This is why I read Stirling…
The lesson of the armies of Ashur is, ultimately, that one cannot have a metropolitan economy that relies on international trade at the same time that one has a localizing, racist-to-genocidal religious basis for internal political legitimacy. Eventually the polarization internally will destroy the ability to project force externally, because the external force relies upon the production of the cities and a military that consumes too many resources. While individual cities benefit from having localized cults, cities themselves do not. The Assyrians claim to have destroyed hundreds of cities and towns to enforce worship and obedience. Even if this is highly exaggerated, it does not take many examples of sacking a town and flaying the leaders alive to destroy confidence in city life. Similarly, it does not take many Katrinas to destroy faith in a system that is supposed to protect city life in the present.
The elevation of Bush as God-King of localized Jesus cults is a fact that can be seen from the polarization of rural counties, and the presence of two “right poles” of American voting – in the edge of the Great Plains and rocky mountains and in Appalachia. That America’s great locality cult, the Mormon Church in Utah, has become avidly Republican is not an accident, but an adherence of like to like. America has begun marching down the campaign trail of Assyria, with its early wins of powerful control over a core – one that raises up a powerful military that can invade and defeat enemies on the battlefield, but that at the same time prohibits the kind of broad internationalism that feeds both the army and the cities in its core. Localized cults are good at absorbing, but not at expanding their reach. It would be the Greeks who would hit upon the first part of the formula, in terms of a broad cultural city system and a warrior who had real man-to-man superiority in combat. The Romans and the Chinese would find solutions to the other parts of the problem, and would create the pinnacle empires of the neo-antiquity period. But Assyria would, literally, be on the slag heap of history, remembered fondly only by those seeking a narrative to counter Islam.
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The Armies of Ashur could conquer the world, but they could not even hold the hearts and minds of their own people. In the end, these armies themselves spearheaded the revolt against the cult-king and his worship. In the end, it was the internal polarization driven by the religious system against the geo-political and economic realities that destroyed their state, and that is destroying ours.
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