitation of the Democrats, we’re being invaded by them, and you’re a horrible xenophobe if you cry foul.
Well, I’ll be the xenophobe and say it: We are being invaded.
It is a leftist mantra that we need immigrants because “there are jobs Americans won’t do.” The reality is that there are jobs that Americans won’t do because they pay less than welfare or unemployment because the competition for those jobs from illegal labor keeps the wages very low.
You might note that when President Donald Trump tamped down illegal immigration, wages in the U.S. rose and minority unemployment fell. In case you’ve forgotten in these heady days of “no more bad orange man,” the US had the most robust economy in modern times before the scamdemic struck.
I’m not denying the reality of the COVID-19 epidemic, but I am denying the scientific basis of the U.S. response to it; that was totally political and it worked. That said, Covid-19 was a miracle virus in that it almost completely eliminated influenza and pneumonia as causes of death.
There is, however, one job that not enough Americans will turn out to do: Vote Democrat. The Coastal Elites deplore the mostly white denizens of “flyover country” and they have determined to replace them. They are flooding the country with illegal immigrants, literally making no attempt to stop illegal border crossings.
This is an archetypal Cloward-Piven strategy; they intend to overwhelm the law enforcement and social services infrastructure of the US with illegal aliens. Then, the only solution will be to give as many of them as they can get away with citizenship rights.
President Lyndon Johnson’s boast that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would guarantee black votes for Democrats for 100 years started to unravel under President Trump. Now Democrats need to naturalize illegal aliens to secure Democrat power for another hundred years.
Unlike the black and brown people who have been in the U.S. for centuries, the black and brown people being imported have no experience with democratic government. Even though most black and brown Americans have historically been deprived of some of the rights and privileges of our democracy, they have enjoyed some of its benefits, and in recent years almost all of its benefits.
The people pouring into our country have never known anything but autocracy, oligarchy, or outright dictatorship. They know nothing of the legitimate expectations of a free citizen of a republican democracy. They will do whatever for whoever provides “free stuff.” It’s the new version of LBJ’s promise about the black vote.
The Romans thought they could make use of the Goths at little cost; they only saw cheap labor in the form of dispensable troops for their legions.
Ultimately, the Goths revolted and conquered the city of Rome, much of Gaul, Hispania, and Roman Africa. The last Western Roman emperor, another Romulus, abdicated to a Gothic leader in 476.
The Democrats have managed to control the black population in much the same way the Nazis controlled the Jews; they recruited members of the Jewish community to exercise authority on behalf of the Nazis, and there were always Jews who wanted to be the last ones killed, they were called the Kapos.
The brown population in America is already at least twice the size of the black population; it is going to take a lot more than a few Kapos to control them.
While the brown population has not had the benefits of republican democracy they do know how to work in order to prosper; they haven’t had the poison of American culture teaching them to resent work.
The U.S. Left has spent the last half-century wishin’ and hopin’ for their “Helter-Skelter,” a black revolution and a race war that would propel them to never-ending power. It was and remains inconceivable to them that they could lose that war.
Now they’ve given up on the blacks; the blacks keep trying to escape the Democrat plantation, and many are turning conservative. The Democrats have set their sights on importing a whole new crop of undocumented Democrats. This won’t have a happy ending.
Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.
