The Beginning of the American Empire
The American Empire Has Begun and the Parallels With Ancient Rome are Telling
I often hear people say something to the effect of, “America is in its final days,” or, “The American Empire is falling just like the Roman Empire collapsed!” While there’s a bit of a half-truth to these statements, it’s not quite like these people imagine it to be; the parallels between the contemporary United States and ancient Rome are certainly there, the only trouble is, we’re in the beginning stages of Empire; far from being in decline, we’re in our empire’s infancy, and there’s a good amount of evidence for this. It should be noted that the Roman Empire didn’t look very much like the Roman Republic once the transformation took hold and Augustus became the first emperor of Rome. Our transition is likely to be similar, a slight erosion of human and American rights and civil liberties over time that leads us down the path of imperial America, and the American Empire, like it’s Roman ancestor, will not be American at all, but representative of a minority class of powerful citizens, rather than the populace as a whole.
In order to discuss this further, we’ll need to take a trip back in time to a place called Latium, where the much-later Roman Empire once began…
Latium: Roman Beginnings
Once upon a time at around 500 B.C.E., there was a country called Latium, the people of which spoke a language called Latin, and the largest city of them was called Rome. This was long before the Etruscans were overtaken by what we today call “Rome” and what we call in hindsight The Roman Republic had even begun, and since the 7th-century B.C.E., the Latin people were a territory occupied by the larger Etruscan civilization. Rome was just a small and militarily ineffective city compared to their neighbors to the north, the Etruscans, and the colonists to the south, the Greeks, who’d taken a foothold in Italy. In a lot of ways, Rome had humble beginnings. Rome was, at this point, a monarchy and a city-state within the larger nation of the regional Latium who all shared the same customs and language, much like the ancient Greeks did, but they were subjects of the Etruscans who largely left them alone to do as they wished. Such is the way of empires, and such was the way of America’s humble beginnings as a colony of the British Empire.
The Latin people eventually developed a fierce military which was markedly different from anything the world had known in that it was comprised of legions which would operate with a strict formation. This military came to challenge Etruscan rule like the Americans eventually did, and unlike their former captors, the Latins brought with them their language and culture, forcing each on the Etruscan civilization. But they didn’t stop there — the Latins would go on to advance farther north and eventually to the south, as well, pushing the Greeks back to their native homeland in Greece proper, a story that’s told in depth in the book Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin.
During the 6th-century B.C.E., the monarchy of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was overthrown by Lucius Junius Brutus and the Roman Republic was established, a Democracy by the people and for the people, at least in theory. This Brutus was likely a direct ancestor of the much more famous Brutus, head conspirator in the assassination of Julius Caesar some 500 years later, and I highly suggest reading the work Brutus: The Noble Conspirator, for more, from Yale University Press. It could also be noted, here, that this revolution was very much not unlike the American Revolution — the overthrow of an oppressive monarchy, the establishment of a Republic (Latin, meaning “For the People”). Republican Rome was, in a very real way, the original America. At some point, the political aims of Rome diverged from the rest of the Latins. Rome became seen as a separate, dominant class within the small-but-growing Latin country, a country which wasn’t yet an empire.
Barbarism and Dehumanization
Let’s get a few things straight, here, when it comes to the United States and our current political framework:
- Transgender isn’t “the left”
- LGBTQ isn’t “the left”
- African Americans aren’t “the left”
- Hispanics and Latinos aren’t “the left”
- Women aren’t “the left”
- Feminism isn’t “the left”
- Criminals aren’t “the left”
- Muslims aren’t “the left”
What do I mean by this? And, why the distinction? Because this type of dehumanization has always been a necessary precursor to imperial goals and aims. The fact that this is so common in the everyday speech of people around the globe, including media pundits, demonstrates a willingness to participate in the imperial scheme, one that’s rather dehumanizing, be it intentionally or not. The point of such dehumanization is to create a common enemy, be that enemy economic or military subjects. This is the beginning of being able to simply say with a swooping, iron fist, “You’re not a real American.”
