By William Rapier

Each day it is not too difficult to find hundreds of articles from countries across the world supporting the anti-immigration case. One could waste a lifetime collecting these and shouting to the masses: look out! Moo, don’t disturb my grass eating.

Another critical approach is the historical one, of looking at past societies which were brought down by immigration. A case for the fall of Rome being based upon out-of-control immigration was made by Peter Heather, The Fall of The Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, (Pan Books, 2006). The punch line is that Rome did not fall from all those things which conservatives like to think it fell from, such as too much tax, but because the state had been weakened by out-of-control immigration, and finished off by the barbarians.

Although Christians like to point out that Christianity could not, contrary to Gibbon, have been a force weakening the Roman Empire, because the Eastern Roman Empire did not collapse then, the Heather thesis allows it all to be brought together, since the East Roman Empire did not have the barbarian invasion via immigration, which pushed Western Rome over the abyss. As I see it, Gibbon was right about Christianity weakening Rome’s martial spirit, but Heather is right about how Rome ultimately fell.

Here are some extracts from a review of Heather, “How Immigration Destroyed Rome” which explain this:

“The fall of the Roman Empire in the West, has been the ground for much historical speculation. How could this powerful, long-lasting empire finally be laid so low? How could it succumb, at long last, to a barbarian usurper at the head of an Italian army composed largely of other barbarians? The most prominent of all the historians of Rome, Edward Gibbon, in his magisterial treatise entitled The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, concluded that Christianity was principally responsible. This new religion, Gibbon argued, caused Roman leaders to drop out of the public eye in favor of contemplative religious pursuits, caused the empire to concern itself too much with the distractions of doctrinal disputes, and, most telling, undermined the martial spirit of the Romans with a turn-the-other-cheek mentality.

After Gibbon, others, for a time, pointed to barbarians as a contributing factor. More recently, historians have pointed to economic factors, arguing that aggressive taxation destroyed the empire's economy and finally the empire itself. But what really happened? The answer, according to Oxford historian Peter Heather, is that unchecked immigration and invasion led to the gradual dismantling of the empire. Heather tells the story of this massive and crippling wave of hostile immigration in his new book, The Fall of the Roman Empire. For modern Americans grappling with issues of empire abroad and facing the beginning elements of unchecked immigration themselves, the book is fascinating, if somewhat disquieting, reading.

The Power of the Empire

In the late fourth century, the power of the Roman Empire, whether in the East or West, was unchallenged. As a result of the external peace, internally the citizens of the state were able to carry on their daily lives in comparative peace and quiet. Some historians have argued, though, that this was actually a time when agriculture in important areas of the empire, especially in Italy, was failing. To make this claim they point to the fact that tremendous amounts of agricultural produce were brought to Rome from the empire's North African provinces, rather than grown locally. Moreover, it is historical orthodoxy to hold that the later empire overtaxed its land-owning class, causing a flight from the land that resulted in the infamous Agri Deserti, the phenomenon of the "deserted lands."

This phenomenon no doubt did occur in some areas. Ancient texts make reference to it, and historians were quick, too quick it seems, to assume this applied to the empire as a whole. Heather cites archaeological evidence to the contrary. Some areas, he points out, experienced rapid and intense agricultural and rural growth. In Roman North Africa, Greece, the Near East and elsewhere, agriculture flourished. In these areas, Heather writes, "the fourth and fifth centuries have emerged as a period of maximum rural development—not minimum, as the orthodoxy would have led us to expect."

The economy of the Roman Empire was grounded in agriculture; the power of the state, militarily, reflected this economy. If the agricultural sector was strong, the state's coffers would be full, and the military, largely the only full-scale service provided by the Roman State, would be correspondingly strong. In fact, the military of the Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, just when it was supposedly on the decline according to orthodox historical interpretation, was in reality near its zenith. Heather points out that at the beginning of the fourth century, at the end of the reign of the Emperor Diocletian, the Romans could field an army of at least 300,000 men. Moreover, this was a well-trained army that could fight a two-front war and it did so not long after, against the Goths in the West and the Persians in the East.

Invasion

Clearly, Gibbon's thesis that Christianity caused the empire to become soft militarily is not true. Moreover, the empire had the economic wherewithal to support its massive military establishment, a fact that destroys the hypothesis that the late empire faced an agricultural shortage. So, what brought down this colossus?

The beginning of the end came with an amnesty for a horde of Gothic immigrants. Faced with pressure from marauding Huns in the East, powerful tribes of Germanic Goths fell back to the Carpathian Mountains to mount a defense. The effort failed and, in 375-376 A.D., under pressure from Hun attacks, two large tribes of Goths moved further west, to the banks of the Danube River where they sought asylum and safety inside the Roman Empire. In a sense, their timing was perfect. The Romans were deeply embroiled in the East with a resurgent Persian empire. The Balkans were, therefore, a bit short on manpower. Under the circumstances, the Emperor Valens was forced to admit the Gothic horde. All went well until food supplies ran short and tempers flared. There was an attack on the emperor at a banquet and soon there was war, which raged for six years.

From the time of this conflict, known as the Gothic War, until the fall of the Roman Empire, continuous pressure from the Huns would force other barbarians to move en masse across the Western Empire. Throughout the book, Heather examines the empire's continuing attempts to repel or at least contain the onslaught. More often than not, they were successful in battle, but each success (and sometimes spectacular failure) sapped the strength of the giant. Soon Gaul was overrun, and Spain, too.

