Migrants

There are all sorts of analyses on the current migrant crises, but as usual, the most important points are left out. And those points are:

1. The cause of the crisis

2. Optimal crisis management

3. The end result

With current crises management, the end result is pretty much this:

Europe, 2015

But let's handle first things first.

The cause

There are actually two causes, one internal and one external. The internal cause can pretty much be summed up as - too many people. Or, if we want to get down and dirty with the details, it can be described as as too many young people in a water-depleted part of the world that failed to properly capitalize on oil abundance. Even when the oil was above 100$ per barel, most of the Mideast countries failed to use that economic boon as a vehicle for their social and technological transformation. Instead, they built golden skyscrapers and bought excess military equipment. Now that the oil is cheap, and will likely remain so thanks to the emergence of electric cars, that historical opportunity has been lost. Instead, what we have is too many young adults realizing the rest of their lives will pretty much suck.

The second cause, which affects only about 1/3 of the migrants, is strategic and is basically the result of the rise of IS (it's pointless to call the organization that is active in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Lybia, and Yemen ISIS or ISIL). Yet the rise of the IS is more or less an engineered event, a result of regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. After GW Bush's idiotic Iraqi intervention, population dynamics resulted in about 2/3 of the former Iraq to fall under full Iranian Shia influence. The rest is split between the Kurds and the Sunnis. By gaining dominance over Iraq, Iran basically became the primary regional power with direct access to the Mediterranean sea through its Syrian ally Assad. With around 29 million people, Saudi Arabia was no match for 80 million Iranians, and another 20 million Iraqi and 2 million Syrian Shiites. Turkey was also not very happy to see a rival equal in size arise on their southern flank. But they had an ace up their sleeve, and that ace was the fact that there were still a bit more than 15 million Sunni Arabs in Syria, as well as another 5 million in Iraq, which formed a wedge that split the Shiite crescent in half. It didn't take much to unite those people, as they already considered themselves of the same stock (noticed already a century ago by Lawrence of Arabia and pretty much noone else) and have them form a brand new state. Cruel and crazy the IS may be, but it achieved important strategic objectives for both Turkey and SA. Iran was contained, and the Kurds were occupied with a new enemy, which was quite a nice additional bonus for Turkey.

The US, being allied with both Turkey and SA, as well as opposed to Iran and Syria, wholeheartedly supported the whole thing as well. And therein lies the mystical survival of the Islamic State. While on the surface they pretend to be enemies with pretty much everyone, in reality they are allies of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and United States. It's silly to believe that a country which was able to plow through Iraq and dispose Saddam Hussein in a matter of days can't destroy an entity that's militarily less than 10% its size.

There's also one more possible scenario, and that is yet another way of containing Russia. Syria is Russia's biggest ally in the region, and the Russians are using a Syrian port for their Mediterranean fleet. It's pretty obvious why the US would want to put an end to such an agreement. With the USA still being paranoid about Russia, I'm inclined to believe that Saudi decision to keep the oil pumping regardless of the market crash was conceived in accordance with the United States in order to weaken the Russian economy. Even if it weakened bot the American and the Saudi Arabian economies as well. Perhaps as a part of that deal, Saudi Arabia was allowed to push the IS into becoming primary Syrian opposition, while the US abandoned their former Al Qaeda allies.

An odd alliance

Crisis management

Currently, the crisis is managed by actively supporting the Islamic State and allowing hordes of refugees (likely infiltrated by AQ or IS terrorists as well) into Europe. This is very short-sighted thinking (for Europe at least, the US may well want Europe to be weak), and the end result may more than likely be a religious or civil war in Europe. What Kosovo is to Serbia today, Marseilles will be to France tomorrow. European politicians who believe migrants will accept new culture are living in a fantasy world. If Turkey, which occupied the Balkan peninsula for almost 500 years, failed to integrate and assimilate Serbs, Greeks, and pretty much everyone else it conquered, it is unlikely that Europe will be able to do the same thing in 50 or so years that are left before Islam becomes a dominant religion on the continent.

What should have been done is not attacking Iraq in the first place. What should now be done is to sign a peace agreement with Assad, force Saudi Arabia to pacify the IS and give them the Sunni state they so desperately desire. What should not be done is prolonging this war ad infinitum and flooding Europe with countless waves of immigrants that will irrevocably change the very essence of its culture.

