Word: barbarian
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...sine qua non of civilized society. The end in view was not agreement but the kind of understanding that honest disagreement presupposes. "Disagreement," he would often say, "is not an easy thing to reach." This, he felt, was society's protection against the confusion spread by the barbarian perpetually at the gates...
Another feature of the Chinese scene is the stay-at-home quality of their history. It is the center of things; China is not a place you want to go away from, it is a place to stay in. If you go out, you're going to the barbarian outside, where there's nothing. Chinese culture is Sino-centric, and today the people are still concerned with what's going on inside the country. They wish the outside would disappear and not bother them. This is very different from a seafaring country including not only the Japanese, ourselves...
...fable, Borges imagines Droc-tulft, a barbarian, fighting against the Romans at the siege of Ravenna. When Droctulft's eyes fix on the city he is helping to storm, he sees for the first time "a whole that is complex and yet without disorder. He knows that in the city he will be a dog or a child, and that he will not even begin to understand it, but that it is worth more than his god and his sworn faith and the German marshes." Droctulft deserts and dies fighting for dying Rome. "He was not a traitor," writes...
...Roman philosopher Celsus made the point that "if all men were to do the same as you, there would be nothing to prevent the king from being left in utter solitude and desertion, and the forces of empire would fall into the hands of the wildest and most lawless barbarians." But Christians ceased to be pacifist when the Emperor Constantine turned Christianity from a fringe sect into the Establishment. It now behooved the church to defend the Christian empire, and St. Augustine, faced with the waves of barbarian invasions, built upon the codes of Aristotle, Plato and Cicero the Christian...
...mixed authorship called US. The title stands for U.S., as well as us, meaning the British; but the show plays more like Marat / Sade Goes to Viet Nam. In a series of unrelated psychedelic scenes, it portrays America's role in the war as hypocritical at best, barbarian at worst...