By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) November 7, 2023, excerpted from The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations, Chapter 10 in the 2018 textbook, Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding, itself adapted and updated from my 2011 graduate school paper The How Behind Roman Pax: Selected Roman Operations Aimed at Establishing Peace and their Lessons for Modern Peace Operations –  PDF here); because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

The Concept of Roman Peace

Contrary to popular and Hollywood-style views of Rome, Romans were not all warmongering imperialist murderers, rather, peace was highly valued and praised in Roman society and many Romans had sophisticated views of peace (Goldsworthy 2016b, pp. 10, 12-13).  Inevitably, any view of peace is tied to views of war; without one, a definition of the other is meaningless.  Just as right and wrong, rich and poor are terms that can exist only relative to each other, war and peace will always be related to each other.  Today, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) includes “Freedom from civil unrest or disorder; public order and security” as the first definition, and another definition is “Freedom from, absence of, or cessation of war or hostilities; the condition or state of a nation or community in which it is not at war with another; peacetime” (OED Online).  Other OED definitions include “a state of friendliness; amity, concord” and “stillness, quiet.”  It notes the origin of the word is from the Latin word pax, also meaning peace.  Though the modern Western “notion of peace [is] the child of Roman pax,” it is important to note that there are significant differences between how the Romans conceptualized peace and how the modern world does the same (Barton 2007, p. 245).  The Latin word pax, like other important Latin words, has two opposite elements that form the range of the potential use of the word, these two meanings “poised…on the two opposite poles of a balance beam” in a figurative sense, as “[p]ax (peace) for the Romans could be a form of justice or a form of mercy; it might be a type of covenant or it might signal the absence of any contractual relationship” (p. 245).  Thus the same word might give or take, bestow or impose. It can have a “light” or “dark” meaning, yet the “[m]odern English [word ‘peace’] suppresses the ‘darker’ meaning of Roman pax, or subsumes the ‘darker’ meaning in the ‘lighter,’” so that “the non-contractual aspects have been assimilated into the contractual” (p. 245).  Words like “peace” and “mercy” today only give off a “gentle” vibe (p. 245).  During the final, long period of civil wars that led to the collapse of the Republic and the establishment of the Imperial Roman state, the Roman definition of peace came much closer to the non-threatening, magnanimous, and forgiving meaning it holds for modern audiences, but for much of Roman history there was the aforementioned duality to its meaning.  The duality existed, in part, because it took forceful, violent action on the part of Roman officials and armies, and the threat of such action, in order for anything approaching peace to exist.  Retribution was a key element in peace and order, and domestic politics as well as international relations was a balancing act between opposing forces in the Roman world.  Pax could also refer to social contracts; ultimately, much of Roman international relations (and domestic politics) can be seen as a series of social contracts, both formal and informal.  Finally, one of the common uses of pax was in the context of pax deorum—peace with the gods—referring to the Romans’ relationship with the divine forces that governed the world (pp. 245-247).

For Romans, “war in official ideology was the restoration of order against those who had disrupted that order (Eckstein 2006b, p. 216);” in fact, it was “[t]he Romans [who] were the first to regard war as a form of legal self-help if another state had committed wrong by denial of justice” (Ziegler 2010, p. 972).  It was something the Romans took very seriously, and it was, for much of republican Roman history, a matter of sacred religion.  The beginnings of war involved special priests called fetiales who would approach the border of a foreign state that the Romans felt had done them wrong and would engage in a ritual called the rerum repitio, formally stating Rome’s grievances with the offending party or parties and giving that party or those parties a chance to make amends (even when the system changed as the Republic became larger and political envoys were used to declare war instead of priests, the envoys still regularly went through the motions of presenting Roman grievances and giving a chance and, importantly, time for atonement for them). This was how the Romans would show the gods and other nations that that their war, should the enemy not redress the wrongs committed against Rome, was a “just war” (bellum iustum) and that the Romans were not the ones disturbing the natural order. In fact, the war would be undertaken to restore the proper order of things.  This was markedly different from other cultures of the time, cultures for which aggressive war for its own sake, for territory or plunder or glory, was almost never argued against, cultures which had no official mechanism to restrain their aggressiveness, let alone a sacred, religious one. And for the Romans, bellum iustum had to be defensive in nature, or it was not a bellum iustum. Cicero emphasized this when he wrote that

…wars are unjust when they are undertaken without proper cause.  No war can be waged except for the sake of punishing or repelling an enemy…no war is deemed to be just if it has not been declared and proclaimed, and if redress has not been previously sought…

(The Republic 35, trans. 1998)

