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The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero

Excellent, readable short history of the battle of Adrianople, setting it in context of the final decades of the Western Roman Empire. Worth reading in particular for valuable historical context for the various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies the USA has embraced over the past few generations.

At a certain point in Rome's historical arc, its leaders discovered that it could use barbarians as low cost labor and low cost military manpower. Further, both immigration and a type of what we might call "loose fiscal policy" could be powerful tools Roman elites could use to retain power and maintain the status quo that so enriched them at the expense of the peasantry.

As the saying goes, history never repeats, but it sure rhymes. And it is incredibly disturbing to see policy decisions in 300-400 AD Rome--right before its collapse--that "rhyme" so well with various fiscal, monetary and immigration policies in place here and now in the USA. Striking. 

Finally, one thing that this book drives home is how overconfident every civilization is in its ability to endure. Yet history has never shown us a mutli-ethnic or multicultural empire that endured beyond a few centuries--most barely lasted a few decades. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, The former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the Ottoman Empire, even 1930s-1940s Japan and its "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" can all join the late Roman empire as short-lived, failed experiments in massive, elite-enforced multiculturalism. 

Roman elites in the late stages of the empire had to use more and more immigration to sustain their labor markets and their military, and they placed extreme confidence that because "the Roman Empire already was a mutli-ethnic crucible of languages, races and religions, and it was perfectly capable of absorbing massive immigration without becoming destabilized." Except that it wasn't perfectly capable, in fact it was not capable at all, and the Roman Empire quickly collapsed, triggered by the military and diplomatic disaster at Adrianople.

So where, on a timeline of decline and fall, might the United States "empire" be?

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