I'm sorry that you feel that this has anything to do with my personal feelings about the relative worth of these groups of ancient people. Much of my academic training prior to my post graduate work was in history. This is historical analysis, and nothing more.
And I'm sorry, Rizla, but your interpretation of both what the article said and what I said is faulty. You're reacting emotionally, in reaction to some imagined slight, imo, and therefore you're not at all following the logic of what I said in relation to that article.
Let's turn to the article first. Clearly, the Romans thought that the tribes with whom they came into contact, i.e. the Celts, Germans etc. were "barbaric", as in wild, savage, lacking in civilization. (The Greeks felt the same way about the non-Greeks in Europe with whom they came into contact.)
That absolutely doesn't mean that they based or said they based their conquests on a
desire to civilize them, although it may mean they believed that gave them the
right to conquer them. Surely you can see the difference between those two things?
One way you can see what I mean is with the Greeks. The Romans never considered the Greeks savages. If anything they thought the Greeks were effete,
too civilized. Did it stop them from conquering them and enslaving a lot of them? Clearly not. It just meant that Greek slaves, since they were literate, educated, conversant with "civilized" norms, were the most prized slaves.
The thing to do, Rizla, when studying warfare, is to always, absolutely always "follow the money", or follow the economic gain. Tribes fight other tribes, countries fight other countries over resources: land, minerals, water, gold, women, slaves, you name it. If you can paint your opponents as barbaric sub-humans it helps to justify it in your mind.
Here's another way of seeing what I mean. The European countries, predominantly England, engaged in large scale conquests of other lands for economic reasons as well. However, the twist they added, which I personally think is hypocritical, is to state that they were doing it for the
good of these savages.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a very famous poem for its time called the White Man's Burden which served as a sort of banner for the concept.
"
In the later 20th century, in the context of decolonisation and the Developing World, the phrase "the white man's burden" was emblematic of the "well-intentioned" aspects of Western colonialism and "Eurocentrism".[16] The poem's imperialist interpretation also includes the milder, philanthropic colonialism of the missionaries:
The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit — economic or strategic or otherwise — of Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized).[17]
The poem positively represents colonialism as the moral burden of the white race, which is divinely destined to civilise the brutish and barbarous parts of the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden
This is the kind of attitude to which I was referring. There's nothing really like it in antiquity.
In fact, the Romans sort of invented the concept later revived in France after other large scale encounters with less "civilized" people of the "Noble Savage", whom they contrasted with their more civilized and therefore corrupt societies. Obviously, anyone with a head on their shoulders should know that both the "barbarity" and "nobleness" are exaggerations, formulated for their own benefit and not having anything necessarily to do with the "natives" themselves.
For example:
"
Thus it is that the German women live in a chastity that is impregnable, uncorrupted by the temptations of public shows or the excitements of banquets. Clandestine love-letters are unknown to men and women alike. Adultery in that populous nation is rare in the extreme, and punishment is summary and left to the husband. He shaves off his wife's hair, strips her in the presence of kinsmen, thrusts her from his house and flogs her through the whole village. They have, in fact, no mercy on a woman who prostitutes her chastity. Neither beauty, youth nor wealth can find the sinner a husband. No one in Germany finds vice amusing, or calls it 'up-to-date' to debauch and be debauched. It is still better with those states in which only virgins marry, and the hopes and prayers of a wife are settled once and for all. They take one husband, like the one body or life that they possess. No thought or desire must stray beyond him. They must not love the husband so much as the married state. To restrict the number of children or to put to death any born after the heir is considered criminal. Good morality is more effective in Germany than good laws in some places that we know."
https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/tacitusc/germany/chap1.htm
I don't know how you get from that to saying I was somehow disparaging the tribes of northern Europe.
In so far as I have a personal opinion about the "Fall of Rome", of course I'm not "for" something that destroyed not only our infrastructure, but decimated our people. However, I would feel the same way if I were not Italian, contrary to what you are implying. My opinion, academic as well as personal, is, as I have said again and again, the fact that I am always "for" the civilized "core" against the incursions of the less "civilized" peripheral peoples.
Frankly, I don't know how anyone not blinded by "ethnic" feeling and bias could think otherwise. How could one think it's a good thing for humanity as a whole to have all our carefully acquired technology and culture, built up over thousands of years, including literacy, be lost, and to be plunged into a "Dark Ages" of hundreds if not thousands of years, where we have to climb our way back up all over again, be something to be applauded. My attitude is the same whether we're talking about the Han Chinese, or the Indians, or certain cultures in Africa and South America. It has nothing to do with my personal ethnicity. I know it seems to be the cycle of human history, but I don't have to like it. For goodness sakes' both sides of my family are from Ligure areas. The Romans killed the Ligures, enslaved them, exiled them. Only some survived. I don't bear grudges, and not just because I'm also descended from the invaders. It's because the Ligures chose the wrong side, imo. They were much better after their incorporation into the Roman world than they were before.
Honestly, when I go through this over and over again, I am constantly amazed that so many people in this hobby think these are novel opinions, only held by Italians or other Southern Europeans. People, you have to read some of the thousands of books and papers written on the subject in English, books and the ideas from them to which I was introduced in AMERICAN universities, by AMERICANS of primarily Northern European ancestry.
