by David D. Horowitz
During the past decade the United States witnessed the passage of the Patriot Act and other legislation facilitating state-sanctioned monitoring of people deemed suspicious. As this occurred I kept thinking of Ancient Rome, and I periodically read William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Ancient Rome began as a citizen’s republic and evolved into an autocracy. It has rightly been called the world’s first superpower, and its wars with non-Roman peoples helped breed the resentment and retaliation that caused its destruction. Ancient Rome’s glorious, grotesque, marvelous, and corrupt history haunts the United States, the greatest superpower of today.
How long can the United States remain a free, open republic when its citizens, rightly or wrongly, feel vulnerable to attack? How much do our political and corporate elites manufacture fear to justify clandestine usurpation of freedoms of speech and assembly? Will we slip into patterns of autocracy? Have we already? Some decry welfare dependency, drug use, violent crime, and declining military preparedness, and claim we decay like Ancient Rome. Others cite media celebrity obsessions designed to distract citizens from loss of rights and diverse consumer addictions peddled by a greedy corporate oligarchy—and suggest we have become a de facto tyranny. The bread and circuses of Ancient Rome live on, though now the everyman craves burgers, beer, and ball games, and the educated their lattes and wine-and-cheese soirées. Occasional whining aside, though, few dare to genuinely challenge the powers that provide. Most sprint to snatch the coins the oligarch flings from his carriage into the gutter. Few wonder whether corruption mints the coins. And does an Alaric or Attila ponder an opportunity, conflating American prosperity with weakness, to invade and sack?
And have we become a tyranny to protect our shores from terror networks and drug cartels? Must every honest, thinking citizen anguish like Shakespeare’s Brutus over a Caesar in our midst? Rome seemed invulnerable. It fell. Many thinking citizens of the United States are at least dimly aware of that history—and fear we are doomed to repeat it, and sooner than later. Julius Caesar remains one of Shakespeare’s most frequently taught and performed plays because the ghost of Ancient Rome’s fall still haunts the modern world, especially the United States