Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  THE CIVILIZATION WE ARE IN THE PROCESS OF DESTROYING IN IRAQ IS PART of our own heritage. It is also part of the world’s patrimony. Before our invasion of Afghanistan, we condemned the Taliban for their March 2001 dynamiting of the monumental third-century AD Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. Those were two gigantic statues of remarkable historical value and the barbarism involved in their destruction blazed in headlines and horrified commentaries in our country. Today, our own government is guilty of far greater crimes when it comes to the destruction of a whole universe of antiquity, and few here, when they consider Iraqi attitudes toward the American occupation, even take that into consideration. But what we do not care to remember, others may recall all too well.

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  Comparative Imperial Pathologies:

  Rome, Britain, and America

  In late July [43 BC] a centurion from Octavian’s army suddenly appeared in the Senate House. From the assembled gathering he demanded the consulship, still vacant, for his general. The Senate refused. The centurion brushed back his cloak and laid his hand on the hilt of his sword. “If you do not make him consul,” he warned, “then this will.” And so it happened.

  —TOM HOLLAND,

  Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic (2003)

  War came naturally enough to the British, after so much experience of it, and empire offered them a more or less perpetual battle-field.

  —JAN MORRIS,

  Heavens Command: An Imperial Progress (1973)

  The English-speaking peoples are past masters in the art of concealing their selfish national interests in the guise of the general good.... This kind of hypocrisy is a special and characteristic peculiarity of the Anglo-Saxon mind.

  —E. H. CARR,

  The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939)

  In 1972, Henry Kissinger, then President Nixon’s national security adviser, was in Beijing talking with Zhou Enlai, China’s first postrevolutionary prime minister, about normalizing Chinese-American relations. At one point in their conversation Kissinger asked what the prime minister thought was the significance of the French Revolution. Zhou replied, “It’s too soon to tell.”

  Zhou Enlai was not being as enigmatic as this sounds. The two men had been discussing the Chinese revolution of 1949, the most complex revolutionary upheaval in recorded history. A great deal of time will have to pass before we can begin to appreciate its various meanings, if we ever do. Zhou Enlai was also reminding Kissinger that historical significance is an extremely elusive concept and that comparisons, precedents, analyses, and claims of importance derived from history are almost invariably elements of arguments best judged by their contemporary purposes and whether or not they are persuasive, rather than by their claims of accuracy.

  The most famous English-language study of ancient Rome is surely Edward Gibbons The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788). He contended, among other things, that Christianity brought down Rome because it sapped the Roman spirit, was hostile to Mediterranean culture, and displaced Roman imperial pretensions with monasticism and contemplation. Not many people today would buy that interpretation, particularly since the collapse of the Roman Republic into dictatorship preceded by a century the spread of Christianity. Moreover, Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 AD imposed the autocratic style of Rome on the church as much as it Christianized the Roman empire.1

  So long as one is not dogmatic, it is perfectly logical to compare aspects of the American republic some 230 years after the Declaration of Independence with ancient Rome and the British Empire. Pundits of all sorts have been doing so for decades. In fourteen speeches to the U.S. Senate on Roman constitutionalism, in 1993, the venerable Senator Robert Byrd (Democrat from West Virginia) observed, “Many, if not most, of the Framers were conversant with Roman history and with the history of England. They were also familiar with the political philosophy of Montesquieu, whose political theory of checks and balances and separation of powers influenced them in their writing of the Constitution. Montesquieu was also influenced in his political philosophy by the history of the Romans, by contemporary English institutions, and by English history.”2

  This is true and a good reason for putting the United States in a class with the Roman Republic as well as the British Empire. But I want to focus on the traditional Roman and British comparisons for other reasons, more germane to our moment. The collapse of the Roman Republic offers a perfect case study of how imperialism and militarism can undermine even the best defenses of a democracy, while enthusiasts for the American empire systematically prettify the history of the British Empire in order to make it an acceptable model for the United States today.

  When it comes to the collapse of Roman democracy, Zhou Enlai’s dictum probably applies. Not enough time has passed to produce a universally accepted understanding of the events. The problem is not one of new materials, since short of a miraculous archaeological discovery, new sources that could alter our basic knowledge about ancient Rome are unlikely to appear. Writers today have roughly the same sources that Shakespeare consulted in writing his plays Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens—primarily, the Greek historian Plutarch. Contemporary historians can also consult remnants from the works of three Roman historians, Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius. Nonetheless, Rome still inspires utterly contradictory interpretations, providing a classical backdrop for clashing contemporary political projects.

  Three contemporary books illustrate the differences of opinion about the Roman Republic’s end that are alive and flourishing today. The British classicist Anthony Everitt’s Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician is a worthy example of what might be thought of as Western historical orthodoxy: the view that Julius Caesar was a military populist, the leader of the mob against entrenched representatives of the constitutional order, and a tyrant. In this analysis, Cicero, a senator and consul, acted selflessly to try to preserve constitutional government against implacable forces of corruption and the abuse of military power. “During his childhood and youth,” Everitt writes, “Cicero had watched with horror as Rome set about dismantling itself. If he had a mission as an adult, it was to recall the Republic to order.”3

  Everitt’s Cicero reminds one of the remarkable career of Senator Robert Byrd, who first took the oath of office on January 7, 1959. While his state has profited from his powerful position in Washington—a great many public buildings in West Virginia are named “Byrd”—he has also tirelessly tried to educate his colleagues about the concept of a “republic” and why, when working properly, it is a bulwark of democracy.

