How cunning and evil it is that America funded the internet and then allowed it to spread around the world.
If you're worried about "absolute control over digital systems", notice how many standards get published describing how those digital systems work -- you're welcome to reimplement them if you'd like more control.
What I'm saying is this: there's nothing stopping you from using communication methods that aren't controlled by Americans. All of the protocols that the internet uses are documented.
Like most Python material that ceased to be funny decades ago thanks to people quoting it endlessly...
The Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians, and claimed they lived in wastelands. The truth is more complex. In many places — yes, including Judaea — they inherited infrastructure and buildings. Judaea was previously occupied by the Greeks and a number of other civilisations had left behind remains. The idea that it was terra nullis or a tabula rasa is nonsense. Even Gaul which was considered to be a frontier already had a road system (some of which has been only rediscovered in recent times), and what is now Marseilles was a Greek city going way back before the Roman conquest.
> Romans were true imperialists. They considered their opponents to be barbarians
The Romans also aggressively appropriated from and integrated the people they conquered, extending the concept of citizenship and thus what it meant to be Roman in the process.
Nobody is saying the Romans came across terra nullis. But describing their engineering and culture as "merely improving roads" is silly.
They stole literature and architecture from the Greeks, chariot building techniques from the Gauls, their identity from the Etruscans and Latins, and probably more than they would ever admit to from the Carthaginians.
When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing. The Monty Python film even promotes that as a joke. There are cities in the Holy Land like Jericho which were inhabited before Rome was even founded.
p.s. Do I get downvotes for pointing out archaeological and historical fact here? When I said "merely improved roads", I was talking about their road network not their entire civilisation.
Rome was entirely reliant upon the looting and expansion of the empire to support them. Without building up those roads Rome would have starved and fallen apart.