Endgame

As already mentioned, the end result is basically the destruction of Europe as we know it. It shouldn't be so. These nations and people should be left to handle themselves on their own, and ultimately they would reorganize their lands into something Lawrence of Arabia suggested a century ago. While the current sequence of events may be beneficial to the US, which still seems to think Russia is USSR 2.0 (while it's looking more and more like inverse is becoming the case), Islamic Europe is most certainly not in their interest. It would have been much better to have a friendly relationship with Russia and leave the Arab countries to rot after squandering the opportunity given to them by oil. Maybe they would have come to their senses sooner as well.

But what is more likely to happen is Islamization and Africanization of Europe. With a dwindling population, Europe is already less populated than Africa (although it had 4 times as many people a 100 years ago). Moving Africa to Europe will help neither the Africans nor the Europeans. It will destroy the latter, while making no difference to the former. 

People get all teary when they see refugee children, but no one mentions that there's just too many refugee children. Pathological altruism consecrates people who destroy their lives for strangers, but pathologically altruistic societies tend to die out or be destroyed by others which are not that altruistic. By naively helping everyone who needs help, Europe will help nobody and destroy itself. What should be done is ending involvement and minding one's own business. And already accepted migrants should be shipped off to the US and Saudi Arabia which both started this whole mess.

Imminent progress

Name the last great scientist you know. I bet you'll say Stephen Hawking, and that's pretty much because he's the last (and not to be disrespectful, but not the most important) of his kind. While his research was most certainly profound, it basically comes down to evaporating black holes. Anyone else in the last 50 years? Well, no, not really. I mean, there are scientists around, some of them very relevant, but none that really changed the world.

Now, let's move back before 1968, the year when all that was good, beautiful, and true retreated before the solipsistic hordes. You'd really have a hard time naming just one.

A shocking lack of diversity

And this is barely half of them. There's Tesla, Oppenheimer's nuke team, Watson&Crick&ThatForgottenChick, Alan Turing, that misogynist Feynman, Schottky and his Bell labs team, Von Neumann, Von Braun, Korolev, Fleming...just the few of the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more which I have unfairly forgotten to mention.

So what basically happened is that 60 years ago we had somewhere close to 50 great scientists alive and kicking, each of them having given us a profound insight in the nature of the universe or a profound technological breakthrough. Today we have one, and sadly he's not really in the best of shape nowadays.

Still too white and male, but at least disabled

So when you hear all that progressive talk that today the living standard is greater than ever, the only reason for that is the fact that the discoveries from people like these found their way in people's everyday lives. First those of the first world, and finally those of the third world. All the great things we have now, such as iPhone and the internet owe their existence to this bunch. It's a natural progression, but one that takes decades to develop. So when we're saying our gadgets of today are nicer than the ones which previous generation played with, it's only because the fundamental research of that previous generation didn't make it into the mainstream markets yet.

What is worrying, however, is that there are no more people like this. The last of his kind has a few more years to live, and that pretty much puts the species to an end. Whether it's biological or social, I can't really say. Sadly, I believe it's both.

The biological part is, to be honest, a long shot. But it may be quite possible that huge leaps in medicine allowed the weak to live, essentially introducing many small defects into the gene pool, and thereby making exceptional individuals ever more rare. This may or may not be correct.

What most certainly is correct is the social problem. First of all, there's really no reason for any smart guy to go into science anymore. While it was once a solid career, today it's a total personal failure. PHD comics is essentially a documentary. After working hard to be the best in your school, you get to a good college. Where you work your ass off again to enter tenure. Working for half the paycheck of your elementary school dimwit colleague who's now a certified plumber, you and 5 other people compete for one professorship place at your university. Truly, who in their right mind would want that? What's left in the universities are essentially not so bright but very bookish people.

Then comes the publish or perish mantra. You have to churn out enough papers to stay on track. If you make a bombshell discovery, you need to split it in a dozen smaller papers to satisfy the bureaucracy. Or you can really make something huge and be a one shot wonder, most likely losing your career over slow production because you didn't satisfy the bureaucracy trolls. It's basically become impossible to do, at least for people who don't live at home with their mothers, thereby independent of paychecks and being forced to pay the bills.

There's also an easier road, one that most prefer to take, which is simply to publish crap. Just satisfy the form and churn out as many bad research as possible, it's unlikely anyone will ever read it anyway. With enough ass-licking, you have a good shot at becoming a new professor one day.

