Are we the Modern Romans? Part 3 (Transcript)

The fall of Ancient Rome happened. We all know it. Well, what does that have to do with America?

Hi, this is Bob Barney and the last two episodes that I have done on these broadcasts have been about the decline and fall of Ancient Rome. A famous 6 volume book written by Edward Gibbon; I had mentioned in the 1700’s/ He went over the reasons why Rome fell after 1000 years of existence of a world power. The answers as I went over are very parallel to what is going on in America, today.

People have noticed this for at least 50 years.  When I first came to this, I was still in college, studying poly sci which was my major and we were studying American history as well as diplomacy…it was brought to my attention about the book by Gibbons, why Rome fell, and how there were so many parallels to the then United States of America, right after the Vietnam War had come to an end.

For those newer and younger people listening, I do not think people understand, the younger group anyways, the trauma that Vietnam caused for Americans and America. It was a war unlike the wars we have today, it was very unpopular because there was a draft. Today we have an all-volunteer army. However, in the 60’s we had a draft and at first when the war was a little bit smaller under Kennedy and Johnson, people could get deferred by just going to college. If you went to college, you were exempt. That really wasn’t fair for a lot of people who couldn’t afford to go to college. It was a war of poorer people fighting for the rich people staying home.

Then around 1966 as the war broadened, the college exemption went away. I know my brother fell in that category at the time and what people started doing then was join the Natl Guard instead. If you got in, most of the guard was not drawn up which made you exempt from going Vietnam. They used a lottery system, pulling out of a bingo type cylinder with dates. If you pulled May, then you were number one for the draft. If you were anywhere in the 160’s or under, you would be drafted because the war was not going well under Johnson and the need for troops kept growing. We had almost half a million troops by 1968. My brother had graduated high school in 1966 and was going to college at the time. At first, he thought he was safe but then found out that the lottery was looming. All the rich kids were already in the Natl Guard and that wasn’t going to work for him. We worried a little bit. The lottery came and his birthday January 6 was on the top numbers drawn that year and he knew he would be drafted.

 As a family we worried about it because we had some friends and relatives that got hurt. In one case someone we knew died. I was young at the time, but we certainly worried what would happen to my oldest brother Vic.  Low and behold, he decided he would join the Airforce. If you are going to be in any service, the Navy or the AF was the best to go into. He was advised not to go into the Navy because if they had enough sailors, they would send you over to the Marines and you would be knee deep in swamps fighting the Vietcong. So, the safest route was the join the AF.  

When he joined the A F in 1967 and after the AF bootcamp was over, he went to Colorado and was given the offer to pick Seoul, Korea. He could pick Vietnam or Korea at Osan AF base. He was told by the recruiter, probably a lie being told, that if you told a warzone like Korea which was no longer a warzone, then you would not go to Vietnam the next tour and would possibly end up in Europe or even America. He picked Korea and guess what happened in 1968? The pueblo, the spy ship of America was captured by the No Koreans, we were on WW three alert and the main target was Korea with nuclear bombs, so my family worried about his fate in South Korea. However, after that incident was over and Vic came back from Korea, we were positive his life was safe from Vietnam. But like I said, it might have been a lie because his next tour was in Vietnam, Danang AF base which was constantly shelled at night from the enemy. Vic would talk about the people he would work with in the daytime who were the same people shelling you at nighttime.  If it was a holiday, they wouldn’t work in the nighttime so they would shell in the daytime.

So, unless you experienced this era of Vietnam, people don’t understand why it was so unpopular. The wars we go into today, like Afghanistan and Iraq, they really didn’t have the protest against the war because there isn’t a draft. So, people who aren’t drafted hate to say this, but selfishly don’t care about people who volunteer to go that get hurt. We have had a lot of casualties in the last 20 years probably more than Vietnam if you add up the wounded as well and not just the dead. 

The Vietnam era made many people start to wonder about Americans involvement in overseas wars that they did not belong in. Mohammed Ali, the famous boxer, his name was Casious Clay before he changed to Islam, which some people believed at the time he could use a religious exemption, because he was drafted and refused to go.  As a mooslem, what ended up happening with that was he was stripped of his world crown title, as heavy weight boxer of the world.  It was big news at the time, but again, it was a war that just tore America apart. By the mid 70’s when I was in college, people started noticing that America and Ancient Rome had many things in common. I have gone over them in the last 2 episodes. The first thing was the decline in morality. The republic of Rome which started around 400 BC, the Republic of Rome was based on like the American colonial America or even early American country as history which had a belief in the family and the father being the head of the family, morality, and their pagan gods but they believed in god and a set of rules to live by. We had the Ten Commandments today and they had the 12 tablets. So, there was morality, nationalism, people who looked up to their leaders who were virtuous people like we think of George Washington for example. Then Rome under the Cesars especially became a decadent society where there was rampant decadent sex of all types. Bestiality, pedophilia, you name it. The Cesars, who are just another name for the kings of the empire, were the most immoral evil people of their decade. People like Nero was just an ego maniac, evil, I mean he made Hitler look like a choir boy. So, Rome was constantly involved in one foreign war after another. So, they started hiring mercenaries to be their soldiers.  So you had the decline of the household, of the family…like America since 1917, war after war. We haven’t had more than ten years we haven’t been in some kind of a conflict since WWI. The only one I am sure of is the 1920’s, maybe 12 years. Then of course, Eisenhower administration, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, even Ford. Carter, Reagan, both Bushes, Obama, Clinton, and even DJT though he ended the wars we were in as President. And again, we are not in a war now, but we are on the very edge of going to war in Ukraine. 

