X-Message-Number: 18766
From: "Stephen Bogner" <>
Subject: Re:Pax Romana and Pax Americana
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2002 12:22:50 -0700

George Smith writes:

"Rome maintained a civilized world for a thousand years called the "Pax
Romana" (The Roman Peace) through the ruthless use of superior force.  It
was certainly not a time of peace pre se, but it was unquestionably a period
of civilization.  The scornful barbarians who later stood upon the ruins of
the Roman Empire could not even read the words carved in marble under their
feet."


A wise general once told a group of us that the best time to defeat your
enemy is when he is weak and when you are strong - and that it is only a
fool who will put off an inevitable battle until the enemy has built up
enough strength to make it a "fair fight".

The trick, of course is knowing ahead of time which battles are going to be
"inevitable".

In terms of military preparedness and capacity, he also said that the
minimum acceptable posture is enough force to deter the rational aggressor,
and to utterly destroy the irrational aggressor. He also pointed out that
the highest form of the military art is to win your battles by convincing
your enemy to abandon the field before you even have to fire a shot.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that anyone will argue that the enemy in the
current war is acting out of rational aggression.  Indeed, who could argue
that their aggression against us is not the primal, irrational martyrdom of
a hopeless cause - a suicidal impulse emerging out of a doomed world view
that finally realizes, at a gut level - that it is dying from the poisons in
its own memetic excrement.  Lost as he is in a self-referential cultural
pathology, the only apparent path to salvation for our enemy is through the
cleansing vindication of Armageddon.  Who can doubt the inevitablity with
which our enemy, already lost and damned, would turn nuclear fires against
the world, should he ever have the opportunity to do so.

At any cost, short of our own destruction, our enemy must never have that
opportunity.  Irrational and suicidal, he cannot be deterred.  He can only
be destroyed - as he must be, root and branch.  If it ultimately turns out
that we can only secure our civilization at the point of a gun (and has it
ever really been possible that it could be otherwise?), and that we
ultimately find ourselves standing watch over a radioactive desert where our
enemy once found succor - where only his ashes now blow in the wind - so be
it.

Steve.

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