The most important Kalypso review, Kalypso nightclub dance review, salsa, salsa reggaeton show, this episode 64, welcome. So in 1800s when Greece is regained from the Ottomans, the country Greece is formed, declares its independence in this, 1823, and you find there the English poet Byron but many other English and also French interests, they go out of the area to help the Greeks fight the Turk and regain independence. And you find a Western interest actually not only in Greece but other parts of Ottoman Empire in the 1800s, they are interested into how these pieces, these European parts of Ottoman Empire break off, how they understand themselves once they become free, what kind of nations they are to be.

Which of course, if you're Western, you want an obvious receptive to Western interests and influence. But you can stick just to Greece's case, it's very interesting what happened. Biden was there to promote this idea of Hellenic revival, right? Biden is very good, he's a kind of Chad poet warrior. It's very funny, when Schopenhauer went to Italy with some girl and he had a letter of introduction for Byron and he saw Byron in the distance and never went up to him because he was worried the girl he was with would go for Byron. But don't judge Schopenhauer too harshly. He was, however, a Chad himself, but of the misogynist type. People don't like to admit this because of his famous essay on women, they believe he must have been an incel.

But you must not believe the stories about German philosophers, that they were masturbators in this. Schopenhauer had many women in his youth, even later. So back to Byron and the Greeks, I'm on this side of Byron, of Hellenic revival, of the revival of ancient Greek spirit, which is what the Western nations wanted. They wanted to push that side. But it's interesting to hear the other side too. This is what I'm saying, when Greece broke off from Ottoman Empire, there were various parties, different factions, which way should Greece go? So you all might have heard, well, Byron was there but he left disgusted because he was hoping that he would resurrect the ancient Greek warrior spirit and then he thinks, okay,

so here are their descendants, the hoplites, they must all look and act like Spartans or Athenians at Marathon, but instead it was guerrilla fighters who would do things like they would move the Turks, they would show their ass and run away, and they would not have this kind of Spartan courage he was hoping for, this poetic, it was, you know, the typical Balkanoid of today, unfortunately, it was this, and I don't mean to insult my Greek Holoid friends, you know, yes, there was a woman, Cassandra, she raped me, but I like her very much. But of course, him being English, the Byron English, you might have to weigh the English vice into the calculation of his judgment of what happened in Greece, the famous English vice. I mean, look, what he went there expecting, I don't know.

You look up Richard Burton, the explorer. You look up James Brooke, Roger Brooke, who became the king of Sarawak, he founded the dynasties. These are adventurers, I admire them very much, but it must be admitted that unusual tastes fueled, unfortunately, some of the most famous English explorers were fueled by this. You know, please don't tell Nicholas Sallow, he will chimp if you put him on this topic of the English vice. So Byron went there and both England and France were so, they were promoting this Hellenic – this party of independence from the Ottomans to have modern Greece be reborn on an ancient Hellenic role-playing, you could say, base, role-playing ancient Greece. But there was another party, is what I'm telling you, this was the Roman party.

In other words, the question was for the Greeks, do we declare independence from the Turks and do we re-establish our Romanness, our Romanity? To put it plainly, do we re-establish the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire as you might know it in other words, or do we succeed on the other hand as a national state and look back not to Rome, not to the continuity of Hellenism through Rome, which is actually what that area was when it was taken over by the Ottomans in 1453, right? But do we not do that, do we try to leap from that back to our ancient Greek roots and to become Hellenists to adopt a Hellenic identity solely, surely not pagan, you know, but looking back to that pagan antiquity as our primary heritage while ignoring or at least downplaying

the Roman identity part and no longer calling ourselves Roman. Because remember they call themselves Roman, the Byzantine in that whole area in fact, so this was crucial question for the West and you can imagine why for two reasons. First of all, there was Russia, okay, so you know, I'll never forgive England and France for stopping Russia from retaking Constantinople, which Russia was ready to do a couple of times in the 19th century. And please, my Turkish friends must forgive me for saying this. I have to say that because I actually have quite a large audience in Turkey and among Turks, I mean large for me, okay, what means, but a bunch of Turk friends like my book very much and my message, they listen to me. You wouldn't expect this, maybe, but it's true.

I was in Istanbul in 2007 for about three weeks. It's a wonderful city. There is a wonderful dessert palace there, Saray Muwele Bicisi. They make the best part of Ottoman cuisine, which is the dessert for me, and it's a wonderful city with a real city feel to it, and everyone will hear me for saying this, but by contrast Many European towns and cities, you know, they feel like a museum and nursing home. But Istanbul feels like a real city. The only West European city I know with the feel of real city is Madrid. Madrid is a wonderful big city feel. Maybe parts of Lisbon. Lisbon is too unusual, however. Lisbon is spook-central. Do you know what I mean? Lisbon is like every spook in the world is there around every corner doing who knows

But because every Intel service, private or state, is there, it's off the eye of Sauron, it's outside the eye of the NWO for some reason. I don't know, but I guess it's a kind of limited free space. They killed Alekhin, the great chess player, Alekhin. He was killed there after World War II, I think in 1947. Why did Russia do this? Why did the Soviet KGB come and kill the genius – he's a wild genius, you know, everyone uses the word genius – Alekhin, look him up, he's a wild genius, there's no other chess player like him, maybe Fisher, but not even his ideas. Why did the Soviet Union kill Alekhin in Lisbon? He was just chess players, but he would have been a continual embarrassment to the commies. He was a handsome, charismatic chess genius, he was crushing their lesser players, in other

words making a mockery of the Soviet chess education and prestige, but he was a White Russian, in other words Imperial Russia, and he had supposedly collaborated with the Nazis so they offed him, they whacked him in Lisbon. So anyway, I have a lot of Turkish fans, and apparently you might think it's weird, but it's not. They are Kemalists, these are secular Turks, followers of Kemal at a Turk, and what is Kemalism is baptism, okay, I mean I'm exaggerating, I'm simplifying a bit for a fact, but there are many similarities, it's a Kemalism secular nationalist militarist ideology that seeks the replacement of priestly effigy with a secular military manliness and virtue, and in certain varieties of Kemalism it even harks back to a pagan antiquities, very interesting,

