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Shouldering Giants

Byzantium 2.0? The 400-Year English Civil War Deciding the Fate of the English-Speaking Peoples

  • 2 days ago
  • 26 min read

All we see, the world over, is the third great English Civil War.


The entire world finds itself inexorably ensnared in English Civil War 3.0—a protracted intra-elite struggle among English-speaking elites over the locus of authority, the legitimacy of wealth (licit production versus illicit extraction), and the very soul of our civilization—precisely because the British Empire’s global dominion, extended and amplified through the American post-World War II order as its ultimate manifestation, permeates every corner of human affairs via the seven pillars of national power: diplomatic alliances that bind nations in webs of obligation, informational narratives shaping global perceptions through media empires, military projections enforcing hegemony from distant bases, economic structures dictating trade and development, financial mechanisms wielding debt as a weapon of control, intelligence networks infiltrating adversaries and allies alike, and law enforcement apparatuses extending extraterritorial reach to suppress dissent; this omnipresent apparatus, born from the 1688 capture of the English Crown by continental Financialists and replicated across oceans, now transforms proxy conflicts in Ukraine, trade wars with China, and economic upheavals worldwide into mere theaters of an internal schism, where non-state Praetorian banks and investment behemoths outmuscle sovereigns, compelling billions—wittingly or not—to fund and fight in a final civil war that could either liberate English civilization from four centuries of parasitic rule or consign it, and the globe it envelops, to irreversible decay or even utter destruction.


I. Introduction: The Spectacle and the Substance


The world’s attention is fixated on the surface-level drama of a new Cold War or even a third world war. Commentators speak breathlessly of the U.S.-China rivalry, the war in Ukraine, the rise of BRICS, and the fragmentation of the post-1945 liberal order. These are presented by mainstream analysis as a clash of nations—a conventional great power competition reminiscent of the twentieth century’s darkest chapters.


But this interpretation mistakes symptoms for causes, effects for essence. This article argues that these geopolitical conflicts are not the primary event, but the visible symptoms of a deeper, centuries-long struggle: English Civil War 3.0. This is an intra-civilizational war among the English-speaking elites over the fundamental source and locus of power. Its roots lie in the “capture” of the English Crown by continental financial interests in 1688—an event that created a persistent ruling class whose power now challenges the sovereignty of the nation-states they inhabit. The current global instability represents the final phase of this struggle, a contest for the soul of English Civilization itself.


To understand our present moment, we must first understand how a “bloodless” revolution on a small island nearly four centuries ago planted the institutional DNA that now governs the financial life of billions. We must trace how that DNA was replicated across oceans and empires, and how it now faces its ultimate challenge. The stakes could not be higher: whether Washington, D.C., can become a new Constantinople, preserving the core of English civilization while casting off corrupting influences, or whether it, like the old Rome, will be consumed by the internal rot of Praetorian rule.


II. Part I: Defining the Battlefield — Actors, Concepts, and Stakes


A. The “Financialist” Defined: Not a Conspiracy, but a Type


Any argument that posits elite continuity across centuries must immediately confront the charge of conspiratorial thinking. The accusation is predictable: that this framework reduces complex history to a puppet show, with shadowy figures pulling strings from a secret room in Geneva or London.


This article rejects that caricature. What I’m describing isn’t a conspiracy but a type—a grouping of like-minded humans sharing material interests, institutional homes, educational backgrounds, and a coherent worldview that transcends national borders. As the Max Planck studies on financialization document, finance “inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship” and fundamentally “reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization.” This isn’t the work of a secret committee but the organic expression of a parasitic class whose power derives from a specific relationship to wealth creation.


The “Financialist” type can be defined with precision. Its members derive power and profit not from production, innovation, or trade—what we should call “licit” wealth creation—but from financial engineering, the manipulation of debt, control of currency issuance, and the extraction of rent from the productive economy. This constitutes “illicit” wealth in the sense that it captures value created by others rather than generating new value. The instruments of Financialist power are the great institutions of global finance: banks and central banks operating with varying degrees of independence from political control, massive investment firms that manage assets exceeding the GDP of most nations, and the interlocking directorates that create a unified worldview and set of policy preferences regardless of national borders.

When BlackRock manages $10 trillion in assets—a sum greater than the economies of all but three nations—it exercises power that’s not merely economic but fundamentally political. When the chair of the Federal Reserve can move markets with a single sentence, that’s power without societal mandate. When Treasury secretaries and central bankers move seamlessly between government service and employment by the very institutions they once regulated, that’s not conspiracy; it’s type cohesion.


