so Julius Caesar was Hitler
or was it Hitler trying to be Julius Caesar?
I really can't believe that's a serious question. Or, from your response to Maleth, that you think Caesar killed, or wanted to kill, more people than Hitler.
Warfare has been a constant in human history down to the present day. I may deplore it, but it's a fact. Probably, to get rid of it, we'd have to get rid of men. I'd personally be sorry to see that happen even if we could solve the procreation issue, but there you have it. Any acquaintance with the philosophy of Hobbes?
Even when talking about war, however, there are differences. Alexander, and Caesar/Augustus, if you want to broaden it out, and even, say, Napoleon, can't be equated with Hitler. They were garden variety conquerors. Once you submitted to their hegemony, as Maleth pointed out, you could accrue all the benefits of the culture or empire on an equal footing with the invaders. In the case of Greece, you became a Hellene, in the case of Rome you became a "Roman". So long as you paid your taxes and didn't revolt, you had all the benefits of the Empire. That's what happened to some of my ancestors, the Celt-Ligurians. Under Napoleon, you got all the reforms that had been introduced with the French Revolution, except for actual democracy, of course.
For a comparison to Hitler you'd have to use someone like Genghis Khan (new biography out on him, which is very interesting), who wanted the steppe cleared of people so that there would be lots of nice pasture land for their herds. Maybe Tamerlane is a good example too. They wanted to
exterminate the people they conquered, not just become overlords. We even have more modern examples of that in Europe, with the war in Kosovo, and its "ethnic cleansing" and the use of rape as a weapon of war.
As for the Celts, I would think that their goal when they invaded Italy starting in the first millennium BC, even sacking Rome itself in 390 BC, was sometimes to raid and plunder, and sometimes was to grab some land and become overlords, as was the case with the Greeks, and the Carthaginians, and the Romans. How did they wind up all over northern Italy, otherwise? However, they didn't exterminate the people in the lands they conquered, as can be seen in Liguria, for example. They mingled with them.
The ancestors of the Celts, or those of their ancestors who were Indo-Europeans, might have been a different story. Were the Indo-Europeans just wandering shepherds fleeing drying conditions on the steppe who happened to bring the plague along with them when they encountered the Neolithic Europeans who were already weakened by famine in the relatively sparsely populated northern areas of Europe? Or, were they horse riding hordes who ruthlessly butchered as many of the indigenous men as they could, those who hadn't already succumbed to famine and plague, that is?
I would prefer, given I have
some of their ancestry, even if not a lot, the former. Others either just think the latter happened, or positively relish the idea, as they made clear before they were trying to get accepted as quasi-academic researchers.
The jury is still out, don't you think? Although, I find it very suspicious that the mtDna lines survived quite well, but the ylines were almost wiped out.
