One of the most vivid and persistent myths from the ancient world has to do with the outcome of the Third Punic War, in which the victorious Romans supposedly sowed the the city with salt in order to ensure that nothing of value would ever grow there again.
That this is almost certainly a myth is not really up for debate among historians these days. The fact is that Carthage became a highly productive and major Roman holding within a century of the city’s conquest and destruction by the forces of the Roman Republic.
Nevertheless, the question remains: why, exactly, were the fathers of the city of Rome so utterly and implacably hostile to the god-kings and oligarchs of Carthage?
The Punic Wars were not merely a clash between rival powers over trading interests. We have seen plenty of those over the last 10,000 years of human history. Very, very few such conflicts have taken on the kind of utterly genocidal bent that permeated the history of those particular wars. The major example that comes to mind is the near-mythical Trojan War, which as far as anyone can tell was possibly based on a real-life conflict between the Myceneans and the Hittites over control over trading in the Aegean, and ended with the probable utter destruction of a city located in and around modern Hisarlik in Turkey.
Most such conflicts over trade and markets have generally ended with forced treaties and settlements that were wantonly unfair to one side or another; the Treaty of Nanking following the First Opium War between Britain and China is one such example, in which China was forcibly opened to trade with Britain following a brutal and humiliating defeat at the hands of a vastly more technologically advanced power.
So why is it, then, that in the wars between Rome and Carthage, the Roman Senate desired rather more than the mere subjugation and annexation of Carthaginian territories to feed their massive and growing population?
Why is it that the Romans decided eventually that the only way to deal with Carthage was to ensure its utter and complete destruction?
Why is it that Cato the Elder, one of the greatest statesmen in the history of Rome, was known for ending most of his speeches in the Roman Senate – on whatever subject, almost always unrelated to Carthage itself – with the phrase, ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam? Today we understand this as the phrase, Carthago delenda est:
CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED.
What was it about Carthage that drove the famously stern, patrician, disciplined, and austere Roman Republicans so crazy that they literally tore down the entire city at the climax of the Third Punic War, enslaved 50,000 people – about a tenth of the city’s population – and committed such a brutal sack of the place that the commanding Roman general, Scipio Aemilianus (descendant through both adoption and blood of the legendary Scipio Africanus), wept openly at the horrors that he saw perpetrated by the very men under his command?
Perhaps it was the likelihood that the Carthaginians sacrificed their own children to appease their pagan gods:
After decades of historians denying that the Carthaginians sacrificed their children as described in Greek accounts, a new study claims to have found ‘overwhelming’ evidence that the ancient civilisation really did carry out bloodthirsty practice.
Carthaginian parents ritually sacrificed young children as an offering to the gods and laid them to rest in special infant burial grounds, according to a team of international researchers.
They said that the archaeological, literary and documentary evidence for child sacrifice is ‘overwhelming’.
A collaborative paper by academics from institutions across the globe, including Oxford University reveals that previous well-meaning attempts to interpret these ancient burial grounds, called tophets, simply as child cemeteries, are misguided.
Instead, the researchers think the practice of child sacrifice could even hold the key to why the civilisation was founded in the first place.
The research pulls together literary, epigraphical, archaeological and historical evidence and confirms the Greek and Roman account of events that held sway until the 1970s, when scholars began to argue that the theory was simply anti-Carthaginian propaganda.
‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the stories about Carthaginian child sacrifice are true. This is something the Romans and Greeks said the Carthaginians did and it was part of the popular history of Carthage in the 18th and 19th centuries,’ said Dr Josephine Quinn, of the university’s Faculty of Classics, who an author of the paper, published in the journal Antiquity.
‘But in the 20th century, people increasingly took the view that this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks and Romans against their political enemy and that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander,’ she said.
The problem with archaeology is the same as that which confronts most fields of secular humanistic endeavour these days: they all stopped looking for the truth, and started looking for acceptance by the world instead.
The results have always and everywhere been the same. The difference between what academics think, and what actually happens – or, in the case of archaeology, happened – grows ever greater, until perception can no longer be reconciled with reality and the entire construct collapses in on itself.
It is worth noting in passing that archaeologists have long debated whether the Bible has any real historicity to it, and that many eminent persons in that once-noble field have stated categorically that the Book of Exodus was largely a work of fiction. Turns out, there is very good reason to think that their timelines are completely off and that the Exodus really did happen, in some form.
As for what relevance is held today for the blood feud between the Carthaginians and Romans – well, most of my readers are no doubt aware that the Governor of New York recently signed into law a bill that permits a woman to abort, which is to say, murder, her child even after 24 weeks in the womb. It is now legal for a woman to terminate her pregnancy right up to the few minutes before her child is born, for any reason whatsoever.
Now, to be as fair as possible, the actual contents of the law are designed to update New York State’s existing law concerning abortion.
Seriously, that’s as fair as we can be about this. The rest of the story concerning that “change to the law” is deeply depressing, and disgusting, for any functional society that wants to stay that way.
