Barbarian Invasion Quotes
The congressman was distraught with the national immigration picture at that time. He believed that the influx of Hispanic immigrants into the United States would radically change the culture and the immigrant culture would then predominate. Throughout American history with every wave of immigration, there have been fears expressed about the culture of America. The Irish immigration, the Scandinavians, the Germans, Italians, Jews, the Chinese—all engendered fear that they would “take over” and radically change the country. The reality is that none of them took over but all made some changes and influenced cultural direction of the nation. The congressman was repeating an old refrain.
Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. 6 years earlier, the Ottoman Turks, had captured Byzantium (Constantinople, later Istanbul), the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. One o the reasons the city fell was the squabbling of the different Christian national armies about support for the city and the internal bickering of those armies and navies that were there. The Emperor, Constantine XI, the successor to Constantine the Great—the roman Emperor who Christianized the Empire, was killed. Emperor Justinian had built the Hagia Sophia—the largest church at the time and for 1000 years thereafter under a single dome, and this great house of Christianity was turned into a Mosque by the Islamic conquerors.
The seeds of revolution were sprouting. That year there were over 2400 strikes in Czarist Russia where a strike was unheard of just a few years before. Four years after this prediction, Russia erupted in revolution and bloody civil war. The standard of living for all Russians would crash and not recover for decades.
From earliest times, leaders have justified war using religion as the lever to convince the people to fight and pay the other costs of a war. The leaders may have been motivated by hegemony, land, trade and the like but almost always tried to make the war a moral crusade.
At the time England and Scotland were part of the Roman Empire. The Britons who by that time were mostly Christians were constantly being raided by barbarians (Picts, Northumbrians, and Irish). However, by this time the Roman Empire was not what it had been, and the traditional response of sending Roman Legions to punish those who raided Roman provinces was no longer possible in the declining empire. Getting no help from Rome, the Britons invited the Saxons to come and form an alliance that changed the course of history.
The Emperor and many Japanese did not want foreign trading missions in the country. (see {613126}.) The problem at the time had nothing to do with the potential economic effects of trade on domestic industry or balance of payments, but for the Japanese was strictly a cultural problem. They were in great fear of what today some call “cultural imperialism”--the adoption of a foreign culture. The Japanese had been so fearful of cultural influence of foreigners that when some Japanese fishermen’s boat had been sunk and they had been rescued by foreign seamen and returned to Japan, they were executed as they had been “contaminated” and could “contaminate” the rest of the population. The government was in disarray ({613125}) and the military did not feel strong enough to take on the foreigners. Note the appeal of the line of Emperors of whom Komei was the 121st.
They were each children of kings who were held as hostages by Attila. Living at his court, they learned much of the Huns under Attila. The couple fell in love and escaped to be rare eyewitnesses to Attila and his kingdom.