B. The Glorious Revolution of 1688: The Genesis Event


To understand how this type achieved its enduring grip on the English-speaking world, we must examine the pivotal moment of November 1688, when William of Orange, the Dutch Stadholder, landed at Torbay with an invading force funded by continental merchants. This wasn’t merely a dynastic squabble or a religious realignment. It was, in the most literal sense, a hostile takeover of the English state. The first hostile corporate takeover by the VOC of the BEIC, ala the mindset of Gordon Gekko.


Prior to 1688, the English monarchy had been persistently insolvent. King Charles II had been forced to declare a “stop on the exchequer” in 1672, suspending repayment of his debts. His father, Charles I, had resorted to “forced loans” when voluntary credit dried up. The fundamental problem was structural: without parliamentary consent for taxation, the Crown lacked the credible commitment to repay its obligations, and lenders therefore refused to advance funds.


In reflecting on the fiscal architecture of English monarchy from Elizabeth I to James II, one discerns a deliberate orchestration by merchants, bankers, parliamentarians, bureaucrats, and select nobles to externalize the realm’s essential expenditures—defense, security, and administration—onto the sovereign. This created a gilded cage of indebtedness, where monarchs were compelled to accrue unpayable loans, their authority eroded by dependency on these very elites who profited from the arrangement. Elizabeth’s reign exemplified this, as costs for armadas and explorations burdened royal coffers while commercial gains flowed to private interests, forcing reliance on conditional parliamentary subsidies and high-interest City loans. The Stuarts inherited and amplified this vulnerability: James I and Charles I faced escalating military demands without fiscal autonomy, leading to contentious measures like ship money, portrayed as tyranny but rooted in systemic entrapment.


Under Charles II and James II, the pattern persisted amid Restoration wars and colonial ambitions, with Dutch and English financiers extending credit that siphoned resources through interest, perpetuating corruption unchecked by a weakened crown. James II’s bids for efficiency and toleration were thwarted by this fiscal straitjacket, his opponents framing reforms as absolutism while safeguarding their advantages. This dynamic not only impoverished the monarchy but also stifled its role as guardian of the populace against elite excesses, fostering instability that culminated in the events of 1688.


The inGlorious Revolution, far from a mere vindication of liberty, formalized this shift by embedding parliamentary—specifically Whig-dominated—control over finances, as North and Weingast elucidated in resolving the “credible commitment” problem for creditors. Parliament’s annual sessions, audits, and purse-string dominance, per the 1689 Declaration of Rights, empowered the manufacturing and trading sectors that funded William’s invasion, derailing James’s absolutism as Pincus and Robinson describe. Yet this was no popular empowerment; it entrenched a financial order favoring those elites, birthing institutions like the Bank of England to manage debt in their interest, thus redirecting and permanently instantiating rather than dismantling the inequities, forced upon the monarchs, that had long plagued the realm.


The creation of the Bank of England in 1694 was the institutional embodiment of this new dispensation. As one historian noted, “The History of the Bank of England during its first few years is in no slight degree the history of the settlement of 1689.” The Bank was established as a private corporation that would manage the public debt—lending money to the government in exchange for the privilege of issuing banknotes and controlling the nation’s currency. This was the original sin: the creation of a permanent national debt, managed by private interests, which would fund the state’s perpetual wars while simultaneously enriching the financial class that held the debt, most all Praetorian Rome connected, if not outright Praetorian Rome.


The political economy of the Revolution was itself contested. King James II had been deeply rooted in the Royal African and East India Companies, believing that “only land could produce wealth” and that England’s future lay in overseas territorial empire. The Whigs who displaced him rejected this model. They argued that “labor created wealth” and that government should actively support economic development, particularly in the manufacturing sector. Their creation of the Bank of England was intended to “promote the development of the manufacturing sector” by making credit more available. But the institutional mechanism they created—a private central bank managing public debt—contained within it the seeds of a new form of power that would eventually transcend and subsume the manufacturing interests it was meant to serve.