Is it then surprising that the only way to make the Saturn V - equivalent engines nowadays is to pull the Chinese option? That is - scan the black box you don't really understand and just make a copy. It works for now. At least while we still know how to make copies. Next in line, we'll pray to the Mighty Mountain God to help us.

Our house

Imagine you have a house, let's say you share it with a sibling. And let's say it's a big house, so each one of you actively uses only 10% of the house, the rest is common good. Now, suppose your sibling invites 8 of his trashy yolo friends to permanently live in the house with you and they all get their own 10% of the house. Would anyone in their right mind agree to such an arrangement? Clearly, not. Would you be better off with the new roomies than alone? Not really. Yet it is exactly what is happening in today's west, except it's not our houses but our countries. Why? I think I have a pretty good explanation.

Let's look at some of the details to this story, as well as common misconceptions. Now, first of all, why would anyone commit such a lunacy at all? Either that person is a small envious creature, so bent on ruining your life that it's willing to ruin its own in the process. Those people really do exist, but they are limited in numbers, concentrated in various NGO's, humanities, and Sweden. Such a minority may certainly cause problems similar to the one mentioned, and they are often being used as useful idiots for people who pull the strings. But I do not believe they are at the core of this. To realize why, let's make a small modification to the story.

Let's say I live nearby and own the house, with you and your sibling as my tenants. Clearly, having 80% of the house empty is not in my direct financial interest. Yes, I may wait for you guys to procreate, and in another 50 years or so my rent will be maximised. Yet 50 years is a long time. Or as an alternative, I may wait a year or two till I find some decent people to move in. But I want the cash, and I want it now. Maybe I gambled too much and I'm in debt. Maybe I picked a fight with the wrong people, got beat up, and now have to spend money on medical bills. Whatever the case, I need money and I need it soon. Most likely I don't really like the new tenants either. They're dirty and quarrelsome, and frankly they make my neighborhood uglier. But with the guy from the electric company threatening to cut the wire, I really don't have much of a choice now, do I? I let the scum come in, and solve my dire financial situation for a while.

New tenants

Now, you and your sibling clearly lost out. While the house was formally mine all along, you could freely roam the other rooms as well without my direct opposition. Maybe you could have cheaply bought one more room for your kids once they grow up as well and solved their existential worries. Yet now you can't because you have a drunken crowd partying in every room other than yours all day and night. As the rooms get filled up and situation gets intolerable, you're really left with the only choice - to leave and find some other place to live.

It's pretty clear why leftist useful idiots would fall for this crap. They love anarchy, they love destruction, and they love to destroy all that is good, beautiful, and true. If the rest of the world regresses, your relative value grows, even though you're not moving anywhere.

But why would the center and the right fall for the story? Because they're sold a false narrative that's leaving one little detail out. The narrative goes something like this - Yes, you do lose a bit of your Luddite life quality, but what you gain is immeasurable. All the new tenants bring in their stuff with them, they fill the empty rooms with fascinating oriental furniture, and the house on the whole has a lot more value. The house grows and becomes larger, new floors are added, and soon there is a mighty skyscraper towering over neighboring shacks. What was once a tiny shed surrounded by empty and unused land is now an asset generating behemoth.

Pure beauty

Your room is more valuable as well, because some of those people are breeding fast and they may want to pay you to get in. And if you're poor, you may get some of the surplus goods owned by one of your new cohabitants and end up better off than you were before. Even if the furniture is not that fancy, still, a plastic shelf is worth more than no shelf at all, is it not? Well, yes it is, before it turns to garbage and becomes a pollutant, but even if we disregard that issue, there's one little thing left out. It's really not your house. It's the house you share with your sibling and 8 other people. Instead of having a house to your own, empty as it may be, you two now live in 20% of the house, with the rest being occupied by noisy trash.

The one who sees real benefit is the owner of the house. Instead of having 2 people paying their rent and enjoying their surroundings, now there are 10 people paying their rent, even though they don't enjoy their surroundings all that much.

