Barbarism and nudism! I’m a little worried what they intend to do to that statue – The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890 (public domain)

(19) BARBARISM

“There once was a dream – a dream to purge this rotten world of the barbarians that infest it!” – Dovahhatty

Essentially anti-imperialism but from the perspective of the empire – or really, pretty much how an empire sees anyone who isn’t in it.

Barbarism is what an empire sees itself as rescuing its subjects from, or what it sees its subjects returning to if they resist or revolt against it – and what it sees itself holding the line against or falling to in the worst case scenario.

An empire sees anyone outside it as barbarians, even if those outsiders have an empire of their own – and indeed there’s a few empire that might be labelled barbarian empires, foremost among them nomadic empires like that of the Mongols.

Sure, an empire might give another empire some grudging respect, but in its heart see itself as superior to the other as barbarian, kind of like the way D.H. Lawrence summed up how the English – and by extension the British in their empire – saw themselves compared to others.

The English are so nice

so awfully nice

they are the nicest people in the world.

And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice

about your being nice as well!

If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it.

Americans and French and Germans and so on

they’re all very well

but they’re not really nice, you know.

They’re not nice in our sense of the word, are they now?