C. The Institutional DNA: How 1688 Created a Self-Perpetuating System


The significance of 1688 lies not in any single event but in the creation of an institutional template that would prove remarkably durable and portable, as well as outright slaver in nature if not label. This template contained several key elements:


  • The centralization of public debt through a private institution. The Bank of England model created a self-reinforcing cycle: the state required ever more debt to fund its ambitions (primarily wars); the financial class held that debt and collected interest on it; the state’s need for future borrowing made it dependent on the continued goodwill of the financial class; and the financial class, in turn, had a vested interest in the state’s ability to tax the productive economy to service the debt. And so the financial class - Financialists, kept the realm in perpetual state of conflict and war.


  • The fusion of state power and financial interest through interlocking elites. The same families and interests that controlled the Bank of England also sat in Parliament, advised “controlled” the Crown, and dominated the great trading companies. This wasn’t corruption in the modern sense; it was the normal operation of a system in which public and private power were seamlessly integrated. That is, until it became nothing but corruption beginning around the time of WWI.


  • The exportability of the model. The institutional architecture created in London after 1688—a central bank managing public debt, a permanent national debt, a financial class whose interests were aligned with state expansion—could be replicated in other English-speaking polities. And it was, most significantly in the American colonies that would eventually rebel against London’s control while simultaneously adopting many of its financial innovations.


III. Part II: The Long War — Key “Handoff” Moments and Fractures


A. English Civil War 2.0 (The American Revolution): A Schism in the Elite


The American Revolution has traditionally been understood as a colonial rebellion against imperial overreach—a fight over “taxation without representation” waged by liberty-loving colonists against a distant and oppressive Parliament. This interpretation isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.


What if we view the Revolution instead as a schism within the English-speaking elite? The colonists who led the rebellion weren’t the dispossessed or the marginalized; they were the colonial elite—landed gentry, emerging industrialists, merchants whose commercial ambitions were constrained by London’s mercantilist system. Their quarrel wasn’t with English civilization or English institutions but with the specific configuration of power that had emerged from the 1688 Settlement.


The Navigation Acts, the restrictions on colonial manufacturing, the requirement that all trade pass through British ports—these were not arbitrary impositions. They were the logical expression of a financialized imperial system designed to extract value from the periphery for the benefit of the metropolitan center. The colonial elite, producing real wealth from land, labor, and enterprise, found themselves perpetually subordinate to a London-based financial class whose power rested on debt and manipulation rather than production.


The Declaration of Independence is, read in this light, a revolutionary document not just in its repudiation of monarchy but in its implicit rejection of the Financialist model. Its indictment of the King for “imposing taxes on us without our consent” was also an indictment of a Parliament that had, since 1688, claimed the exclusive right to tax precisely because it was the institution where financial interests were represented. When the colonists spoke of “consent,” they meant something different from the Whig oligarchs of London: they meant the consent of the governed, not the consent of bondholders.


Yet the American Republic, even as it threw off political control, immediately faced the same fundamental question that had haunted England: what kind of financial system would it have? The fierce battles between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s weren’t mere policy disputes. Hamilton’s program—a national bank, assumption of state debts, federal encouragement of commerce and manufacturing—was an explicit attempt to replicate the Bank of England model on American soil. Jefferson’s opposition—his vision of an agrarian republic of independent yeomen—was a rejection of that entire trajectory. The fact that Hamilton largely won, that the First and Second Banks of the United States were chartered, that the United States eventually established its own central bank and its own permanent national debt, demonstrates that the “capture” of 1688 wasn’t merely a British phenomenon but an English-speaking one. The institutional DNA had crossed the Atlantic. No one had broken free of anything but the illusionary power of the Crown.


B. The Crucible of the Nineteenth Century: Industrialists vs. Rentiers


The nineteenth century witnessed the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a new tension within the English-speaking elite: the struggle between industrial capitalists (who created wealth through production) and financial capitalists (who extracted wealth through finance). This tension played out differently in Britain and America, but it was present in both.


In Britain, the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 represented a victory for industrial capital over landed interests—but it was also a victory for the financial class, which had long sought to lower food prices to keep wages down and maintain Britain’s competitive advantage in manufacturing. The mid-Victorian boom was a golden age for both industry and finance, but the underlying tensions remained. By the late nineteenth century, British capital was flowing overseas in enormous quantities—to build railroads in Argentina, mines in South Africa, plantations in India—while domestic industry began to stagnate. The financial class profited handsomely from this global portfolio; the industrial working class paid the price in unemployment and declining living standards.

