When you or I can’t pay our bills, our telephone service gets cut off or “they” repossess the car, truck, fishing boat, or whatever. When a country can’t pay its bills, the consequences get even more dire. As Henry C. Adams noted as recently as 1898, or 21 BK (Before Keynes, who thought being permanently in debt was a Good Thing),
Henry C. Adams
The tendency of foreign borrowing is in the same direction as that of domestic borrowing. As the latter obstructs the efficiency of constitutional methods, so the former tends to destroy the full autonomy of weak states. The granting of foreign credit is a first step toward the establishment of an aggressive foreign policy, and, under certain conditions, leads inevitably to conquest and occupation. . . . The facts disclosed permit one to understand how deficit financiering, carried so far as to result in an interchange of capital and credit between peoples of varying grades of political advancement, must endanger the autonomy of weaker states unable to meet their debt-payments. Provided only that the interests involved are of sufficient importance to make diplomatic interference worth the while, the claims allowed by international law will certainly be urged against the delinquent states, and the citizens of such states may regard themselves fortunate if they succeed in maintaining their political integrity. (Henry C. Adams, Public Debts, An Essay in the Science of Finance. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898, 25, 28-29.)
And that’s in peacetime, which can lead to one country to take over another in a “hostile takeover” or even a war if the stakes are high enough. It’s even worse when a country at war can’t pay its bills . . . and worst of all when some politician thinks he (or she) is being clever or “smart” and won’t pay the bills or cheats people out of their due. That happened in 241 BC when the Carthaginian Senate thought they would get cute and save a bit of money by not paying their mercenary army who had saved their collective behinds from the upstart Roman Republic that was starting to cut into profits.
The Carthaginians were primarily merchants, not soldiers. Carthage was a Phoenician colony — the Philistines of the Bible. The city may have been established as a refuge by a group of Punici (as the Romans called them) when they were run out of the near East. Some scholars think this was due to their enthusiasm for sacrificing their children to Moloch (to gain favor and increase profits) after human sacrifice began falling into disfavor in their homeland. This was probably due to the Jews, those intruders who insisted on forcing their morality on others and (gasp) worshiped only one God.
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| Salammbô |
Anyway, the Carthaginian Senate outsmarted themselves by not paying their hired guns . . . er, swords, resulting in the Mercenary Revolt that took place from 241 to 237 BC. The Revolt ended with the mercenaries (who fought better than the Carthaginians for some reason) only being defeated after a long and bloody fight and cost a lot more than paying the mercenaries their due in the first place would have. Readers of now-obscure historical novels and films will be familiar with the story from Salammbô (1862), a bestseller by Gustave Flaubert, who used Book I of Polybius’s Roman History as his primary source.
So, what has this got to do with Vladimir Putin, the Dictator of the Russian Federation? Recruitment of “native” Russians has dropped precipitously considering the plummeting life expectancy of front-line soldiers engaged in attempting to advance Putin’s conquest of Ukraine for power ’n profit. Convicts haven’t been able to fill the ranks, and Russia has been luring thousands of desperate foreigners into the army as mercenaries.
There is another problem. Recruiting mercenaries is one thing. Treating them like dirt or disposable cannon fodder is quite another. It’s not merely disgraceful, it’s extremely dangerous, as the Mercenary Revolt and Russia’s own experience with the Wagner Group have shown. Do you really want to put weapons in people’s hands, trust them with defending you with their lives . . . and then cheat them? That might not be too bright.
For Putin and those like him, however, it’s a clever way to save money and get rid of undesirables, such as ethnic minorities in Russia, criminals, and dumb foreigners who soon learn that poking “the West” in the eye isn’t as much fun as the recruiters and kidnappers might have made out. It might take a little time, but if and when Russia’s cannon fodder soldiers wake up, Putin’s days — if not his hours, possibly minutes — are numbered.
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