There are Turks, Kemalist Turks. Some of them look back to Rome, to pagan Rome, and they wanted to see Turkey as a continuation of Roman heritage, and others look back to pagan Anatolia, to Hittite nationalism. And I've joked about Hittite nationalism, but some do this for real, it's true. And they want to escape, you know, the musty smell of the priest, okay, the musty smell of the woman, who is the cleric's actual client throughout history, the primary client of the priest and the cleric, who is the woman, and the womanish man. And this is a common turn in modern situation, what I just described now with the Kemalists, because where, for example, you have very similar, the Shah of Iran wanted to make the same turn.

He goes into the 1970s, the Shah of Iran was going back to Zoroastrianism, ancient Persia. If not for the full state adoption of Zoroastrian religion, which I think that the Shah probably would have done eventually if he could have, but maybe he wouldn't go that far, but at least the feel, the symbols, this historical grandeur of Zoroastrian religion, primarily as a way to escape the shackles of the clerecy, the Shiite clerecy of Iran. And it didn't work out in Iran because in the Turkish case it's now up in the air and it looks like it will not work in Turkey either, this kind of secular term. But I believe pure Kemalism and the Shah would have been better for these societies than Islamic Republic or whatever Erdogan is turning it into now.

You must forgive me, but I believe in this vitalistic secularism, in scientific, military, modern society. I like that. You can attribute that to my upbringing under communist ideals if you will, although I believe that communism at no point, when I was a small boy I thought they were terrible wankers. The society of repressive wankers wanted to police what you said in this, although as you realize you had a lot more freedom under East Bloc in the 1980s than you had in America even before Trump, and certainly then you'll have going forward under the broken shell of American so-called republic. In other words, it took a lot more to get cancelled in East Bloc than it does today in America, as they only went for the big dissidents at work.

You could go and you could say – you could even be overheard by the party attaché. There was a party attaché there, and of course now every American workplace has multiple party attaches, that's the purpose of forcing people to hire certain protected minorities. They become the eyes and ears of the state in the office. But you could be overheard by one of these apparatchiks, you could be overheard criticizing the government, but they generally look the other way, it didn't get you fired. In other words, it took much more to get fired there than it does in the United States now to get canceled. So anyway, I say this before, but that's for another show. But I don't like this term to religion across the world. I think it's fake and gay.

And I speak to you saying that, you know me, I'm a religious fanatic. But even so, I think this term to political religion is fake and gay. And you know what I'm referring to. Not the ones among you who have genuine religiosity. I have an essay on this in the American Sun. You know me. I'm not a rationalist, materialist. I'm not a Reddit believer in the fake atheist cult of scientism, but I can't take seriously these public expressions of religiosity by entire societies today. I doubt the purity of their belief. I think they're just trying too hard, they're constipated. I don't have a problem when Orban or Putin puts it on as a political statement, but I don't believe there's genuine religious faith anywhere in the world now on any broad scale, and maybe there never was.

But it's the political misuse of religion, I think, where if on the other hand a nation wants to be guided by a true divine path and divine madness of a genuine kind, it has to find a prophet, somebody who receives true, vital visions, much like Joan of Arc, for example, or this. But today you just have wankers of the type of Erdogan or the false piety of the American preachers and the fake traditionalists who submit to the real religion of the age, to the cult of shit-libery, to the religion of egalitarianism. But I get off track, where was I? The Western powers, they did not want Russia to have Mediterranean empire, right? So they stopped them from taking Constantinople twice in 19th century. I cannot forgive them this. They just mess up Russia plans for their area.

It changed history for the worst, I think. So you know when Greece and the other part of Ottoman Empire, they want to secede, which in some ways the Ottomans were happy to let them go because the birth rate at that time in the European part of the empire was just getting too high, they were getting demographically swamped by the European parts, the Bulgarian, the Greek, the Macedonians. In the same way, the Turks are demographically swamped right now, by the way, by the Anatolians. That's why Turkey abandons Kemalism in favor of this crappy pseudo-Islamism. It's not quite Islamism yet, but the Anatolians are more religious, lower IQ, and brown. They're brown. So if you go to Istanbul, on the other hand, it's whiter than Greece, it's whiter than South Italy. It's a true story.

I'm sorry if I offend my Greekiloid friends, you know, I love you, cocorezzi is my favorite food. I love this cocorezzi. It's the same as ancient Greek food. So when these European parts of the Ottoman Empire are trying to succeed, so I think Greece is 1821 or 1823, and the Western powers have an interest in them, in Greece, these nations adopting Western-style liberal nationalism, or at least something like it, and the West have an interest in these nations in Greece not understanding themselves as the re-establishment of the Byzantine, which is really the Roman Empire, while the Russians on the other hand they very much want to support the Roman or the Romanist party in Greece, the party that wants Greece to secede and to say we are re-establishing the Roman Empire.

