Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (2 page)

Cicero believed that the Roman Republic had achieved that mixed form; that the Roman constitution was as near perfection as mankind could achieve. Yet even as he wrote, the Republic was falling, and Cicero was eventually murdered by agents of Octavius Caesar, later called Augustus. A single lifetime was sufficient to witness the glory of the Republic extinguished in civil war; the dictatorship of Julius Caesar; and the monarchy of Augustus.

Hundreds of books attempt to explain the fall of the Republic. Here is one of the best:

"Let us compare the situation around 150 BC [when the Republic was strong] with that around 50 [just before the end]. The transformation is astonishing. In a hundred years, the character of political competition—as well as its potential rewards—changed dramatically. In the 50s, at the very top of the political tree, the prize was total indefinite dominance. Caesar and Pompey fought to rule the Roman world. Contrast the 150s. Then the prizes were of limited character and duration . . ."

—Mary Beard and Michael Crawford,
Rome in the Late Republic

In a word, the scope of politics had changed. Moreover, the place of Rome in the world had changed. In 150 BC, Rome was a regional power. By 50 BC, she was the greatest power on Earth, with no rival but Persia.

Santayana tells us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the nineteenth century, theorists might delude themselves into the notion that the cycles were ended, and progress had come at last. Marxism was one such philosophy that predicted that government and society would evolve from lower to higher forms.

Inmates of Auschwitz and the Gulag found otherwise. Not only is progress not inevitable; things can and do get worse, as well as better. If we wish to avoid catastrophe, we had best be aware of history.

Certainly, we have much to learn from the fate of Rome and Athens. In our enlightened time we may not kill our unsuccessful generals, but we allow the media to humiliate them. We may not conduct our foreign policy by debate in the marketplace, but is television much different? We are well aware that to tell anything to the Congress is to tell it to the world; yet the Congress, in the name of the people, demands to know all our military and diplomatic secrets.

The top prize in politics may not be unlimited power forever, but it is certainly fame and fortune. Lyndon Johnson never held any but public jobs, from Texas school-teacher to President, and left a fortune anyone might envy. Nixon may have resigned in disgrace, but he will never go hungry. Contrast that to Jefferson, who put up Monticello as a lottery prize in order to pay debts incurred when he was President.

In the last century, a Secretary of State could say, "Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will be America's heart, her benediction, and her prayers. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

In this century, John F. Kennedy could say that America would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty." We may not, in fact, have fulfilled all of Kennedy's promises, but we have gone abroad in search of monsters, which, alas, we failed to destroy.

During the hot summer of 1787, as remarkable a group of men as was ever assembled met in Philadelphia to write a Constitution for the newly independent United Colonies. All had some kind of political influence, but many were scholars, and most were much more familiar with history than would be any collection of that many politicians we might assemble today. They were all well aware of the cycles, and they were determined to found a nation that might escape them. "A new day now begins," they said, and so it was written onto the Great Seal of the United States. Our New Order would be neither democracy nor monarchy, but a mixed form—one that might endure so long as we were worthy of it.

"What have we?" an onlooker asked of Ben Franklin when the work was done. "A republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic, Madam, if we can keep it."

Many believed, and time seems to have proved, that the Philadelphia Constitution was the most perfect instrument of government ever devised by mankind. Certainly, it brought relative peace and absolute prosperity, and endured practically unchanged for generations; in fact, until the present.

This generation has seen more fundamental change in the nature of our Republic than any previous one. We have come a long way from the mixed Republic, and a long way toward a pure democracy. We have changed from a public philosophy of reliance on individual responsibility to a preference for collectivism. We have not so much disparaged liberty, but we have made security, not liberty, the highest goal of the state.

"Those who would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," Franklin warned us. We have come perilously close to doing that.

"The state was the great gainer of the twentieth century, and the central failure. Up to 1914, it was rare for the public sector to embrace more than 10 percent of the economy. By the 1970s, even in liberal countries, the state took up to 45 percent of the GNP. But whereas, at the time of the Versailles Treaty, most intelligent people believed that an enlarged stage could increase the sum total of human happiness, by the 1980s, the view was held by no one outside a small, diminishing, and dispirited band of zealots. The experiment had been tried in innumerable ways, and it had failed in nearly all of them. The state had proven itself to be an insatiable spender, an unrivaled waster. Indeed, in the twentieth century, it had proven itself the great killer of all time. By the 1980s, state action had been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of over 100 million people—more perhaps than it had hitherto succeeded in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. Its inhuman malevolence had more than kept pace with its growing size and expanding means.

"What was not clear was whether the fall from grace of the state would likewise discredit its agents, the activist politicians, whose phenomenal rise in numbers and authority was the most important development of modern times. As we have noted, by the turn of the century, politics was replacing religion as the chief form of zealotry. To archetypes of the new class, such as Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung, politics—by which they meant the engineering of society for lofty purposes—was the one legitimate form of moral activity, the only sure means of improving humanity. This view, which would have struck an earlier age as fantastic, became to some extent the orthodoxy everywhere . . ."

—Paul Johnson,
Modern Times

In 1940, the people of the United States believed in individual responsibility. They might look to government for a helping hand, even for temporary assistance to get past a crisis, but the notion that the government might be responsible for feeding and clothing and housing the citizens would have been rejected as socialism. Today, things are a bit different.