In America, the Civil War itself can be viewed through this lens. The conflict between the industrial North and the agrarian South was many things—a moral struggle over slavery, a constitutional crisis over union—but it was also a struggle between two different models of political economy. The North, with its factories, its banks, its railroads, represented the future that Hamilton had envisioned. The South, with its plantation agriculture dependent on slave labor and export markets, represented an older form of wealth extraction. The North’s victory ensured that the American future would be industrial and capitalist—but it also cemented the power of the financial houses that had financed the war. Jay Cooke’s sale of government bonds to ordinary citizens created a new class of investors with a stake in the federal debt. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 created a uniform national currency and a system of nationally chartered banks. The institutional architecture of Financialist power was being built, even as the nation celebrated its triumph over slavery and disunion. Replacing the slavery of chains with the slavery of ever increasing taxes and debt never fully payable with real wage stagnation and decline.


C. The Great Relocation: Bretton Woods and the Transfer of the Center (1944)


The Second World War devastated Europe and left Britain prostrate. The United States emerged as the undisputed hegemon of the capitalist world. But this wasn’t merely a transfer of military and political power; it was a relocation of the center of English-speaking now utterly financialized world.


The Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 is conventionally understood as a moment of enlightened international cooperation—forty-four nations coming together to design a new global financial architecture that would prevent the competitive devaluations and trade wars of the 1930s. This interpretation contains truth, but it conceals as much as it reveals.


As Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations has documented, the primary American architects of Bretton Woods—Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his deputy Harry Dexter White—had two aims. The first was public and laudable: to establish a new international monetary framework, with a privileged place for the U.S. dollar, overseen by a new International Monetary Fund. The second was never stated publicly but was “at least as important”: “to use American financial leverage over bankrupt Britain to pull down the economic foundations of its global empire.” This included the special status of the pound sterling and the system of imperial trade preference that gave Britain privileged access to the markets of its colonies and dominions. Treasury believed this would “permanently eliminate Britain as a geopolitical and economic rival.”


The Americans succeeded brilliantly. Britain emerged from the war with enormous debts and a shattered economy. The Lend-Lease agreement was abruptly terminated in 1945, and Britain was forced to negotiate a massive loan from the United States—on American terms. The pound sterling was gradually dethroned as a reserve currency. The dollar became the world’s money, backed by gold at $35 per ounce, with all other currencies fixed to the dollar.


Yet this transfer of power from London to Washington was not a liberation from Financialist control; it was a relocation of the center of that control. The institutions created at Bretton Woods—the IMF, the World Bank, and later the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—were designed to manage a global economy on terms favorable to American capital. But the same interlocking elites that had dominated London’s financial world now found new homes in Washington and New York. The Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission—these were the new nodes of transatlantic elite coordination. The hardware changed, but the software remained the same. As did the City of London itself.


The continuity is personified by figures like the Rockefeller family, whose fortune was made in oil but whose power extended through banking (Chase Manhattan), philanthropy (the Rockefeller Foundation), and foreign policy (Nelson Rockefeller’s various government positions). Or the Dulles brothers: John Foster Dulles as Secretary of State, Allen Dulles as Director of Central Intelligence, both partners at Sullivan & Cromwell, one of Wall Street’s most powerful law firms. The Financialist class had simply relocated its headquarters.


While the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 appeared to orchestrate a grand transfer of global financial dominion from the storied City of London to the burgeoning might of Wall Street—enshrining the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency and spawning institutions like the IMF and World Bank to ostensibly democratize economic stability—a deeper scrutiny unveils a masterful sleight of hand perpetuated by figures such as the Dulles brothers, whose Wall Street pedigrees at Sullivan & Cromwell intertwined with the birth of the American national security state. John Foster Dulles, as a architect of postwar diplomacy, and Allen Dulles, pivotal in transitioning the OSS to the CIA in 1947, concurrently facilitated the chartering of the National Science Foundation in 1950 and the bolstering of the National Institutes of Health, framing these as pillars of progress while embedding mechanisms for a self-funding global paramilitary apparatus. This shadowy consortium, sustained through covert black budgets, illicit trades, and coerced international tributes, has compelled nations to underwrite perpetual wars, engineered conflicts, and the expropriation of trillions in wealth, all while maintaining operational coordination from the enduring financial nerve center of the City of London, where transnational elites ensure that apparent shifts in power merely mask an unbroken chain of imperial control to the present era.