He also wrote that “…wars should be undertaken for the one purpose of living peaceably without suffering injustice” (On Obligations 1.35, trans. 2000).  This comment in particular captures the civil order/social justice peace operations conception of a just peace, as in the absence of structural as well as physical violence. Cicero is the best extant articulation of the strain of Roman Stoic principles as applied to government and war and peace; the same principles are amplified by the poet Virgil in The Aeneid, articulating belief in Rome’s divine mission to bring civilization and peace to the world (though this is written after the case studies in question, after the Republic has given way to Augustus and the principate, an emperor-system dressed in the trappings of the Republic and honoring its traditions as the first phase of the Imperial government of the Roman Empire):

“Others, I have no doubt,

will forge the bronze to breathe with suppler lines,

draw from the block of marble features quick with life,

plead their cases better, chart with their rods the stars

that climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power

the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts:

to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,

to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

(6.980, trans. 2006)

The strain of Stoicism in Late Republican conceptions of peace always had undercurrents of universal brotherhood, promoted by wise, elected officials governing a free society through laws and wisdom that uphold the universal dignity and brotherhood all men share, and that to go against such principles and treat people unjustly is to violate the basic foundation of society and this universal law, is even to violate the gods themselves. Of course, this was the ideal; as in any ideal, practice would differ while still being constrained by the ideal.[1]

Though “the Romans measured war and peace against a very different yardstick of values than do contemporary Americans or Europeans” (Rosenstein 2007, p. 228), the Roman ideas of war and peace should be regarded as important for students and practitioners of peace/stability operations, in particular, because “[m]odern notions of ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’ are two keys to understanding ancient Roman notions of peace” (Barton 2007, p. 245).

At the heart of the concepts of both “peace” and “justice” for Rome was reciprocity (Barton 2007, 246). As Nathan Rosenstein (2007) points out, there was no United Nations or general concept of international law as exists today in the modern world (p. 228).  Eckstein (2006b) will be heavily cited throughout this chapter partly to make the point that the ancient Mediterranean was a fiercely competitive political environment between states; all large states and medium were very aggressive and even many smaller ones, too.  Much of this atmosphere comes from centuries of the Greek interstate political culture which dominated much of the Mediterranean.  Thucydides, the ancient Greek historian today generally considered to be the founder of the “Realist” school of international relations, writing of his own era used what has become a famous phrase from a dialogue between Athenian and Melian representatives that “right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (History of the Peloponnesian War 5.89, trans. 1874/1996).  The issue in question is not loot or glory, but simply survival.  In a brutal “militarized interstate anarchy” such as that of the ancient Mediterranean, “fear dominates the decision making of most states” (Eckstein 2006b, pp. 49-50).  Even when a state needs to behave defensively, “such defensive actions often take the aggressive form;” it was a world where if one state did not exploit another weaker one, that first state’s rival would exploit that other weaker state and then use its increased power to dominate the first state that hesitated (p. 51).  Even the mere appearance of being weak invited trouble and aggression from other states.  The “system,” and it probably should not even be granted that sophisticated a word to describe it, “works” whereby any weaker state must be severely punished by the larger state it challenges, for any positive result for the weaker state could encourage other weaker states to follow suit, or even join together against the larger state, or, in a worst-case scenario, the stronger state’s own subjects may conclude it is too weak to punish them and may rebel or even seek to overthrow said state.  In such an environment, mercy encourages further challenges, so the “system” “works” when the strong state brutalizes and possibly annihilates the smaller state that challenges it, keeping other states in line and following the “rules.”  In the case of the Athenians and the Melians, the Melians, after reaching out to allies of Sparta, Athens’ chief rival, did not submit to Athenian rule and were totally destroyed by Athens.  Athens may not have even wanted to behave so brutally, but it felt it had no choice under the conditions of “the system.” Thus, the “system” encourages brutality as a necessary means of survival and pushes peoples and states that would prefer mercy to act against such inclinations.  It was common for “state expansion…[to be] caused primarily by fear generated by pressing circumstances” (p. 56).[2]

NOTES

[1] For more on these themes, see Eckstein 2006b, pp. 216-229; Rosenstein 2007, p. 229; Clark 2011, pp. 3-4; Pangle and Ahrensdorf 1999, pp. 51-72; Adler 2007, pp. 310-312; Yakobson 2009; and Burton 2011, pp. 121-122, 333-334.

[2] For further detail on these themes, see Barton 2007, p. 246; Rosenstein 2007, p. 228; Eckstein 2006b, pp. 48-57; Goldsworthy 2016b, p. 59.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Adler, E. (2007, February-March). [Review of the book Caesar in Gaul and Rome: War in Words, by A M. Riggsby]. The Classical Journal, 102(3), 310–312.

