[wordup] Rome, AD ... Rome, DC?

[Adam Shand]

I had to go digging to find a bit I wrote several years ago while on a
holiday in England that seemed appropriate.

From: http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/WorldThoughts

  Recently I was on holiday in England and as such spent more time in that
  month thinking then I had for a good long time.  It occurred to me that
  maybe the simple fact is that society *is* suffering moral decay and
  apathy and it doesn't matter how much any one tries until people change
  it ain't going to mean squat.  Then it struck me all of a sudden, a
  concept that completely changed everything and opens up a whole new
  avenue of questions.  Maybe we are at the end of an Era.

  It seems to me that American culture is as close to a global culture as
  it gets, and spreads ever more insidiously into more parts of the world
  every day.  And yet the American dream rings a bit hollow these days and
  while it promises freedom it gives you only material freedom in exchange
  for taking your freedom of spirit.  People who believe the wrong thing
  too loudly have a tendency to disappear and we are constantly bombarded
  with other peoples information and views which can easily crush our own
  powers of free thinking.

  Back to my point... put in context with the Roman Empire it seems that
  we are about due to have the Barbarians come screaming down from the
  north, destroy our cities, rape our woman and end our reign of power.
  Yet in todays context a war is no longer really viable.  A war of that
  scale would probably be the end of the human species (and most other
  species for that matter).  Further more we are talking about a culture
  that is no longer limited by physical boundaries... you could destroy
  America or England or even all of Europe and yet miss the culture that
  you were after.  So next the question we ask is "How is the end of the
  Era going to come?" and hopefully "What do we want to replace it?".

And now the actual point of the story ... :-)

Adam.

From: rebecca <rebecca at wetafx.co.nz>
Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,794163,00.html

They came, they saw, they conquered, and now the Americans dominate the
world like no nation before. But is the US really the Roman empire of the
21st century? And if so, is it on the rise - or heading for a fall?
Jonathan Freedland sifts the evidence

Wednesday September 18, 2002
The Guardian

The word of the hour is empire. As the United States marches to war, no
other label quite seems to capture the scope of American power or the
scale of its ambition. "Sole superpower" is accurate enough, but seems
oddly modest. "Hyperpower" may appeal to the French; "hegemon" is favoured
by academics. But empire is the big one, the gorilla of geopolitical
designations - and suddenly America is bearing its name. Of course,
enemies of the US have shaken their fist at its "imperialism"  for
decades: they are doing it again now, as Washington wages a global "war
against terror" and braces itself for a campaign aimed at "regime change"
in a foreign, sovereign state. What is more surprising, and much newer, is
that the notion of an American empire has suddenly become a live debate
inside the US. And not just among Europhile liberals either, but across
the range - from left to right.

Today a liberal dissenter such as Gore Vidal, who called his most recent
collection of essays on the US The Last Empire, finds an ally in the likes
of conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer. Earlier this year
Krauthammer told the New York Times, "People are coming out of the closet
on the word 'empire'." He argued that Americans should admit the truth and
face up to their responsibilities as the undisputed masters of the world.
And it wasn't any old empire he had in mind. "The fact is, no country has
been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily
in the history of the world since the Roman empire."

Accelerated by the post-9/11 debate on America's role in the world, the
idea of the United States as a 21st-century Rome is gaining a foothold in
the country's consciousness. The New York Review of Books illustrated a
recent piece on US might with a drawing of George Bush togged up as a
Roman centurion, complete with shield and spears. Earlier this month
Boston's WBUR radio station titled a special on US imperial power with the
Latin tag Pax Americana. Tom Wolfe has written that the America of today
is "now the mightiest power on earth, as omnipotent as... Rome under
Julius Caesar".

But is the comparison apt? Are the Americans the new Romans? In making a
documentary film on the subject over the past few months, I put that
question to a group of people uniquely qualified to know. Not experts on
US defence strategy or American foreign policy, but Britain's leading
historians of the ancient world. They know Rome intimately - and, without
exception, they are struck by the similarities between the empire of now
and the imperium of then.

The most obvious is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the
superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest
budgets and finest equipment the world had ever seen. No one else came
close. The United States is just as dominant - its defence budget will
soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries put
together, allowing the US to deploy its forces almost anywhere on the
planet at lightning speed. Throw in the country's global technological
lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival.