Now to bring that up to state level, one only needs to ask oneself - who controls all the empty land? Who is a part-owner of all the houses on that land? The government. And the government wants to maximize rent. Now, don't make a mistake and think they don't know what they're doing - they most certainly do. But they have to do it because they're broke. And the reason they're broke is democracy. When your governance is limited to 4 years and you have a very demanding population who may or may not give you another 4 years, but you're also allowed to take 30-year loans, it's pretty clear what the best course of action is. You take as many 30-year loans in those 4 years of power as possible, spend as much as you can on bread and circuses, and then use the plebs' positive sentiment to gain another 4 years. If you don't do it, the other side will, so there isn't really much of a moral hazard anyway.

When the next government comes, it will have to finance those debts. And the easiest way to do that is to raise taxes or increase the number of taxed individuals. Ideally, both. Also, raise as much new 30-year loans as possible, hoping there's still some value to scavange left over from the previous government. So what you end up with is a house owned by a person with a spending addiction, whose only way to cover his ever mounting debts and survive the day is to keep increasing the number of tenants and raising the price of rent. Repeat ad nauseam.

Victory of mysticism

The amount of knowledge discovered in the last couple of centuries is truly immense. Just to think of the fact that 250 years ago we didn't know of any planet beyond the ones visible to our earliest hominid ancestors seems almost like a joke. Barely 20 years ago we didn't have the knowledge of any extrasolar planets. Today we count known planets in the thousands, and just recently we've discovered a planet that's pretty much Earth's twin in a pressure cooker. One may only wonder what future discoveries lie ahead of us.

That is, unless the devices used to make those discoveries hurt someone's feelings. Especially if that someone is a stone age savage. Truly, I must be joking, right? I mean, for all the political correctness of modern progressivism, science is still held on a holy pedestal, a sort of new religion for the new world order, right? Wrong. See, the biggest lie that progressivism and leftism ever served us is that their proponents rely on cold hard science. They do take science into consideration, that is true, but only when it can be used as a tool to promote equality and demote Christianity. But when science suggests their whole ideology is on shaky ground, it is readily dismissed and laughed upon, labeled as backward and racist prejudice. The leftists don't revere science, they hate it. And they use it only as a shield to destroy what they hate even more, which is stability and social order.

The story of the Thirty Meter Telescope is a revelatory insight into their actual stance towards science and knowledge. They are willing to prevent the construction of a remarkable scientific tool which could provide us with an immeasurable amount of knowledge, just so that some stone age tribe won't get upset by the evil white men putting a reflective hat on the head of their mountain-god.

The TMT has been the source of controversy. Due to its immense light-gathering power and the optimal observing conditions which prevail atop Mauna Kea, the TMT would enable astronomers to conduct research which is unfeasible with current instruments. However, the TMT has triggered protests—both locally and across the world—about the lack of indigenous peoples' consent over the construction of the telescope and its 18-story-high enclosure on land which is sacred to native Hawaiians,^[5] attracting international coverage.^[6] In October of 2014, its construction was temporarily halted voluntarily due to protests, and while construction of the telescope was set to resume on April 2 and later on June 24, 2015, it was blocked by further protests each time.^[7]

The evil eye of desecration

Truly it is paramount that a stone age tribe, whose members most likely don't even believe anymore in the gods they used to worship, has its sacred places untouched. Knowledge, exploration...to hell with that. They're a trademark of patriarchy anyway. It's more important that we dance around the fire and honor the mighty Mountain God of Mauna Kea!

Long ago, in medieval Europe, there was an ongoing debate between mysticism and scholasticism. One side thought that God can be experienced through personal mystical experience, while the other considered the same to be possible through reason and logic alone. A sort of mathematical proof that God exists, if you will. Because it had a side effect of creating an immense amount of knowledge completely unrelated to religion, scholasticism won the day, and in not-so-distant past, mysticism was all but defeated. Rationalism ruled the day, and people considered the universe to be a sort of an infinitely complex mechanical device. Yes, their understanding was limited by the steampunk age they lived in, but it showed a much greater rationality than what we have today.

But the success of scholasticism was its own undoing, because while it discovered so many wonderful things, it pretty much proved the Bible to be factually incorrect. The creation was really just a myth, copied from the Babylonian faith, and not much unlike all the other indigenous creation stories. It transformed itself from a method of proving Bible right into a method of proving Bible wrong. Still, powerful enough as it was, even in the fairly religious nation of USA, religious fundamentalists weren't allowed to block the construction of  telescopes. While they were afraid the evil device may actually look far enough into the universe to see God himself, they were even more afraid of the army guns which protected the train on which the telescope mirror was transported through the Midwest.

