You cannot even begin to imagine how over it is. You also cannot begin to imagine the glory and triumph of the return.
The deification of Caesar by Augustus sounded a knell of long death for Rome. The original Roman religion was ancestor worship; the sacred hearth and the sacred tomb of the fathers. The public gods, Jupiter and so forth, were secondary to the clannish religion at first, and gradually began to rise in prominence as the ruling families of Rome required greater cooperation for more complex external action. Their worship was also something the plebeian, who had no gods of his own, could take part in; its rise to prominence was the result of HLvM patronage politics and had a "democratic" character. The admission of commoners into the Marian legion and their concomitant increase in status went hand in hand with the rising prominence of public cults; an explicit goal of the Populares in times of Republic's unrest was to secure gods for themselves. Those who had no ancestors, no active hearth-and-tomb worship, were not fully citizens. Even this later religion was dying by the time of Caesar. Creating the Imperial Cult was a smart move. You could have faith in it, for a while. Caesar was indeed a great man who saved Rome. "We need a new religion" is something one hears around here a lot. Augustus got that. He gave Rome one. The problem is, that which violates natural law will fail to survive. Augustus in some ways "completed" the system of Classical Pagan worship by making the emperor a living god. A "public ancestor" who is right there. A "living ancestor". It is the sort of contradictory tension-- "divine nonsense"-- that makes for a good and powerful religion. Unfortunately, one can easily put the lie to the living god, by stabbing him and putting on the purple robe. Now anyone can be a god. The Romans figured that out, and stabbing the emperor became the typical modus operendi of politics from thence out, excepting the occurrence of some frontier or provincial general declaring himself Caesar and starting a civil war, which also happened like clockwork.
When Caesar was deified, an old-believing Roman would have found this blasphemous, a grave transgression and impiety inviting divine wrath. I say "would have", because if there were any left at that point, they did not dare speak out, and history did not remember their words. They would have purged by Augustus, who was more similar to Stalin than to the reactionary character he is portrayed by historians as. Like a Stalin or Cromwell, he halted the entropy spiral of leftism, and said "this far and no further". Like Stalin and Cromwell, he had to kill an enormous amount of people to do so.
The old-believing Romans were right, but their religion was still dead. Perhaps, when the Praetorian Guard betrayed the Emperor and auctioned off the purple, sold the office of emperor to the highest bidder, maybe even the degenerate Roman of that day would have felt a twinge of violated piety. Maybe some realized then that it was over. The average sentiment seems to have been "this is just a temporary setback, Rome's best days are ahead of her, Turbo Rome..." and so on. Even Christianity could not save Rome; for the Western Empire, it was merely an anesthesiac faith, a means by which a degraded people could clock out of life and anticipate the coming paradise in a blissful haze of world-denying righteousness. Augustine says as much, why would you not take his word for it?
I introduce you with all of this because many today feel that they are in the Late Republic of Rome waiting for a Caesar. I tell you that this is not the case. Our Caesar has long since come and gone; we are on the cusp of a "Crisis of the Third Century". For Western man, the "Caesarean act", the grave transgression and transformation of the old religion meant to revitalize a fractious and dying culture is what is often accused to be "gnosticism". Marxism and its related ideologies, which are at their core attempts to instantiate a "heaven-on-earth" regardless of specific ideological content, from the English Civil War and the French Revolution onward, are the Faustian Imperial Cult. It is the ruling ideology of the Global American Empire today, and it explains the blind and insane fervor of its zealots. The Imperial Cult began to wither under the onslaught of reality. Anybody can stab the emperor and become a god. And they did. But aside from this single chink in the armor, the Imperial Cult was pretty based. Rome died a slow death from one weakness as its spiritual vitality bled out. The modern imperial cult, in comparison, is more frothingly batshit crazy than the most exaggerated accounts of Nero or Caligula. It is completely detached from reality. Africans are astrophysicists, men are women, we will all be equal with "education" and wealth redistribution... when one attempts to actualize this, the result is death and suffering on a scale unheard of, autogenocides that surpass any historical war but the most ruthless wars of total extermination waged before written language, without even a hint of success. These communist democides are analogous to Rome's civil wars and coups, the contradictions of the Imperial faith shaking themselves out. We are watching the contradictions of the liberal faith beginning to unravel society; were it not for the unprecedented material luxuries created by our far more competent forebears, the world would already be laid waste, but Zimbabwe is coming for every nation under the GAE flag as the incompetent are expected to maintain the advanced technics that make modern material prosperity possible, and the competent are hounded out of society.