Barton, C. A. (2007). “The price of peace in ancient Rome.” In K. A. Raalflaub (Ed.), War and peace in the ancient world (pp. 245–257). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. doi:10.1002/9780470774083.ch14

Burton, P. L. (2011). Friendship and empire: Roman diplomacy and imperialism in the Middle Republic 335-146 BC. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139035590

Clark, G. (2011). Late Antiquity: A very short introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/actrade/9780199546206.001.0001

Eckstein, A. M. (2006b). Mediterranean anarchy, interstate war, and the rise of Rome. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Goldsworthy, A. (2016b). Pax, Romana: War, peace and conquest in the Roman world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Pangle, T. L., & Ahrensdorf, P. J. (1999). Justice among nations: On the moral basis of power and peace. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Rosenstein, N. (2007). “War and peace, fear and reconciliation at Rome.” In K. A. Raaflaub (Ed.), War and peace in the ancient world (pp. 226–244). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Yakobson, A. (2009). “Public opinion, foreign policy and just war in the late republic.”In C. Eilers (Ed.), Diplomats and diplomacy in the Roman world (pp. 45–72). Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Ziegler, K. H. (2010). “War, just.” In A. Grafton, G. W. Most, & S. Settis (Eds.), The classical tradition,972-973. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 13, 2023; *update August 15, 2024: Earlier in February 2024, Ukraine clarified that its numbers for Russian military casualties included wounded as earlier use of the term liquidated led many to believe the running total given included only killed and not wounded; updated March 7, 2023 to include new 6-month map of Russia’s Bakhmut-area “progress;” because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request. See related January 14 article, THE TWO MAPS SHOWING WHY RUSSIA’S BAKHMUT CAMPAIGN IS UNDENIABLY A MISERABLE FAILURE (including Soledar); my initial Twitter thread that inspired this article was shared and praised by none other than Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe (so much appreciation to him and he and his analysis are definitely worth following):

Update January 13: THE man to follow on logistics and equipment in the Ukraine war—Trent Telenko, one of my top 5 accounts to follow on the war—just generously plugged my initial thread…

SILVER SPRING—The eyes of the world are currently on the small town of Soledar, a suburb of the small city of Bakhmut, “every inch of which,” to quote Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s in-person address to the U.S. Congress in late December, “is soaked in blood.”  Russian advances in Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, come in the context of Bakhmut for months being the focus of Russia’s main ground offensives in Ukraine (Russia being reduced, in most other cases with its offensive activity, to primarily lobbing missiles and drones against civilian, non-military targets—civilians themselves and their water and power infrastructure—since Russia’s military remains largely ineffective against Ukraine’s actual military).  Yet the massive Russian effort to take Bakhmut over these recent months has very, very little to show for it, for, as the increasingly famous meme proclaims daily, “Bakhmut Holds” for Ukraine.

Neither Bakhmut nor Soledar are significant in and of themselves; there are multiple far larger, far more strategically important cities a few hours’ drive or not even an hour’s drive away from them, but they have been made important because Russia keeps desperately attacking there and Ukraine is able to keep defending while inflicting terribly high casualties on the attackers, the Ukrainians themselves having to fight fiercely—and, even the Russians admit, bravely—as Soledar and Bakhmut are both reduced to WWII-like landscapes of rubble amidst brutal fighting that is testing the limits of both sides.

While Russia will mostly have to bring in raw conscripts from within Russia to reinforce its positions here—unless it wants to weaken other positions and invite other Ukrainian counteroffensives—Ukraine is fighting on home turf and is not reinforcing with barely-trained, barely-equipped mobilized like the Russians but with well-motivated soldiers who have been training for some time or even veterans, often equipped with newer Western weapons and equipment far superior to what their Russian counterparts field, which I have repeatedly noted before and has been the case for most of the war.  Reinforcing and resupplying Bakhmut and Soledar positions, then, is a far easier proposition for Ukraine than for Russia, and the better-equipped, better-organized, better-supplied, better-trained, better-cared-for Ukrainian soldiers are also suffering far less from things like trench foot along with hypothermia and the other harsh effects of winter, additional losses that are hard to track but are certainly being sustained.

Throughout its Bakhmut campaign, Russia has been throwing hastily-mobilized, often poorly-equipped troops in what seem sometimes to be human-wave style attacks against Ukraine in Bakhmut and its small suburbs, hoping to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders with quantity over quality, and not only has it not worked well, the Russian casualties have been staggering.