But just when it was thought to be defeated, mysticism reappeared in all its might. This time, however, it was masked as nothing other than rationalism itself. Like a cuckoo egg, it infiltrated rational and scientific circles, and after what will ultimately become known as the catastrophe of 1968, became a dominant worldview. There is little left of the old rationalism in the new. While the old rationalism despised superstitions, the new one embraces them thoroughly. While old rationalism embraced order and hierarchy, new one wants to destroy it. There is just one remnant of the old rationalism in the new, and that is its hostility towards Christianity. Aside from that, it's pure mysticism, this time especially dangerous, as it is shrouded in a rationalist disguise.

And while rationalism, or its ancestor, scholasticism, believed in reason and knowledge, mysticism believes in feelings and superstitions. Knowledge of the universe is not important, what is important are one's individual feelings. While scholasticism is a unique school of thought which made western civilization great, mysticism is really the philosophy of cavemen and our hominid ancestors. While Homo Erectus may have difficulties understanding atomic theory, the idea of dancing around the fire for the glory of a Mountain God would most likely feel perfectly natural for the creature.

What the left actually does is that it unknowingly tries to reduce the society back to a caveman culture. A culture where everything around us is a mystery, world rife with small gods and demigods, where every rock has a soul and mighty anthropocentric giants shoot lightnings from their eyes during storms. Their real enemy is not religion, because they are a religion, their real enemies are science, knowledge, and order. The opposition to Christianity is just an atavistic tic. 

True diversity

It has become a meme that diversity is a code word for white genocide, and there truly is some truth in that. Instead of what many believe is a Jewish conspiracy, I consider it to be primarily a matter of white flagellantism, as the whites still more or less run the show. What makes the whole thing somewhat obfuscated is the fact that such behavior is quite unusual in the elites, so many mistakenly consider their self-destructivism to be a matter of external conspiracy. Sadly, an external conspiracy would be a much easier thing to deal with. Jews are in on the bandwagon, that's for sure, but I'm inclined to believe they are in it only because they smelled that's where the power lies. Their primary interest is to be on the top, not so much as what that top actually looks like.

As the whites slowly move to become a minority, and as other races become more included in the upper echelons of the society, I believe the spirit of flagellantism will spread to their leaders as well. Because, really, even if you're black it's impossible to rise to the top if you're a conservative male. Sure, the color of your skin gives you some credit, but not nearly as much as you lose when the social elite bouncers realize you don't think families should be destroyed and Christian religion replaced by some sort of quasi-rational antitheism.

Ultimately, the goal is to have a raceless and classless society. If the terminology seems familiar and reminescent of Trotskyism, that's because it's exactly that. In a utopian communist dream world, making all people exactly equal will eliminate all other sorts of inequality and struggles for power. The fact that equal people can still be assholes towards each other somehow eluded the thinkers from the red ivory tower.

Unfortunately, evolution really doesn't work as the Marxists think it should, so instead of having equal clones, there is plenty of biodiversity in the human race. One way to resolve the problem is to actually remove biodiversity alltogether. The way to do that is to encourage or force as many people as possible to resettle and ultimately interbreed. Sure, the genes will still be there, but their manifestation will be utterly insignificant, especially if they are recessive.

Take a blue-eyed gene for example. Back in the day, almost 60% of the US population had blue eyes. Today, it's only 16%. And still, the non-latino white population decreased much less, from almost 90% to 60%. The reason for that is that even a small increase in the amount of dominant genes significantly decreases the manifestation of recessive genes. Many US whites are not purebreeds, having an occasional ancestor from another race. When considering recessive gene traits, such seemingly minor incursions end up having significant results.

And this is really not only about whites. There are many unique genetic traits specific to pretty much all the peoples of the earth. Whether you like them or not, whether you think they're pretty or not, they're bound to go the way of blue eyes and red hair - into oblivion. People who were once typical of their stock will become freaks and oddities. Just as the Bushmen women with steatopygia were considered a circus attraction in the west, so will be the blondes and redheads in the brave new coffee-colored world of lookist equality. Not that the bushmen will have it any better either, whatever you may think of their butts, they'll end up virtually extinct as well.

