Alexander the Great and Dixie’s Decline

Articles, Home 18 comments

In 336 BC, Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, did the unthinkable and invaded the vast Persian Empire. The Persian Empire was the premier power of the day, stretching from what is today Greece to modern Pakistan. A quarter of the entire population of the world was living under Persian rule at the empire’s height. The Persians, decades earlier, had even tried to conquer the Greek mainland, something that was prevented only by a mix of Greek tenacity, Persian arrogance, and some sheer luck. For Greece, a nation far smaller in terms of both territory and population, to launch an offensive war against Persia bordered on madness. Almost any observer would have predicted that not only would the invasion fail, but Persia would also likely use it as an excuse to reinvade Greece and crush their independence forever.

However, the unthinkable happened – Greece won and completely conquered the Persian Empire. By 323 BC, less than a decade after the invasion began, the greatest power the world had ever know up to that point ceased to exist. Such an unlikely event requires a deep examination. Typically, discussions around the fall of the Persian Empire revolve around the personal brilliance of Alexander the Great, and with good reason. Alexander is one of the greatest military minds to ever live, the kind of genius that only appears once every few centuries. Without Alexander, it is extremely unlikely Persia falls as spectacularly as it did.

While Alexander’s greatness is important, it is not the only reason for the Greek conquests of Persia, as there were factors beyond Alexander’s control. Though still very large, the Persian Empire had failed to learn anything from its invasion of Greece. Much of the reason why Persia could not take Greece, although being much larger, was because the Greek military was “lean and mean,” while the Persian military was badly bloated and dysfunctional. Rather than taking the failed invasion as a wakeup call, the Persians tried to go on as business as usual, and Alexander, leading a far smaller military, had a much better one.

Greece is a mountainous country, and much like Appalachia, created a tough and stubborn people. By contrast, the Persians were no longer the mighty warriors they had been under Cyrus the Great. The Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun coined the term “asabiyyah” to describe the process by which empires rise and fall. Originally, a nation is united and the harsh conditions they live under enables them to become tenacious warriors and forge an empire. But with an empire comes great wealth and creates a weaking of that warrior spirit, as well as, group cohesion. Decadence sets in, and it only becomes a matter of time and circumstances before the empire is destroyed. When Alexander invaded, the Greeks were on the first part of this process while the Persians were at the end stage of this trajectory.

The Persians also failed to culturally unite their empire. Stretching as far as it did, the Persian Empire was multi-ethnic, and the vast majority of its population did not consider themselves Persian and had no incentive to fight for it. In a way, Persia was the victim of its own success (like most empires). One of the reasons the Persians were able to build their empire is because they had a well-deserved reputation for tolerant rule. Generally speaking, Persians would allow local customs to go on as usual, and this gave their conquered populations little incentive for revolt, especially when the alternative was the cruel Babylonians. This is why the Bible speaks so much better of Persia than it does the other pagan empires that conquered Ancient Israel, especially the Babylonians or Assyrians. But this tolerance came with a serious downside – there was no sense of “Persian-ness” in the general population, there was no love of Persia, and no real motivation to save Persia. It was an empire held together by military might, and when Alexander exposed that to be a paper tiger in deep decay, everything fell apart.

But there is one more reason why Alexander was so successful – the Greeks had established the cultural ground by which Alexander’s conquests would be made possible. Part of this is ethnic in origin. The western fringes of the Persian Empire, western Anatolia, was ethnically Greek. When Alexander first launched his invasion, he was seen as a liberator, freeing his fellow Greeks from Persian rule. And while the more eastern Mediterranean areas of the Persian Empire were not majority Greek, as was western Anatolia, Alexander did enjoy some of the same advantages. The Greeks have always been a merchant people, and thus a significant number of Greeks had moved into the region for business. Although not the majority, Alexander was still greeted as a liberator by a significant portion of the western half of the Persian Empire. By the time he reached the less Greek portions of the Persian Empire, it was too late to save it, their earlier defeats had crippled them. But Alexander had another advantage that went beyond simple Greek ethnicity – Greek culture was largely viewed as superior to Persian culture, even by non-Greeks in the Persian Empire. Greeks worked had to make their culture attractive, something the Persians failed to do; as a result, Persia had its war effort hampered by deep internal division, many people of the empire were happy to be ruled by a superior culture. Greek culture, namely its philosophy and theater, was a welcomed substitute to Persian culture, which tried to import culture from conquered areas rather than export their own.