So, all of these foreign wars caused ancient Rome to need money. So, what was the next thing they did? Incredible taxes. Making everyone pay their fair share so we can fight wars oversees. They taxed people on everything. The people became poor, the middle class was basically wiped out. Something that is happening in America today. The middle class has been under attack for some 50 years. At least. I mean, the 1970’s were the most traumatic experience for those who were in the good upper middle class. They might have only had an 8th grade education as my dad did, or they may have had only a HS education, but they could go to work in a factory and through hard work they could climb the ladder, becoming a foreman, then an executive, then actually a general manager.

My father, for example, started at the very bottom at the Nestle company following that path to a plant manager for different Nestle’s and in our hometown. All with an 8th grade education. He made very good money. I did not grow up poor. I grew up very well to do, middle class. We did not have a lot of money in a sense as my father did work three jobs. We were the first family to have 3 cars, a swimming pool. My father came out of the depression, so he worked very hard to get ahead.  But the assault of the middle class starting in the 70’s came with a violent rampant inflation with the last years of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, which Reagan won the presidency. You had 18-21 percent on car loans…the middle class was so decimated, factories were closing, US steel and all of the major employers and car companies and Detroit, all started to lay off all of their workers or move them to Mexico or Japan at the time. Many well-paying jobs went away and one of the favorite quotes at the time, the Midwest, which was the industrial heartland of America, was called The Rust Belt. Nothing was maintained and everyo8ne was laid off and the metal structures of these factories started to rust.

The middle class never really regained its high standard of living since the depression in my case, what I see as. Reagan said, a recession is when your neighbor is out of work and a depression is when you are out of work.

The 1970s were as close as a depression as we have come to compared to right now. Millions of Americans were laid off and they were never able to recruit the jobs with the salaries and benefits I remember in the 60’s my father had great health insurance from Nestle and there was no deductible! We could go to the hospital or dentist for any reason and never pay a dime out of our pockets because it was all covered. This is how well the middle-class people could live. Many people in the 50s and 60s allowed their wives to stay home. They did not have to go to the workplace. My mom stayed home for the most part and raised us. We all went to school, then she got a job as a housemaid at Canterbury School, a private HS in our home town and she only worked from 9-1 part time to raise a little money for herself for spending and to make sure she could take me to school and pick me up when I was in grade school. The American people, the middle class really accelerated in these decades into the early 70s until all of the layoffs began. Therefore, all of the misery of the middle class began paralleling the misery that the middle class had during the time of Ancient Rome.

The lack of morality, sexual immorality, the lack of heroes, the lack of the family unit and now rampant inflation and wars and rumors of wars and heavy taxation. This took a toll. After people refused to fight and do things for themselves, Rome decided to bring in aliens to do all of their work, all of their menial labor, and to fight in their armies.  Rome allowed people to buy their citizenship. Most countries, you have to be a person of the blood, you have to have had French blood in you to be a Frenchman, or German blood to be a German. most countries don’t allow you just because you are born here, to be called a citizen of that country. America, like Rome, you could buy your citizenship which is people coming in and going to school and paying a lawyer to get your green card and apply for citizenship. You can negotiate it by joining the military, which happened in Rome as well as here. So, you had many people become Roman Citizens that had no loyalty to Rome whatsoever. They are the people who ended up helping destroy Rome. Rome was destroyed by the aliens amongst them. Like what is happening to our country today where the aliens amongst us in time, rule over us. They will become our bosses and we will become their slaves. This happened in Rome when all of the servants from other nationalities turned on the Roman citizens and started to kill them. Rome found themselves in turmoil. The economy collapsed. Their family structure collapsed. Their religion collapsed. Inflation was nuts. The middle class collapsed.

Finally, aliens doing all the work and doing all the fighting took over the empire.

Then Rome fell and the dark ages began. They are called dark ages for a reason. Believe it or not, if not for monks in the Catholic church writing down every book they could find, not just the Bible, but other books, writing them out freehand, there would be many works of history lost. The dark ages were like a bunch of Muslim terrorists, ruling the known world and wanting to destroy anything that they didn’t agree with. That included burning books, and, in that day, it would have been scroll of course, but the monks preserved them in their monasteries and wrote copies of the Bible yes, but also many of the works which we have today. So, America is going down the same road as Ancient Rome. That is why the title of the series is Are We The Modern Romans? The frank answer is yes, we are.

We are going the same way of Rome. 

