Couverture de The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 21: Just Like the Fall of Rome

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 Mike Isaacson: Rome gets sacked ONE TIME, and that’s all these people can talk about! [Theme song] Nazi SS UFOsLizards wearing human clothesHinduism’s secret codesThese are nazi lies Race and IQ are in genesWarfare keeps the nation cleanWhiteness is an AIDS vaccineThese are nazi lies Hollow earth, white genocideMuslim’s rampant femicideShooting suspects named Sam HydeHiter lived and no Jews died Army, navy, and the copsSecret service, special opsThey protect us, not sweatshopsThese are nazi lies Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today we’re talking with Edward Watts, professor of history and Alkaviadis Vassiliadis Endowed Chair in Byzantine Greek History at the University of California San Diego. He’s here to talk to us about his book, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. The book is an extraordinary scholarly endeavor that managed to give a detailed and engaging history of 1700 years of Roman history in under 300 pages. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Watts. Edward Watts: Thanks so much for having me. It's exciting to be here. Mike: All right. Now, you are one of the rare guests on our show whose book was actually directed at debunking Nazi lies. Tell us what you had in mind when you were writing this book. Edward: So the thing that prompted me to write this book was a recognition that the history of Rome, and in particular the legacy of Rome as it relates to the end of Roman history, was something that was being repeatedly misused across thousands of years to justify doing all sorts of violence and horrible things to people who really in the Roman context had very little to do with the decline of Rome, and in a post-Roman context, had nothing really to do with the challenges that people using the legacy of Rome wanted to try to address. And in particular, what prompted this was the recognition after 2016 of how stories about the classical past and the Roman past were being used on the far right and the sort of fascist fringe as a way of pointing to where they saw to be challenging dynamics and changes, critical changes, in the way that society was functioning. What was happening was people were doing things like using the story of the Gothic migrations in the 4th century AD to talk about the need to do radical things in our society related to immigration. And the discussions were just misusing the Roman past in really aggressive ways as kind of proof for radical ideas that didn't really relate to anything that happened in the past and I think are generally not things that people would be willing to accept in the present. And Rome provides a kind of argument when it's misunderstood,when Roman history is misunderstood, it provides a kind of argument that people are not familiar enough with to be able to refute, that might get people who think that a certain policy is aggressive or inhumane or unnecessary to think twice about whether that policy is something that is a response to a problem that people need to consider. And that's just wrong. It's a wrong way to use Roman history. It's a wrong way to use history altogether. And it's a rhetoric that really needs to be highlighted and pointed to so that people can see how insidious these kinds of comparisons can be. Mike: Okay, so your book discusses the idea of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which you say started before any such decline or fall in the late Republic. What was politics like in the Roman Empire before the myth of Rome's decline popped up? Edward: So this is an interesting question because the story of Roman decline actually shows up in some of the very earliest Roman literature that we have. So the very first sort of intact Latin texts that we have from the Roman period are things like the plays of Plautus. In one of the earlier plays of Plautus, he is already making fun of people for saying that Rome is in decline. And he's saying this at a time right after the Roman victory over Hannibal when there is no evidence that Rome is in decline at all. And yet we know that there are politicians who are pushing this idea that the victory over Hannibal has unleashed a kind of moral decline in Rome that is leading to the degeneration of Roman morals and Roman behaviors and Roman social structures in such a fashion that will disrupt the ability of Rome to continue. This is just not something that most people recognized to be true, but what we see when politicians in the third century and second century BC are saying things like this, they aren't particularly interested in describing an objective reality. What they're looking to do is insert ideas into popular discourse, so that people in the context of their society begin to think it might be possible that decline exists. So I think that when we look at Roman history before Roman literature, or before these pieces of Roman literature exist, we really are looking at much later reconstructions. But I think that it's fair to say ...
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