This really brings us to the point of true diversity. As is quite often the case in cultural Marxist newspeak, the words tend to have the meaning opposite of what they actually define. Sad truth is - in the brave new world of equality, there will be no diversity whatsoever. This really isn't a white genocide - it's everybody's genocide. Sure, the whites may fall first, but it's foolish to think the process will just stop there. It will continue, till we are all equally dull and uniteresting.

Leftist idea of diversity.

And it doesn't end just with biology either. All the cultures will be devoured. Yes, there will still be some remnants providing entertainment for the tourists, and history buffs will talk about the days when there were Christians in Europe or Shintoists in Japan, but for all intents and purposes, old cultures will be dead and buried. Just as Slavs now recreate Roman emperors on the eastern Adriatic coast, and just as Black people dress up in Victorian costumes for the Olympic Games opening ceremony, there will be people who will recreate the past. But as much as one may feel sympathy for their will, they will hardly ever be more than impersonators, and even more sadly, they will simply be part of the cultural white noise.

What I stand for, and what I believe everyone should stand for, is diversity. But not diversity in its newspeak meaning, which is white genocide followed by all the others (though Jews, smart as they are, may end up being the last and even pull through). I stand for true diversity which really means what people still think it does. I love the fact that there are different peoples on this planet, that they have different capabilities, that they look differently, and that they have different cultural, artistic, and social norms. Sure, some are better than others, there's no point in denying that, but the fact that so many different culture and people exist makes this world a much more interesting place. Cultural Marxists intend to destroy that. We should not let them.

The point of no return...

...is way past us. Why such a gloomy outlook? Well, one only needs to look at population statistics to see why. There are two parts to this story, economic and social. Both are beyond saving. Let's look at the economic part first.

For that I'll be using one European country that I am familiar with, which happens to be Croatia, since Europe is leading the way on this one, and Croatia is yet again one of the unfortunate leaders in the union. There are 3.7 million registered voters in Croatia, and 1.3 million employees, out of which 300k work for the state. Simple math shows that factual taxpayers make up around 28% of the voting population. In other words, any attempt to reduce the state is impossible, as we would need to convince more than 30% of people who are directly or indirectly living from the taxes paid by those 28% to vote against their obvious interest. Sure, a few percent of people can always be convinced to do such a thing, but 30% is a target which even the best propaganda or PR teams would have serious trouble with.

Ok, Croatia is a former communist country in a socialist hell called the EU. Surely the libertarian USA is doing much better on that front? Well, not exactly. Seems like there are 123 million employees in the USA, and 20 million of those work for the government, leaving the 103 million voting taxpayers. There are 235 million voters, meaning that even in a so called center of capitalism, people who make capital are actually a 44% minority. While not quite as bad as the socialist Mecca called Europe, it too is beyond salvation. Add to that the votes of illegal immigrants, and we're getting pretty close to the worst of the EU performers.

The second part is social. And while the battle is still not lost on that front, as the majority of the population is still indigenous, the economic aspect is making the battle practically impossible to win. The reason for that is that the pro-welfare government needs continuous import of foreign welfare cases in order to maintain its power. Some immigrants actually do "melt" in the pot and accept local cultural and social norms. This usually means they start working as well, and when that happens, they usually start voting for fiscal conservatives. If immigration and welfare were to somehow magically stop right now, most of those people would still eventually manage to assimilate and the whole leftist agenda would shatter.

But by keeping the immigration pressure high, the left achieves two things. First, it directly increases the number of welfare cases, perpetuating its power. Second, it slows down the integration and consequential employment of current immigrants. While one immigrant in a protestant neighborhood will pretty much be forced to blend in and find a job or suffer social ostracism, 10 000 immigrants can pretty much keep to their culture and live off welfare for as long as they please, and without any unease or condemnation.

Adding all those things together, it's becoming crystal clear what Europe and the US will become in the upcoming several decades. Venezuela will start looking like a paradise.

The fall of Rome

We all know how Rome fell, right? An empire that held control over most of Europe was defeated when innumerable hordes of barbarians poured through Germanic lands, their armies obliterated brave defenders, and sacked the glorious city, bringing with them centuries of feudal darkness.

Well, not quite. Let's take a more detailed approach, and see what was really going on...