I told you, it is over. No new or old religion will save us; the cynical man of late civilization, and this includes you, my reader, lacks the class-vitality to turn things around. Rome was spiritually exhausted and concerned with the petty; look at the difference in the Christian faith of the Germanic who went on the Crusades versus the Late Roman. He had become what Spengler calls "fellaheen", an eternal peasant regardless of his wealth; futureless, pastless, and classless, a heap of aggregated biomass that exists as life for life's sake, an NPC, human yeast. There were plenty of competent enough Emperors in late Rome. There are plenty of competent enough liberal societies today, think Singapore; both adhered more to natural law and attempted to ignore or abandon the contradictions of their cult. But both have no real future; the only possibility for such a society is the state that China attained, to stagnate in an eternal present that can last millennia, to be captured by foreign dynasties, to be deracinated, absorbing the invader into the dysfunctional feminine condition of bureaucratic rule.
Now we must talk about race and what this means. Race is a quality possessed by the elite of a people; the lower classes are "stock" which occasionally produces individuals of quality that can help regenerate the elite. This higher caste lends its culture to the mass of lower humanity beneath it; the qualities particular to a "race" are always expressed most perfectly in its elites, but birth alone is not enough. A race must also be "in form" in the same way that a sports team is "in form", it is both bred and *trained* for excellence, and maintains this through war and adventure, even internal competition, and can degenerate through the lack of this. When this elite is gutted, as it was in Rome, the patrician caste and its Senate receding to near historical irrelevance, the entire race suffers. This is the fellaheen state; excellent individuals, exemplars of their race, may be born to the fellaheen, but they cannot find each other, cooperate, and restore elite rule. They are athletes, but not a team, not a koryos, not a warband. The proliferation of human garbage at all levels of society eventually stifles the possibility of true growth.
These men, who bear the seeds of race within them, cannot effect a "restoration". Or at least history tells us they never have. It is possible for them to flee; Venice was founded by such a group of men who fled Rome and was the only city-state of Italy capable of restoring an empire, though it was squashed by even more vigorous and competent peoples. You can "flee" today, can "exit", but they will put great effort into chasing you. It is over. I also spoke of glorious return. Let me tell you a story.
It is the end of the Bronze Age. The Mycenaean civilization in Greece falls. The details of its fall are hazy, but it sure looks like it degenerated into a socialist demon worshiping matriarchy reliant on long-distance trade networks. Wrong place to go into details. As Subotai (Conan, not the real one) put it: "civilization, ancient and wicked". It was destroyed with extreme wrath. Every palace was put to the sword and fire within a short period of time and their inhabitants were enslaved or executed. Everybody who knew how to write was killed. We only have record of their language at all because the heat of the incineration baked the wet clay they used for record-keeping into hard tablets. The ruins of the palaces were abandoned as if they were cursed and haunted ground.
What historians obfuscate, but logic makes obvious: They were killed by their close cousins. Linear B was deciphered and found to be substantially the same language, i.e. Greek, that the conquerors spoke when they relearned writing. Myths and names of certain gods persisted; the story of the minotaur recalls a time when Mycenae was weak, and paid tribute to the mighty Minoans. Mycenae was destroyed by people from the fringes, barbarians from within its own cultural sphere, and was thus regenerated. The modern day equivalent would be hillbillies from West Virginia driving over the Shenendoah in lifted F150s repurposed as technicals and light mortar systems, driving the Virginia National Guard into the Chesapeake, and burning Washington D.C. to ashes.
This was one in a succession of conquests and acts of war and slaughter on a glorious scale that toppled nearly every society of the bronze age. The Iron Age as we call it was an age of nomadic piracy, of the ruining of ancient and crumbling civilizations. The Bronze Age relied on long-distance trade. When the great empires of the age became too militarily weak to maintain the trade routes, barbarians could destroy those societies by interrupting that trade. An age of piracy born of military weakness that directly caused this collapse.
Mycenae was regenerated by this self-conquest. Egypt was not; it fell into anarchy and then succumbed to foreign rule and never rose again. Today, we live under a socialist demon-worshiping matriarchy reliant on advanced technology and global trade networks. Men are losing the stomach to fight for it and its military strength is declining. A new Iron Age will come. Only two sides can be chosen. The side of the peasant, who prays that the tides of blood that will wash over his land do not drown him personally, or the pirate, the aristocrat, man as a beast of prey, cruel, rapacious, and hungry.
What do I mean by this? Is it really possible for mobile banditry and conquest as practiced by ancient peoples to exist in the "modern" world? Why is this the only path? This becomes too long, I explain later.