There is a big difference, of course. Apart from the odd Puerto Rico or
Guam, the US does not have formal colonies, the way the Romans (or
British, for that matter) always did. There are no American consuls or
viceroys directly ruling faraway lands.

But that difference between ancient Rome and modern Washington may be less
significant than it looks. After all, America has done plenty of
conquering and colonising: it's just that we don't see it that way. For
some historians, the founding of America and its 19th-century push
westward were no less an exercise in empire-building than Rome's drive to
take charge of the Mediterranean. While Julius Caesar took on the Gauls -
bragging that he had slaughtered a million of them - the American pioneers
battled the Cherokee, the Iroquois and the Sioux.  "From the time the
first settlers arrived in Virginia from England and started moving
westward, this was an imperial nation, a conquering nation," according to
Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

More to the point, the US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40
countries across the world - giving it the same global muscle it would
enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. (When the US took on the
Taliban last autumn, it was able to move warships from naval bases in
Britain, Japan, Germany, southern Spain and Italy: the fleets were already
there.) According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and
Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases, numbering into
the hundreds around the world, are today's version of the imperial
colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as "forward deployment",
says Johnson, but colonies are what they are. On this definition, there is
almost no place outside America's reach. Pentagon figures show that there
is a US military presence, large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states
of the United Nations.

So America may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every
corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the United
States' entire approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman.  It's as
if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be
done - and today's Americans are following it religiously.

Lesson one in the Roman handbook for imperial success would be a
realisation that it is not enough to have great military strength: the
rest of the world must know that strength - and fear it too. The Romans
used the propaganda technique of their time - gladiatorial games in the
Colosseum - to show the world how hard they were. Today 24-hour news
coverage of US military operations - including video footage of smart
bombs scoring direct hits - or Hollywood shoot-'em-ups at the multiplex
serve the same function. Both tell the world: this empire is too tough to
beat.

The US has learned a second lesson from Rome, realising the centrality of
technology. For the Romans, it was those famously straight roads, enabling
the empire to move troops or supplies at awesome speeds - rates that would
not be surpassed for well over a thousand years. It was a perfect example
of how one imperial strength tends to feed another: an innovation in
engineering, originally designed for military use, went on to boost Rome
commercially. Today those highways find their counterpart in the
information superhighway: the internet also began as a military tool,
devised by the US defence department, and now stands at the heart of
American commerce. In the process, it is making English the Latin of its
day - a language spoken across the globe. The US is proving what the
Romans already knew: that once an empire is a world leader in one sphere,
it soon dominates in every other.

But it is not just specific tips that the US seems to have picked up from
its ancient forebears. Rather, it is the fundamental approach to empire
that echoes so loudly. Rome understood that, if it is to last, a world
power needs to practise both hard imperialism, the business of winning
wars and invading lands, and soft imperialism, the cultural and political
tricks that work not to win power but to keep it.

So Rome's greatest conquests came not at the end of a spear, but through
its power to seduce conquered peoples. As Tacitus observed in Britain, the
natives seemed to like togas, baths and central heating - never realising
that these were the symbols of their "enslavement". Today the US offers
the people of the world a similarly coherent cultural package, a cluster
of goodies that remain reassuringly uniform wherever you are.  It's not
togas or gladiatorial games today, but Starbucks, Coca-Cola, McDonald's
and Disney, all paid for in the contemporary equivalent of Roman coinage,
the global hard currency of the 21st century: the dollar.

When the process works, you don't even have to resort to direct force;
it is possible to rule by remote control, using friendly client states.
This is a favourite technique for the contemporary US - no need for
colonies when you have the Shah in Iran or Pinochet in Chile to do the job
for you - but the Romans got there first. They ruled by proxy whenever
they could. We, of all people, should know: one of the most loyal of
client kings ruled right here, in the southern England of the first
century AD.

His name was Togidubnus and you can still visit the grand palace that was
his at Fishbourne in Sussex. The mosaic floors, in remarkable condition,
are reminders of the cool palatial quarters where guests would have
gathered for preprandial drinks or a perhaps an audience with the king.
Historians now believe that Togidubnus was a high-born Briton educated in
Rome, brought back to Fishbourne and installed as a pro-Roman puppet. Just
as Washington's elite private schools are full of the "pro-western" Arab
kings, South American presidents or African leaders of the future, so Rome
took in the heirs of the conquered nations' top families, preparing them
for lives as rulers in Rome's interest.