But it was the Hellenist nationalist and not the Romanist imperial party that won out in the end. And then the other maybe interesting, maybe more interesting reason why the Western powers opposed this, you can imagine how strange it would have been, the rebirth in the modern world of a pan-national Roman Empire with the Church at its head, and it was Roman law but also the Orthodox Church that kept the Empire together. And I think the Western powers driven by Enlightenment beliefs and rationalism, Whiggism, they just did not want the re-emergence in a modern setting of a pre-modern polity like the Roman Byzantine Empire, with its unity of church and Caesar. It didn't want a second Russia on the Mediterranean, instead they wanted secular liberal nations

that would be open to Western cultural, commercial, other kinds of influence, intellectual influence. And Russia in some way does have a good claim to be descended from Byzantium and to be the third Rome, and Byzantium also has good claim, not just good claim, it is in fact the second Rome. They have the right to make these claims, Western powers fret about it, they don't like it, but they have, look, I know right, the Byzantines, they spoke Greek, they dressed and they thought very differently from the Romans of Livy, of the early Republic, everyone knows this, but please try to be polite. People like to call the Byzantines Roman in the way they wanted to be called. Others are polite and call you an American.

Chances are you don't have much connection to the funding population of America, whether by culture or blood or political traditions, the political system that existed even before the current mess that exists now. But even before then there was not really the same political system in 1776. So just try to be polite. The continuity is a fiction but it's polite to flatter that fiction so please do the Byzantines that favor. They call themselves Romans so respect that. But as for the Russians and whether they have a right to claim continuity from Byzantium or Rome, I believe they do. But especially in the sense that they continued a very specific type of rule over a multinational, multi-religious state.

And they managed to do it very well over centuries and to keep this patchwork together because they possessed, like both the Romans and the Byzantines, they possessed the art of rule. It's in their culture and maybe in their blood. It requires a strange mix, both of brutality, of ruthlessness to minorities, cruelty even on one hand, and on the other hand tolerance, universalism, clemency, cosmopolitanism, although not the things understood by these words necessarily in America right now. It's a very strange mix of these two characters of brutality on one hand and tolerance and universalism on the other, and it's very un-modern, very hard to get your mind into concrete grasp of how these two things work together. America does not have an imperial culture.

It could have had, and maybe it will have in the future, but it doesn't have this. It doesn't have an empire now, and the American republic is over, okay? So that's all, I'll say for now on the current situation, but after this republic is now over, what comes next in America, it does not come the empire, not right away at least. I think America has confusion about what it is and what it wants to be. It's actually been confused for a long time. And I don't want to talk however depressing things like America on this show. This is history episode and I want to look a little at this strange question of empire and imperialism. What means? What is this art of rule? If we look at one or two unusual example, I'm not going to make a theoretical whatever definition. I like historical example.

I will be right back. The Byzantine Roman Empire be resurrected. I think if Putin and Russia had some more extra special imagination, they could try to refound this as a rival to NATO on a modern basis, of course. They could have a kind of confederation with a revolving crown, and it could be a very interesting revival, but by the way, I bet if you're a liberal listener and you heard me mention Russia in terms of tolerance and universalism and this, and maybe you make an unbelieving sigh, you say, maybe you moan, how can that be, how can Bep say this, even if you're not liberal, I don't know, but I remind you, you don't keep an empire that stretches over 11 time zones for centuries, you don't keep that together by stick alone,

and the Russians are actually much better than Americans are with assimilating minorities and with making ruled peoples loyal to Russianness, they're much better at ruling other people which Americans are just terrible at, at least for now. America tried this in the Philippines. You all want to attack Matt Forney. I like Matt Forney, but Matt Forney, his book, Do the Philippines or Something, where America tried to do the Philippines in the 19th century, didn't do it very well. It's an example of nation buildings that worked maybe 25 percent, really didn't work. And to do this, to rule other people, you need to be confident in who you are. You need to make that, who you are, something powerful, majestic. You need to make it attractive for peripheral minorities to aspire to.

And right now most people around the world know what an American is. It's Robert Redford, and many people found this attractive. But they know it's Robert Redford. It's not Obama. It's not Robert Reich. It's not Kamala. But for whatever reason, and I can tell you this, at the moment I'm an expat from America. I have not lived in America since, well, for a long time. I've been outside of the United States since 2018 and even before then I was outside half the time. But I can tell you as an ex-immigrant to America that the core American population have given up the desire to be the core, which means not that somebody else step in, but that there's nothing there. In other words, if you're an immigrant, there's nothing to assimilate to even if you want to in America right now.

The whole empty civil religions that people like Fukuyama try to resurrect, the empty platitudes of the entrepreneurship mindset, for example, that hacks like Paul Ryan that they're peddling this as the core of Americanness, which it's not. It's the core of any empire is a population, its ways, its customs, its mores, even the way they look. But these other things I mentioned, or the various other kinds of institutional worship, like worshiping the procedures of the constitution, or of the post office even, that various well-meaning conservatives they try to promote this, but not to speak of the left that just openly promotes ethnic fracture and American spiritual self-immolation. But none of this makes for a national identity, or I would say even for existence.

