Rhymes with Wrecksit

"It seems such a shame when the English claim the Earth
That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth"

Noel Coward - Mad Dogs and Englishmen

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"The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt, and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father's eight) that he thought the world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them..."

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
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"How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken?"

Ray Bradbury - Night Meeting


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During its imperial heyday around the year -100 to 300 the city of Rome peaked at a staggering pre-industrial population of a million. As the seat of a sprawling empire, it continued to grow as populations gravitated from the provinces being bled to support it, toward the locus of consumption. By 500 AD it had fallen to less than a tenth of that. Once an imperial heartland can no longer bleed the rest of the world to feed itself, its bloated aristocratic and servant castes will experience inevitable dieback. Yet I wouldn't be surprised, were I to laze about the thermae in the 400s, to hear half the rabble extolling the virtues of that Valentinian III as a strong leader pursuing domestic enemies of the state and how Rome would reconquer Africa in two shakes of a lamb's tail, and nothing will have changed and all will be right as rain again as it was in the time of the five good emperors. And anyway, we're stronger without cooperating with those inferior breeds in the outlying provinces. Quite!

The world's next major empire will be China (after it exterminates Korea, Japan and its southern neighbours) a repressive, genocidal, authoritarian culture vaster and more vicious than anything Europe has ever imagined. The fatcats of the world have ensured its supremacy by their love of Chinese wage slavery. Were any sanity to be found among Europeans now, it would point toward solidarity in negotiating a dignified retreat, toward abandoning dreams of cultural fiat or purity (and the unspoken and laughable ambitions of imperial reconquest underscoring separatist movements) and simply banding together to absorb, integrate, mediate and quite simply... survive, in some form, the several and inevitable Asiatic invasions which loom in the coming century.

Or not.
Retards.