The old law used to say that abortion was part of the state’s criminal code, and terminating a pregnancy after 24 weeks was only permitted if the life of the mother was in danger. The new law says that abortion is no longer a criminal act, that abortion up to 24 weeks is permitted for any reason, and that there will be lots of lenient exceptions to the existing abortion law that basically allow a woman to terminate her pregnancy for any reason, right up to the moment of birth.
The fact that this abortion of a law – see what I did there? – was signed into force by a “Catholic” named Andrew Cuomo, should tell you just how low the Churchian dogmas have brought America. Such “Christians” have basically adopted the attitude that, even though they might personally oppose abortion for religious reasons, they have no right to impose that point of view on the broader society.
Their “reasoning” is as sick and perverted as the very concept of abortion itself.
Let us understand one thing very clearly: in advanced Western societies, abortion for any reason simply is not required.
After 24 weeks of gestation, a foetus has a better than 50% chance of surviving outside of the womb and growing to be a healthy human adult.
The WHO estimates that there are about 28 maternal deaths per 100,000 births in the USA these days, that an estimated 1,200 women a year die during childbirth, and that a further 60,000 women suffer complications from childbirth that are nearly fatal. That sounds pretty bad compared with other Western nations, and even many developing countries like Iran – until you remember that mortality statistics around the world tend to be heavily “fudged” to make the health care systems in those countries look better than they actually are.
Meanwhile, in the USA, at least, the CDC reported over 652,000 abortions throughout the country in 2016.
Finally, it is important to understand one critical technical distinction: when a foetus has to be terminated in order to save the life of the mother, that is NOT “abortion”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, a stereotypical “stiff-arsed upper-class twit” from the United Kingdom of PommieBastardLand if there ever was one, put it perfectly in an interview with a typically clueless media whorenalist from a while back, when he pointed out that the duty of a physician, no matter what his specialisation, is to preserve and protect life.
When it is clear that the baby is actually endangering the mother, and there is no realistic hope of preserving the baby’s life, and the only way to preserve the mother’s life is to terminate the pregnancy, then that is categorically not an abortion.
(The interesting thing about Mr. Rees-Mogg is that he is anything but a twit. He is one of the sharpest, most astute, most erudite, and most carefully calculating political minds in the West today. He walks a very fine line between adhering to his religious principles – which I find highly admirable – and accepting that his nation has already given up its soul to Moloch, Mammon, and Mephisto at this point.)
One of the most common examples of such a situation is the ectopic pregnancy, in which the foetus attaches itself to a part of the mother that is outside of the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are not viable, no matter what, and they result in significant risk of death for the mother.
What percentage of pregnancies end up ectopic?
Very roughly 2-5%.
Those ectopic pregnancies should not be counted among abortions because they are not such. They are genuinely unviable pregnancies which literally would have killed the mother, and by extension any future children she might have had.
How many births are there in the USA every year?
According to the CDC, it was a shade under 4 million in 2015.
So. There would have been perhaps 600,000 additional children in the USA if it were not for all of those abortions. A very large percentage of those children, incidentally, would have been black; not for nothing is it stated bluntly that the most dangerous place for a black child, especially a black girl, is the womb. Very, very few of the mothers who had those children would have truly been at significant risk during pregnancy and childbirth. And of those who were genuinely at risk, very few of them would genuinely have died.
The numbers tell us these things very clearly. The entire argument that abortion is about “women’s reproductive health” is absolute GARBAGE. The numbers simply do not support it.
What, then, is the point of legal abortion? It plainly isn’t about reproductive health and keeping women safe. It plainly isn’t about managing the Western population, which is entering a phase of deep demographic crisis in many countries.
As far as I can tell, it is to sacrifice the children of a nation to the selfish interests of its women.
In that respect, there is no moral difference whatsoever between what the women of Western nations do, by sacrificing their children to their own selfish desires, and what the ancient Carthaginians did in sacrificing their children to their pagan blood-god Moloch.
The major difference between then and now is that there is no Rome to massacre those who so wantonly and happily kill their own children, and no legion to raze their disgusting temples to the ground and sow the soil with salt. But, make no mistake, one way or another, that reckoning will happen. It just won’t happen – as far as we can tell right now – through fire and steel at the hands of men.
Understand one thing, brothers: what you see today is the righteous wrath of God, inflicted upon a very large group of His children who have quite evidently completely lost their minds and forgotten to whom they owe their allegiance and worship. The law that was passed in New York, along with another law that is being considered in Virginia, is as clear an indication as could possibly be given of a society that has become completely unbalanced and detached from its moral foundations.
A society that kills its own children to satiate daemons of its own design, does not deserve to live. It deserves to be destroyed, root and branch.
1 Comment
Didact,
Great post. Yeah the Romans has a chemically pure animus towards the Carthegenians. No doubt the child sacrifice is what convinced the Romans to off their rivals.
Bernal Diaz de Castillo had very much the same reaction when he saw the human sacrifices. He's quite vivid (I read it in Spanish and it's quite direct and frank). Cortes and his guys also brought fire and death.
Reese-Moog is also Catholic. He's got 6 kids and his wife is also a member of parliment. So he's got skin in the game and o yeah he's been the object of that wonderful British trait of deranged anti Catholicism.
xavier