“James LaFond, in reading Gibbon on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, it is apparent that the ancients believed that power was regarded as this force, this source of rule among men, a thing that is fed and grows and has a life of its own—but then these Emperors all seemed to rule at the consent of the army. The army had the real power and the emperor who did not serve that power would be replaced. Doesn’t that argue that the military is the real power today, that whoever is controlling the military will control society?”

We are right to speak of Rome.

We are also well-advised to adjust definitions according to the tech level.

Basic tech levels are:

-Stone [Summer and Egypt, Aztec and Inca]

-Bronze [Аrуаn conquest]

-Iron [Hellas and Rome]

-Steel & stirrup [High Middle Ages—crusades]

-Gunpowder [early modernity—reformation]

The horse power age ends and the industrial ages begins

-Steam power [Plantation America]

-Petrol power [Industrial America]

-Atomic power [Post WWII]

The industrial age wanes and the information age dawns with an overlapping suite of social power tools:

gunpowder,

steam [largely replaced by hydroelectric power but still vested in power points pushing energy to use points],

petrol

and atomic,

all powers falling under information and exchange systems of control, so that these are now tools and not powers in and of themselves, the power being vested “off stage.” [I do not know how the petrol dollar and fiat currency interact, but the former seems to be used as a tool by the latter.]

What was the Roman Military Machine to Rome?

-It built the roads and aqua-system infrastructure and extinguished piracy, facilitating unheard of levels of economic exchange, cultural exchange and disease exchange, which built the economy and facilitated its eventual crash

-the legions sallied forth from the homeland and slew nations and enslaved the indigines and shipped them back to Rome as slaves. The modern version of these slaves is petrol. Since WWII the America legions have primarily guarded access to petrol.

Rome would implode inevitably as soon as it could no longer conquer, or at that point where the density of conquered populations did not net a gain in slave labor, as Rome was dependent on enslaved conquered labor.

So when one thinks of the Roman legions in Modern terms, one must include most private corporations, the entire construction industry, from highway surveying to bridge-making, ironworking and the Civil Corp of Engineers and utility companies.

Under our fiat money system, internationally privatized yet nationally guaranteed by a captive tax-herd [2008 banker bailout] one can, at a glance, only trace true power to the wall or curtain of international high finance.

Are the bankers the puppet masters, are they the wall of power, wielding the legions of politicians and mercenary soldiers for their own ends?

Or, are these international banks merely a curtain, behind which the true manipulative power resides?

And, if the banks are just fronts for deeper and more evil interests and agendas, are those Oz-like intelligences behind them, so dependent upon their levers of power that if these levers were broken, they would fall away like the cloak of a wraith of the Lie touched by the naked hand of Truth?

These are things that I cannot know, will not know, and will not seek to know.

For I am an ork in a dark kingdom, born under a cloud and fated to die in its suffocating fog.

Why should I care if I am ruled by this dark lord or that dark lord, by this coven of witches or that cabal of warlocks?

I am still just an ork wondering absently and uselessly at the vile forces that have brought my suffering into existence and will bring it wheezing to its sorry end.