It's not an imperial thing, it's all fake and gay and anti-existence. Whereas on the other hand an empire, and there's a lot of silliness about empire being said on the right even today, for a strong empire, a real empire, you actually need a really confident national core. You need a special cause that is both confident and assertive on one hand, and also tolerant and welcoming on the other, but welcoming in a very special way, the way Romans were or the way Russians were. And just by saying that, you see how alien it sounds, right, because whatever way Russians were welcoming, America just isn't this. It's a nation that wants to delete itself with a self-deleting occupational class. This might have some incidental similarities to empire because it's people without a nation

on the take, and so they act somewhat internationally across borders or transnationally. But it's not really an empire, it's a parochial people on the take. And I'm referring to the so-called fake American elite only right now. And this is reflected in very many concrete ways that America differs from an empire. The whole rhetoric about the civil religion of rights and democracy as the foundation of national identity, I doubt that dorks like Fukuyama really believe that. I think it's a way for them really just to browbeat heritage Americans, who could really without the heritage Americans, without the Anglo-Americans, America is nothing. But I don't think Fukuyama means the whole replacement of that by this fake civil religion. I don't think it's meant in earnest.

It can't be unless he really is that stupid, it's possible. So America is in many ways an anti-empire and even before its present identity incoherence it wasn't very good actually at assimilating foreigners. It still has, look up Banfield, the Unheavenly City. He wrote this I think in the 70s, I'm not sure, but he talks about America still has a German underclass in the Midwest from the 19th century imported, they assimilated but not completely, and it has Irish, Italians and Jews that never assimilated, really, not really. And the Russian Jews are more Russian and more loyal to Russia than the American Jews are to America. I know that sounds strange. You wouldn't know that hearing American media put like this, but it's true.

Max Boot and Julia Ioffe, these are Russian Jew immigrants to United States, Ioffe, are you listening? You know, she got a job by sucking a lot of cocks, but people like that are not representative of the Jews in Russia, who they actually like Putler, and she has a very good relationship with Netanyahu, a lot of Russian Jews moved to Israel and they like Putler, so you know the Jews are a special case because, okay, they're especially fractious, you can say They don't like to assimilate anywhere, but it's like this in general, not just with them. America just is not very good at assimilating people, period. It never was. It should have stayed something like the Dutch Republic or I always fantasize what would

a Puritan free state be like, a Yankee Puritan state that preserves its, I don't want to say racially, but yes, preserves its racial national core. And of course merchant republics always have resident foreigners staying there, other foreign merchants, artists, scientists, and this, but they never let them join the coordination. People don't like to accept this, that commercial republics actually are closed states compared to an empire. So you know, if you're English and you successfully assimilate some Dutch or some Hanover Germans and this, that doesn't really count, that's your cousins, America was very good at that. But other minorities, not so much, I mean the blacks, let's not get 500 years or however

long they've been United States, I mean Americas, they've been for 400 years and they've never assimilated. Many classical political thinkers would look at the blacks in America now and would say this is a population in stasis, in revolt against the nation, and maybe they have cause to be, you can say that, but they are not American. So not by any classical standard, I understand culturally and jazz exists, but America was not very good at assimilating them at all, so many minorities in America are actually undergoing a process of de-assimilation now. And second and third generation immigrants are less likely than their parents and grandparents to think of themselves as really American. So America is not good at ruling foreign peoples either within its borders or outside.

In this it's very characteristic of a commercial republic, not an empire. Again it's confused about what it wants to be, but abroad you already know America America repeatedly fails at colonial ventures or ruling other peoples and it's not respected by its allies. You have to pay to keep bases in Spain and so on, and that's not empire. Now it's true that America does try to browbeat nations into adopting its terrible culture, such as gay parades and universal sodomy, and now the Black Lives Matter or this crap, but again it would be a misunderstanding of what imperialism was historically to call call it this name. The word imperialism and empire now is just another loaded vague, emotionally charged word like neoliberalism or like elites or geopolitics.

It's a word that angry people throw about to attack, and they think they're attacking their political opponent when they do it, so it's very hard to find non-moral, non-polymical understanding of what empire is. It's a moot point in any case because now America is about to enter an accelerated decomposition phase and it's going to be very embarrassing to watch. It's a fake country run by a hologram bidon and a woman, Gamal, who could not break one percent in the primaries but who the cartel, men of no nation, not imperialists but men of no nation, the cartel wanted to impose her on you. See Mulholland Drive, this is the girl at Central Line, this about Gamela, a very sinister movie Mulholland Drive, I will be right back.

This Yankee Puritan Free State, Yankee Puritan Republic, I think if it had existed separate from the rest of the United States, it would have been on its own one of the most remarkable polities in human history, you know, it's not my thing, you know, the kind of government and so forth that I admire the kinds of societies, it's very different of course from ancient Greek or Renaissance Italy, but the Puritan Yankee, the English Islander, has an IQ least equal to the Jew, probably higher actually if you look at the full range of IQ studies that have been done, and this state would have been an amazing achievement in science, In scholarship, they were obsessed with this, education, science, scholarship, with business,

and it would have been one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind, I think, in that direction of the commercial republic. And instead I think they became less, not more, by being part of the continental United States at large, because their intellectual and moral energies were dissipated in continental politics and other such things. So I guess it was better for them to get into wars against the lazy southerner, against the southern aristocracy. I guess that was a better use of their energies, you think, and to engage in moral foppery and then lording it over the south. I don't know. I don't think so. I think mankind missed an opportunity of some kind to have, let's say, an independent New England, but I guess it was never possible for it to remain on its own. Who knows?

Who knows? You know, I was reading about Byzantine Empire this week and of its needless cruelties and its stupid self-defeating intrigues in South Italy now in the 1000s that really, you know, they had this whole area and they lost it. They lost Sicily to the Arabs, first of all. I think in around the 800s they lost Sicily to the Arabs or even before and they lost all of South Italy including Sicily to the Normans later and it was needless, just needless cruelty, heavy taxation and arrogance toward the local population of Lombards and Italians that made these people just hate the Byzantines so much that they would try to revolt whenever they could to regain their independence plus also cruelty on an individual level.