The real blow came when Goths and Vandals crossed into North Africa and took over the Roman provinces there. Loss of these provinces would mean loss of the West, and the combined forces of all the empire were sent to recover the area. Just before making landfall near Carthage, the Roman fleet was trapped and destroyed by a Vandal fleet.

Lessons of the Fall. There are two major lessons to be learned from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and these are made apparent in Heather's book. First and foremost is the danger of uncontrolled hostile immigration. That the empire could absorb large groups of immigrants is beyond doubt. It could and did do so over several centuries. But even the Roman Empire, with its vast territory and unprecedented wealth, had a limit to the number of people it could absorb and Romanize.

Eventually, the immigrants grew more powerful than the existing Roman authority and, maintaining to some degree their independence of spirit and character, were unwilling to relinquish their own culture and adopt the Roman. Vast blocs of once-Roman territory eventually became foreign and even the pre-existing Roman population, eventually outnumbered, had to make peace with the newcomers.”

Another article, , gives more details about the clear dangers from taking in refugees:

“The defeat of Adrianople didn’t happen because of Valens’s stubborn thirst for power or because he grossly underestimated his adversary’s belligerence. What was arguably the most important defeat in the history of the Roman empire had roots in something else: a refugee crisis.

Two years earlier the Goths had descended toward Roman territory looking for shelter. The mismanagement of Goth refugees started a chain of events that led to the collapse of one of the biggest political and military powers humankind has ever known.

It’s a story shockingly similar to what’s happening in Europe right now—and it should serve as a cautionary tale.

According to historian Ammianus Marcellinus, in 376, the Goths were forced to leave their territories, in what’s now Eastern Europe, pushed south by the Huns, in Marcellinus’ words, “a race savage beyond all parallel.” The Huns, Marcellinus writes, “descended like a whirlwind from the lofty mountains, as if they had risen from some secret recess of the earth, and were ravaging and destroying everything which came in their way.”

It resulted in terrifying bloodshed, and many of the Goths—like many Syrians and others displaced by war—decided to flee.

They decided that settling in Thrace, right across the Danube river, was the best solution; the land was fertile, and the river would provide defense to keep the Huns at bay.”

The problem was the that population flow was massive and swamping:

“It was an unexpected, unprecedented flow (some estimates say up to 200,000 people). Officials in charge of managing the Goths tried to “to calculate their numbers,” but determined it was hopeless.

Traditionally, the Roman attitude toward “barbarians,” though autocratic, had been pretty longsighted. Populations were often sent where the empire needed them the most, with little regard to where they wished to stay; however, there was a strong push toward assimilation that eventually turned foreigners into citizens. Descendants of immigrants would routinely be seen in the high ranks of the military or the administration. The recipe that kept the empire safe from attack from other populations was simple: allow them into the empire and make them Roman.

But things eventually changed. The military officials who were in charge of provisions for the Goths—an ancient version of the support offered to migrants arriving in Greece or Italy—were corrupt and profited off of what was meant for the refugees. The starving Goths were forced to buy dog meat from the Romans.

Marcellinus has no doubt: “their treacherous covetousness was the cause of all our [the Romans’] disasters.”

The trust between the abused Goths and the Romans was broken several times before Adrianople, and the Goths went from wanting to become Roman to wanting to destroy Rome.

Less than two years later, Marcellinus writes, “with rage flashing in their eyes, the barbarians pursued our men.” And they took down the empire.”

See further:

One would like to hope that Western man could learn something from the past. My guess is that history will continue to repeat itself. Probably when Whites no longer exist, this Ragnarok cycle will come to an end.

Cultural critic like Keven MacDonald, “What Makes Western Culture Unique,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 2, 2002, believes that the West is unique because of various factors, such as socially imposed monogamy, although he does mention the de-emphasis on kinship networks, a lack of ethnocentrism and individualism. Northwestern Europeans come to be in a cold climate that did not support either polygamy or large groups, as was seen in the Middle Old-World culture. Hunting in such environments required high intelligence, along with physical prowess, as running ability alone would not have been sufficient to deal with the dangerous animals of the hunt. It is likely that individualism, and a lack of a collectivist tribal mindset arose in such environments and had survival value. But, transferred to a modern context, standing against groups who evolved with cohesive group strategies, individualistic Northwestern Europeans are just toast. Individualistic humanism, as seen in liberalism, grips the minds of Nordics like a vice. It has influenced their choice in philosophies, religions and ideologies, such as the acceptance of the universalistic Christianity, and is now a force that is destroying them, after deracinating them, and allowing the new barbarians to not only enter the city gates, but rule, taking their women and riches. What was once an evolutionary adaptation in one environment is now a pathology, a White pathology, which has become institutionalized:

It may well be that Nordics as a whole can do little against this in the end, and the rest of world history will be the history of China. Not even a mention of the achievements of Europeans may exist in 1,000 years’ time, or even 1000 years. After all, Whites are slowly being worked out of the scheme of things even now.

What is more likely is that even the much more tribal Chinese will be infected by the modernity virus, as a great people like the Japanese now have been, and may follow us into racial oblivion:

White Natters like to argue that it is primarily Whites who are being destroyed culturally and racially, but a more objective assessment would see ALL of the advanced parts of civilization now under a profound attack by the vast network of undermen:

We are facing, not only the great train crash of the West, but of civilization itself. The future will be drinking blood from skulls, before the final lights out on life.

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