Earlier, there were more of the “normal” newly-mobilized going into the actual Russian Army and the Donetsk and Luhansk separatist militias involved, but more recently, the private Wagner Group has taken the lead in the Bakhmut area.  Wagner acts as an extension of the Russian military and is led by close Putin ally Yevgeniy Prigozhin—known as “Putin’s chef”—who for many years has been a point man for Russian President Vladimir Putin on everything from pro-Trump anti-Clinton election interference against the U.S., a Russian mercenary attack against U.S. and local-American-allied forces in Syria, and, today, Russia’s “grand” campaign for the tiny city of Bakhmut.

While the 2016 election interference succeeded wildly beyond what could have been expected, on the military side of things, the attack on American and local-U.S.-allied forces in Syria ended in disaster, which is the same result, thus far, for Prigozhin’s military efforts in Bakhmut.  Within the Wager forces, there are some 10,000 “regular” Wagner mercenaries leading some 40,000 recruits from the Russian prison system, prisoners convicted of all sorts of (sometimes horrible) crimes being used in quite cruel and inhumane ways that result in horrific casualties on the Russian side while achieving very little.  Out of this Wagnerian/convict force, recently there have been over 14,000 casualties: over 10,000 wounded, over 4,100 killed, with over 1,000 killed in the very short time “between late November and early December,” an overall casualty percentage approaching (now probably in excess of) thirty-percent

Stupidly yet predictably for Russia, even specially-trained Russian Army forces—like these artillerists begging not to be used as mere cannon fodder—are being used as mere cannon fodder.  As of today, Ukraine estimates that over 113,000 Russian military personnel have been killed and wounded* in the war since February 24, an official estimate I have long argued is worth taking seriously.

On Pyrrhus and “Pyrrhic Victory”

With these attacks by Russia and the level of their costs for Russia, the word “Pyrrhic” comes to mind, which you often hear in the phrase “Pyrrhic victory”—defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a victory that is not worth winning because the winner has suffered or lost so much in winning it”—but I will not use that term because assigning the word “victory” to Russia’s madness in Soledar is premature; we can settle for “Pyrrhic advances” here, but the word “Pyrrhic” and common phrase “Pyrrhic victory” deserve some discussion.

The term is actually from a person’s name, a famous general from antiquity, Pyrrhus of Epirus (319-272 BCE), who, according to Plutarch, was held by Rome’s later great foe Hannibal Barca of Carthage (247-c. 183-181 BCE) to be the greatest general in history.  Already in his time, Pyrrhus was an incredibly famous Greek general at a time when famous generals were sometimes found to be taking up wars upon request from other parties, and Pyrrhus was in intense demand in his day.  One of these requests for aid he accepted involved the Greek state of Tarentum in southern Italy in 281 (the Greeks had colonized southern Italy centuries ago).  Tarentum had found its supremacy in Southern Italy challenged by a rising power from central Italy: the Roman Republic, and the Tarentines requested aid from their fellow Greek, King Pyrrhus, just a short sail from Epirus (western Greece) across to Italy’s boot, on which Tarentum lay.

In the first clash between Rome against a mainland Greek power from the Mediterranean’s east, Pyrrhus fought two major battles against the Romans in 280 at Heraclea (Rome’s first, and disastrous, encounter with elephants in battle) and 279 at Asculum, and both seem to have been devastating Roman defeats, with Pyrrhus coming to “within two days’ march of Rome itself” (admittedly with formidable walls for defense, but still…).  Yet Pyrrhus was distraught, in particular, after his second victory:

The two sides disengaged, and Pyrrhus is said to have remarked to someone who was congratulating him:  “One more victory like that over the Romans and we shall be completely undone.”  For by then he had lost a large part of the army he came with, and almost all his Friends and generals, who were irreplaceable.  He could also see that, while the enthusiasm of his allies in Italy was waning, the Roman army was quickly and easily brought back up to strength—it was as though there were a spring that flowed straight from their home into their camp—and so far from being demoralized by their defeats, the resentment they felt towards the enemy gave them extra strength and determination (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,The Life of Pyrrhus 21).

Rome was saved at that moment by a combination of its own dogged determination but also by Pyrrhus being enticed to go to Sicily to fight on behalf of Greek cities there against Carthage (saved not likely existentially—even if that may not have been obvious at the time for the Romans—but from winning, at that time, supremacy in southern Italy, but that, in turn, could have substantially altered the trajectory of Roman and world history, especially with the Punic Wars against Carthage on the horizon, which would begin in 264 BCE over in Sicily).