This matters because it gives key insights into why the Fourth Southern Reconstruction, having been earnestly launched in the wake of the despicable Dylann Roof shooting, has had success beyond anything I could have imagined on that dark day in 2015. Remember, though the War of Northern Aggression and First Reconstruction ended hopes for an Independent Southern nation, the ferocity of the resistance eventually forced the Yankees to accept home rule. The Second Reconstruction may have ended home rule, by literal bayonet, but it could not make Southerners give up their love of Dixie. However, during the Fourth Reconstruction, it appears as if they have a blank check to do whatever they want to the South.

When asked why the Yankees have had such dizzying success, most native Southerners will point to an increased number of non-Southerners living in Dixie, and this is a major factor. In the last 40 years, Atlanta, central North Carolina, Northern Virginia, southern Florida, and large parts of Texas have been lost to Dixie, and those are only the areas where the losses have been the most severe. Other places in Dixie have had less severe, but still significant losses. While immigration is important, it alone cannot explain everything. Part of this can also be laid at the feet of a generation of native Southerners that have been taught, both implicitly and explicitly by several significant forces, namely the schools and the media, that Dixie is a cultural backwater that has only given the world racism. This created a generation raised only to view Southerners (themselves) as violent rednecks who wake up every morning dreaming of killing black people for no reason. That generation has now grown up and can offer no resistance because they view what is happening to their homeland much the same way the non-Greeks welcomed Alexander, as a bringer of a superior culture.

But there is good news. After Alexander, the Persians learned their lesson, and after the fall of the Greco-Persian Seleucid Empire, the Persians were careful to exert their own civilization and worked hard to promote Persian culture. And they were successful, their efforts can still be seen today. Anyone who studies Islamic civilization will be struck by just how different Iran is from the rest of the Islamic world. Shiite Islam states that the leader of the Islamic world must be a decedent of Muhammad, specifically from his son-in-law Ali. Shiite Islam is more dynastic, and by accepting Shiite Islam, the Persians were able to have something closer to native Persian culture and its love of dynastic rule.

How the Persians were able to keep so much of their own native culture after the Islamic invasion is even more impressive in context. Though Arabization/Islamification tended to take centuries, far longer than most realize and for a verity of reasons too complex to do so here, it has been very successful. Arab culture, more or less, eventually replaced the native cultures of the people they conquered, and what exceptions there are, such as the Turkic nations, Indonesia, and Morocco, tend to be on the peripheries of the Islamic world. But that is not the case with Persia, it is in the middle of the Islamic world, and it was able to resist Arabization even as it was not able to resist Islamification, and it did so because the Persians were so fiercely proud to be Persian.

To restore Southern culture, Southerners must learn again to be proud to be Southerners and vigorously promote Southern culture. The consequences of at least one, and really two, generations of native Southerners accepting to look down on their own civilization is now being felt. For the first time in our history, a significant portion of our own population looks at the Yankees as liberators, bringing a superior culture rather than the busybodies and interlopers they have always been. I have a reputation within Identity Dixie writing circles as focusing on cultural elements: Southern Nationalists, and the broader Dissident Right, ignores culture at our own peril. A nation that cannot exercise, defend, and promote its own culture, and give its people a reason to love and protect it, will perish. We used to have that, and when we did the Yankees could never fully break us. The loss of that has given the Yankees that dangerous blank check. When you see young Southerners cheering on the destruction of their own inheritance and culture, an inheritance bought and paid for by the blood of Southern patriots, consider how they were taught to treat that inheritance.

