The End Is Always Near

by Dan Carlin

  * Peter Heather thinks the whole battle was smaller, and the Roman deaths more like ten thousand men.

  * One can’t help but think of the slaves of the American South who often fled to native tribes like the Seminole and Cherokee to join them as tribal members.

  * Odoacer.

  * For you Star Trek fans. “Backup” or “emergency power” for everyone else.

  * The Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (which had formerly been called Byzantium), is often referred to by historians as the Byzantine Empire when discussing the period after the fall of the western empire. The inhabitants always referred to themselves as “Romans,” though.

  * Also sometimes called the Western Church or the Latin Church.

  * And the French name for Germany is Allemagne, after the Alemanni tribe in this very story.

  * There are a lot of good Clovis stories in the history books. His historical press got better after his conversion, but it seems pretty clear Clovis was a badass.

  * Apparently in large part due to the influence of his wife Clotilde, who was sainted by the church for her actions.

  * This is obviously the Gallic/French version of his name. In the German version, he’s “Karl der Grosse.” His native tongue was Old German. The question over which name should be used has prompted disagreement in the past, and some feel it has political overtones in Europe even today.

  * He’d be somewhat taller than average today, but in the seventh century he towered over most of his subjects. His bones seem to show a man probably about six feet tall and weighing about 175 pounds. That height would be six inches taller than the average man of his day. A weight of 175 pounds seems thin, but Charlemagne died an old man for that era and may have been somewhat withered (sixty-five to seventy-two is the usual range given, but his exact age is disputed).

  * “Emperor of the Romans.” This act by Pope Leo III opened a Pandora’s box of issues that would plague Europe for centuries. The primacy of church or state, for example. If the pope crowned the emperor, does that mean the pope made the emperor? Who is superior in this symbolism? Lots of people would die over questions like this. Charlemagne altered the title to read: “The Most Supreme Augustus, Crowned by God, the Great and Peace-Loving Ruler of the Roman Empire, as well as by the Grace of God the Franks and the Lombards.”

  * In fact, if you take the Western Church’s interpretation, the newly crowned Charles was the only “Roman emperor.” At this time, an empress had taken power in Constantinople, and that to them was deemed illegitimate femineum imperium (“a woman’s rule”). Hence the Western Church jumped at the chance to nominate not merely a new emperor for itself but the new emperor for all.

  * Many historians think this “branding” was part of an effort to find a sort of ideological glue that could unite all the different peoples under the empire’s dominion in a way similar to what Rome had been able to do.

  * Translated usually as “renovation,” “renewal,” or “updating” of the Roman Empire.

  * Roger Collins says that Charlemagne was aiming for his educated “literate” class of people to possess the equivalent of about a Roman-era primary-level education. But he says that before we disparage that, we should consider “the base from which they started.” This was more about educating people for positions in the clergy rather than educating laypeople.

  * That will eventually morph into central Europe’s “Holy Roman Empire,” of which Voltaire famously quipped, “This body which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”

  * Were these the same people? Good question.

  * Hard to define the line here between actual religious reasons for doing things and what might have been seen as a sort of power politics. If Christianized Saxons give the empire less trouble than the pagan variety, that might explain the “convert or die” aspect to the struggle.

  * The World Tree, a.k.a. Irminsul, in the Teutoburg Forest, was the seat of worship.

  * This date applies only to the most medically advanced societies. In less advanced areas, medical progress came later.

  * These are just the ones for which records are available. Most of these ancient events have no surviving accounts to document what occurred.

  * Pericles lost two sons to the same epidemic and is supposed to have been despondent about it. Who wouldn’t be?

  * Caused by hemorrhages under the skin that occur in the late stages of the disease.

  * When they presumably had no access for months to fresh fruit or vegetables that are usually an easy source of vitamin C.

  * Note that modern childhood illnesses, William Rosen writes, have evolved from “far more dangerous versions” that killed “hundreds of thousands, possibly millions.”

  * This was one of the very valuable roles religion played for the people in these cultures.

  * In a world that obviously had a fraction of our current population.

  * According to Rosen, “bubonic plague kills ‘only’ four to seven out of ten victims, [whereas] septicemic plague is virtually 100% deadly.”

  * In an age, let’s remember, when the people were religious, and frankly, superstitious, to a degree that most people today, even very devout people, would consider fanatical.