  In contrast, author Michael Parenti denigrates Cicero and other constitutionalists. Parenti portrays Caesar as a cross between Juan Peron and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—a ruthless populist. In his book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, Parenti stresses the class warfare that dominated much of Roman life. His hero is Caesar, a man who came from a well-established family but nonetheless devoted himself to the common man and was murdered in the Senate by a conspiracy of blue bloods. “Caesar seems not to have comprehended that in the conflict between haves and have-nots, the haves are really have-it-alls,” writes Parenti. “The Roman aristocrats lambasted the palest reforms as the worst kind of thievery, the beginning of a calamitous revolutionary leveling, necessitating extreme countermeasures. And they presented their violent retaliation not as an ugly class expediency but as an honorable act on behalf of republican liberty.”4 Parenti is repelled by what Cicero later wrote to Brutus, the leader of Caesar’s killers on the Ides of March, 44 BC: “That memorable almost God-like deed of yours is proof against all criticisms; indeed it can never be adequately praised.”5

  Parenti’s book is not just a paean to Caesar but also a polemic against establishmentarian history. “In the one-sided record that is called history,” he contends, “it has been a long-standing practice to damn popular agitatio
n as the work of riffraff and demagogues.”6 He is scandalized that in Gibbon, for example, there is “not a word ... about an empire built upon sacked towns, shattered armies, slaughtered villagers, raped women, enslaved prisoners, plundered lands, burned crops, and mercilessly overtaxed populations.”7 Parenti accepts that “democracy, a wonderful invention by the people of history to defend themselves from the power of the wealthy, took tenuous root in ancient Rome,” but he warns that “when their class interests were at stake, the senators had no trouble choosing political dictatorship over the most anemic traces of popular rule and egalitarian economic reform.”8

  Tom Holland, a leading BBC radio personality who has written highly acclaimed adaptations of Herodotus’s Histories and Virgil’s Aeneid, has produced Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. Though he comments that “the comparison of Rome to the modern-day United States has become something of a cliche,” he draws a picture of the late Republic that seems a model of the modern United States with its flamboyant excesses of wealth, bad taste, and arrogance, as well as its impulse toward militarism. His social history of republican decadence, highlighting a puerile Roman vision of politics and war, sounds very much like the second Bush administration and the shop-until-you-drop world of American consumerism.

  “Celebrity chefs had long been regarded as a particularly pernicious symptom of decadence,” Holland observes. Quoting from Livy’s History of Rome, Holland explains that “back in the virtuous, homespun days of the early Republic, so historians liked to claim, the cook ‘had been the least valuable of slaves,’ but no sooner had the Romans come into contact with the fleshpots of the East than ‘he began to be highly prized, and what had been a mere function instead came to be regarded as high art.’ In a city awash with new money and with no tradition of big spending, cookery had rapidly become an all-consuming craze. Not only cooks but ever more exotic ingredients had been brought into Rome on a ceaseless flood of gold. To those who upheld the traditional values of the Republic, this mania threatened a ruin that was as much moral as financial.”9 Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

  On empire building, Holland notes, “The Romans killed to inspire terror, not in a savage frenzy but as the disciplined components of a fighting machine.” After the worst Roman defeat of all time—the Carthaginian general Hannibal’s adroit use of his cavalry to destroy eight legions at Cannae in 216 BC—they adopted the same strategy that the United States turned to after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Never again, the Romans swore, would they tolerate the rise of a Mediterranean power like Carthage, “capable of threatening their own survival. Rather than risk that, they felt themselves perfectly justified in launching a preemptive strike against any opponent who appeared to be growing too uppity.”10

  In 1992, when he was the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, Paul Wolfowitz enunciated a similar strategy, which he and his colleagues began implementing in 2001 after Bush appointed him undersecretary of defense. According to Patrick E. Tyler, writing in the New York Times, “The Defense Department asserts that America’s political and military mission in the post-Cold War era will be to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia, or the territory of the former Soviet Union.... The new [Wolfowitz] draft sketches a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders ‘must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ “11 In 2002, this vision was officially embedded in the National Security Strategy of the United States, a key policy document. The goal of such megalomanic visions came to be called by the Romans a Pax Romana and by American pundits a Pax Americana.12

  After the great Roman general Pompey’s conquests in Asia Minor (66-62 BC), including his storming of Jerusalem in 63, “What had once been a toehold in the east was now to be a great tract of provinces. Beyond them was to stretch an even broader crescent of client states. All were to be docile and obedient, and all were to pay a regular tribute. This, henceforward, was what the pax Romana was to mean.”13 Holland concludes that, ultimately, “Corruption in the Republic threatened to putrefy the world.”14 The American record has been comparable: the Bush administration waged preventive war against Iraq, “putrefied” that country through incompetence and massive corruption, and in the process produced global revulsion against the United States—similar to the “world of enemies” that eventually overwhelmed the Roman Empire.15

