Hey guys, I was thinking about something last night. I was reading about the fall of the Ottoman empire and how it directly correlates to the turmoil in the middle east today, and I started noticing similarities between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the Roman Empire, specifically the long periods of time after the fall of those once great civilizations.
I came up with a term to describe this effect, I call it the Dark Age Effect.
When a great empire that spans through many cultural and ethnic regions falls, it creates a power vacuum. That power vacuum has to be filled by someone. Those ethnic regions that used to be under the power of the Empire, now have to fight one another for the land and borders they claimed was theirs before the invasion. This often leads to long, bitter wars between cultures and ethnicities.
Examples include
The fall of the Roman Empire, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire.
What do you guys think? Do you guys think the Middle East conflict could be classified as the Islamic Dark Ages?
>>1077095
Dark ages weren't called dark because of the turmoil that followed the fall of the western roman empire. It was simply called as such because of the lack of data available during that period which left a dark spot in our history.
>>1077119
This.
You can't have a dark age with Go Pros everywhere.
>>1077095
Dude, you realise anything with a brain realised that when they were 15? Only retards and racists refuse to accept that the fall of an empire has no consequences, the sort of people who don't realise that all history is completely linked and consequences can last centuries.
>>1077137
>Only retards and racists refuse to accept that the fall of an empire has no consequences
But anon, the racists realize that, after all they're generally the ones who become reactionaries and fascists that want to restore imperialism. It's the leftists who want to destroy empires in the name of equality that fail to realize it.
>>1077119
That's literally irrelevant to my post and doesn't change anything.
>>1077154
The racists never realise it, unless it supports them. As far as they're concerned, any place, country or land with a war, strife or poverty is entirely the fault of their skin colour and nothing to do with the local history, recent or past events.
>>1077095
You're taking a very superficial look at things and leaving out tons of conflicting information to support some meaningless conflict of yours.
The fall of the Ottoman Empire wasn't the cause of the turmoil in the Middle East so much as the partition of it by Britain and France along with the later creation of Israel and heavy involvement of foreign powers in the regional affairs.
The fall of the Soviet Union is anything but a Dark Age. Unless we're talking about Russia proper, the majority of the former Warsaw Pact is doing amazingly well compared to their time under Soviet influence, and it seems that only Russia is really stagnating.
>>1077207
You stormfags are too butthurt about me using the term "Dark Age", I'm just calling it that because that's what the age is called after the Roman Empire fell.
I'm not saying anything negative about Europe, I'm just pointing out what happens when a power vacuum gets created after the fall of an empire.
>>1077217
What the fuck was stormfag about that post? I'm just calling your vague generalization retarded.
>>1077227
You're so upset that I called your ancestral homeland "Dark" when that wasn't even the point of my post.
>>1077236
Is this bait?
>>1077247
No, you literally ignored everything else I said and just became buttblasted because I referred to the period as "The Dark Ages"
>>1077236
Are you literally retarded? The fall of those three "empires" you mentioned have literally nothing to do with eachother. You just picked three examples and tried to portray them so vaguely that they'd fit into any bullshit archetype you could come up with.
The power vaccuum we see after the fall of the Roman empire is absolutely nothing like the situation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and you can hardly call post-Soviet Eastern Europe a power vacuum at all. All three of these situations happened under wildly different circumstances from wildly different causes, and the only similarity between them is that they marked the end of a big political entity.
>>1077272
>No, you literally ignored everything else I said and just became buttblasted because I referred to the period as "The Dark Ages"
No, I'm calling you retarded because you're pulling shit out of your ass to make up a meaningless term that doesn't even begin to hold up to the smallest amount of scrutiny.
I would say it's Not a "dark age effect, although there are some similarities. The Ottoman Empire got dismantled as has been mentioned, Britain, and Francs partitioned the Middle East. Then you got all the wars with Israel and the US. There was however, a time in the postwar period after the fall of the ottomans where the Middle East wasn't a terrible place to live. Dark ages is not a good comparison in this instance because most economic historians would say Europe did not surpass its economic development during the height of Rome until the 16th or 17th century. Although Europe probably would have sooner if not for the plague, who knows econometrics is wildly unreliable the further you go back. I'm pretty sure the Middle East has surpassed its development since the fall of the ottomans. A lot of people would argue the inefficiencies of ottoman rule actually hampered the areas they ruled.
