> Mistreatment by provincial Roman governors soon led to widespread discontent among the Visigoths and, by 376 CE, open rebellion had broken out.

In other words: treat your refugees as if they're people.

By the mid-470s, the Eastern Empire was rich, but the Western Empire was poor and struggling in every capacity. The Western Empire's army was so dependent on Germanic soldiers that the Emperor was a puppet of the commander of the Germanic forces, Ricimer. Ricimer would even kill emperors who stopped acting as loyal puppets! After Ricimer died, the emperor of the Eastern Empire decided enough was enough, and he took the opportunity to restore Roman rule to the Western Empire by sending Julius Nepos to lead an army to depose both Ricimer's successor Gundobad and his puppet Glycerius.

Julius Nepos was successful, establishing himself as the new emperor of the Western Empire. He appointed two key generals who he believed were loyal to him: Orestes leading the Roman forces, and Odoacer leading the Germanic forces. Shortly after this, there was an uprising in Gaul by a group of Germanic tribes who were upset over not having enough land. Julius Nepos sent Orestes to put down the rebellion, which wound up being a fatal mistake. Orestes had a dream his entire life of restoring the Western Empire to its former glory, and he believed Julius Nepos wasn't strong enough to do so. In fact, he believed that the only person who could make Rome great again was himself. So when he arrived in Gaul, he made a deal with the rebels. He told them that if they followed him home to the capital in Ravenna and helped him overthrow Julius Nepos, he'd grant them all the Italian land they want.

And so Orestes and an army of Germanic rebels entered Ravenna and sent both Julius Nepos and his remaining general Odoacer into exile. Orestes knew that it would be a mistake to take the throne himself -- nobody would tolerate an emperor who had the last guy kicked out -- so he instead appointed a puppet he could control, his nephew Romulus Augustulus ("Augustulus" being a nickname for "little emperor", not his actual name). But then Orestes made his own fatal mistake. He turned his back on the Germanic forces who helped him defeat Julius Nepos and said "I lied". He gave them no land and told them to beat it back to Gaul.

They weren't happy at all. They were so pissed in fact that they tracked down Odoacer in his exile and begged him to lead them to overthrow Orestes and his puppet. Odoacer agreed. In the civil war that resulted, Orestes and his brother were both captured and executed, Ravenna was sacked, and Romulus Augustulus sent into exile. Odoacer was nice enough to actually give the kid a generous stipend and sent him to live with the rest of his family, since it wasn't really his fault Orestes put him on the throne. Tired of the cycle of conflicts over the emperorship, Odoacer declared himself King of Italy and sent all the imperial regalia to Constantinople along with a note saying that an emperor in the west is no longer needed. And the Germanic refugees got all the land they could ever want.

And that is how the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. Breaking your promises to your refugees is a good way to get overthrown.

(edited to fix a typo; thank you jacquesm for pointing it out)

How to spot someone ignorant of history: Use of the argument "Thing X (that just happens to relate to contemporary political angle they are pushing) caused the fall of Rome."

They played a chess game with the people around them, and the right to settle or not within their rather arbitrarily defined borders was part of the game. Remember that the borders that they gave rights to enter were borders they established through imperial conquest anyways...

The Franks and the Goths both Romanized and created successor states that mimiced the Romans. To many of the people who lived in these areas the transition from Rome to these new states was so gradual they never fully clued into it. The successor states of Francia, Visigothic Spain, Lombardic Italy, etc. all inherited most of the legal and cultural framework of Rome.

Additionally the Western part of the empire fell for reasons probably not much related to barbarian invaders but more to economic and political decline. Taxation models shifted, landholding models shifted, raising large successful armies became harder, and the empire became harder to defend.

And the eastern half of the Empire continued with significant vibrancy for quite some time.

I really like this book on this topic: "The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000" https://www.amazon.ca/Inheritance-Rome-Illuminating-Dark-400...

He was informed that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms and pathetic lamentations they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman government; and most solemnly protested that, if the gracious liberality of the emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, they should ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws and to guard the limits of the republic.

