My kids and I are reading Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, having abandoned a text that turned out to be too multicultural and unfocused for our goals. Today we read about the East Anglian king of Iceni (and his wife Boudicca) who voluntarily and peremptorily surrendered to the Roman invaders and wrote Nero in as an heir to his kingdom and fortunes.
In response, the Romans decided to sack his kingdom, kill him, ravage his daughters, and flog his wife. This seemingly senseless and malevolent act resulted in an uprising within Britannia the likes of which has not been seen since. The people, Welsh and others gathered up along the way, began a concerted and viscous rampage across Britannia, striking major Roman outposts. No one was spared. They killed every Roman and Romanised Britain they could. Men, Women, children, old people. It made no difference. If you either were a Roman or had expressed a sympathetic position towards Romans, you were dead. According to Churchill, this massive and coordinated mob had little to do with Boudicca, except that she participated and was held up as the figurehead by the people. Instead it was incited and maintained by the anger of the people and their desire to live freely.
In our modern times, popular culture creates stories of the Zombie Apocalypse. To liberals, the Zombie Apocalypse appears to mean an uprising of conservatives. To conservatives, the Zombie Apocalypse is a euphemism for an uprising of dependent poor cut off from the government handouts that sustain them. And to millennial, the Zombie Apocolypse appears to be simply what the words mean – the undead rising up to eat us.
I think that people do not realize how devastating and thorough a huge nationwide angry mob bent on the utter obliteration of a class of people can be. It is a state to be feared, even if the mob is not bent on your destruction. Following Boudicca campaign of terror, the Romans brought in aid as crops had not been planted and the people were starving on such a massive scale that we would not exist as an English speaking people today if they had not interceded. There would be no England, no Australia, no America, and probably no unified India, without the determination on the part of the Roman senate that food and basic survival aid was required to avoid, as Churchill puts it, inheriting a desert instead of the people of Britannia at the end of the campaign.
In our modern day potential apocalypse, caused by one to many eliminations of a given segment’s freedom, we will face an aftermath more terrible since there will be no forward-thinking civilization that will provide and aid the materials to restructure our society. We will be left to starve in our modern ‘Zombie apocalypse’, or fend for ourselves but either way our civilization will go down in one fell swoop of inconsideration. Unless it is the Millenial’s Zombie Apocalypse in which case will all be eaten.
On that happy note, we begin another exiting week of education in our little homeschool.
