Archaeologica.org

Digit wrote:The Americas were occupied by people fleeing persecution in Europe.

Didn't W.S. Blake say: "To generalize is to be an idiot"?

The pilgrims didn't occupy "the Americas fleeing persecution in Europe"! That's complete BS! A fairy tale! The pilgrims occupied only a very tiny part of 'the Americas'. The part that is now known as (a small part of) New England. All the rest of 'the Americas', about a thousand times as much, were occupied, and still are today, by other fortune hunters and gold diggers. First the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, the French, and the Germans, and after 1900 everybody...
And the pilgrims were NOT persecuted in Europe! They were simply an odd community/group of people united under a very fundamentalist protestant banner who made themselves stand very apart from the general populace. They were regarded as strange religious fanatics. Because they behaved as such. They didn't fit in, because they didn't want to fit in. That's why they eventually went to Plymouth, Mass.
Exactly like Jim Jones went to Guyana with 900 followers! We all know what happened to that colony of religious fanatics, don't we? How sane a venture was that, I ask you?

Will the US revere Jim Jones in 3/4 centuries as the US revere the pilgrim fathers now...?

I.o.w.:

The Americas were occupied by people fleeing persecution in Europe.

should really be read as:
a bunch of religious nuts who wanted to escape being reminded every day by their own behavior and attitudes how idiotic they really were fled their peers to start farming on a patch of the east coast of north America.

Like the hippies in Goa...

The pilgrims didn't occupy "the Americas fleeing persecution in Europe"! That's complete BS! A fairy tale! The pilgrims occupied only a very tiny part of 'the Americas'.

Granted, neither did the early Jewish refugees, just part of it. They purchased the parts they occupied as did your countrymen in the new world.

The English ones were persecuted, as were the catholics and non-conformists as they could not comply with the Acts of Conformity, even establishment figures like Pepys ran foul of the acts. Catholics can still not reign in this country.

Will the US revere Jim Jones in 3/4 centuries as the US revere the pilgrim fathers now...?

Probably, some people revere Hitler so Jones is probably in with a chance.

Roy.

And we have Min admiring the Romans, don't we?

Better than those baby-killing Carthaginian monsters!

Uni goes about baptised Jews as though they were unique, they certainly were not. Many who would be excluded from the professions by the Test Acts paid lip service to the C of E. Even two of our kings did so, so why the emphasis on just the Jews I know not.

Roy.

So what did the Romans do for us? :lol

Roy.

Minimalist wrote:Better than those baby-killing Carthaginian monsters!

Yeah, and not to be outdone the Romans matched and waaay exceeded that sadism by institutionalizing it in the Coliseum a.o. as a popular, Roman culture. They were proud of it! Proud of the public display of butchering and goring live people and animals in front of a cheering crowd of thousands... Again and again.

The Phoenicians/Carthaginians were sissies compared to the Romans.

Why else do you think they lost?

Yeah, that's true.
Too.

But good ol' Hannibal gave 'm a good hiding, didn't he? Vivat Cannae!

Yeah...but he couldn't break up the Roman system of alliances in Italy. No one wanted to work for baby-killers!

Minimalist wrote:Yeah...but he couldn't break up the Roman system of alliances in Italy. No one wanted to work for baby-killers!

No one initially wanted to work for the Roman monsters either, but slavery, flagellation and crucifixion turned out to be convincing incentives.

Incorrect. Roman treatment of other Italians was quite mild. They were assimilated into the Roman state. It took the Carthaginians to teach them how to be brutal. BTW, the Romans also learned crucifixion from Carthage. And perfected it... as they did everything else.

Minimalist wrote:Incorrect. Roman treatment of other Italians was quite mild. They were assimilated into the Roman state. It took the Carthaginians to teach them how to be brutal. BTW, the Romans also learned crucifixion from Carthage. And perfected it... as they did everything else.

Incorrect. The Roman development of myopia for everything beyond the borders of their empire was certainly very un-Phoenician/Carthaginian.

I'd accuse you of reading Punic Progaganda but none has survived.

The Romans defeated and then absorbed the other Latin tribes, then the Etruscans, the the Campanians and Southern Hill tribes ( Samnites, et al). They did this by granting various rights and citizenship to worthy individuals or communities. The bonds thus formed proved to be far stronger than Hannibal and his army of Spaniards, Gauls and an occasional African could break. It also gave the Romans an enormous manpower pool. It is why Hannibal failed.

Overall the Romans seem to have been a force for good rather than evil IMO.

Roy.