Grato ao meu colega Renato Marques que me enviou este artigo, e autor dos comentários iniciais.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
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Para aqueles que (não) leram meu livro, capítulo Tempus Fugit, recordo que nele abordo o impacto da invasão desses "novos bárbaros" (na composição étnica, na identidade cultural e no quadro de valores das sociedades hospedeiras) e a estratégia ambígua e ineficaz até agora adotada pela Europa (ajuda financeira e/ou intervenção militar). Os EUA tampouco estão imunes a essa problemática, mesmo que à margem das grandes correntes migratórias (dado o antagonismo entre a agenda assistencialista favorecida por seus núcleos hispânicos e afroamericanos, cuja taxa de natalidade faz antever sua maioria em 2043). No Brasil, a proliferação na base da pirâmide torna o ambiente político refém de noções que vão na contra mão do desenvolvimento e da competitividade. Por distintas razões, os três estariam assim condenados a um futuro medíocre (Europa e EUA - de onde vêm os Nobel de ciências e medicina - teriam sua trajetória de grandeza interrompida; o Brasil sequer a realizaria).
Mas o objetivo era enviar o excelente artigo de Niall Ferguson (caso você tenha chegado até aqui). Eu acrescentaria apenas um elemento novo dentre as causas do declínio do Império Romano, algo que o bom mocismo e o politicamente correto tem deixado de mencionar: a crescente introdução e propagação de valores cristãos, de solidariedade (somos todos irmãos), de rejeição à acumulação capitalista de riquezas (é mais fácil um camelo passar pelo buraco de uma agulha do que um rico entrar no reino dos Céus) e de apego ao trabalho (visto como uma punição pelo Pecado Capital).
Dito isso, recomendo sobretudo a leitura do 13° parágrafo do artigo do Ferguson, por sua atualidade.
Renato L R Marques
Renato L R Marques
Like the Roman empire, Europe has let its defences crumble
Niall Ferguson
The Sunday Times, 15 November 2015
I am not going to repeat what you have already read or heard.
I am not going to say that what happened in Paris on Friday night was
unprecedented horror, for it was not. I am not going to say that the world
stands with France, for it is a hollow phrase. Nor am I going to applaud
François Hollande’s pledge of “pitiless” vengeance, for I do not believe it. I
am, instead, going to tell you that this is exactly how civilisations
fall.
Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in
August 410AD: “. . . In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was
inflamed, and every restraint was removed . . . a cruel slaughter was made of
the Romans; and . . . the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies . .
. Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the
promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless. . .”
Now, does that not describe the scenes we witnessed in
Paris on Friday night? True, Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, represented
Rome’s demise as a slow burn. Gibbon covered more than 1,400 years of history.
The causes he identified ranged from the personality disorders of individual
emperors to the power of the Praetorian Guard and the rise of Sassanid Persia.
Decline shaded into fall, with monotheism acting as a kind of imperial dry rot.
For many years, more modern historians of “late antiquity”
tended to agree with Gibbon about the gradual nature of the process. Indeed,
some went further, arguing that “decline” was an anachronistic term, like the
word “barbarian”. Far from declining and falling, they insisted, the Roman
empire had imperceptibly merged with the Germanic tribes, producing a
multicultural post-imperial idyll that deserved a more flattering label than
“Dark Ages”. Recently, however, a new generation of historians has raised the
possibility that the process of Roman decline was in fact sudden — and bloody —
rather than smooth.
For Bryan Ward-Perkins, what happened was “violent seizure . .
. by barbarian invaders”. The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of
Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope
never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation,
throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of
prehistoric times”.
In five decades the population of Rome itself fell by
three-quarters. Archaeological evidence from the late fifth century — inferior
housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle — shows that the
benign influence of Rome diminished rapidly in the rest of western Europe. “The
end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single
generation.
Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire emphasises the
disastrous effects not just of mass migration but of organised violence: first
the westward shift of the Huns of Central Asia and then the Germanic irruption
into Roman territory. In his reading, the Visigoths who settled in Aquitaine
and the Vandals who conquered Carthage were attracted to the Roman empire by
its wealth, but were enabled to seize that wealth by the arms they acquired and
the skills they learnt from the Romans themselves.
“For the adventurous,” writes Heather, “the Roman empire,
while being a threat to their existence, also presented an unprecedented
opportunity to prosper . . . Once the Huns had pushed large numbers of [alien
groups] across the frontier, the Roman state became its own worst enemy. Its
military power and financial sophistication both hastened the process whereby
streams of incomers became coherent forces capable of carving out kingdoms from
its own body politic.”
Uncannily similar processes are destroying the European Union
today, though few of us want to recognise them for what they are. Like the
Roman Empire in the early fifth century, Europe has allowed its defences to
crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along
with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its shopping malls and sports
stadiums. At the same time it has opened its gates to outsiders who have
coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.
The distant shock to this weakened edifice has been the Syrian
civil war, though it has been a catalyst as much as a direct cause for the
great Völkerwanderung of 2015. As before, they have come from all over the
imperial periphery — from North Africa, from the Levant, from south Asia — but
this time they have come in their millions, not in mere tens of
thousands.
To be sure, most have come hoping only for a better life.
Things in their own countries have become just good enough economically for
them to afford to leave and just bad enough politically for them to risk
leaving. But they cannot stream northwards and westwards without some of that
political malaise coming with them. As Gibbon saw, convinced monotheists pose a
grave threat to a secular empire.
It is doubtless true to say that the overwhelming majority of
Muslims in Europe are not violent. But it is also true that the majority hold
views not easily reconciled with the principles of our liberal democracies,
including our novel notions about sexual equality and tolerance not merely of
religious diversity but of nearly all sexual proclivities. And it is thus
remarkably easy for a violent minority to acquire their weapons and prepare
their assaults on civilisation within these avowedly peace-loving communities.
I do not know enough about the fifth century to be able to
quote Romans who described each new act of barbarism as unprecedented, even
when it had happened multiple times before; or who issued pious calls for solidarity
after the fall of Rome, even when standing together meant falling together; or
who issued empty threats of pitiless revenge, even when all they intended to do
was to strike a melodramatic posture.
I do know that 21st-century Europe has itself to blame for the
mess it is now in. Surely nowhere in the world has devoted more resources to
the study of history than modern Europe did. When I went up to Oxford more than
30 years ago, it was taken for granted that in the first term I would study
Gibbon. It did no good. We learnt a lot of nonsense to the effect that
nationalism was a bad thing, nation states worse and empires the worst things
of all.
“Romans before the fall”, wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain
as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially
unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their
complacency.”
Poor, poor Paris. Killed by complacency.
Niall
Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch professor of history at Harvard, a senior fellow
of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author of Kissinger, 1923-1968:
The Idealist (Penguin)
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