I think it is more than fair to describe this as "taking refugees", though the Romans didn't really have the option of saying "no", because the consequence would have been more immediately ruinous.

It was thought expedient that an accurate account should be taken of their numbers; but the persons who were employed soon desisted, with amazement and dismay, from the prosecution of the endless and impracticable task;(67) and the principal historian of the age most seriously affirms that the prodigious armies of Darius and Xerxes, which had so long been considered as the fables of vain and credulous antiquity, were now justified, in the eyes of mankind, by the evidence of fact and experience. A probable testimony has fixed the number of the Gothic warriors at two hundred thousand men; and if we can venture to add the just proportion of women, of children, and of slaves, the whole mass of people which composed this formidable emigration must have amounted to near a million of persons, of both sexes and of all ages.

http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap26.htm

Yes, the Romans did use Goths in their military, but this particular situation was quite a bit different.

The ancient empires weren't modern nation states. People, particularly the Roman designated barbarians were more mobile. The Romans used these peoples as buffer states to keep other tribes migrating from the East away from their borders.

Even the "Roman" lands weren't necessarily Roman. There were petty kingdoms and tribes in there too, with scattered Roman settlements. As the empire declined economically, they started depending more and more on the non-Roman kingdoms to fight as mercenaries, etc.

Erdogan is working hard to undo approximately 80 years of Turkish progress. He may succeed in Turkey, but I highly doubt he will succeed to destabilize the rest of Europe or to make good on his threats of using Turkish citizens that have moved abroad as some kind of fifth column. He's mostly playing to a local audience with statements like that and likes to depict himself as the strong man in a struggle that is mostly initiated by Erdogan himself.

I feel pretty safe on the streets here. Much safer than I would feel in Ankara or Istanbul, and much safer than plenty of Turks feel in their own country.

Please imagine 70million people saying something.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/09/19...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/19/saudis-dropped...

See also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and a very large number of other places where proxy wars between western states and meddling in local affairs in order to gain the upper hand in veiled conflicts over resources have made the world a much worse place for a very large number of people.

A good rule for who, exactly?

Sure it could end different but for some reason it never does.

You are suggesting that westerners should, of their own accord, import millions of fighting age and potentially bitter men into their homelands. You admit this is a 'bit of a problem' for those westerners. Now you are suggesting that if westerners choose not to import these millions of people into their homelands, some nebulous force will haunt them. And your basis for this claim is, ultimately, the fact that civilizations tend to fall apart after a while? Given the enormous complexity of the causes of the downfall of great civilizations, do you realize how absurd that sounds? Given the enormous, albeit temporary (as all things are), success of civilizations that didn't feel bad about taking advantage of their neighbors, do you understand why your argument is so unpersuasive?

In any case what's done is done, and if we've already waged war on them, it makes no sense to open our borders to them because most of them are bitter at us and some of them want to and have succeeded in killing us in our own soil. It's simply a security issue.

There are millions of Muslims now scattered everywhere in Europe, and these last attacks are simply the beginning. Now Erdogan can threaten us because he has a dormant army everywhere. And we let them in, like a trojan horse.

(I'm European)

No, we all together own the result and fractionally each of us. That's the price of living in a democracy, and one I gladly accept. In a dictatorship you could argue like you do (and even there there are options, but with a much higher personal price).

> In any case what's done is done, and if we've already waged war on them, it makes no sense to open our borders to them because most of them are bitter at us and some of them want to and have succeeded in killing us in our own soil.

That is a vanishingly small fraction of those entering. In fact, the vast majority would like nothing better than to turn back if not for the fact that their lives are in danger where they lived. Sure, there are people who move with economic motives, but those are even less likely to be a danger.

> It's simply a security issue.

Yes, it is a security issue. And you deal with that like you deal with any other security issue: through law enforcement.

> There are millions of Muslims now scattered everywhere in Europe, and these last attacks are simply the beginning.

Do you actually believe that these 'millions of Muslims' are going to pick up arms and attack the citizens of the countries they have shared their lives with and who for the most part employ them and ensure their bread is buttered over the silly statements of some dictator? What you'll likely see is some angry youths who might rebel, but that's not too far from what Western raised youths do when given half a chance. There are plenty of examples of that.