In 1945, the forces of freedom and liberty held dominant power over the world. The Republic of the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons, an enormous army in Europe and another in Japan, and a war economy. We might have imposed imperial rule over the world. Instead, we dismantled our army, brought the soldiers home, and used our economy to help our former enemies. We were given the choice between republic and empire, and we opted to remain true to our republican heritage.

Five years later, we were engaged in war in Korea—war that somehow, for all our might, we couldn't win. Within a generation, a president who had pledged to bear any burden and fight any foe stood below the Berlin Wall and could do no more than shout defiance. Within two generations, more than half the people of the world lived under tyranny, and we were still not done.

"In the days that followed Brezhnev's death in November 1982, the multitude of British and American Sovietologists and political figures interviewed from morning to night by the media urged that we "seize the opportunity" to give the Soviet Union proof of our good will. Most of them specifically recommended that the Americans immediately lift their embargo on technological transfers to the U.S.S.R.—even those with possible military applications (this was done at once)—and that we postpone for one year the deployment of the Euromissiles that were to comprise Western Europe's counterweight to the intermediate-range SS-20s Russia had already positioned on its Western frontiers.

"Just what was this 'opportunity' to be seized? The death of one leader and his replacement by another do not necessarily mean the country's policy will change. Only the new man's actions can show if he has taken a different tack. In the seven years preceding Brezhnev's death, it was Soviet foreign policy that was aggressive, not the West's. So it was up to Moscow to take the first step, not the West. There was no sign in Andropov's past of liberalism or pacifism. So why offer him unilateral concessions before he had given the slightest indication of his good will or uttered a single word that sounded conciliatory?

"Why? Because deep down, whatever they may say and write to the contrary, Westerners accept the Soviet Union's idea of them. They very nearly agree that they are at fault for the collapse of detente. We see ourselves through Moscow's eyes, we accept the myth of the Communists' desire for peace, and acknowledge that it is we who are guilty of aggressivity endangering the world's stability."

—Jean-Francois Revel,
How Democracies Perish

Democracies endure until the citizens care more for what the state can give them than for its ability to defend rich and poor alike; until they care more for their privileges than their responsibilities; until they learn they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury and use the state as an instrument for plundering, first, those who have wealth, then those who create it.

The American people seem to be learning that fatal lesson. The last forty years have seen the United States reject the temptations of empire, but nearly succumb to the seductions of democracy. We have reached the abyss, but not yet taken the last step over it. The survival of freedom itself is at stake, and that future is by no means certain.

Herewith, stories of republic and empire in the near and far future.

Norman Spinrad lives just up the hill from me, but we don't see each other nearly as often as we'd like. Writing can be a lonely business.

Spinrad was once considered a "new wave" writer, but since I haven't any notion of what that means, I can't comment. I do know that he pays attention to character as well as technical detail, but then, so do a lot of writers who aren't thought "new wave" at all. One thing is certain. He can tell stories that you'll remember a while.

In conventional thought, Democracies are preferable to Empires, because they are more humane and ethical, and more likely to adhere to the rule of law. The facts are different. Polities conventionally described as Republics have had imperial ambitions, and have often enforced their imperial rule over others. The Athenians converted from Republic to Democracy, but continued to act as colonial masters over their former allies in the Aegean. And as C. Northcote Parkinson points out, they enforced their rule with a cynical ferocity matched only by the most ruthless of dictators.

On one occasion, Mytilene wished to withdraw from the alliance and cease paying tribute to Athens. The Athenians blockaded the city and brought about its surrender, after which Cleon got the popular assembly to decree that the entire military-age population of Mytilene should be massacred, and everyone else sold into slavery. A galley was dispatched to deliver the order to the Athenian military commander at Mytilene.

The issue was debated again the next day. When Diodotus called for mercy, Cleon demanded justice: he warned the Athenians that the maintenance of empire demanded that the subjects be kept in a constant state of fear, and the empire would pass away if the Athenians were guided by compassion.

The moderates won, and another ship was dispatched to rescind the orders of the first. On that happy occasion, the first ship, bearing the dreadful news, was slow, while the second was rowed by men eager to arrive on time.

Athens was hardly the last state, republic or empire, to sacrifice principle to expediency. For all the power of the state, though, the decrees of Republic and Empire alike must be carried out by men.

Captain Peter Reed floated closer to the big central viewport of the conning globe.

Before him, filling half his field of vision, was the planet Maxwell, green continents and blue seas reminding him of Earth.

He shook his white-haired head. Earth was fifty light-years off, or to put it another way, seventy years ago, or in another way, only four months.

Reed shrugged, not an easy task for a seventy-year-old man in free fall. Or to put it another way, an eight-hundred-year-old man.

Reed could not help laughing aloud. Fifty subjective years in space, he thought, eight hundred years in objective time, and still it has its wonder for me.

As he watched, a mote of light detached itself from the disk of Maxwell, and arced upward.

That would be Director Horvath's ship, thought Reed. Last time the
Outward Bound
was at Maxwell, it had been ruled by a hereditary king. But that was three hundred years ago. King La Farge, thought Reed sadly, dead and gone three hundred years.

This Lazlo Horvath, now. He seems to be a different proposition. Ambitious, dangerous.

Reed smiled wryly. If he keeps up this way, he may soon be honored by a visit from Jacob ben Ezra.