"I don't think he could've chosen that at all considering the political situation in the Roman empire at the time."
You're mixing up the timeline. He chose Gaul when him and two dudes controlled the entire Roman empire. One of those dudes went East and died fighting there.
"Everything you're saying is almost purely conjecture"
Almost all historical analysis like this is conjecture. Some of it is just well reasoned and others is not.
It's a fact that he cited my reason in his commentaries and so is who is father-in-law is. He was related, through his wife, to someone that the Gauls killed in recent history.
Anyway, you're not really adding any information here and you're resorting to personal attacks, so I'm done here. Later!
"Ok, I don't know why do I have to specify this but I meant the slave labor if hundreds of thousands..."
Because they didn't do anything substantively different in this regard? Pointing out that the Romans had slaves as if it somehow differentiated them seems misleading.
The number of people living under slavery, or near-slavery, was probably quite similar before and after the Romans took over any given territory. In some cases, less, and other cases more.
"Well it's tangential anyway and has little to do with Caesar's motivations."
We can't read his mind but it seems very believable that he genuinely wanted to eliminate a threat to Rome, among other things. Most big things like this have more than one motivation. He could have chosen to go east to do his conquering, but he chose Gaul.
At one point he refers to the defeat and death of his father-in-law's grandfather, at the hands of the Gallic tribe he was engaged with. There's a good chance he sat at a dinner talking with his father-in-law about this. It wouldn't be surprising if they both agreed that it was time someone do something about the threat they posed.
> The Roman empire was almost entirely built on slave labor and exhortation of the territories they subjugated.
This is a description of virtually every ancient society in this region. The Romans were simply the most dominant. And as a rule, they were fairer and more tolerant than the entities they replaced.
> By that point the Celts weren't as much of a threat as they were 50-100+ years ago.
The argument that the Gauls were no longer a threat merely because it had been 40-something years since the last successful invasion of Roman territory doesn't make much sense.
Nothing fundamental had changed. The Romans were stronger by then but the territories bordering Gaul were still at risk. Vercingetorix himself attempted an invasion of the Roman province as a response Caesar's invasion.
> In any case the Roman senate didn't really consider the war to be necessary in that sense.
This is really accepting ancient propaganda at face value. It's more accurate to say that Caesar's opponents in the senate claimed it was unnecessary as a means of attacking him politically. Most of these same Roman senators used the Roman army in much the same way when serving at governors in the provinces.
Well, maybe. We just don't know how things would have played out.
The safest assumption seems to be that people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak very significantly accelerated progress.
But because of the way acceleration seems to kick of revolutionary changes, it does seem fair to say they were pretty 'Great' in terms of their impact.
For example, without them, maybe we would be in the 1990s era of personal computing now, thirty years later. Or maybe someone else would have done even better than them, and we would be further along, but the latter is harder to believe.
We'll simply never know the answer to these questions because we can't run the counter-factual.
As we've seen, genocide has become a recent term for almost any kind of warfare. It used to have a much more narrowly defined usage that was accordingly more meaningful.
Caesar's goal in Gaul was certainly not the extermination of its people or its culture. He wanted to pacify Gaul and Germany, for his own glory, but also for very legitimate self-defense reasons. And the Romans, as a rule, were famously tolerant of other people's national pride, customs, and religions.
And of course, the Gaul and German tribes were at least as brutal to each other as Caesar was to them. The entire region was filled with constantly warring tribes that would often commit something much closer to actual genocide. Caesar, and the later Romans, did a lot to reduce this internecine warfare.
The reality of these kinds of events is a lot more nuanced than a simple label like "genocide" will allow.
You're mixing up the timeline. He chose Gaul when him and two dudes controlled the entire Roman empire. One of those dudes went East and died fighting there.
"Everything you're saying is almost purely conjecture"
Almost all historical analysis like this is conjecture. Some of it is just well reasoned and others is not.
It's a fact that he cited my reason in his commentaries and so is who is father-in-law is. He was related, through his wife, to someone that the Gauls killed in recent history.
Anyway, you're not really adding any information here and you're resorting to personal attacks, so I'm done here. Later!