I mean the intrigues toward each other of Byzantine politicians and generals and leading to one historic disaster after another. But I was reading this thinking how strange it is, the practice of empire, because on one hand you have this bullying of course of minorities and subject populations and on the other hand again there is this clemency and inclusivity, if I can use an office word, a universalism or in Byzantine language it was called the oikumenai, you know, it saw itself as having sovereignty in other words over the inhabited and settled part of the world, ecumenicalism, right, it speaks also to this cosmopolitanism, a desire to absorb others or to be clement to the subjects, the old Roman clemency, but it's a mix of these

two things that is very unusual for us to understand because there's nothing like it in the West today, and we have an anti-imperial culture and America is an anti-empire, and I will get in a moment or maybe another show to what this means, but I think this weird mix both of universalism, clemency on one hand and bullying cruelty on the other has to be contrasted to the non-imperial races who do not have this, they don't have the universalism or cosmopolitanism, and who are often cruel and exploitative only when they They interact with outsiders and for example, look up story of the Phoenicians. They were a commercial Republican people. The West has inherited the institution of the Senate from the Phoenicians and they were

not an imperial people, but their reputation for fraud, for double dealing, for piracy and rape. So, you know, a commercial sort of empire like that is not really an empire because you are not really ruling others, and the Venetians and Carthaginians were never really able to rule others. Having a trade outpost somewhere is not the same. And the Venetians from Venice are another example of a people who, while maybe they had the art of command in a sense, and they could have cultivated it if they wanted, but their sea empire, their seaborne maritime empire, was again just a series of outposts, And actually they not had much ability to rule outsiders, and when they owned an entire area like, for example, the Dalmatian Coast and the Adriatic, they were just famous for

exploitation, for deforestation and many such things. They were not good rulers, they were resented, they did not have this loyalty that imperial peoples often can command. But I mentioned the art of rule, and this is what imperialism is about. How you run successful, long-lasting dominion over peoples different from you, and it's hard to understand this in a non-moral, non-polymical way. Today if this comes up on the right, even on the right I mean, it's only to denounce it. And American imperialism, it's denounced by both the right and the left. I think America is not an empire at all, does not have an imperial culture, it doesn't have command in its blood. It could have, maybe, and maybe it will go in that direction in the future, but at the

moment it does not have the art of rule in any sector of its society, elite or not. It's not very good at ruling outsiders at all, very much again like commercial republic sea business societies I mentioned, like Carthage or Venice, although it doesn't understand itself as well as they did, and it confuses itself with something else. And you know that's the thing, the art of rule, that the Phoenician-Carthaginian Hannibal, he found when he invaded Italy and he thought he could win these impressive battles and that the Italians who were the subjects of the Romans, the other states that, the states and the peoples that the Romans conquered in the Italian peninsula, and the Romans often treated them cruelly. It would seem, from the outside at least, the Italian, the other subject peoples in

city-states were treated brutally at times by the Romans, conquered, at times abused. It would seem from the outside looking that it would seem that way. But Hannibal thought, okay, I will give them a chance to rally to me after I show them that I beat the Romans. And you see what? That didn't happen. They did not come to Hannibal. He did not manage to tear away Roman clients and allies away from Rome. Why? Unlike him and unlike the Americans now, and very much like the Byzantines, who again call themselves Romans still, Romans had this elusive thing, the art of rule. It's only rare peoples that have this ability. From the outside, it's hard to understand, from the outside, again you have left-leaning people who decry the oppressive nature of empires, who are the right, nationalist right.

They dislike the internationalism and this of empire, so both condemn it for different things mostly, and both blame the other side of being imperialist and this. So from outside there is little reason to it. It often looks like capricious cruelty, an act of sporadic stupidity, and why would they tax this area to death? Why would they engage in pointless palace intrigues that lose wars and provinces? But then you see peoples like the Romans or the Byzantines, despite mistakes like I mentioned in their, for example, their treatment of South Italy, I'll get to it in a moment. But these empires last a thousand years, and in the case of the Byzantines, it's in an almost impossible strategic position, with never-ending dangers on all sides.

And this should really be considered a miracle that they lasted it all, let alone a thousand years with giant indefensible borders, with frightful enemies. I say this on previous shows. It's for example impossible really to defeat a steppe enemy, one of those horse peoples from the steppe. Because if you defeat them, the next one will come along and finish you off. So with Persians, and it had Persians in the east and a rising Arabic Islam later, and then Normans, Franks and Venetians in the west, so extremely powerful enemies, and yet they lasted despite all this. And despite frequent, it would seem to an outsider at least, but frequent big political mistakes – again, seemingly senseless cruelty that provokes, revolts, stupid intrigues.

And I mentioned here another set of spectacular mistakes. So you see in 1040 AD, the Byzantines are invading Sicily. So they lost Sicily before and they have a campaign to retake Sicily back from the Arabs. And it was going to be the Byzantines, not the Normans, who did this. They had Norman mercenaries at this time, but the Byzantines of course had their own very good soldiers, plus Italians and Lombards recruited from Apulia and Calabria. This is the bottom of the boot, the boot of the Italian peninsula. So they invade Sicily and they have one big success after another. This is 1040 AD, just to show you the kind of typical mistake empire like the Byzantine makes seemingly stupid. You see this, you ask, how do these people last a thousand years?