IV. Part III: The Argument Refined — Complexity, Not Conspiracy


A. Anticipating the Counterargument


At this point, the skeptical reader will object: this is a reductionist conspiracy theory. It ignores the immense complexity of history, the contingency of events, the role of ideas and individuals in shaping outcomes. It posits a centuries-old plot by shadowy figures who never appear in the historical record. It is, in short, bad history.

This objection deserves a serious response. If this article were arguing that a secret committee of Venetian bankers met in 1688 and planned the entire subsequent course of English-speaking history, it would indeed be nonsense. But that isn’t the argument. That’s not how a type works. They don’t have to. They are of a type and therefore think and act in predictable always self-serving ways to any and all events and occurrences.


B. The Rebuttal: A Convergence of Class Interests


What I’m describing isn’t a conspiracy but a convergence of interests. Individuals educated at the same institutions—Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, the London School of Economics—moving through the same social and professional circles—Davos, Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations—and sharing the same material stake in a debt-based, financialized system will naturally pursue policies that protect and expand that system. This is class consciousness, not conspiracy.


The economic historian might object that the concept of “class” is too blunt an instrument, that it obscures as much as it reveals. But the Max Planck studies on financialization demonstrate that scholars can and do analyze financialization as a structural phenomenon without descending into conspiratorial thinking. They examine “the ways in which finance inserts itself into relationships of class and kinship,” how it “reconfigures legal and ecological dimensions of social organization.” This is serious scholarship, not speculative fantasy.


Consider the response to the 2008 financial crisis. When the global financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, policymakers in the United States and Europe responded with a series of extraordinary measures: bailouts of major banks, near-zero interest rates, massive purchases of government and corporate debt by central banks. These policies were described by their proponents as pragmatic responses to an unprecedented emergency. But they also had the effect—foreseeable and foreseen—of protecting the interests of the Financialist class. Bondholders were made whole; shareholders in major banks were largely protected; the socialized losses of the financial sector were paid for by the public, while the privatized gains of the boom years remained in private hands.


Was this the result of a conspiracy? No. It was the result of a type with a shared worldview occupying key positions in Treasury departments, central banks, and financial regulatory agencies. A Treasury secretary who’s spent his career on Wall Street, a central banker who’s spent his life in the fraternity of central bankers, a regulator who expects to return to the industry he regulates—these individuals don’t need to conspire. They share assumptions so deeply embedded that they appear not as ideology but as common sense. All it requires is bad actors conducting fraud and corruption beyond a scale, such failure crashes the entire system, all masked long enough for this very thing to be brought to such a point. Then the Financialists go into action acting naturally to their type.


As Adam Smith described an “invisible hand” guiding market outcomes, there’s an invisible hand of type interest guiding policy outcomes. A chancellor, a treasury secretary, and a central banker from this milieu will all “independently” arrive at the same “pragmatic” solution to a crisis—a bailout, an austerity measure, a trade deal—because their shared worldview defines those actions as both necessary and natural. The “capture” of 1688 created the institutional DNA, and that DNA has been replicating itself ever since.


C. Why This Matters for Understanding the Present


This framework matters because it offers a more accurate diagnosis of our present discontents than the conventional great-power competition narrative. If the conflict in Ukraine is simply a clash between NATO and Russia, then the solution is more NATO, more sanctions, more military aid to Kyiv. If the U.S.-China rivalry is simply a new Cold War, then the solution is containment, confrontation, and preparation for eventual conflict.


But if these conflicts are symptoms of a deeper intra-elite war within the broader English-speaking civilization, then the prescriptions change. The question becomes not how to defeat Russia or contain China, but how to resolve the internal contradictions that have made the English-speaking world vulnerable to external challenges. The enemy, if that word can be used, isn’t in Moscow or Beijing; it’s in London, New York, and Washington—or rather, in a type within the three elite classes that operates across all these cities with little regard for national loyalty.


This isn’t to absolve Russia or China of responsibility for their actions. The former’s aggression in Ukraine is real; the latter’s successful capitalism presents genuine challenges. But the weakness that these powers exploit is internal to the English-speaking world. A civilization that has hollowed out its industrial base, addicted itself to debt, and allowed a financial type to capture its political institutions is a civilization ripe for challenge from without and far more so from within.


