Harbinger.

Battle of Teutoberg Forest

The Roman Empire 'fell' only in the minds of people who had a particular and limited view of what the Roman Empire was . . . For the auxiliary soldier serving on the Rhine frontier at the end of the Roman period, for farmers in villages in central France . . . there was no abrupt fall of the imperial power . . . (This touches) on a question of fundamental importance for understanding the past and indeed the present, in human societies. The approach to the past for which I have argued is a 'bottom-up' one rather than the traditional 'top-down' approach. . . The big question . . . is which people drive change? Is change brought about largely through the actions of leaders, or by the majority of people? To read traditional text-based history of the first millennium, we would think that the persons named in the texts were the decisive factors . . . But battles were won by armies, not by generals. -- Barbarians To Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered by Peter S. Wells, pp. 200-291.

In St. Louis and in Chicago yesterday the future could be beheld by those with vision enough to glimpse "through a glass, and darkly, the age long strife."

It would be overly simple to explain this run-up to fratricide as between a shape-shifting demagogue and competing elites from the likes of George Soros and the Wall Street banksters and their GOP familiars. There is much truth in that view. But there is also no denying that yesterday represented two peoples eager to tear each other's throats out in an ancient atavism whose time has come round again.

For those of us who refuse to fully enlist in either cause, the choice is clear, If the three sided race war, abetted by various cynical strains of collectivism, is about to break wide open then it behooves us to work locally to defend our interests, our safety and our liberty against all sides who threaten them with their "true belief" We need not, we must not, choose an evil side in this clash of collectivisms (and yes, Trumpism represents one authoritarian strain of that age-old disease). We must stand ready to defend what may be defended, to save what must be saved and to preserve what may be preserved.