Any normal person on the Right thinks the Roof shooting was abhorrent, and I do not know single traditional Southerner that views him as anything more than a ne’er-do-well, malcontent psychopath that decided to kill defenseless people rather than do something to actually build up his people. But his actions alone cannot explain what has happed since, that lays at the feet of the cultural degradation of Dixie that many young Southerners internalized. When the Fourth Reconstruction was launched, the groundwork had already been set, and that allowed for the stunning series of victories for our adversaries. A proud Dixie would still rightfully see Roof as evil, but his actions would not have been successfully used a pretext to destroy our history and culture. Our lack and loss of pride did that.

Related Posts

18 comments

  1. To restore Southern culture, Southerners must learn again to be proud to be Southerners and vigorously promote Southern culture. The consequences of at least one, and really two, generations of native Southerners accepting to look down on their own civilization is now being felt. For the first time in our history, a significant portion of our own population looks at the Yankees as liberators, bringing a superior culture rather than the busybodies and interlopers they have always been. … Southern Nationalists, and the broader Dissident Right, ignores culture at our own peril. A nation that cannot exercise, defend, and promote its own culture, and give its people a reason to love and protect it, will perish. We used to have that, and when we did the Yankees could never fully break us. The loss of that has given the Yankees that dangerous blank check. When you see young Southerners cheering on the destruction of their own inheritance and culture, an inheritance bought and paid for by the blood of Southern patriots, consider how they were taught to treat that inheritance.

    A wonderfully written paragraph; I could not agree more. The Yankee invader bears great responsibility in all of this, either directly or indirectly, as you well know. It is, after all, his “universal” public education system and its thoroughly indoctrinated “teachers” under which young Southerners have been trained for several generations to despise their proud ancestors and to reject their superior culture as inferior to the Yankee; it is, after all, his “universal” public education system which has systematically taught generations of young Southerners that integration and miscegenation – mixing Southern blood with foreigners, including Yankees – is good and righteous altogether.

    I often quote William James on matters such as this when he wrote (paraphrase) that ‘there is nothing so absurd than when you repeat a thing often enough, people begin to believe it.’ Remember the advice Daniel Webster allegedly gave to two of his Southern Senate colleagues when he asked of them privately in the Capitol Rotunda whether Southerners could not put an immediate end to slavery in their states. They answered that Southerners could not be compelled to end slavery by Yankee coercion. To which Mr. Webster reportedly answered, ‘well then, gentlemen, you had best make haste back to the South and tell your constituents to beat their ploughshares into swords, because Yankee school marms have successfully taught two generations of Northerners to hate slavery and slave holders, and to go to war with them.’

    Unrighteousness seeks to corrupt and convert the children. Always. Excellent article!

    1. I wouldn’t want to, and probably shouldn’t, make the above statements without the authority of Dr. Dabney to back me up. To wit:

      There is one point on which you insist too little, which is vital to the young citizens of the South. This is, that he shall not allow the dominant party to teach him a perverted history of the past contests. This is a mistake of which you are in imminent peril.

      With all the astute activity of their race, our conquerors strain every nerve to pre-occupy the ears of all America with the false version of affairs which suits the purposes of their usurpation. With a gigantic sweep of mendacity, this literature aims to falsify or misrepresent everything; the very facts of history, the principles of the former Constitution as admitted in the days of freedom by all statesmen of all parties; the characters and motives of our patriots; the purposes of parties; the very essential names of rights and virtues and vices. The whole sway of their commercial and political ascendancy is exerted to fill the South with this false literature. Its sheets come up, like the frogs of Egypt, into our houses, our bed chambers, our very kneading troughs.

      Now, against this deluge of perversions I solemnly warn young men of the South, not for our sakes, but for their own. Even if the memory of the defeated had no rights; if historical truth had no prerogatives; if it were the same to you that the sires whose blood fills your veins, and whose names you bear, be written down as traitors by the pen of slanderous history, still it is essential to your own future that you shall learn the history of the past truly. For the institutions which are to be, however unlike those which have been, must have a causal relation to them: must be in some sense the progeny of them.