  Even after two millennia there is little agreement on which of the multitude of comparisons Rome evokes are the most important, but perhaps the one most relevant to present-day America concerns how empire and its inescapable companion, militarism, subtly and insidiously erode the foundations of a republic. The United States took many of its key political principles from its ancient predecessor. Separation of powers, checks and balances, government in accordance with constitutional law, a toleration of slavery, fixed terms in office, the presidential “veto” (Latin for “I forbid”)—all of these ideas were influenced by Roman precedents. John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams often read Cicero and both spoke of him as a personal inspiration. The architects of the new American capital were so taken with Rome that they even named the now filled-in creek that flowed where the Mall is today the “Tiber River.”16 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, in writing the Federalist Papers to argue for the ratification of the Constitution, signed their articles with the pseudonym “Publius Valerius Publicola”—who was the third consul of the Roman Republic and the first to personify its values. Yet, as Holland notes, “By the first century BC, there was only one free city left, and that was Rome herself. And then Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Republic imploded, and none was left at all As a result, a thousand years of civic self-government were brought to an end, and not for another thousand, and more, would it become a living reality again.”17

  The Roman Republic failed to adjust to the unintended consequences of its imperialism, leading to drastic alterations in its form of government. The militarism that inescapably accompanied Rome’s imperial projects slowly undermined its constitution as well as the very genuine political and human rights its citizens enjoyed. The American republic has, of course, not yet collapsed; it is just under great strain as its imperial presidency and its increasingly powerful military legions undermine Congress and the courts. However, the Roman outcome—turning over power to a dictator backed by military force welcomed by ordinary citizens because it seems to bring stability—suggests what might well happen sometime in the future as a result of George Bush’s contempt for the separation of powers.

  Obviously, there is nothing deterministic about such a progression, and many prominent Romans, notably Brutus and Cicero, paid with their lives trying to head it off. But there is something utterly logical about it. Republican checks and balances are simply incompatible with the maintenance of a large empire and a huge standing army. Democratic nations sometimes acquire empires, which they are reluctant to give up because they are a source of wealth and national pride, but their domestic liberties are thereby put at risk.

  Many current aspects of our American government suggest a Romanlike fatigue with republican proprieties. As Holland puts it, “The Roman people, ... in the end, grew tired of antique virtues, preferring the comforts of easy slavery and peace.”18 After Congress voted in October 2002 to give the president unrestricted power to use any means, including military force and nuclear weapons, in a preventive strike against Iraq whenever he—and he alone—deemed it “appropriate,” it would be hard to argue that the governmental structure laid out in the Constitution of 1787 bears much relationship to the one that prevails today in Washington.

  The Roman Republic is conventionally dated from 509 to 27 BC, even though Romulus’s founding of the city is traditionally said to have occurred in 753 BC. All we know about its past, including those first two centuries, comes from the histories written by Livy and others and from the discoveries of modern archaeology. For the century pre
ceding the republic, Rome was ruled by Etruscan kings from their nearby state of Etruria (modern Tuscany). In 510 BC, according to legend, Sextus, the son of King Tarquinius Superbus (“King Tarquin”), raped Lucretia, the daughter of a leading Roman family. A group of aristocrats backed by the Roman citizenry revolted against this outrage and expelled the Etruscans from Rome. The rebels were determined that never again would any single man be allowed to obtain supreme power in the city, and they created a system that for four centuries more or less succeeded in preventing that from happening. “This was the main principle,” writes Everitt, “that underpinned constitutional arrangements which, by Cicero’s time, were of a baffling complexity.”19

  At the heart of the unwritten Roman constitution was the Senate, which, by the early years of the first century BC, was composed of about three hundred members from whose ranks two chief executives, called consuls, were elected. The consuls took turns being in charge for a month, and neither could hold office for more than a year. Over time an amazing set of checks and balances evolved to ensure that the consuls and other executives whose offices conferred on them imperium—the right to command an army, to interpret and carry out the law, and to pass sentences of death—did not entertain visions of grandeur and overstay their welcome. At the heart of these restraints were the principles of collegiality and term limits. The first meant that for every office there were at least two incumbents, neither of whom had seniority or superiority over the other. Office holders were normally limited to one-year terms and could be re-elected to the same office only after waiting ten years. Senators had to serve two to three years in lower offices—as quaestors, tribunes, aediles, or praetors— before they were eligible for election to a higher office, including the consulship. All office holders could veto the acts of their equals, and higher officials could veto decisions of lower ones. The chief exception to these rules was the office of “dictator,” appointed by the Senate in times of military emergency. There was always only one dictator and his decisions were immune to veto; according to the constitution, he could hold office for only six months or the duration of a crisis, whichever was shorter.