Collectivism 135, Part 1: The Fall of Rome, Explained by a Five Year Old
Written 1981, Revised 2021
Exhibit 100
Teen Turmoil, page 173
Hey, and welcome back to Safe White Space!
If you need context for what PACEs are and the scope of these PACE reviews, check out this post:
Collectivism 133, Part 1: Lucifer, the Son with Morning Wood
For the rest of us, let’s hop right in. These are the learning Objectives for this PACE:
Exhibit 139
Collectivism 135, page 1
By the end of this series, I will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is not earnestly incorrect in good-faith, but an outright lie. Donald admits so, in a Freudian type of way when he projects his own ignorance like the Bat Signal:
Exhibit 140
In the vast miasma of seemingly endless manifestations of collectivistic “isms,” there exists considerable overlap. In most cases, it is difficult—if not impossible— to discern any really appreciable differences between and among these various humanistic approaches to collective society…
The several forms of collectivism are but repeated efforts by Satan to dethrone God and realize the deification of man by means of confusion and deceit…
Collectivism 135, page 3
This is militant ignorance. It’s not hard to get to find extreme differences between anarchist, socialists, or communists. It gets tedious parsing Leninism and Marxism, but seriously, this is a pathetic attempt at making more intelligent “American citizen(s).”
Even Donald agrees:
Exhibit 141
Due to the limited space and time available, these PACE’s [sic] can not even begin to be a definitive study of the entire complex history of communism, but will of necessity be only a brief and sketchy [sic] overview..
Communism is usually erroneously viewed as beginning in the nineteenth-century revolutions of Europe..
Communism has always represented a revolt against God’s natural order of things in His universe.
Collectivism 135, page 3
“Sketchy,” indeed.
Take that “natural order” in the most literal, classist, and racist way possible. Just wait till we discuss the French Revolution in Part 2. To Donald, setting slaves free, and poor people getting voting rights is against “God’s natural order of things.”
The first 22 pages of this PACE suck for me in general because it covers Ancient Greek history I don’t know enough about this topic to know what questions to even ask of the PACE. Throughout, Donald does his classic, “Tradition tells us,” or “Some historians believe,” or “it has been said,” too often. It is already tedious and time consuming, even with today’s search engine, to chase down these unnamed sources, and I often come up empty handed. So when he does this with ancient Greek history, it’s too much. I have to pick my battles.
If someone with a better understanding of Greek history wants, I’ll send you the pages and you and/or I can publish what you find. The topics cover:
Lycurgus
Ancient Athens politics
Spartacus
“Roman Communism,” (lol)
“Spartacist Communism,”
then he revises history with regards to the decline and fall of Rome
All throughout, he is calling everything “communist(ic),” and referring back to his original point from Collectivism 133, which is that Satan is the real “Father of Communism.” At this point in the Collectivism course (and at no time in his five manifestos) does he ever square how Satan is both controlling all the governments through a secret Commie cabal who hate Christians, and the activating force behind every single revolution against said governments. It just makes no sense.
To summarize the position the PACEs take on the fall of the Roman Republic, here is Donald in his second manifesto, explaining more than 1000 years of history in a single paragraph:
Exhibit 143
[Bureaucracy] is the basic reason for the fall of Rome. The decline of Rome took many years, and the only consistent element was her bureaucracy, which eliminated private enterprise from every sector and which became more and more expensive as it interfered more and more with the life of her citizenry. Taxation, the only way to pay for bureaucracies, became irresistible and finally killed private enterprise. Rome fell because she replaced her soldiers with welfare recipients, eliminated her natural leaders, and destroyed her middle class.
Rebirth of Our Nation, page 581
For some reason, I feel like all the slaves and gladiators would disagree about Donald’s take on “private enterprise.” I’ll be more direct, while Donald’s take isn’t true at all, if you have a slave based, caste based culture, I hope your society gets burned to the ground, in the most literal sense. If it takes “bureaucracy” to do it, fuck you, bureaucracy it is.
The PACEs summarize the fall this way:
Exhibit 144
For three centuries, the twin cancers of collectivism and centralization of power spread their inevitable destruction throughout the one-time republic..
What dissatisfaction did exist was placated by seemingly limitless welfarism and elaborate public entertainment at government expense. The Roman populace was quite literally anesthetized by Diocletian’s “bread and circuses.”
Collectivism 135, page 19
Going by Donald’s manifestos, collectivism and centralization of power are entirely antithetical. It would have helped if he explained exactly what he meant, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t.
That pretty much sums up how the first 22 pages of this PACE goes. If anyone has knowledge about Ancient Greek history or just wants to take on the task of fact-checking this, I can send you pictures of the sections.
Sorry this was pretty lackluster :/
In Part 2 we will cover the French Revolution of 1789. Particularly, we will contrast Donald’s historical revisionism with reality, using real historians. From that angle we will learn a lot about the way Donald, and fascists broadly, relay information they, by necessity, must distort in-order for their worldview to hold even an ounce of water.
The topic of the French Revolution actually makes me mad, if I’m being honest. Growing up, we heard all these fantastical lies about how the founding fathers were these great men who, by honoring God and fighting for freedom, threw off the shackles of Empire and set man free. The French Revolution, by contrast, was presented as this evil thing that died because it was wholly violent and based on greed and blah blah blah. In researching for Part 2, I am entirely convinced that, whom the Christians call God is actually just the Devil in disguise.
The French Revolution was actually everything the American Revolution has been branded as in the States. Contrasted with the American Revolution, which was headed by a bunch of billionaires who just wanted to keep their slaves, the French Revolution seems almost Christ-like. The French Revolution had poor people finally receiving education, and rich slave owners getting beheaded. The American Revolution had billionaires battling a King in a war where almost exclusively poor people died. The French Revolution actually advanced the concepts of human autonomy and freedom, and exponentially increased the literacy rate of France, and Europe as a whole. The American Revolution saw another ~90 years of slavery, ~150 years of women’s suffrage, and ~190 years of a two-tiered citizen-system based on race, which we haven’t even come close to actually deconstructing. That should help contextualize what he means by “God’s natural order.”
Not only all that, but the French Revolution is just cool. It’s fascinating history, even if you don’t like the idea of poor people feeding their families. Reducing history, especially in the context of education, to Satan did and thing and God countered it, is just depressing.
Millstone these people.
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6
From his first manifesto:
Exhibit 142
The average person pays one hundred fold more taxes than forty years ago. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Historians tell us that taxation was one of the major reasons for the fall of Rome. Yet, the average United States citizen pays a higher percentage of taxes than the average Roman citizen did in the fifth century at the fall of Rome.
To Save a Nation, page 16