‘Hard Times Create Strong Men, Strong Men Create Good Times, Good Times Create Weak Men, Weak Men Create Hard Times’ — Not Only False, But Fascist Rhetoric
“..Showing the natural changes of Landscape & those effected by man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization, to Luxury, the Vicious state or state of destruction and to the state of Ruin & Desolation.
The philosophy of my subject is drawn from the history of the past, wherein we see how nations have risen from the Savage state to that of Power & Glory & then fallen & become extinct…” — Thomas Cole to Luman Reed, conceiving of his five part series of painting dubbed The Course of Empire.
The human evolutionary niche exists at the confluence of advanced cognitive development and societal sophistication. It is the capability to not only hone rudimentary spears and bludgeons, but to operate in tandem with our kind to slay woolly mammoths and fashion warm garments from its furs, to run down antelopes to the point of exhaustion and hurriedly carry its slain corpse home before the carcass attracts other predators.
The natural conclusion of such complex organization is civilization. Where once half-a-dozen hunters acting as one to fell their prey for subsistence served as the height of human conflict, now mankind became dominated by empires and with them, imperial war-making. Tens of thousands of humans engaged in bloody internecine warfare with one another, serving as the killing apparatus of gestalt organisms compromised of countless villages, farms and cities.
While the propensity of civilization’s elite to spend the flesh of its youth and the labor of its craftsmen in the naked pursuit of further enrichment under a myriad of ostensible justifications endures, it rests upon a vast legacy. Many are oft struck with a sense of awe at the sight of those ancient marble edifices of Rome and Greece, flensed clean of their painted flesh down to the alabaster hypodermis that has become such prominent fixtures in the historical conscious. The detritus of empires and kingdoms that once stretched the breadth of the known world, tombstones to a past lauded as glorious.
The intuitive questions soon surface: Why did these goliaths of antiquity fall? How? The answer is presented with an appealing flair of brevity: Decadence.
It was the debauchery of the later Emperors, too enmeshed in the flagrant congress of orgies and the intoxication of wine to notice the barbarians sundering their gates. It was the Ottoman Sultans softened by the easy living of their harems and the sweet caresses of countless concubines, too meek to offer opposition to jealous janissaries and vapid viziers. It was the city-born descendants of Genghis Khan, divorced from their forefathers roughed upbringings of fermented mare’s milk, saddle-sore raids and the open skies.
It was effeminacy.
It was weakness.
It was complacency.
And its wrong.
You are a Roman citizen in the late century AD, living through a turbulent period that historians nearly two thousand years after your death would dub the Crisis of the Third Century. If that doesn’t sound like it bodes well for your livelihood, that’s because it doesn’t.
Your family started the century off well being granted Roman citizenship via the Edict of Caracalla and your grandfather had established himself as a prosperous tanner in the city of Massalia or modern day Marseille. It was only during you and your father’s lifetimes that times became lean. Massalia, a prominent port city, suffered from the large-scale destabilization of the era and the decline in trade that followed, as merchants could no longer travel from one corner of the empire to another in safety.
Hyperinflation caused by decades of diluting coinage with baser materials to sate a bloated army made currency worthless, families that could no longer subsist on increasingly scarce and expensive grain shipments over fraught trade routes fled the cities to work on expansive manors for basic subsistence, planting the seed of what would germinate into feudalism. Intermittent civil wars, raids and famine sap the energy from you. You witness your family wither away to the yearly attrition, any hopes of higher education or service ebb to nothing as your malnourished form concerns itself solely with survival. Times are very, very hard but you are anything but strong.
This situation is caused not by a deficit of strong men, but a surplus of them.
The Crisis of the Third Century is characterized by a series of short-lived warlords known as Barracks Emperors. These men were anything but ‘weak’ in the conventional sense; they often had spent years at the frontier battling off enemy incursion and in the case of Maximinus Thrax, this strength was materialized literally. Thrax was a veteran soldier who had taken the throne by force of arms, and some historical sources claim him to have been north of eight feet tall with a thumb thick enough to wear his wife’s bracelet as a ring. Whilst no doubt much of this is the typical exaggeration from dubious accounts, he no doubt dwarfed the average man of the era.
Yet this ‘strong man’ did not bring peace, instead suffering the ignominious and all-too-common fate of Roman Emperors: murdered by his own legionaires, an end also shared by his two successors. Strong man after strong man rose, yet instead of bringing about the ‘good times’ each only exacerbated it.