  * Not just that, but many of these people probably joined the clergy to get into a career. Many of these men were more scribes than preachers of the Gospel or leaders of a religious flock. It’s probably not fair to hold them all up to a modern “priestly” standard.

  * If you happen to be Protestant, maybe you consider this development to be a benefit of the Black Death.

  * According to the author Henrik Svensen, Jews were almost wiped out of a couple of European nations during this era because of their association with the plague.

  * Based on a European population of 740 million.

  * Many places have seen their populations grow steadily since the era of the Black Death. Interestingly enough, though, the collapses can be almost as rapid as the explosions in population. If every couple simply has a single child, a given population will halve in a generation. This isn’t conjecture. In the 1990s, Russian birth rates took a turn into negative territory, and other developed nations currently have similar demographic trends.

  * This can take you down the intellectual rabbit hole quickly. Do vaccines short-circuit nature’s delicate population-balance mechanisms? Do longer life spans and lower child mortality rates damage the earth? If we decided they did, would we ever voluntarily forsake them to allow “nature to take its course”? Science fiction indeed.

  * And as we are all aware from the headlines, even older maladies are increasingly developing tolerances to our current antibiotics.

  * All these death tolls are estimates, but the First World War is usually blamed for between 16 and 19 million deaths. The Spanish Influenza killed tens of millions.

  * Imagine this epidemic in our modern twenty-first-century international travel environment.

  * Theaters, sporting events, festivals, and even elections were subject to disruption to prevent large numbers of people from gathering in ways that might spread disease.

  * It’s interesting to examine how people, cities, and societies reacted to this example of a modern plague. It’s a rare modern case study.

  * It’s intriguing to wonder about how losing younger people affects a society differently than losing older ones. One of the oft-mentioned ramifications of the Spanish Flu pandemic was an increase in the popularity of occult practices connected to communicating with the dead. Mediums and séances, for example, were very popular in the postflu period. One senses a desperation that would make more sense for grieving parents or spouses mourning people cut down early rather than those wishing to contact parents or grandparents who had lived full life spans and died old, as nature seemed to intend.

  * Isn’t this what the bad guy Thanos is doing in the Marvel/Disney Avengers movies? Wiping out half of the
life in the universe to ease the strains of overpopulation? Perhaps the Thanos character is a metaphor for disease as a maintenance tool.

  * This is an understandable rationale one might use today as well. The less you see of a disease, the less you feel an urgency to inoculate yourself.

  * When the USSR disintegrated in the early 1990s, fears similar to those of nuclear experts, who worried about lax safeguards for nuclear weapons, concerned biological weapons experts, who worried about Soviet stores of bioweapons and diseases falling into the hands of terrorists or rogue states.

  * For beneficial reasons, creating vaccines, studying genome stuff, etc.

  * Multiple times so far, including cases in 2013 and 2014.

  * Including, crazily enough, to the population of the attacker.

  * The US government has already warned of the danger of people replicating killer diseases, pointing out that the genome information for smallpox is posted on the Internet.

  * Part of what made AIDS a different sort of plague from something like smallpox or influenza was its long incubation and often longer survival period compared with most traditional epidemic diseases. It gave society more time to adjust than would have been the case if AIDS had killed all the victims it claimed from inception to today in a single year or two. Think of the societal destabilization that would have happened if the estimated thirty-five to forty-two million who have died from AIDS had perished in a matter of months or a year. It was destabilizing enough as it was.

  * Yet smallpox isn’t considered a great disease to use as a weapon to cause casualties. It could easily backfire, and vaccines exist or could probably be easily created. Something like anthrax seems to be much more directly dangerous. But if the intent is to prompt societies to panic and do damage to themselves through fear, smallpox is one of the most scary of pathogens in our collective memory. “The thing with smallpox is that the fear associated with it is not justified,” writes the bacteriology expert Hugh Pennington. “Yes it will kill a few people, but it is the panic that comes with it that makes it such an effective tool. It’s not a weapon of mass destruction, it’s a weapon of mass panic.”

  In fact, some of the biggest fears about smallpox today seem to be centered on the mass public panic that might occur if a disease with this many deaths to its credit ever broke out again. A smallpox incident in New York in 1947, for example, led to a national effort involving the military to have more than six million New Yorkers—as many people as died in the Holocaust—vaccinated in a supremely short period of time to ward off a pathogen that formerly killed six million people a year rather routinely.