 I wanted to end this series and didn’t intend on three segments, but it took time…I wanted to say that history repeats itself. The first thing I said was those that do not learn from history are bound to repeat it all over again. The Bible does say the same thing you know, there is nothing new under the son. A person just like you living 4000 years ago had the same wants and ideas that you did.  Maybe they weren’t as “civilized” as you are, but they hurt as bad as we did when someone died, they long for a better life like we do…they are made in God’s image. They are the same. We tend to think that the ancient people, were all caveman, but that is a whole other subject I won’t get into, but there is a whole lot of b.s. as to what cavemen really were. But the idea in the Bible that makes it clear, that every thought you have today, there is someone before you that had the same thought. The same wishes and wants that you have are what ancient people had as well. History does repeat itself. In order not to make the mistakes of history, one had to read their history, learn from it, and plan a course of action to avert the same results. It has been said that too many people do bad science when they do the same things over and over again but expect different results. If you follow what Rome did wrong to destroy itself, and you follow it to the T, then you are going to destroy yourself.

history repeats itself unless you learn from history. Unfortunately, Americans have not learned their history very well. Much of it is because of the mainstream media. Much of it is because of the educational system got taken over in the 20’s by a group of people, now the National Education Association, a group of people that did not have good motivations about school our children. They wanted to promote an agenda, and not the truth. The three R’s as they used to be called were not on the agenda. That went away. And in the 20s! The Rockefeller’s had a lot to do with that. The educational system does not teach our children true history to learn from. And that means we are going to repeat history. The plain truth is, and the good news is, if we do learn about our history and we study what happened in the past and we alter the course like any scientific experiment, if you touch a fire every single time and you burn your hand, you know that every time you touch that flame your hands going to burn. So, if you learn from that history of experience then you stop touching the fire. Right? No, not when it comes to getting into foreign wars or raising taxes which causes inflation, hurting the middle class, destroying the middle class, doing all of that you are going to have the same history as Ancient Rome. That is the destruction of our society.

You know I have been saying this now as long as I have been writing on The Plain Truth about 18 years, America is going to collapse from within.

It is prophesied in the Bible Deut 28, Leviticus 26. It will happen but it does not have to happen in our lifetime. God will allow us to as a nation, repent from our sins. Learn our history. Seek God. And prosper. God wants you to prosper. Even if this country is far gone, which sometimes I will admit that I think we are beyond help, you yourself can seek God. Find God. And God will come to you. Reveal truths to you that you may not even want to know as was in my case. But if you follow God, obey God, worship God and believe what He says in His Bible and not try to scurry them away in your thoughts as if they do not apply to you…they do apply to you…. you will find victory in either this life or the life to come. Afterall, Jesus made it clear, what good is it for you to find life, to save your life in this world? Which is temporal. Maybe you are going to live 70 or 80 years if you are lucky. What good is it to give away everything you have to save this precious life for 70 or 80 years and lose all of eternity? Living for eternity that is promised to you by God! Don’t make that mistake. Seek God. If this country seeks Him, we will make it for longer. But if not, if you seek God, listen to God, read His Word, know it is true and obey. Don’t listen to a minister that the law has been abolished or that the Sabbath day no longer exists. Don’t listen to what men tell you, even me, look it up and prove it. I might be wrong. I might be wrong.  Go find out for yourself. Do not listen to a human being, never put your trust in any human being. Yes, there are people that we have to trust, presidents hopefully if they are good, or leaders, or generals, but at the same time do not put all of your faith there. Only put it in God. He will not fail.  God is in control and do not think He isn’t. He may not be running this world because he put it under the control of the devil as the Bible says, but he is returning to take that kingship away from the devil. He qualified to do it on the cross. He is to lead this world into a utopia. That is what our future is. So, put yourself for God. The whole idea of this series is we are the modern romans and on the course of destruction, but we can still change it. 2024 will be a very important election. Do we want dictatorship? Another Cesar? Or do we want freedom and liberty? This is what our forefathers and our grandparents and great grandparents fought for many years ago. 

Again, this show is almost out of time, and I want to talk about The Plain Truth.

I do not believe there is a better place to go other than The Plain Truth to find out what is going on. That is what is going on in the world, in God’s mind even, what’s going on with your health and the health of the world, what’s going on in what we would call water cooler things. So, if you go to The Plain Truth.com you are going to open up to a beautiful news site that flashes in front of you all of the news for the day. Then you can see from there the Message Board. Go there and you can comment on any story or be like a reporter for the Plain Truth on the Message Board. Then of course you can go to Your Health Today from the main page. You may not even be aware of some of the topics we cover. You may not be aware that you are under the Machiavellian medical system that wants to lie to you and not tell you the truth about your own health. You will see there are answers to disease, to what you eat and how to live and live longer and a better life. A lot of those answers are found in alternate medicine, real medicine, real science and of course the Bible, the Bible is the ultimate source. It is as relevant today as it was when it was first put together by Ezra and the New Testament by early church fathers. 

Go to the plain truth every day, that is my charge for you. Look at the News, the Message Board, listen to these broadcasts that we do. It is not always me; it can be other people and educate yourself on what is going on. 

So, this is the end of the series on Aer We The Modern Romans? Yes, we are.

This is Bob Barney saying thanks for listening and I hope you have other people that you know and care about come to our site to learn from it as well. Goodbye.