V. Part IV: Byzantium 2.0 — The Analogy Perfected


A. The Parallels Drawn


The Roman Empire’s third-century crisis—a period of fifty years during which more than twenty emperors were assassinated, the economy collapsed, and the frontiers were breached by barbarian invaders—offers a powerful analogy for our own time. Then, as now, elite rivalry and financial debasement threatened to destroy a civilization that had dominated the known world for centuries.


Diocletian’s response to this crisis was the Tetrarchy: a division of the empire into eastern and western halves, each ruled by a senior emperor (Augustus) and a junior successor (Caesar). This system stabilized the empire for a time, but it also acknowledged a fundamental reality: the center could no longer hold. The western empire, with its capital at Rome, continued to decay under the pressure of barbarian invasions, elite corruption, and economic decline. It finally collapsed in 476 AD, when the last western emperor was deposed by a Germanic chieftain.


But the eastern empire—what we now call the Byzantine Empire—endured for another thousand years. Its capital, Constantinople, founded by Constantine the Great in 330 AD, became the center of a civilization that preserved Roman law, Greek learning, and Christian orthodoxy long after Rome itself had fallen to barbarians. The Byzantine emperors faced challenges that would have destroyed any other state: Persian invasions, Arab conquests, Bulgarian wars, Crusader treachery. Yet they adapted, compromised, and survived.


As one scholar notes, the Byzantine Empire “does not fit easily into a ‘Western’ narrative” and is “seen as ‘outside’ the development of the Western state and international state system.” But this very marginality—this position between East and West, this refusal to be assimilated into a simple story of Western progress—makes Byzantium a powerful metaphor for the English-speaking world’s current predicament. For we too, as the English-Speaking Peoples, the English Civilization, have refused to assimilate, to remain on the outside of First and Second Rome, to value sovereignty over conformity.


To trace this evolution across eras:


Pre-1688 Era

  • Dominant center: Crown/Parliament

  • Key influences: Monarchical absolutism and religious strife

  • Freedom level: Limited by royal prerogative and divine right

  • Roman parallel: Pre-crisis Rome—Senate clashing with emperors like Nero


1688-1945 Era

  • Dominant center: London

  • Key influences: Continental banking via Dutch loans and Financialists

  • Freedom level: Captured; empire financed through perpetual debt

  • Roman parallel: Divided Empire (293-395 AD)—Tetrarchy with East-West co-emperors under Diocletian


Post-1945 Era

  • Dominant center: Washington

  • Key influences: U.S. hegemony via Bretton Woods and global institutions

  • Freedom level: Partially free; persistent elite entanglements

  • Roman parallel: Constantinople’s Rise (330-476 AD)—Eastern survival amid Western barbarian sacks


Contemporary Era

  • Dominant center: Contested

  • Key influences: America-Russia-China constructive rivalries and populist awakenings

  • Freedom level: Potential for full independence from Praetorian control

  • Roman parallel: Byzantine Peak (476-1453 AD)—Enduring Roman legacy against Persian, Arab, and Ottoman threats


B. Refining the Metaphor: Who Are the New Barbarians?


The conventional use of the Rome analogy identifies the “barbarians” as external powers: Cartels, Foreign Invaders, Islamist terrorism. These are the forces pressing against and within the gates of English Civilization, threatening to overwhelm it as the Goths and Vandals overwhelmed Rome.


This article proposes a different interpretation. The real barbarians are within.

The external threats are real enough, but they aren’t the primary danger. They are powers exploiting the West’s internal decay, much as the Sassanid Persians and later the Arabs exploited Roman-Persian exhaustion in the seventh century. The four-century rivalry between Byzantium and Sassanid Persia created a buffer zone that remained stable for long periods, but when the two great powers exhausted each other in final wars of annihilation, the resulting power vacuum allowed the rise of Islam—”one of the most significant events of Middle Eastern and global history.”


The contemporary parallel is striking. The United States and its allies have spent two decades fighting wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, expending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. China has watched, and learned, and built. Now it stands as the great creditor nation, holding trillions in dollar reserves, extending its influence through the Belt and Road Initiative, competing with the American-led order not through direct confrontation but through economic penetration and diplomatic persuasion.