And given that if your name is 'Muhammed' or 'Mustafa' or your skin a little bit different than lily white they actually have some reasons to be upset.

> Now Erdogan can threaten us because he has a dormant army everywhere.

No, sorry, he really doesn't. Erdogan, for all his bluster is incapable of ruling Turkey the way he wants to without vast human rights violations, there is little to no chance of him being able to rouse the Turks in Western European societies in the numbers required to cause a real problem.

That does leave open the door to polarization and escalation, and because of that those need to be fought tooth and nail, we all of us living here, Turks, Morroccans (and their children, who usually have the nationality of the country they were born in), refugees and natives (who likely were refugees of some war a couple of generations back) need to work out our differences and settle on something long-term viable and give Erdogan the collective finger.

And for the most part, we are doing just that. A few hundred misguided people are not going to change anything, and there are plenty of misguided people in our own ranks.

Well, you said I could change things, I'm telling you I can't, because I don't get to choose. We all do, and the majority, by now, disagrees with me.

>That is a vanishingly small fraction of those entering. In fact, the vast majority would like nothing better than to turn back if not for the fact that their lives are in danger where they lived. Sure, there are people who move with economic motives, but those are even less likely to be a danger.

I am aware of it, but it's not worth the risk to let any of them in.

>Yes, it is a security issue. And you deal with that like you deal with any other security issue: through law enforcement.

That's supposing law enforcement can stop 100% of terror attacks before they have happened. Isn't it better to just remove the root of the issue?

>Do you actually believe that these 'millions of Muslims' are going to pick up arms and attack the citizens of the countries they have shared their lives with and who for the most part employ them and ensure their bread is buttered over the silly statements of some dictator?

No, not millions of them, but just a few ones are enough to wreak havoc.

And yes, they are going to attack us, first because they are bitter we made them lose everything, and second because there's definitely not enough butter for all of them (in my own country, there isn't even enough butter for us natives!).

>No, sorry, he really doesn't. Erdogan, for all his bluster is incapable of ruling Turkey the way he wants to without vast human rights violations, there is little to no chance of him being able to rouse the Turks in Western European societies in the numbers required to cause a real problem.

Nobody talked about Turks. Turkey will covertly support ISIS as long as ISIS keeps killing Kurds, and they will because, let's be honest, all Muslims hate Kurds. And yes, ISIS lone fighters will keep terrorising us. It just happened yesterday.

About the rest, that's wishful thinking. I don't believe for a second two cultures that are fundamentally so different will ever manage to work together for one specific goal, let alone create something viable in the long term.

You'd rather see 10's or 100's of thousands dead than risk a few incidents?

> That's supposing law enforcement can stop 100% of terror attacks before they have happened.

There are so few of them that even with broken LE the dangers from terrorism are smaller than from smoking.

> Isn't it better to just remove the root of the issue?

Yes, but it is too late for that as you already wrote.

> No, not millions of them, but just a few ones are enough to wreak havoc.

Nah, only when viewed through the magnifying lens of the media. Traffic and obesity kill vastly more people than terrorists ever can.

> And yes, they are going to attack us, first because they are bitter we made them lose everything, and second because there's definitely not enough butter for all of them (in my own country, there isn't even enough butter for us natives!).

Where do you live then?

> Turkey will covertly support ISIS as long as ISIS keeps killing Kurds, and they will because, let's be honest, all Muslims hate Kurds.

Do you realize the majority of Kurds are Muslims? Are you suggesting they hate themselves?

> And yes, ISIS lone fighters will keep terrorising us. It just happened yesterday.

You let it happen to you, yesterday. Statistically speaking I feel no less safe than I did on Thursday last week, and if I see something that hints at an attack in progress I'll act. Until then life goes on.

> I don't believe for a second two cultures that are fundamentally so different will ever manage to work together for one specific goal, let alone create something viable in the long term.

It's already working. What do you suggest?

Isolationism? Close all borders to refugees? Barbed wire borders and soldiers with orders to shoot if the refugees should approach the border?

Are you willing to go and stand there to pull the trigger?