No nation has ever survived once its citizenry ceased to believe its culture worth saving. (Hanson’s Law)
In Professor Hanson’s essay, War Will Be War, which became the genesis for this book and was the inspiration for this immutable law, he wrote: “Themistocles’ Athens beat back hundreds of thousands of Persians; yet little more than a century later Demosthenes addressed an Athens that had become far wealthier—and could not marshal a far larger population to repulse a few thousand Macedonians.”
The professor goes on to allude that the allied armies of less than thirty Greek city-states defeated the Persian Empire, repelling an army ten times their size in 479 BC. Yet one hundred forty years later, after losing only one battle to Philip II of Macedon at Chaeronea, in 338 BC, the same Greek city-states ceded their magnificently innovative culture and its associated freedoms to their new Macedonian overlords. In so doing, the Greeks remained a subjugated people for the next 2,400 years.
In October 2001, American Special Forces troops, mounted on horseback during a pitched battle with the Taliban in Northern Afghanistan, reported seeing enemy fighters running toward them with their hands in the air and, in the next instant, falling forward dead in the dirt. They were native Afghan men who had been shot in the back by their foreign Taliban commanders from Pakistan, Chechnya, and Saudi Arabia.
The Taliban had conscripted the Afghans with the threat they would kill their families if they did not join the army. The Afghan farmers, shopkeepers, and teachers who had once welcomed the Taliban as their liberators from the Russians now dreaded them.
Law #2: In battle, free men almost always defeat slaves. (Herodotus’ Law)
Law #3: Appeasement of a ruthless outside power always invites aggression. Treaties made with ruthless despots are always fruitless and dangerous.
Law #4: If a people cannot avoid continuous internal warfare, they will have a new order imposed from without.
Law #5: When a free people, through taxation, is deprived of its ability to acquire wealth and property, collapse is presaged.
Law #6: To hold territory, a state must be populated by those loyal to the central authority. When immigration overwhelms assimilation, the fall is predicted.
Law #7: With the loss of fiscal solvency comes a loss of sovereignty.
Law #8: Debasing the currency always destabilizes the governing authority.
Law #9: When a civilization accepts the propaganda of its enemy as truth, it has reached the far side of appeasement and capitulation is nigh.
Law #10: Declining civilizations will always face superior firepower from ascending civilizations because sovereignty is only temporarily uncontested.