So they invade Sicily and they have one big campaign success after another. They take back the island almost and they're led by this giant man, this general called Maniakes. He looked like, think, Valoev, the boxer, this kind of monstrous, possibly with acromegaly, Some type of aboriginal, again, chromagnon holdover, 6'7", ruthless, cannibal type, a violent man. He would end his life later in a violent death. He was going to try later, after the episode I'm telling you now, later he would try to take over Constantinople and he died in trying to take over the empire later. But he's a genius, a military genius, and there are still places in Sicily named after him, Maniache and so forth, near Palermo I think, and he's a maniac, right?

He invades and they get to Syracuse, for example, on the southeast coast of Sicily, the Greeks do the Byzantines, and they're besieging it, and the Arabs are about to ambush them from the mountains, but again this is super competent, general, and the Byzantines, they had the best intelligence, Edward Glutwack talks this, like the Russians today actually, I don't mean just IQ, but on a societal level, the best intelligence-gathering culture. It permeated all their institutions, their diplomatic corps, their military, everything. It was not, in other words, just one building with soccer mounds and lactation rooms playing James Bond. It was the real thing. And in this case, it pays off in ways big and small.

In this case, he knew the Arabs were coming, so he attacks them first in the mountains, he routs them, he saves the day, and the Greeks take Syracuse back and they're about to regain Sicily. But in typical Byzantine fashion, a huge mistake happens for entirely personal and palace politics entry. Maniakes gets recalled to Constantinople, it's so strange, you know, this house Athenians lost Syracuse also. Remember they sent Alcibiades and then they recalled him over you could say personal political matters and his replacement was not so good and lost the war for them. And the same thing happened here, Maniakes was a violent man and he physically manhandles the Greek admiral on the expedition, Stephen I think his name is, but the Greek admiral

is the brother-in-law I think of the emperor or of his wife. So Maniakes, well that didn't make any sense what I just said, but you understand he's the brother-in-law of the emperor. So Maniakes gets recalled to Constantinople and he gets thrown in jail. And it's always this, family squabbles, fight over court advantage. This always trumps national interest when you look in almost any state. Maybe you see some of this now, but meanwhile the other disaster happened. The Norman mercenaries, the best fighters that the Byzantines had, they feel slighted because they didn't get the loot that they hoped for from Syracuse or they did not in fact get enough pay for the expedition as a whole. It took two years for them to get to Syracuse. So they decide just to leave with their Lombard associate.

One guy named Arduin is a leader who is a go-between the Normans and the Byzantines. His name is Arduin, a very capable Lombard, who Maniakes mistreated this Arduin also by having him stripped and whipped and beaten because he demanded more loot for the Normans. So the Greeks, the Byzantines, they lose their general, very capable. He gets replaced with a nobody. They lose their general because again he offends some relative of imperial house. Then they lose their most important fighters. They lose Arduin, who's another important leader that they had a kind of diplomat and so forth. And so the entire Byzantine campaign to retake Sicily from the Arabs collapses from this point on, which is why the Normans were later able to come in some decade later and take

it for themselves, which I will discuss on future show, the Norman kingdom in Sicily, very, very flashy period human history. But I mean, history would have been very different if it weren't for these mistakes, very small mistake with big consequences and even more in between, in the years between the Byzantine loss in Sicily and the Norman takeover of Sicily. So right after the failure of this expedition in the 1040s to retake Sicily, you know what happens. Not only does the Byzantines fail to regain the island, they also lose all of south Italy. They get permanently exiled from Italy, in other words. They would never come again. Byzantines ruled parts of Italy throughout almost the history of the empire, but after this 1040, 1050, they get permanently thrown out of Italy.

They had kept on to South Italy, but they lose it as an uprising by Lombards against their rule. And it is this same Arduin, who I mentioned just now, who was mistreated by Maniakes publicly, and Arduin ends up playing a crucial role in how the Byzantines lost Italy. There is no reason to go into all the details here, but what happens is he gets appointed to a high position by the subsequent Byzantine governor and he betrays him in favor of a Lombard uprising. So I see such things and with series of spectacular and stupid mistakes like this and with petty cruelties against the rural populations and you end up again wondering how it is this empire lasted for so long and the Byzantine Empire has, less so now, but it had before

a very bad reputation in the West, partly because of the Gibbon treatment and in general I think because of the writers of the enlightenment of the 19th century Whiggish tradition of history they hated the idea of Byzantium, they did not like the idea of a Christian Rome continuing for a thousand years, it offended them, they wanted rather the idea of an ancient republic in Rome, and they painted Byzantium as an obscurantist backwater. But the empire of what the Vikings called Miklagard, of the great city, of the second Rome Constantinople, it was not backwater, it was the center of civilization of its time, straddling Europe-Asia, a center of very fluid and ever-changing choke points with enemies on all sides, and you do not keep empire in such locations for a thousand years by being

merely cruel or obscurantist and so on. So whatever way Byzantium used to be painted in Enlightenment Uigh-West cannot be correct, but their behavior is nevertheless odd from modern point of view. How they managed to do it, it puzzled me to think about what this is. art of rule, and I will be right back to talk this a little bit more. I need to take coffee break. I'll be right back. Yes, welcome back from commercial break. So you look at the Byzantine management of South Italy and you see actually a Lombard on Italian, I just mentioned this Arduin, but many times a Lombard or a local Italian could often rise to a high position in the administration of this province. It's called the Catapanata, or the Capitanata in later Italian, which is what this southern

part of the boot was called, the province of the Byzantine Empire. Again, think from about the late 800s where they take southern Italy to about 1040, 1050 or so and they get kicked out. And it's interesting, there's Greek influence in this area to this day in words and so forth, But of course it was area settled by the ancient Greeks, but I think the Greek influence in language and maybe even you could say looks and this, I think it comes from this Byzantine period, not from ancient Greek settlement, but who knows. But for example, the big mafia of the Calabria region is called the Ndragheta, it's enormous powerful mafia type ring, tens of billions of dollars worth, it accounts for a big percentage of Italy's black and grey market, which, by the way, when you add to Italy white market,