But the real barbarians aren’t in Beijing nor in Moscow nor even in Mexico or the Muslim world. They’re in the financial districts of New York and London, in the boardrooms where decisions are made to offshore jobs and close factories, in the political action committees that fund campaigns and shape legislation, in the media empires that manufacture consent for policies that enrich the few at the expense of the many. The staged and professionally theater managed January 6th Capitol riot, the heavily funded illusionary rise of populist movements on left and right, the erosion of trust in every major institution—these are the stirrings of the barbarian armies within the gates. They’re the product of decades of deindustrialization, financial extraction, vast and growing inequality, and vast impoverishment and indebtedness. The Financialist class, the descendants of the Praetorian Guard of ancient Rome, has stolen most all can be stolen and now invites the barbarians within the gates, having left the non-repaired walls undefended.


For comparative depth, consider these key aspects:


Trigger

  • English Civil War 3.0: Elite war over wealth legitimacy and power loci

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Civil wars over imperial succession and economic collapse


Influencers

  • English Civil War 3.0: Continental Financialists and Praetorian banks

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Praetorian Guard, barbarian alliances, economic elites


Old Center

  • English Civil War 3.0: London, captured post-1688 by holding the Crown

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Rome, decayed by internal corruption and invasions


New Center

  • English Civil War 3.0: Washington, can escape total external control

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Constantinople, resilient hub for centuries


Outcome

  • English Civil War 3.0: Liberation of English-speaking peoples after 400 years

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Byzantine continuity of Roman civilization for 1,000+ years


Global Impact

  • English Civil War 3.0: DIMEFIL elements strained in global empires

  • Roman Split and Byzantium Rise: Preservation of Roman legacy amid Western fall and Eastern defenses


C. The Stake: What “Washington Prevails” Actually Means


If this analysis is correct, then the outcome of English Civil War 3.0 will determine whether Washington can become a new Constantinople—a center of resilient, adaptive civilization that preserves the core of English-speaking values for centuries to come—or whether it will follow old Rome into decay and collapse.


For Washington to “prevail” means something very specific. It means breaking the Financialist stranglehold on American institutions. It means:


  • Reasserting political control over monetary policy, auditing and reforming the Federal Reserve to ensure it serves the public interest rather than the interests of bondholders and bankers.


  • Breaking up monopolistic financial institutions deemed “too big to fail” and therefore too powerful to control.


  • Reorienting economic policy to reward production and innovation over financial engineering—rewriting the tax code, trade policy, and regulatory framework to favor those who create value over those who extract it.


  • Ending the regime of perpetual war, which is the primary engine of national debt and Financialist profit.


This isn’t a program for isolationism or autarky. Constantinople didn’t withdraw from the world; it engaged with it, trading with East and West, forming alliances when necessary, fighting when unavoidable. But it did so from a position of internal strength and coherence. Its survival for a millennium wasn’t the result of geographic good fortune alone; it was the result of institutions that worked, an elite that served the state rather than plundering it, and a population that identified its interests with the empire’s survival.

The parallels with contemporary Greece are instructive. As one historian notes, the modern Greek state has long grappled with a debate between “pro-Western factions” who argue that Greece must fully embrace European integration and those who perceive this alignment as “a form of cultural and political surrender.” The latter faction advocates for “a stronger emphasis on Greek sovereignty, Orthodox values, and an independent foreign policy.” They draw on the Byzantine legacy of “pragmatic diplomacy” and “strategic autonomy.”


Greece’s dilemma is the English-speaking world’s dilemma writ small. Integration into transnational structures brings economic benefits but also erodes sovereignty and cultural identity. The Byzantine model suggests a third way: engagement without subordination, cooperation without surrender. As the historian Theodoris Rakkas argues, “By reviving this legacy, Greece could adopt a more balanced foreign policy, engaging constructively with the EU, NATO, and regional neighbors like Turkey, while strengthening its strategic autonomy.”


The same logic applies to the United States. Engagement with the world is necessary and desirable. But engagement from a position of weakness—with a hollowed-out economy, a captured political system, and a demoralized population—isn’t engagement; it’s subordination. The first task of American statecraft must be internal reconstruction: the rebuilding of productive capacity, the restoration of political accountability, the reassertion of national sovereignty over transnational financial power. It is a civil war that is being fought the world over. A civil war within the English-Speaking Peoples that must be won if our more than a thousand year old civilization is to survive at all, if our people are to survive at all.


VI. Conclusion: The Threshold of Transformation


The crises of the twenty-first century aren’t random events. They’re the unfolding consequences of a four-hundred-year struggle within English-speaking civilization over who will rule and for whose benefit. The inGlorious Revolution of 1688 created an institutional template—a private central bank managing public debt, a financial class whose interests were fused with state power—that’s proven remarkably durable and portable. That template crossed the Atlantic with the American colonists, survived the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, and was successfully relocated from London to Washington after World War II.