Not quite sudden

So for starters, Rome was desperately out of money. The Roman plebs grew ever more numerous, and the bread and circuses they demanded became more and more costly. Events like mock ship battles in the Colosseum would be unimaginably expensive by today's standards, let alone for a preindustrial civilization. What started as a fairly minor issue slowly turned into a nightmare. While Rome managed to control the situation in the beginning, conquering new lands and sucking them dry to provide for the local proletariat-equivalent, as the city grew and rich borderlands shrank, the situation slowly became financially impossible to maintain. To end the social program was hardly a possibility anymore, considering the fact that such a measure would instantly turn the city of one million people into a bloody battlefield, where the emperor's forces were vastly outnumbered.

So what did the government do? What governments always do - raised taxes and created inflation. While the idea of printing unlimited amounts of fiat money was still nonexistent, what they did come up with was to put less and less silver into silver coins. Taxes were also raised to the point where normal people simply didn't have enough resources to both pay the taxes and not starve to death. No wonder the demographic picture looked pretty bleak.

Still, not all was doom and gloom. For those who had good connections with the elite, such as senators and their clique, tax deductions were allowed. Thus latifundia were born. The local villagers really had no way to compete with giant semi-industrialized agricultural holdings, and were soon forced to sell their lands to latifundium owners and thereby bind themselves and their work to their new owners. Thus feudalism was born.

With villages emptied and free folk turned to semi-slaves, Germanic tribes slowly poured in. Not through conquest, but through negotiation and diplomacy. As they moved in, they usually moved in bulk, creating something similar to vassal states within a larger Roman state. While officially subjects to the emperor, they pretty much had the freedom to do whatever they wanted to do, as long as they helped the Roman army in their campaigns. This was an important issue, since the army turned into a shadow of its former self, and was largely composed of Germans, mercenaries, and all other people that really didn't have much to do with Rome itself.

The society changed as well. Becoming a multicultural state, Roman gods and traditions slowly faded and became just one of thousands new deities. With nothing to believe in, moral decadence became ever more prominent. Emperors also began to take on godly status, some of them proclaiming themselves to be gods, thereby amplifying the charade. Sure, people had to pretend they were real gods, but in reality, it all just became one big mockery. This social disintegration ultimately allowed Christianity to take over and spread its less than enthusiastic stance towards serving the homeland.

Finally, when Attila the Hun came about, he found the Roman state practically ready to implode. Nevertheless, the half-Germanic general Aetius managed to defeat his hordes, which was pretty much what lead to his downfall, as the empiror Valentinian decided he became too powerful and should therefore be killed. This proved to be a tragic mistake for the Empire, as it turned out Aetius was pretty much the only person who still kept the disentangling mess in one piece.

Even with Aetius, the empire was really not much to be admired. Large swathes of land in today's Spain and France were effectively no longer under the emperor's control, and what was left was pretty much in shambles. While parts of the Empire had occasionally splintered off before, especially during the third century civil war, it was always thought of as one country. Therefore any generals who seceded didn't really want to have their own country next to Rome, they wanted to take control of the entire empire instead.

But this time around, as most parts of the Roman Empire were short of Romans and populated by tiny barbarian tribes instead, the new warlords had no real desire or possibility to reunite with other clans. It was simply impossible to keep the empire in one piece anymore. The eastern half, or Byzantium, managed to avoid that fate, held on to their lands, and survived another thousand years.

What is striking about this story is the resemblance to what is happening in today's western world. Let's go through the list, shall we?

• Inflation? Check
• Rising taxes? Check
• More welfare (ab)users? Check
• Rising state debt? Check
• Uncontrolled immigration? Check
• No-go zones in parts of sovereign territory (today's inner cities)? Check
• Moral and social disintegration? Check
• Crony capitalism (latifundia)? Check

If something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's quite possible that it's actually a duck. History repeats itself, and today's duck walks and quacks staggeringly similar to the duck of late Rome. Rome didn't fall in one battle, it was falling apart for centuries. As its internal weakness allowed immigrants occupied parts of its territory, what was left in the end was an empty skeleton. And when the skeleton collapsed, all the lands it held together simply went their own separate ways. There was no sudden foreign invasion, just constant immigration and internal decay. It was not an event, it was a process which lasted for centuries. And one that is strikingly similar to what we see today. What is happening in today's Marseilles or Arizona is exactly what was happening in Roman Iberia and Gaul. And it will end the same way.

Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? A weak one, but yes. Byzantium survived, and it looks like it might survive again. Although it moved 2000 kilometers to the north.