Italy's much bigger economies than it seems. So, andragetta, the name comes from Greek, ancient Greek, andragatia. The verb form is andragatigestai, it comes from andragatos, meaning, you know, Chad, someone who's noble, manly, warrior-man, aner agathos, like a manly man who's good, good meaning brave warrior, and this verb form is still used in Calabrese dialect, ndragitari, which means, again, to be a chad, to want, to be brave. But I think this comes from this period of Byzantine rule from right before 1000 to 1050 the idea when the Byzantines are finally kicked out of there for good after owning it off and on, well, since the foundation really of the empire, but they regain it in the 800s and so I don't think it comes from ancient Greece.

But in any case, under the Byzantines they had this imperial universalism where they recruited talented locals, so you were not actually just pressed beyond, you could rise in the Byzantine bureaucracy as a Lombard or Italian, and of course in the empire itself Many of the actual emperors were not Greek, they were Armenian and many other things and I think I said before, if you went to Byzantine court and you referred to the emperor as a Greek or the ruler of the Greeks as the king of the Greeks, they would forthwith throw you in the dungeon because by doing so you would have insulted their claim to universal rule, their Romanity in other words. And this persisted even very late when it was a small rump state.

But I was trying, as I tell you, to understand this oddity, because from modern view it's hard to get your mind how they are both on one hand inclusive in this way, and on the other hand cruel and oppressive and brutal, and empires like this last a thousand years seem sometimes to be so stupid and heavy-handed. In this case they caused local revolt, why? They were heavily taxing, first of all, Byzantines always heavily tax, and then they were press ganging the Italians and the Lombards into, you know, they were recruiting them into the military for the campaign to retake Sicily, and the Lombards did not want to get involved in that. So this is what caused the uprising as soon as the Lombards had a chance they did it.

But even before this uprising, there were many cruel and stupid mistakes, again, recalling their best general, Maniakes, or mistreating frivolously somebody very capable, like one of their mercenary leaders like Ardoin, who then they later promoted to a captaincy of great importance, so he was able to betray them, which he did both in return for their mistreatment of him and also because they were oppressing his race of Lombards and he saw an opportunity to free them. And it's just strange mistakes that cost them their presence in Italy altogether. Or when you look further back, I say this episode, sometime early episode, I tell you this anecdote, but forgive if I repeat, but it's because they lost Italy twice in the same way.

You might wonder why the Lombards were in Italy in the first place. The Lombards are from North Germany originally. Tacitus in his Germania mentions them as a people who were always surrounded by other tribes and so they were especially valiant in fighting. They had to be, but how they end up in South Italy? They came from North Germany. But after the Romans or the Byzantines, call them what you will, they took Italy back from the Goths in the 500s under Justinian, and there was a series of very difficult wars under great generals, under Belisarius and then Narcis. And this Narcis was an Armenian eunuch, but very capable general, despite being eunuch. And after many victories in his old age, he was terribly mistreated against this kind

of personal thing with momentous consequences for history of an empire, but he was terribly mistreated by the empress, Sophia, and see this is what I mean throughout Byzantine history, just gratuitous stupidity, caprice, cruelty, you wonder how they end up ruling an unruly and crucial part of the world for a millennium, okay, so needlessly the empress offends him A narcissist in revenge invites the Lombards, formerly Roman or Byzantine allies, at that time they were residing in the Pannonian plain around current day Hungary, and he invites them to invade Italy. He sends them a message, envoys with bounty of fruits and wheats and such from the land saying here is rich land, come take it. So the Byzantines, having retaken Italy after so many efforts, they end up losing it again

because of one empress's pointless insult, she dishonoured this capable leader for no reason. So this same empire that successfully keeps together a motley of peoples and of ethnic groups ends up veering to the other side with such stupid mistakes. So they lost Italy twice in the same way, if you think about it, because of this mix of cruelty and dump court intrigue and personal vanity. And if you think how they and the Romans and the Russians and other imperial peoples, they mix these qualities with, again, a kind of universalism and tolerance and what a strange mix that is. I think the answer is that despite these constant setbacks, there is one so-called anti-fragile thing and it's something, an imperial culture, which it makes up for incidental and even frequent mistakes like this.

kinds of setbacks that Byzantines could continually mess themselves up, but they could recover again and again and preserve their empire for a millennium. It couldn't have just been blood, because it was a patchwork of peoples, but there was a truly some kind of imperial mission, an imperial culture that guaranteed they would continue despite setbacks like these. And you contrast what I just said to how quickly Carthage fell when it was attacked, or how How quickly the Aztecs collapsed, right? When Hernan Cortes, you compare Hernan Cortes, the conquistadores by the way, they also call themselves Romans sometimes, but you compare Hernan Cortes to Hannibal. Hannibal came with many men with powerful weapons, you know, famous elephants, but the Carthaginians didn't just have elephants.