Now that template faces its ultimate challenge. The Financialist type that it empowered have grown so powerful that they threaten the sovereignty of the very states that nurtured them. Global debt stands at unprecedented levels. Central banks have become the dominant actors in financial markets. Inequality has reached heights not seen since the Gilded Age. And the political systems of the English-speaking world seem incapable of addressing these challenges, precisely because they’ve been captured by the interests that profit from them and turned against the very native peoples who have for four hundred years fueled the entire system of global graft and theft.


This isn’t a counsel of despair. Empires don’t simply fall; they transform under the pressure of elite failures and popular revolts. The western Roman Empire fell, but the eastern empire endured for another millennium, preserving and transmitting the legacy of Rome to future generations. The question for our time is whether the English-speaking peoples can effect a similar transformation: whether we can throw off the corrupting influence of the Financialists and rebuild our civilization on a sounder foundation.


The stakes could not be higher. If Washington succumbs to the same forces that consumed London—if it remains a captured city, serving Financialist interests rather than the public good—then the English-speaking world will follow old Rome into decay and collapse. The barbarians will not need to breach the gates; they’ll find the gates already open, the walls unguarded, the population indifferent to its own fate. As they’ve been for nearly forty years.


But if Washington can become a new Constantinople—if it can break free from Financialist control, rebuild its productive economy, restore political accountability, and reassert its sovereignty—then English civilization may endure for centuries to come. It will face challenges, as Constantinople faced Persians, Arabs, and Turks. It will make compromises and suffer defeats. But it will survive.


We stand at the threshold of this transformation. The outcome isn’t predetermined. It will be determined by the choices we make in the coming years: in every election, every policy debate, every moment of crisis. The war of our time is English Civil War 3.0. Its outcome will shape the future not only of the English-speaking peoples but of the entire world.

VII. Appendix: Tracing Continuity Across Empires — The DIMEFIL Elements

To illustrate the continuity of power mechanisms across empires, consider how each of the seven elements of national power has been employed from Rome to the present:


Diplomatic

  • British Empire: Alliances with European powers, Triple Entente

  • U.S. Post-WWII: Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe and contain communism

  • Roman Empire: Treaties with Parthians and Persians to secure borders

  • Modern tension: U.S.-China trade negotiations amid tariff wars; G7 vs. BRICS


Informational

  • British Empire: Colonial propaganda via newspapers and missions

  • U.S. Post-WWII: Hollywood’s Cold War narratives; Voice of America

  • Roman Empire: Imperial cults and edicts proclaiming divine rule

  • Modern tension: Social media disinformation campaigns; TikTok as a vector of Chinese influence


Military

  • British Empire: Naval supremacy, Battle of Trafalgar (1805)

  • U.S. Post-WWII: NATO interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan

  • Roman Empire: Legions defending against barbarians, Adrianople (378 AD)

  • Modern tension: Proxy conflicts in Ukraine; U.S.-China tensions in Taiwan Strait


Economic

  • British Empire: Mercantilist trade monopolies in India and Africa

  • U.S. Post-WWII: WTO-driven globalization and free trade agreements

  • Roman Empire: Grain imports from Egypt funding the state

  • Modern tension: Supply chain disruptions; U.S.-China decoupling; industrial policy revival


Financial

  • British Empire: Bank of England loans financing Napoleonic Wars

  • U.S. Post-WWII: Dollar hegemony enabling sanctions and debt leverage

  • Roman Empire: Currency reforms, Constantine’s solidus (324 AD)

  • Modern tension: Cryptocurrencies vs. CBDCs; dedollarization efforts by BRICS


Intelligence

  • British Empire: Espionage networks in colonial territories

  • U.S. Post-WWII: CIA operations during Cold War and beyond

  • Roman Empire: Frumentarii spies monitoring internal threats

  • Modern tension: Cyber espionage, SolarWinds hack (2020); Huawei security concerns


Law Enforcement

  • British Empire: Colonial policing suppressing uprisings

  • U.S. Post-WWII: Extradition treaties; international law enforcement cooperation

  • Roman Empire: Praetorian Guard enforcing imperial decrees

  • Modern tension: Global sanctions enforcement; ICC investigations

VIII. Key Citations

 
 
 

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