It’s tragic that this rebranding campaign has been so successful that virtually everyone falls into it. It plays into a very powerful linguistic dynamic, one of duality, that there is the dominant class and anyone who challenges that dominant class is branded with a single, swooping term. This is how every cultural domination in history has been successful. The unified label of “Indians” rather than acknowledging the vast groups of very different Native American tribes, in the American Colonies, and a slew of examples which span the entirety of human history demonstrate the effectiveness of this tactic. When we skip forward a few centuries to the point where Rome was just about to make its transition from Republic to Empire, we see this same thing happening:
“Gallia est omnis divisa in partis tris; quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur.” said Julius Caesar of the Gallic campaigns, the battles which subjected these various groups to Roman rule, which explains that there were three distinct people in the territory of Gaul, the Belgians, Aquitani, and Celts, but the Romans just called them “Gauls” for simplicity— this made them an easier target as an enemy.
It is just as the Greeks had done before them, referring to the “Barbaros” (βάρβαρος) as barbarians, which was a term that simply meant non-Greek. Persians were barbarians, Romans were barbarians, Phoenicians were Barbarians, etc., “barbarian” is an antonym of “citizen” which basically means “non-citizen,” a very telling distinction in today’s American discourse.
This is actually all of the evidence you need of the imperialist and hegemonical goals and tendencies of the dominant class. The ambiguity around what it means to be an “American” is nothing new, it’s actually taken place in every single state before the rise of an Empire. We often refer to the Nazi quest for a unified Germany as the rise of Fascism, but this was around long before the Fascist state. These respective struggles are individual in their own right, but they’re mere expressions of a larger class struggle at work. Xenophobia is the fuel of the engines which drive economic and military conquest.
Conquest has never been wholly military, either, though militaries have been employed, almost invariably has conquest been the economic control of the subjects in question — the Normans left the Anglo-Saxons alone, they just wanted their money and cheap labor, just as the Romans spreading “Pax Romana” the “Peace of Rome” wanted their loot, trading ideological uniformity and economic submission for peace. Send in the threatening military and force a group into compliance, then make your demands of peace — for a fee, usually a cost of the resources in that nation. (Iraq, Panama, Libya, Columbia). We now see the United States trying to spread the so-called democratic peace of America around the globe. The American Empire is now headed, not by a democratically governing Populus, but a Corporatocracy. The coup d’état has been a quiet one, as revolutions usually often are, though it hasn’t been bloodless. The American Military is little more, at this point than the threatening arm of physical force representing the American Corporation — the State is the enforcement arm of corporate private property rights.
If I had to liken our time to any point in history, it would be somewhere around the outlandish reign of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname, Caligula. Trump is the perfect Caligula, representing an American dominant class of wealthy citizens and corporations at the flagrant expense of the civil rights of the average citizen: when what it means to be an “American” or “Latin” or “Roman” becomes blurred, abuses of anyone not deemed a proper citizen are almost guaranteed.
Make no mistake, the American Empire isn’t in decline, it’s actually just beginning, just as the Roman Empire began with the dismantling of the Roman Republic by the Elite class of ancestral Romans in Latinum. Indeed, the way to create an empire has always been to hijack the military of a democratic population and redirect it to perform the aims of a wealthy or ideologically like-minded few. Taking this as a guide, it would seem that Ronald Reagan was America’s version of Julius Caesar, and the current Empire is merely in its infancy. How uninspiring is that?
The succession of Reagan by George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, not unlike the reserved rule of the military-general-turned-emperor Tiberius, with Bill Clinton serving as more of a figure like the American Augustus.
The gang’s all here, the powerful elite class of Americans has already pulled the necessary political levers to begin the onset of empire…time will tell how this plays out, but, my hunch is, it’ll be a lot like Ancient Rome.
What we’re seeing today is a battle, the battle between the ideas of law and republicanism, values of the traditional American democracy, and the combined state-corporate powers which are attempting, by force or by guile, to subvert those aims. The real question is, who will win?
This story references Encyclopedia Britannica and two works, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin and Brutus: The Noble Conspirator, the latter two of which contain affiliate links which, as an Amazon associate, I may make a small commission from. Thank you for reading.