And Togidubnus did not let his masters down. When Boudicca led her
uprising against the Roman occupation in AD60, she made great advances in
Colchester, St Albans and London - but not Sussex. Historians now believe
that was because Togidubnus kept the native Britons under him in line.
Just as Hosni Mubarak and Pervez Musharraf have kept the lid on
anti-American feeling in Egypt and Pakistan, Togidubnus did the same job
for Rome nearly two millennia ago.

Not that it always worked. Rebellions against the empire were a permanent
fixture, with barbarians constantly pressing at the borders.  Some
accounts suggest that the rebels were not always fundamentally anti-Roman;
they merely wanted to share in the privileges and affluence of Roman life.
If that has a familiar ring, consider this: several of the enemies who
rose up against Rome are thought to have been men previously nurtured by
the empire to serve as pliant allies. Need one mention former US protege
Saddam Hussein or one-time CIA trainee Osama bin Laden?

Rome even had its own 9/11 moment. In the 80s BC, Hellenistic king
Mithridates called on his followers to kill all Roman citizens in their
midst, naming a specific day for the slaughter. They heeded the call - and
killed 80,000 Romans in local communities across Greece. "The Romans were
incredibly shocked by this," says ancient historian Jeremy Paterson of
Newcastle University. "It's a little bit like the statements in so many of
the American newspapers since September 11: 'Why are we hated so much?' "

Internally, too, today's United States would strike many Romans as
familiar terrain. America's mythologising of its past - its casting of
founding fathers Washington and Jefferson as heroic titans, its folk-tale
rendering of the Boston Tea Party and the war of independence - is very
Roman. That empire, too, felt the need to create a mythic past, starred
with heroes. For them it was Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but the urge
was the same: to show that the great nation was no accident, but the fruit
of manifest destiny.

And America shares Rome's conviction that it is on a mission sanctioned
from on high. Augustus declared himself the son of a god, raising a statue
to his adoptive father Julius Caesar on a podium alongside Mars and Venus.
The US dollar bill bears the words "In God we trust" and US politicians
always like to end their speeches with "God bless America."

Even that most modern American trait, its ethnic diversity, would make the
Romans feel comfortable. Their society was remarkably diverse, taking in
people from all over the world - and even promising new immigrants the
chance to rise to the very top (so long as they were from the right
families). While America is yet to have a non-white president, Rome
boasted an emperor from north Africa, Septimius Severus. According to
classicist Emma Dench, Rome had its own version of America's "hyphenated"
identities. Like the Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans of today, Rome's
citizens were allowed a "cognomen" - an extra name to convey their
Greek-Roman or British-Roman heritage: Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus.

There are some large differences between the two empires, of course -
starting with self-image. Romans revelled in their status as masters of
the known world, but few Americans would be as ready to brag of their own
imperialism. Indeed, most would deny it. But that may come down to the
US's founding myth. For America was established as a rebellion against
empire, in the name of freedom and self-government. Raised to see
themselves as a rebel nation and plucky underdog, they can't quite accept
their current role as master.

One last factor scares Americans from making a parallel between themselves
and Rome: that empire declined and fell. The historians say this happens
to all empires; they are dynamic entities that follow a common path, from
beginning to middle to end.

"What America will need to consider in the next 10 or 15 years," says
Cambridge classicist Christopher Kelly, "is what is the optimum size for a
nonterritorial empire, how interventionist will it be outside its borders,
what degree of control will it wish to exercise, how directly, how much
through local elites? These were all questions which pressed upon the
Roman empire."

Anti-Americans like to believe that an operation in Iraq might be proof
that the US is succumbing to the temptation that ate away at Rome:
overstretch. But it's just as possible that the US is merely moving into
what was the second phase of Rome's imperial history, when it grew
frustrated with indirect rule through allies and decided to do the job
itself. Which is it? Is the US at the end of its imperial journey, or on
the brink of its most ambitious voyage? Only the historians of the future
can tell us that.