March 19, 2024

Where all roads lead

Feb. 7, 2007
Stumbled across a good book over the holidays. A real page-turner; couldn’t put it down. Even got up at 6 a.m. one weekend to read more. That doesn’t usually happen when a book was written more than 2,000 years ago.
It’s “The Gallic Wars” by Julius Caesar, written during his conquest of Europe during 58-51 B.C. And what Julius went through back then seems eerily familiar today.
In those days the area of Europe including France, Switzerland and the Netherlands was known as Gaul. Caesar led his Roman legions against dozens of tribes, some of which raised armies of 60,000-100,000 warriors, hellbent on protecting their homeland.
If you’ve seen Caesar’s battles in films such as “Gladiator” or HBO’s “Rome,” rest assured, the real deal was a far more awesome spectacle. Sometimes, his legions were outnumbered 10-to-one, deep in hostile territory, hundreds of miles from any help, with their supply lines under constant attack.
Yet, as the pages of “The Gallic War” whiz by, Julius Caesar whips the tar out of one tribe after another -- the undefeated Swiss, the fierce Belgians, the chariot-driving, blue-painted Britons, and hordes of scary Germans, who towered over their Roman foes. All were clobbered by a military and political genius who knew how to play his hand on both the battlefield and at the bargaining table.
How did he do it? For starters, he was an inspiring guy. If there was a downturn in the battle, he‘d grab his sword and “harangue“ the troops to get it on, once even leading the charge himself -- imagine George Bush or his neocon nerds doing that in Iraq.
Caesar‘s troops were also impeccably drilled to stand their ground or advance on the enemy, whose lack of discipline allowed them to be driven willy-nilly. And the Romans had superb engineering: Caesar could toss bridges across the mile-wide Rhine that took the Germans weeks to get across in boats. His siege towers could easily breach castle walls that the Belgians or French believed were impregnable. Sometimes they gave up at the mere sight of Rome‘s machines of war.
But one thing Caesar couldn’t beat was human nature. Every time he conquered a place like northern France and took off for another battle hundreds of miles away, the natives would start chaffing about being the slaves or vassals of the Roman Empire. People didn’t like having their women and kids carted off to Rome to be slaves and concubines, or having to give up most of their crops each year. And before long, they’d be plotting a revolution, and Caesar would be right back where he started.
You can’t help reading this 2,050-year-old book without thinking of the American Empire of the past century. From the U.S. Marines charging into Central America to defend the interests of the United Fruit Company in the early 20th century to our current oil war in Iraq, you can see the long shadow of Caesar’s futile wars looming down through the ages.
...Vietnam ...Jimmy Carter propping up the Shah of Iran... Ronald Reagan sending arms to the Afghan mujahideen to fight the Soviets... Rumsfeld shaking hands with our old buddy Saddam Hussein back in 1983... Kennedy backing the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion... Iraq... The list goes on, and where has it led us? You turn your back on these “liberated” ingrates and they come gunning for you a decade down the road.
Maybe there’s a better way to solve our problems.
***
Speaking of old Europe, it turns out that some of the ancestors of us white folks weren‘t so nice. Caesar notes that the tribes of France, Britain, Belgium, etc. were “greatly devoted” to human sacrifice. People who had serious illnesses or who were going into battle often sacrificed human beings to please their gods.
Here’s one of the nuggets he left us on what our ancestors were up to back then:
“Others use figures of immense size, whose limbs, woven out of twigs, they fill with living men and set on fire, and the men perish in a sheet of flame. They believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods; but when the supply of such fails they resort to the execution even of the innocent.”
It‘s a little something for you hippies to think about at the next Celtic music concert...
***
May as well tell the rest of the story. Caesar spent nine years conquering Gaul. In 49 B.C., his troops “crossed the Rubicon” River to launch a civil war in the Roman Empire that took him to battles in Greece, Egypt and Spain. He won, and spent five years as monarch and dictator before getting knifed by his so-called pals in the Senate on the Ides of March in 44 B.C. And we think politics are rough today...

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