The main driver of the rise of empires, Peter Turchin argues, is interstate competition:
The intensity of this competition, in turn, is dialed up by advances in military technologies. Each military revolution, thus, generates a set of mega-empires. Today we live in the historical shadow of two most consequential military revolutions.
The iron-cavalry revolution dates to about 1000 BCE.
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To cut the long story short, the iron-cavalry revolution transformed the Great Eurasian Steppe into an engine of imperiogenesis. This continental heartland was the home of nomadic pastoralists, whose main military force consisted of horse archers.
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The other consequential revolution was, of course, the one that originated in Western Europe around 1400 CE. Its two components were gunpowder weapons and ocean-going ships. So I refer to it as the “Gunship Revolution.” The parallels between the two revolutions are quite striking. Inner Asians rode horses and shot arrows, while Europeans rode ships and shot cannon balls. The world ocean played the same role as the “sea of grass.” Historians noted these similarities. For example, the historian of Southeast Asia, Victor Lieberman, referred to Europeans as “White Inner Asians.”
Readers, who are familiar with geopolitical theories of Mackinder, Mahan, Spykman, and others (if not, check out this Wikipedia article), will immediately recognize the similarities between what I am talking about here and various geographical concepts central to these theories (the Heartland, the Rimland, the Islands…).
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Thus, the Great Steppe (which is treated as a pivotal region by several geopolitical theories) today is of little significance, except for its historical effect. By 1900 it was completely taken over by Russia and China. Today it’s home to a bunch of weak and geopolitically insignificant states, such as Mongolia and the “Stans.” The successors of old mega-empires, which arose on the Steppe frontiers, is where Eurasian power now resides.
The second pole of power is “Oceania,” which originated on the western shores of Eurasia during the sixteenth century (Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the British Isles), then spread across the Atlantic, and now is a global empire, ruled from Washington and Brussels as a secondary capital (although there are cracks between these two seats of power due to Donald Trump’s policies). A good way to visualize this geopolitical entity is a map of American military bases.
Oceania’s geopolitical logic — encirclement of Eurasian empires — is obvious.
Chronologically:
The Indo-Europeans conquered the world from the steppe, with their military and mobility technology, and also with their mobile culture (put here thing from how houses were built, or the food they ate, their rituals, etc). We can see some of the stem political ways in the Pashtunwali also.
Then, Greeks colonized everything again, from their maritime strenghts settling and founding cities, to Alexander’s push.
Then came the Age of Discovery, where European sailors and settlers did the impossible and became legendary figures worthy of Gods.
Finally, with doctrines such as the Manifest Destiny is the USA or Eurasian Expansion in Russia, came another era of land expansion, using the same horse-drawn wood carriages the Indo-European ancestors used 5000 years ago.
European Civilization is Boundless Space. It’s Apollo and Dyonisus. It’s Faustian.
To deny this nature is everything the Abrahamic project has been trying to do since it infected our minds.
We have paid the price for sharing this world, and we have forgotten what make us strong.
The Great Steppe is of little significance whenever a humid phase ends and a dry one starts. When it switches back to humid, it will be of great significance again (at least economically), due to producing lots and lots of meat.
Anti-Abrahamic says:
«We»! You must be quite old to remember so much. All in all, the saddest case of Wuz Kangz Syndrome seen by me in a year or so.
If you don’t feel included in “We”, you can let yourself out.
Myself and others who realize that We’re literally made of our ancestors, that they lived so that we could, and that we’re a living statement of their existence and their accomplishments, their culture, their pathos and ethos, their legacy, yes, We, will honour what they explicitly have given us and We’ll give it all too to our descendants as well.
If you think you’re an atomized existence with no importance, legacy or even that your actions bear nothing on others, feel free to end yourself, as you’ve made yourself irrelevant. It’s only when you’re ready to die for something that you’re rally alive.
My ancestors are smilling at me, can you say the same? I want to be together with Radbod when my time comes.
Anti-Abrahamic says:
So much for talking like an underdog. Lol. Once again, it proved impossible to conceal modus operandi of a brain for long in a freeform text output.
So you are one of those. I thought you are trying to out-hipster the rest of Viking LARPers.
I shall now amuse myself further by antigene tagging.
You are being a plenipotentiary representative of some hivemind again. Its identity remains either absent or so laughably nebulous it’s meaningless. What it is?
This looks like a strawman (and maybe a projection). But first and foremost, it’s a false dichotomy. False dichotomies are good tells, ladies and gentlemen.
Which also answers the question of identity. False dichotomy defaults it to the usual: The One, The Only, “All People Of Good Will,” etc., etc.
Beside an amusing slip after the previous part…
There’s a lot of talk like this at all times. Yet it gets backed ever less often even among the supposed zealots.
I have no habit of speaking for the dead, being neither a shaman nor a ghoul.
Speaking of the latter, jokes about composition (and decomposition) of US electorate notwithstanding, it’s not a local phenomenon. This seems common for the whole post-millenial memeplex. For example, in “The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin” a she-zealot took a habit of talking for her husband after killing him (the latter part, of course, is coincidental, but the trend is anything but).
And with a pop-kultur quote, two in one.
So, you’re just a retarded wordcel, differring worldviews are “larping” and you didn’t refute or make a single point against what I said or just for yourself. Sad.
You see, this world needs to be life-affirming, and you’re in the way. Your way of thinking is what brought us to this mess in the first place. If I had to guess, you’re a retarded boomer old-school “conservative”, or at least one in spirit.
https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1951280351784907005
I’ll leave this here just as an example, one example, of the paradigm shift happening in our society, who are WE. We’re the next wave that will dominate politics in the next decades, which is sole responsible for many policies right now. I shouldn’t even indulge in talking with you, as you yourself have nothing to offer, empty criticism is the hallmark of the 110 IQ average dunning-kruger.
You’re a meme. Also, I’m not American, but I won’t even fix my grammar mistakes now, you’re just not worthy of that.
Your generation’s worst sin is that you destroyed and betrayed youselves and your country – this world – for nothing.
We’ve identified the problem, will eliminate, and we’ll return to our civilizational project.
I guess you will start by burning the Vatican?