I think we can all agree the spirit of the Empire has changed or shared hands many times throughout history. We can all agree a fundamental root of Western imperialism is the Roman Empire. We can also point to the United States as the clear holder of the title today, and more recently to the British, French, Spanish, and the like. The Nazi Empire was Germany’s attempt to seize the reins.
However, it is hard for me to pinpoint the missing link between the Romans and the developed Christendom/ renaissance/ colonial/ industrial Western powers. Could one be the Vikings?
I am not an expert on the Vikings, but at a glance, it seems to check out. They are romanticized by white culture despite being a violent society–I understand they also foraged and farmed and made art, but they were famous for raiding, raping, murdering, pillaging, burning, and enslaving. There is reasons the Nazis popularized and the middle class whites of today maintain the idea that blonde-haired blue-eyed pale people are the ultimate human form, and the Nordic countries are seen as paradise, the ideal all leftwing imperialist liberals aspire to, despite to this day being functionally aspiring ethnostates. Vikings are not only celebrated in mainstream media, but all the white supremacist fascists love adorning themselves and their imagery with Viking aesthetics. Many Neo Nazi narrators invoke the Vikings as inspiration to the spirit of the legendary White Man™️ they must uphold. It seems their pagan religion was subsumed into the imperial Christian Church, but how did imperial Christianity subsume its neighbors? By integration, perhaps in this case, by taking warlike aesthetics from paganism and cutting off the harmony with nature.
My history knowledge here is a little vague, but didn’t they essentially invade and take over England? So, would that not make the British–the closest to a post-Roman pre-USian singular pilot of Western hegemony–spiritually a lovechild of the Romans and the Vikings who both colonized them? In this way, Britian was much like the United States; original inhabitants slaughtered or subjugated, with a myriad of wicked societies forming a ghoulish beast together, no?
I am definitely no expert on the various histories at play here, so I wanted to see what comrades here think about this narrative.
i think the premise you’re working from is bizarre: what is a “spirit of empire”? imperialism is a political economy, not a mystic titulature that gets passed around.
even if we insist on analysis of roman empire with modern antiimperialist lenses, for what reason are you assuming there would be an ‘heir’ between that empire & the modern ones?
I understand I am using some terms MLs don’t care much for, but I don’t think it’s at all weird to describe, for example, the United States as the spiritual successor to Britain, or the Nazis, or the Romans. This isn’t just “vibes”, this has evidence that can be pointed to, from the enslavement-friendly faux-meritocratic rigid caste system, to the bloody spectacle of the Coliseum, to the long evolution of ideas of Christendom and white supremacy and “Western values.”
I believe there is an heir to the Romans because the Romans are nigh indistinguishable from modern Western imperialists to me, they behave much the same just in a radically different time period and historical/cultural context. Considering the Romans co-opted Christianity and this imperialized Christianity became the spinal column of Western hegemony, to this day with fascist Evangelicals being the most naked form of the classic US American (contested now with the culty scifi atheists of Silicon Valley). Modern Westerners adore and revere the Romans and all want to be the one who gets to say they are holding the baton passed to them by the Romans. I am sure much more links, both broad and microscopic, could be made the longer one compares the Romans to any modern Western imperialist society.
Why bother at all? “Know your enemy,” I suppose. I want to not only know my enemy today, I want to understand their lineage, their history, for this is a truly wicked beast that has taken millenia to evolve and develop into the bastard that stands today.
i think you’re imprinting much more of the present on the past than identifying antecedents that lead to the present.
many, many, many, governments and people have evoked symbolism and rhetoric from rome and other ‘classical’ canons. but we don’t have to be credulous about those premises. in Roman and early medieval times, many chroniclers fabricated stories that x group of people were descended from a character in the Trojan War, or a tribe of israel from the first testament. we do not take these seriously, though some people surely earnestly subscribed to them.
same goes for claiming to be heir to Rome’s Empire. its suitable for identifying an ambition, but unhelpful for analyzing whether a state developed from roman institutions or utilized roman political forms. eg: Holy Roman Empire–its in the name, yes. but absolutely no trace of roman political forms. romans did not have kings. Holy Roman Emperors could only rarely exercise authority over the bishops.
another: USA, has a “senate” named like romans… but what is this house of representatives? who are the nobles? the fuck is a federalism? much todo was made of cloaking all these innovations in Aquilae and phrygian caps, but damn, even the Church Of Rome had almost no purchase in the US at founding
tl;dr devil’s in the details, aesthetic refrains to romanism are not the same as concrete relationships to the roman past
Okay, you probably know more about the nitty gritty of the Romans than I do. I have an honest question, I’m not trying to troll or be stupid or argumentative I’m sincerely asking. Does it matter in its core? Like, is how the Roman Empire run, be it on a micro or macro level, is it functionally that different than the USian Empire? Is it weird to look at the USA as just a modernized, boiled down, truer-to-self version of the je ne sais quoi that was at the bedrock of Roman society. Not just in legislation but down to a psychological and interpersonal level. I’m not accepting that I am asking for a “vibes” answer but I look to hard and soft sciences with equal appreciation.
i don’t think you’re equally prising the material & philosophical if you’re still throwing around “is it functionally that different”–yes the function is the very heart of the differences between the two states which share aesthetic and rhetoric. the US is capitalist, the Romans were not. you’re not going to understand how US empire functions and exists if you can’t distinguish it from an antique empire.