The myth of Imperial decadence leading to the downfall of Rome is a persuasive one, but wholly false. Even as an suppositional simplification, it has no basis in reality. When the Vandals sacked Rome in 410, they did not extinguish the beacon of ‘western civilization’ nor interrupt the revelry of debauched Roman denizens in their marble Eden as conceived in the creative elations of Cole, but rather stripped what wealth remained from an increasingly unimportant cultural hub: defensible Ravenna had been made capital of the empire eight years before.
So why is the idea of ‘weak men’ and ‘degeneracy’ pushed and how does it relate to fascist propaganda?
Fascism is hardly the most coherent ideology and precisely what qualifies it is a manner of some dispute even among modern-day historians and scholars. I tend towards Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism as a concise underpinning for its general tenets, some of which we’ll use to explore the appeal of the myth of imperial decadence in no particular order.
12. “Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
10. “Contempt for the Weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate Leader who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
The cornerstone of the mythical imperial decadence is the notion of a systemic, civic weakness. Lounging senators and patricians are contrasted with images of valiant, brave legionaries, carving out the empire that their descendants now squander in vain hedonism. Stripped of any ameliorating veneer, ‘weakness’ is qualified the absence of warfare, which is viewed as inherently strengthening. The image of the legionary is idolized, and any industry outside of war is amalgamated into effeminate indulgence. Aqueducts and art come as perfunctory mentions, only enabled or directly derived from warfare thus further reinforcing its necessity and corporate health.
Weakness becomes homosexuality, degeneracy, pacifism.
Strength becomes soldiering, a love of conquest and plunder.
9. “Pacifism is Trafficking with the Enemy” because “Life is Permanent Warfare” — there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to NOT build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
Fascism, as a ideology that promises drastic increases in the living standards of its average population whilst simultaneously courting elites that oft hold a disproportionate share of the wealth must rely on warfare to either secure the promised resources from outsider groups or incite an atmosphere of constant military posturing and xenophobia to sate the populace’s desire for material satisfaction with fear and nationalist gratification.
A preconception of history as a cyclical story of empires being built by warriors and crumbling under the misrule of ‘weak’ men — whom every flaw of ‘degeneracy’ may also be implicitly assigned to — is crucial to constructing a framework of warfare as a necessity.
Further playing into the narrative, are the ‘barbarians’ that herald the coup de grace made only possible by the long decline of decadence. These barbarians are an analogue for the out-group foe of the day; the Muslim, the Jew, the Slav. The pillaging Vandal serves as the Jungian archetype for the foreigner in fascist thought, forever waiting for a moment of weakness to defile and destroy the work of mythologized ancestors, the illusive justification for the forever war.
Of course, the narrative decomposes the more critically it is examined.
The early Roman Empire was at its strongest not when the entire nation was apart of some imagined corpus of valiant warriors, but rather when the majority of the population could remain in their provinces at peace to tend to their industries or trade across the Mediterranean while a small minority of soldiers, many of which auxiliaries serving only for the hopes of class advancement, ruthlessly subjugate, enslave and pillage far weaker tribes and civilizations hundreds of miles away and provide their elites a steady trickle of plunder and cheap labor. The forcible exploitation of foreigners is lauded as a great virtue, a situation that does not sound altogether unfamiliar to those living in western countries.
The Roman Empire was not supplemented by a coterie of squalling barbarians, but rather thoroughly romanized kinglets who continued to claim the legitimacy of the old empire and the auspices of its traditions.
Weak men and indulgence did not precipitate the demise of the (Western) Roman Empire, but a decline in trade and stability as the empire’s citizens fled to the safety of increasingly walled cities, fortified manors as the ‘hard men’ filled the power vacuums and did little more but bankrupt the state on lavish largesse to their legions.
This general sentiment of ‘civilizational collapse’ (itself, something of a myth, as previously mentioned neither Rome nor any other empires of the past simply twinkled into non-existence, but rather lived on via rump states, successors and other continuations) being atomized down to what essentially amounts to laziness and whatever the authoritarian/fascist doesn’t like and deems ‘degenerate’ echos today. Stymied American wage growth, income inequality and crumbling infrastructure is attributed to the ostensibly indolent, flamboyant millennials rather than a inherently unjust economic system with the same air of dismissive ignorance as the fall of Rome is associated with drunken Emperors groping their sisters, and with just as much accuracy. That is to say, none.
The myth of Imperial decadence is persuasive and appealing to the layman due to its simplicity and the aesthetic symmetry of its hard-good, weak-hard, cyclical view, but is quintessentially a falsified basis for a fascist world-view of perpetual war and should be vehemently rejected, even if spread unknowingly.
