Trusting Lackeys

At one point during Julius Caesar’s Gallic campaign, when the Aeduan tribe was allied with Rome, the question of whether or not to break the alliance and join Vercingetorix’s “rebellion”–what today might be called Gaul’s “national liberation movement.” The Aeduan leader had recently been confirmed in his position through the personal intervention of Caesar, who had ruled in accordance with Aeduan laws. The Aeduan leader observed,

It is true that I am under some obligation to Caesar - though the justice of my case was so apparent that he could hardly help deciding in my favor. but the cause of national liberty outweighs any such consideration. Why should we call Caesar in to adjudicate questions involving our rights and the interpretation of our laws? We do not expect him to submit questions of Roman law to our arbitration? (Caesar, The Conquest of Gaul. London: Penguin Classics, pp.173-4.)

With that, the lackey declared his independence and led the Aeduans into revolt.

Slippery Slope: Government Undermining of Civil Liberties

“Clematius, an utterly innocent man, was put to death without being allowed to open his mouth or speak.
After this act of wickedness, which, now that cruelty had been given free rein, aroused fears that it would be repeated in other cases, a number of people were found guilty and condemned through mere misty suspicion. Of these some were put to death; others suffered confiscation of their property and were driven into exile from their homes; left with no resource but complaints and tears they supported life on the charity of others, and when what had been a just constitutional government was transformed into a gloody despotism many rich and noble houses shut their doors. In the past savage emperors had often preserved the appearance of legality by preferring charges against their victims in the courts of law, but now even a counterfeit accusation was felt to be superfluous; as one mischief was heaped upon another whatever the implacable Caesar had resolved was immediately put into effect, as if it had all the force of a deliberate legal decision.“–Ammianus Marcellinus The Later Roman Empire (AD 453-378)(Tr. Walter Hamilton), London: Penguin Classics, 2004).

Ammianus Marcellinus, Roman military officer and historian, chronicled the decline of the superpower of his day.

Temptation

“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
che la diritta via era smarrita.”

["When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray."]–Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Tr. Allen Mandelbaum (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1980)

Dante may have been thinking of individuals, but the message applies as well to factions, elites, political parties, countries, cultures, and civilizations.

Democracy, Freedom, & Responsibility

On June 8,. 1978, heroic anti-Soviet intellectual Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave an address at Harvard that bears consideration on numerous grounds. The two paragraphs below offer some  remarks on Western freedom, addressing, first, the media, and, second, the population as a whole:

“The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media). But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist have to his readers, or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? No, it does not happen, because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist always gets away with it. One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance. “ “Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life. There is a dangerous tendency to form a herd, shutting off successful development.” One of Dostoyevsky’s characters [Brothers Karamazov, Signet Classic, p. 292], although developing the rather different concept of having the courage to admit one’s personal errors, makes a remark highly relevant to Solzhenitsyn’s warning: “ ’You are, I see, a man of great strength of character….You have dared to serve the truth, even when by doing so you risked incurring the contempt of all.’ ”

Rash Judgments a la Dostoyevsky

“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach.” [Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (Tr. Constance Garrett), New York: Signet Classic, 1999, p.311.]