      The chrysalis is very unlike its progeny, but nonetheless its traits determine those of the gorgeous butterfly. The acorn is not like a tree, yet its species determines the shape and qualities of the monarch of the forest. To-morrow’s configuration of the planets may be very dissimilar from that of to-day, but it will be rigidly consequential thereon. Hence the astronomer who misconceives and misstates the positions of the orbs to-day, must inevitably err in his prediction of their conjunctions to-morrow. So if public men will gratify their spite, or revenge, or lust of sectional power by misrepresenting the late events, they thereby condemn themselves to fatal blunderings and mistakes in prognosticating that future which can only be the caused sequel to this.

      If you would not be mere blunderers in your new constructions, then you must understand aright the structure of those recent actions on which they must found themselves. You will seek to learn them, not from a Greeley or a Henry Wilson, but from a Stephens and a Davis. While you do not allow your judgment to be hoodwinked by even the possible exaggerations of our own patriots, still less will yon yield your minds to the malignant fables of those partisans who think they can construct history as unscrupulously as a political ring.

      Our age presents the strange instance of a numerous party, who think they can circumvent the resistless forces of truth by systematically misnaming facts and fallacies, who are deliberately building a whole system of empire on the substitution of light for darkness and darkness for light, of good for evil and evil for good, calling that master in our government which was servant, that patriotism which was treason, and that treason which was true, law-preserving patriotism, and that aggression which was righteous defense.

      If you wish to be buried deeper than thrice buried Troy beneath the final mountains of both defeat and shame, go with these architects of detraction. They are but arraying themselves against that unchangeable God who has said: “The lying tongue is but for a moment, but the lip of truth shall be established forever.”

      – R.L. Dabney, The New South, 1882 (paragraph breaks, mine)

        1. You’re very welcome, sir. I have quoted Dr. Dabney and linked to his “works” many times over the years, both here and elsewhere. But German Confederate has probably linked to his writings even more than I have in these threads. In any case, I’m very gratified that you were able to find Dr. Dabney’s prophetic essays online, and without my assistance. Keep in mind as well that he wrote Stonewall Jackson’s biography, upon which subsequent biographies of the man always rely. To say nothing of Dabney’s “Defense of Virginia and of the South,” wherein he obliterates, at every turn, the northern (Yankee) revisionist history of the WBTS. They say we’re “historical revisionists,” and they’re right, technically speaking; we’re historical revisionists revising the Yankee lies about the war they told (and continue to tell) from the beginning. …

  2. Roof got gobsmacked by the redpill and reacted violently. It’s simply not correct to say he was a mindless psychopath who randomly decided to go on a killing spree, anymore than the subsequent Lone Wolf shooters.

    What we need is more of a real life organized presence that can give young men a place to work for the good of their Folk, rather than scattered acts of destruction…

    1. Roof got gobsmacked by the redpill and reacted violently.

      No. Roof got “gobsmacked” by psychotropic drugs. It’s the “elephant in the room” that virtually no one has the courage or intestinal fortitude to acknowledge. Roof’s actions were those of a drug-addled idiot, pure and simple. Expect a bunch more of it in future because of course drug addled idiots on psychotropic “medications” is the “wave of the future.” …

      1. I acknowledge the role that these “happy pills” play in making unhappy people go off the deep end, including Roof, but if you read his own words he said realizing the extent of Black-on-White violence is what really pissed him off and opened his eyes to reality.

        You tell people that they are being targeted for oppression and genocide, not just of your culture but physically, and show them the proof, some angry young men will lash out drugs or no drugs. Hence all the shootings that have happened since, it can’t all be blamed on drugs or being stupid or evil.

        1. Hence all the shootings that have happened since, it can’t all be blamed on drugs or being stupid or evil.

          No one said it could. But, in any case, provide me with examples of “all the shootings that have happened since,” that have nothing whatever to do with psychotropic drug use/abuse. …

          1. Don’t try, you’ll fail. I’ve dealt with this problem more times than any of us cares to count, including yours truly. I would never put my children on psychotropic drugs for any reason, but I can’t control, at length, what people close to me choose to do with their own children. The urge to “kill somebody” is a common theme amongst ADD or ADHD types who, aside from the psychotropic medications their dumbass mothers agreed to have administered to them at an early age and for perpetuity, are basically normal people. Simple as that.

