War Handwavium

 The Roman Republic lasted from 509BC to 27BC. The Republic was in its slow, agonizing death throes when Brutus and a group of Senators assassinated Julius Caesar on the Ides of March, 44BC. In the previous month, the Senate had declared Caesar “Dictator in Perpetuity” of Rome. Brutus and his group called themselves the “Liberators”. After Caesar was dead, Brutus and several Senators walked to the capital shouting “People of Rome, we are once again free!”. 

What Brutus and his Senators had not foreseen was just how popular Caesar was among the middle and low class members of Rome. Brutus thought himself stopping a tyrant. But to the middle and lower class, a small group of Aristocrats had murdered their champion.  Two years after his death, the Roman Senate would declare Julius Caesar a god.

After the death of Julius Caesar in 44BC, the power vacuum caused several years of civil wars, Caesar’s heir, Octavia, a Roman Consul named Marcus Lepidus, and General Mark Antony agreed to a political alliance called the Second Triumvirate in 43 BC. By 36 BC, Octavia had forced Lepidus into exile. By 30BC, Octavia defeated Mark Antony’s forces in battle and Antony committed suicide. In 27 BC, Octavia had became Augustus Caesar, first emporer of the Roman Empire.

Augustus ruled until his death in 14AD. During his rule, he controlled most of the Roman Legions, and used them to coerce the Roman Senate. Augustus inherited significant wealth from Julius, and Augustus used that wealth and used his power to exert influence through patronage. Upon his own death, the Roman Senate declared Augustus a god.

 Augustus ruled as Emporer, starting a period known as Pax Romana, latin for Roman Peace, a period of relative peace and prosperity for the Empire. Augustus reformed the tax system, built lots of roads, established a police and fire department in Rome, expanded the borders of the Empire, and established a relative peace that would last nearly two centuries.

By all accounts, Augustus was an intelligent, decisive, and shrewd politician. And he was an Emporer. His success as Emporer ended the Roman Republic of the previous five centuries, and established the Emporer as the method of rule. Under Augustus, this worked out relatively well for Rome in general. But after Augustus, Emporers weren’t of quite the same level of quality, leading to such stellar failures as Caligula, Nero, and Domitian.

The point is that the lower and middle classes supported Julius over Brutus and the Senate,  and again Augustus over the Senate. And part of that is because at the time, the Senate was weak and corrupt, and both Julius and Augustus were seen as strong and relatively uncorrupt. In both cases, the people supported a tyrant over a republic system of government. In short, they embraced the idea of a benevolant tyrant.

I only bring this up because America has become infatuated with this notion of “spreading democracy”. We have invaded foreign countries, bombed the holy hell out of the land, and attempted to cast ourselves as “liberators” by killing people in power and replacing them with a “democracy” of some strained flavor. And yet, during times we are exporting democracy, we seem to be turning away from democracy at home.

After 9/11, the US government threw out due process, threw out rule of law, threw out numerous checks and balances against abuse of power, started torturing people, started holding people indefinitely without charge, started spying on Americans in wide swaths, invaded two sovereign nations, Iraq and Afghanistan, and stretched itself so thin that it couldn’t win either one. And during the height of all these changes, Bush’s approval rating was through the roof.

People turned away from democracy and turned towards a version of tyranny.

Even while Rome was an empire, the Roman Senate still existed. It’s just that it was brought under the influence of the Emporer, through threat of force, bribes, and patronage. The Senate had become corrupted to the point that it was nothing more than a rubber stamp of the Emporer. During the fear immediately after 9/11, the US Senate turned into little more than a rubber stamp for whatever abuse of power Bush wanted to commit.

The thing is that in both cases, people gave up a representative government for the blind hope that they would find a benevolent and wise tyrant to rule them. In the case of Augustus, it may very well have been that the Senate could have done no better. But Augustus eventually lead to Nero and Caligula, whose abuses are legendary. In the case of post-9/11 America, we found our Nero in George W. Bush. Nero played a lyre as the Empire burned. Bush read “My pet goat”.

I believe that at the heart of this abdication of the people is an infantization, a regression to an emotional, fear-based state, a regression to the condition of a young child in a world of adults. And in looking at the complexities of the world and finding themselves at a loss for answers, they simply project the answer onto someone in power. For a child, mommy and daddy will make it all better. For the adult in a democracy, some benevolant tyrant will know what to do.

We do not simply abdicate democratic powers and hand our future over to a tyrant for no reason.

We do it because we don’t have an answer. And if we don’t have an answer, and we’re under a democracy, then our government doesn’t have an answer. If we abdicate, if we throw our hands up, and hand the wheel over to someone else, then we can pretend we are no longer responsible for what happens and we can pretend that the tyrant will somehow magically have all the answers.

We sacrifice real liberty in hopes to convince ourselves of the fantasy that it will somehow make us more secure.

