Revolution – What We Failed To Learn From The Romans

I’m taking a break from my series of critiques on the types of Anarchism out there because a certain issue has eaten at my mind lately. Its about what are often referred to as ‘revolutions’.

I find it chillingly apt of JFK when he stated that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Of course, I’m not so terribly concerned with the issue of peaceful revolution right now. Of course I see the proper way of dismantling the State and transitioning towards a stateless society is through a peaceful transition. My way of peaceful ‘revolution’ against Statism is to avoid the military, law enforcement or anywhere else in the public sector for career options, not accept the handouts from the government that I am supposedly eligible for seeing as how I only earn a certain amount below the threshold of taxable income, and… of course… most of all is my refusal to buy into the nonsense and mindless distractions and misdirections of mainstream corporate media and culture. I could make an entire post on how people can peacefully reject the State in their own lives, but that’s not the focus of this particular post.

I am talking more about violent revolution. That is when an armed and dangerous populace start shooting at their own government… or when military leaders decide they’re going to turn against their Commander In Chief and stage a coup. There is a lot of anxiety… a lot of fear right now in the United States… some of it warranted, most of it, though, not so much.

Anyway… there are people who are (apparently) ready to violently oppose President Obama. They think he’s this evil fascistic communist (those words don’t belong in the same sentence btw unless that sentence is something like ‘Fascism is the opposite dangerous extreme to Communism’), and they’re armed and ready to ‘water the tree of liberty’ (WWJD is starting to mean What Would Jefferson Do? ).

This is a very dangerous situation America has allowed itself to fall into… quite reminiscent of the last days of the Roman Republic. Remember that Julius Caesar was the leader of the left-wing faction of Rome’s political elite. He was a strong advocate of the welfare state, and he probably harboured more ‘liberal’ ideas of cultural identity than his right-wing opponents.

And of course, the right-wing of Rome’s political elite stoked the flames of fear in their base, convincing them that Caesar was a personal glory whore trying to buy a crown with the Gallic trinkets he’d plundered in his ‘illegal’ war in Gaul and crown himself king.

Now was he really looking to become  a king? This was a culture that absolutely detested monarchy. Like the Americans, their republic had a founding story written in the blood of Monarchists. I find it doubtful that Caesar really did want to be a king… but of course, we’ll never know… he never got to live to see the completion of his agenda.

So… of course, Caesar came back to Rome after a bloody civil war against Pompey and the other Optimates who sought to destroy him at the end of the Gallic War to a city in turmoil. Everything he could possibly have done in the republic led to violent resistance… so of course what does the head of a State do when he comes up against violent resistance? He declares martial law… he suspends the constitution and puts a freeze on all of the ‘lawful’ processes that separate a republic from a totalitarian regime.

The situation was so bad that he repeatedly extended the term of his dictatorship until eventually he just said ’screw this!’ and made himself ‘Dictator For Life’.

So already, the violent resistance to his ‘liberal’ agenda has made their fears of a potential tyrant into something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They fear he’s a power-hungry tyrant, so they violently oppose him, therefore he seeks more power so he can overpower this resistance and ram his agenda down their throats.

So… this went on for some time until a handful of senators like Brutus and Cassius decided to stab him twenty three times on the Senate floor. Did they imagine that with each stab they were killing the evil monster that was eating the Republic away?

No… it is clear that each stab to Caesar’s chest was one more hammer strike that was nailing the coffin of their beloved republic. The very coffin in which the Republic was to be buried alive. But unlike Uma Thurman in Kill Bill who was a strong, healthy woman in her early-mid 30s with advanced assassin training and martial arts mastery bestowed by the great Kung Fu master Pai Mei, the Roman Republic was a sickly old maid barely strong enough to lift a finger, labouring for breath, bloated from centuries of imperialistic conquest. This lady would not be strong enough to punch through the solid wood of her coffin, as the Bride had done to avert her Texas style burial.

You see… those left within Caesar’s faction of the Roman political elite… particularly his nasty piece of work of a great nephew Octavian now had a martyr for their cause, and a very angry ‘liberal’ public ready to fall in line unquestioningly behind those who finally, once and for all, swept away most of the pretense of freedom for the Roman citizenry. Octavian used his great uncle’s legacy to devastating effect to eliminate not only the senators involved in Caesar’s murder, but his own rivals within his own political faction, and to eventually make himself what we in the present day would equate with being an ‘emperor’, and for the descendants of his line to inherit that position.

Of course, there was still some pretense of ‘freedom’ and ‘democratic process’ in Imperial Rome. They still had a Senate after all… but the violent cycle of revolution and counter-revolution in the last decades of B.C.E. had emasculated them as an institution. As for the Roman people… well they were treated to bread and circuses and other largess to distract them from the reality of their situation until the perpetual debt of the Empire became so great that their currency was badly debased, the protection of their borders was outsourced to Blackwat… er… I mean ‘barbarians’ who would eventually pillage the State from within, and the political elite continued to enjoy lavish lifestyles while all everyone else had to look forward to for themselves and their descendants was brutal serfdom as landless peasants for the next thousand years or so.

I worry that maybe with the building tensions within America, the largess of a bloated welfare state and its network of entrenched interests both private and public, a currency debased to less than 5% of its original value, a military that is having so much trouble maintaining the Empire that they’re outsourcing to ‘private contractors’ who seem to be raping and pillaging as they please wherever they’re deployed. I worry that we are seeing a repeat of both the Late Republic and Late Empire of Rome simultaneously.

Anything Obama could possibly do during his Presidency is going to be a potential catalyst for the next gruesome stage of this process of death and decay of Republic and Empire. And I worry about the rest of the world when the American ‘Empire’ finally breathes its last, laborious breath. Its not so much because of the much elevated values upon which America was supposedly founded… its more the grim prospects when it comes to what fills the vacuum in this global system of Nation-States as the dominant force in the world… my concern is that the result is going to be as ugly… perhaps even more so than the Dark Ages that followed the end of the child-emperor Romulus Augustus’ reign over the western half of the Roman world.

No… I don’t buy the ‘New World Order’ conspiracy theories. I am not talking about a deliberate process of subjugation of the global tax livestock (thanks Stefan Molyneux for that awesome analogy ) on the part of a secretive group of bankers, oil tycoons and the military-industrial complex conspiring to impose a highly repressive ‘One World Government’ as Zeitgeist the Movie would have you believe. This is more of an unconsciously complicit population from commoner to elite with deeply entrenched vested interest in this unsustainable system.

So… I’d like to appeal for calm in the next few years. It would do the world a huge favour if these concerned citizens could just calm down, take a step back, take a deep breath, and think this through. We need not subject this bloated, sickly empire to that same Texas style burial. Why not just let it naturally pass away with what little dignity is left to it, and move on gracefully? Mourn if you must… but lets see if we can move on with our lives and build a new world that does not depend on the power of a great ‘empire’ to keep us safe from the darkest aspects of our own human condition.

Do I honestly expect this appeal for calm to reach enough people? Well not really. Even if someone who reads this was to make this same appeal and spread the word… people of this day and age are conditioned to enjoy the distracting bread and circuses of junk food, fast food, Reality TV, Top 40 music and drunken debauchery, and those who are getting violent are extremely desperate, or incredibly stupid.

~ by Jeff Engert on November 3, 2009.