They had very skilled and very well equipped mercenaries from Iberia and elsewhere, and He had great victories, historic wins that are still studied, and yet the Roman allies did not abandon them for him, whereas the reason the Aztecs fell so fast is because they were so hated and they possessed so little of the true art of rule that their subjects and allies abandoned them at the first chance they could. Even for a racial outsider, even for such a small force of a few hundred men, Cortes could have never done it just on his own without the Aztecs' allies, you know, his primitive guns and his very high quality Toledo steel and military knowledge and discipline notwithstanding, he needed these allies and they abandoned the Aztecs for these invading Romans. Why?

Why they do this but Roman allies don't abandon them despite much stronger enemy in Hannibal and it has to do with this strange thing, the art of rule. I don't know what it is, I'm not going to pretend, but it's some ability to spontaneously attract people to your command, to have them prefer you to others. I'm sure you can list of qualities that say it would make, for example, South Italian city like Naples attach itself to Byzantium, the trade relationships, so in other words the economic advantage, the prestige of being associated with Rome, the protections that could occasionally get from Byzantium, but that's not enough because others can often try to offer those same things and they're not always accepted.

Nietzsche talks about these masculine peoples who risklessly seek other nations to put their seed into them, and he counts among them the Romans, the Jews, and he hopes also the Germans, as opposed to the feminine peoples like the Greeks or the French, who they rather want to stay to themselves but to perfect something. They don't seek out other peoples with this restlessness, and ultimately it's the latter, the feminine peoples that are the more impressive because of the high cultural and philosophical production, but what this means to say is there's some kind of magnetism between nations that makes empire work for some and not for others. I think there's this kind of pre-rational, some swagger of power that makes the Romans,

the Byzantines, the Russians, it makes other nations sure, often afraid, but also at times they're willing to attach themselves to these powers I mentioned. Whereas a merchant republic, it does not really have this, it just has money, but it doesn't have the way, you know, a merchant republic is always somehow seen as an imposter when it tries to rule, you know, women do not like the merchant and the shopkeeper, they cheat on him with the warrior. So America does not have this art of rule, although maybe it could one day, I don't know. But not those who rule it now, they do not have this art. Maybe others who come later who will, like I say, who will have this way of ease, who will know how to mix carrot and stick in the right way and make it attractive for foreigners to join.

And as you see now, the American republic is over. So now with Trump was the last chance, and with end of that, American first republic is over. What comes next is hard to say, and it's certainly not American empire. Maybe that's for the future, but in short term it's something dark and dysfunctional, but not empire, which for me, by the way, empire is possibly a good thing. And that's the other question which I talk about another time, but what is value of empire? It could be good or bad. I don't know that it's good in itself, but it's possible. My friend, Europe Esperancy, good poster, Danish, he rightly says the height of Greece isn't its imperial period under Alexander and his successors when they ruled the world,

but it's the non-imperial republic, ancient Greek city-state, where the life of virtue and excellence is perfected. What is the purpose of a state? Is it not to create impressive human specimens? And that is what the city-state does. the Empire not as much. The later development of Empire, however impressive it may be from the outside, is in fact a period of decline for these societies, even for Rome. You could say Rome fulfilled its mission of breeding high virtue in its early republican phase, but it spent itself in the monstrosity, the magnificent monstrosity of later world conquest. And maybe it is the destiny of these engines of virtue to waste themselves in imperial expansion later, but this wastefulness, and I mean that in the best sense, this wastefulness

of a people in the pursuit of empire may be inevitable. It may be inborn in them as a people to do this, the same way that the baobab or certain strange mangrove swamp trees and vines, they just spread in jungle. And you can say, from some view, it's not as beautiful as an orchid, some gigantic powerful jungle vine, but it's who they are, and it's in their nature to expand this way. You cannot begrudge them who they are. So maybe it's an inborn destiny and character of some peoples to waste themselves in an empire in this magnificent way. But you know, I believe what this means is you have to know who you are. So this is a roundabout way of saying that America is still maybe a young nation, is having rough adolescence now maybe, it does not know who it is.

It was settled on a continental scale, but the continent was thinly inhabited, so Americans never really had to rule over foreign peoples. It was, like I say, it was a commercial nation, similar to the Dutch, the Venetians and so on, pursuing business, money, but in its manifest destiny idea to reach the other side of the continent, and in its attempt to free itself from England, from Europe even, and to try to replay Rome in its own way, it introduced also an imperial streak or imperial pretense, but there was never an imperial actual culture or education or training to support this. So by now, when the first American regime is really over, the first American republic is over, the nation may not be necessarily over, but the first American republic is over.

And I hope that after looking beyond the time of troubles that will come for the next, let's say five, ten years, maybe a bit longer, but this presents nevertheless an opportunity for America to redefine its mission, to embrace actually what it is. Sorry to sound like hippie, I'm sorry to sound like hippie, but to find itself. It could be a Puritan merchant republic of that type, or it could be an empire, and right now it does neither very well, and is entering a stage of turmoil and decomposition maybe, But in future, if wiser and stronger men take the lead, and they have to be men, and in particular if they know what they want and who they are, if they have the way and the blood and the manner, they may purify America's mission and they may decide on one course or another.

And I myself, I would hope for a barren-led Hesperides, a continental empire spanning both North and South America, it would be a grand thing. I don't think, you know, America will ever do the Greek or French thing well. The philosophy or culture path is not America's way to be a magnificent Atlantis. It could be this one day, there are people in it even now of this character who can come to embody the nation and purify its character and who can have this art of rule in them. I think I prefer to look to this for future, a possible grand future for America beyond the present time of midgets and of inevitable bloody turmoil in the short run unfortunately, but after that maybe America can be reborn to be the grand Atlantis it was destined to be, the ruler of two great oceans.

Very well, until next time, BAP out!