We don’t know how, though. That’s the problem. If we knew how to make ourselves secure, we as a democracy would simply vote for that, push for that, demand our representatives do that. But when we don’t know what to do, that is when we abdicate our power, hoping it will buy us what we want. Hoping that maybe someone else knows what to do. And while we might hand our fate over to Augustus and bring about the start of the next Pax Romana, we might as easily hand our fate over to Caligula, Dick Cheney, Nero, or George W. Bush.

If we abdicate our power because we don’t know the answer, then we can’t possibly know to whom we are abdicating or what the real consequences of that abdication will be.

And yet, we abdicate. And what almost always happens after we abdicate is war. We hand our power over, we take on the role of infant and turn our tyrant into some sort of Father Figure.  And what Father invariably does is start handing out punishments, which only reinforces the Infant-Father roles. Whoever takes on the Father role will invariably want to reinforce their role as Father and the system’s role as Father.

There is no easy answer when we as a people fear the world around us. The post 9/11 world was little more than a time of barely contained terror for many people. Some people couldn’t contain it. Some people came unhinged by their terror and did terrible terrible things. If there is any answer at all, its that there is no easy answer. The desire to abdicate to tyranny is nothing more than the desire for an easy answer and to relinquish our own responsibility in a world we fear and don’t understand.

And while abdicating may feel like a short term relief, it eventually leads to catastrophe. Even if the current tyrant is benevolent and wise, once Tyranny is established as the method of rule, a tyrant will come along to abuse that system.

The only solution that produces both short term and long term improvements is a difficult solution. It requires controlling our fear enough that we can remain logical. It requires becoming informed of history and the facts of the present to understand the circumstances we are in. And it requires a sense of responsibility for our decisions, of being accountable for our actions, rather than abdicating our responsibility, and therefore our power, by surrendering to tyranny, surrendering to our anger, surrendering to our fears.

We see this time and time again throughout the world and throughout history. When the Taliban first came to power in Afghanistan, many Afghans supported them as a welcome improvement over the various warlord factions who had kept the country in civil war for years. When Gaza had elections in 2006, many voted for Hamas, seeing them as an improvement over the Fatah organization who had essentially nothing to show for cowing to the Israeli government for years.

And now, Israel just had an election and the votes appear to have shifted significantly to the right. The moderate Kadima party of Tzipi Livni won 28 seats, the right wing party of Benyamin Netanyahu won 27 seats, and the far right Yisrael Beiteinu party of Avigdor Lieberman won 15 seats.  And the Labor party won 13 seats.  The most moderate of the top parties, Kadima is headed by Livni who launched the three week bombardment of Gaza in December that killed hundreds of innocent Gazan children and civilians in retaliation for Hamas killing 17 Israelis in an entire year. Netanyahu says that the bombardment stopped too early and that he would attack Hamas and topple them. Lieberman is the most extreme rigth wing candidate, calling Arabs living in Israel “collaborators” against Israel, suggesting that Arabs should be forced to take “loyalty oaths” and those who refuse would be stripped of their citizenship. His opponents call him a fascist and a racist. Netanyahu said he will turn to his natural partners in the nationalist camp to form a coalition government consisting of at least 61 of the 120 total seats.

All of which is to say that the people of Israel have turned to war, have turned against their own population, have turned against anyone not a Jew, anyone who doesn’t swear a loyalty oath, anyone who doesn’t fit the tribal definition of “us”. All of which is to say that Israel is about to go further and further away from any chance for a long term peace and closer and closer to several more years of war. This is what people do when they are angry and afraid and vote. They vote for war. They vote for “us” versus “them”. They vote for tribalism, racism, fascism.

This is nothing more than the US paranoia immediately after 9/11 with the vast majority of people willing to sacrifice anything to feel a little safer, regardless of whether their sacrifice actually made anyone safer. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US gladly marched its way into two wars that we’re still fighting seven years later and still have no end in sight.

If there is going to be peace anytime within our generation, Israel must not be allowed its march towards another senseless war with the Palestinians and Arabs. If the US supports Israel while Israel launches an immoral war, then the US becomes responsible. At the very least, the US cannot continue its blind support of Israel as they continue launching wars against its neighbors, as they continue pushing the region further and further from peace.

The only solution that produces both short term and long term improvements is a difficult solution. It requires controlling our fear enough that we can remain logical. It requires becoming informed of history and the facts of the present to understand the circumstances we are in. And it requires a sense of responsibility for our decisions, of being accountable for our actions, rather than abdicating our responsibility, and therefore our power, by surrendering to tyranny, surrendering to our anger, surrendering to our fears.

Israeli settlements have continued to expand, putting up massive obstacles for peace. Israel’s security wall has claimed about 10% of palestinian land, putting up another massive obstacle for peace. And if Netanyahu has his way, there will likely be an Israeli war launched against Gaza by March, perhaps April. Netanyahu has 28 days, plus perhaps another 14 days, to form a coalition government. If he does so using the most nationalistic parties, then war is inevitable and peace will be pushed back another five or ten years.

If the US is going to do anything to try and bring peace to the Middle East, it has about 4 weeks to do it.