  * The atomic bomb that exploded at Hiroshima released the energy equivalent of 13 to 18 thousand tons of TNT (kilotons). The largest bomb ever tested by the United States was about 15 megatons (millions of tons of TNT). The USSR’s 50-megaton bomb was the equivalent of 50 million tons of TNT.

  * Before missiles became popular, heavy bombers were used to drop such bombs on their target. With very large nuclear bombs, there were always concerns about the planes being able to get far enough away after releasing the bomb to escape damage from the shock waves. Combine a big enough bomb with a slow enough plane, and dropping it becomes a suicide mission.

  * Is war hardwired into us? I think this is still being studied, assessed, and debated.

  * The philosopher Bertrand Russell said about the problem of trying to maintain vigilance, “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.”

  * Weapons are only one element of creating an effective military. Tactics, training, leadership, logistics, battlefield formations, and other such things have also been part of the evolution process. So while both Assyrians in the eighth century BCE and the Romans in the first century BCE used swords, a lot of other elements in the military system had evolved to make the Roman military far more formidable and dangerous than the biblical-era Assyrians.

  * As we’ve said, for much of human history the pace of change was slower, and older systems could often remain viable and effective for a long time.

  * As the French found in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71, for example, especially in the much more effective German use of railroads for troop concentration.

  * “I believe the statement that in this war [World War II] a hundred physicists are worth a million soldiers originated in England,” said the physicist Arthur Holly Compton.

  * Also one that might be wrong. Einstein was telling FDR about something that might be possible, not 100 percent certain. Hard enough to make decisions about stuff like this if you are a physicist and understand it. FDR wasn’t and probably didn’t.

  * Besides the philosophical question of whether it’s smart to forever be increasing the power of weapons, there’s the opportunity cost aspect. Might the effort and money that would go toward such an experimental effort be better spent in an area more likely to help win the war?

  * The device, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, was nicknamed “the Gadget.” Like the one that would be dropped on Nagasaki, the Gadget was an “implosion-type bomb” fueled by plutonium.

  * People sometimes point out that poison gas wasn’t used in a significant way in the Second World War as it had been in the First, but the reason wasn’t humanitarian. It wasn’t a war-winning tool; if it had been, they’d have used it. There was much talk of using it in certain situations, and several Second World War combatant nations were accused of using chemical weapons at some point or another during the conflict.

  * One of the reasons for the popularity of the German city of Heidelberg among tourists today is that the city mostly escaped being badly bombed, and hence it’s one of the best-preserved towns showing what the architecture and style of Germany was like before the war.

  * These numbers are comparable casualtywise to those of the atomic bombs that would be dropped in August 1945.

  * The devices were nicknamed “Little Boy” and “Fat Man.” According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Little Boy was ten feet long, weighed nearly ten thousand pounds, and was fueled by “highly enriched uranium.” It was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Fat Man, a plutonium-fueled implosion-type bomb—the same as the Trinity test bomb—was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Using just thirteen and a half pounds of plutonium—about the size of a softball—Fat Man’s efficiency was deemed “ten times that of Little Boy.”

  * Many questions still arise over how he employed the bombs. Some physicists and even military figures had wanted a demonstration test in a less populated or unpopulated area (such as over water off the coast of Japan) to show Japan what the bombs could do before using them on human beings.

  * Unintentional as well. The bomb’s inventors did not drop the weapon to test what it would do to people. They definitely studied the aftereffects, though. The data the attacks provided was a by-product, but it was extremely instructive and was used in all sorts of ways, including as a stark warning about what a global nuclear conflict would do to the individuals on the ground.

  * Even with bigger, more powerful weapons, the general experience on the ground will probably be similar. The distances from ground zero that will feel the effects will be pushed outward, the kill zone will be extended, but the survivors of the next nuclear bombing will likely look a lot like the ones from the last one.

  * The capacity to rebuild to prewar levels is one of the definitions the physicist Nick Bostrom uses for the term “existential risk” in his book Global Catastrophic Risks. “An existential risk is one that threatens to cause the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or to reduce its quality of life (compared to what would otherwise have been possible) permanently or drastically.”

  * LeMay swore that he never said it.

  * If you’re skipping around and missed chapter 6, be sure to go back if you’d like to read more about the plagues that wiped out huge portions of humanity
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