          2. Brenton Tarrant got rich off of crypto currency and traveled the world, had no history of mental issues or anti-depressants that I’m aware of. He wasn’t a poor, isolated young man.

            John Earnest in Poway was by all accounts a gifted student with a promising life ahead of him, again no history of anti-depressants that I’m aware of.

            I could be wrong. But we’re kind of getting in the weeds here…I stand by my original statement regardless. Chalking Roof up to a “psychopath” is incorrect. Psychopaths act out of self-interest, are impulsive and have low-self control. Many of these acts are planned ahead and motivated by anger at what is happening to Whites.

  3. Brenton Tarrant got rich off of crypto currency and traveled the world, had no history of mental issues or anti-depressants that I’m aware of. He wasn’t a poor, isolated young man.

    John Earnest in Poway was by all accounts a gifted student with a promising life ahead of him, again no history of anti-depressants that I’m aware of.

    I’m assuming that both of these individuals (whom I admittedly know nothing about) killed somebody, and killed somebody because they were “redpilled,” and had, in each case, no connection whatever to psychotrobic drugs? That is what you are arguing, no?

  4. Another factor for T Morris to consider: use of pornography and pornography addiction. Given that its use is statistically 100% amongst the male youth population, and how it affects the brain (brain scans of porn addicts show similar results to hardcore drug addicts), and that wild mood swings and all-the-like are a behavioral result of it, it would seem to be at least a contributing factor.

    The modern varieties of hardcore media, whether its music (dance music with a heavy beat, gangsta rap, certain aggressive metal genres), videogames, TV shows/movies, etc would also likewise contribute to stirring up ones emotions. They’re all examples of hyper-stimulus that weren’t in existence even a few decades ago.

    Compare how you feel after listening to Slavonic or Gregorian chants with how you feel after listening to someone like Skrillex’s “Bangarang” (super popular dubstep song from about a decade ago, over a billion views on YouTube alone– very aggressive tempo)

    No, I’m not saying that any one of these things would necessarily cause someone to react violently in isolation, I’m not 1990s-era Joe Liberman blaming videogames or calling Doom a “murder simulator” (hilarious given the primitiveness of the graphics), but when you mix them all together in to the potent cocktail we call “modern society”, complete with moral relativism, social isolation, and the view of life that “we’re all just atoms in the void, maaan!”, the sum could (likely is) greater than its individual parts.

    P.S. you’re probably right about the drugs though– ADD/ADHD drugs are a stimulant and basically a low-key version of street meth, and, arguably, when it comes to anti-depressant drugs, I imagine a depressed person *not* given anti-depressants would actually be far *less likely* to be violent, given the low-energy and lackluster motivational effects of depression

    1. Yes, I agree that psychotropic drug addiction and porn addiction are two peas in a pod. Sorry for the delay in responding, by the way.

  5. Wonderful article, I submitted one on taking notes from the Volkish movements of Germany and trying to revive the native cultures of the south. I’m from the Tampa Bay area and the revival of heros from my area based off of the crackers, Bobby hicks and Sumter de Leon Lowry Jr is the utmost importance. A counter culture is important and when we eventually have state power I think deurbanization to reconnect blood and soil would work wonders on the population. Having people so clumped together in small areas it’s healthy and it sure is causing dysgenic behavior. Reviving a farming culture in the south will make it more rugged and eugenic. The revival of culture and ecology will need to go hand in hand and i personally think it will do wonders for the south. A guild economics is a good Christian solution to fight capitalism, without a reactionary turn to authoritarian Communism.

    1. Roof had to have been possessed.

      I agree; Roof was definitely possessed, by an evil spirit that the New Testament names “Legion.” The “gateway” to his possession we might not agree on, but I propose in any case that he (and numerous others before and after him) were and are possessed of evil spirits whose gateway into their souls and lives is psychotropic drug use/abuse. I acknowledge Benjamin’s point above concerning p*rnography, but these are just two peas in a pod as far as I’m concerned. …

  7. Pingback: Culture Matters — The Tactical Hermit | Vermont Folk Troth

Comments are closed.