Russia’s Pointless, Pyrrhic Bakhmut Campaign

But that above long quote from the ancient Greek historian Plutarch is quite relevant to the current situation in Ukraine: Pyrrhus, sustaining heavy losses even in his victories (exactly where we get the term “Pyrrhic victory”), could not easily replace the high-quality veterans and leaders he knew well and had brought over the sea with him from Greece, while Rome, fighting in Italy on its home turf, could replace its losses and reinforce far faster with men highly motivated to defend their homes, their losses only motivating them further.  This dynamic is very much true for Russia fighting its imperialist war against Ukrainians in Ukraine, and it is more than fair to apply the adjective “Pyrrhic” to anything resembling a Russian victory (Mariupol) or advance (now in Soledar) after the earliest days of this current Russian escalation in Ukraine that began on February 24, 2022 (I say escalation because Putin actually started the war in 2014).

In the age of mechanized war and in light of Ukraine’s sweeping, historic counteroffensives breaking through Russian lines throughout 2022, the issue that should most concern analysts and journalists is not whether Russia has or has not or to what extent has taken Soledar, but to what degree Russian forces have destroyed themselves and thinned themselves out during these offensives and to what extent that has opened up Russia to a new Ukrainian counteroffensive.  Given the incredible and sustained nature of Russian losses in the Bakhmut region, it would seem very likely that Russia is leaving itself very vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterattack, if not right at Soledar or Bakhmut or nearby, then somewhere else on the front lines neglected by Russia with all the disproportionate attention it has been giving the Bakhmut sector (remember, the major Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman counteroffensives occurred when Russia was focused mainly on Kherson in addition to Bakhmut—the irrational Russian focus on Bakhmut has been going on for months—with the main Kherson counteroffensive coming after the shock of Russia’s catastrophic territorial losses of thousands of square kilometers on the Kharkiv and Izyum/Kupiansk/Lyman fronts). As I noted in my last major Ukraine piece, the war has settled into two main phases: 1.) major Ukrainian counteroffensives and 2.) in between those counteroffensives, while Ukraine bides its time and prepares for its new counterattacks as it keeps inflicting major casualties on Russia while Russia keeps engaging in mostly ineffective and unproductive yet costly assaults. Guess where Bakhmut and Soledar fit in there…

In the end, it is pathetic if it took this much effort and dead Russians for the Russians to take Soledar.  And, if the Russians have not taken it, well, that is even more pathetic.  Almost as pathetic of months of not being able to take Bakhmut.  Almost as pathetic, in turn, as almost ten months of Russia losing.

And even if the Russians somehow took Bakhmut it would not be any major accomplishment; that the Russians have lost thousands of troops failing, thus far, to take it—again, regardless of if they take it and however briefly hold it in the future—is truly emblematic of the wretched capabilities and leadership of the Russian military.  Maybe that that is why Putin has, yet again (it is easy to lose track), shuffled the general running the war, Sergey Surovikin, to be under a new overall commander: Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian Genera Staff, two men who seem only able to achieve the casualty levels of Pyrrhus without his cunning or victories…

Pyrrhus As a Warming to Putin and Prigozhin

And to return to Pyrrhus, he would end up losing in both Sicily and in his return to Italy in 275 BCE, at the Battle of Beneventum (Maleventum then, but later renamed in part to honor Rome’s victory), losing the war overall.  Just a few years later, in 272, he found himself drawn into a civil war in the mainland-Greek city-state of Argos inside the city of Argos itself, the combat devolving into messy fighting in narrow streets.  With one of his elephants wounded and blocking his and his forces’ exit from the city, Pyrrhus met with this inglorious end:

Seeing the storm and surge raging around him, Pyrrhus took off the diadem which distinguished his helmet, handed it to one of his Companions, and then gave his horse its head and charged at his pursuers. As he engaged them, he took a spear in the chest. The wound was not fatal or even serious, though it pierced his breastplate, but Pyrrhus turned against the man who had struck him. Now, this man was an Argive of no social standing, the son of a poor old woman, who was watching the affray from the rooftops along with all the other women. When she saw that her son was fighting Pyrrhus, she was terrified for him, and she picked up a roof-tile with both hands and threw it at Pyrrhus. It struck him on the back of the head, just below the helmet, and crushed the vertebrae at the base of his neck. His vision blurred, his hands dropped the reins, and he slid from his horse and fell to the ground by the tomb of Licymnius. (Plutarch, Parallel Lives,Pyrrhus 34).

Pyrrhus sought to expand the influence and size of his realm, often using his military more like a private military company (PMC) than a national army.   Thus, both Putin and Prigozhin could learn from Pyrrhus’s Pyrrhic victories that even the great may fall, and not only fall suddenly, but quite pathetically (they may also yet learn to fear the wrath of soldiers’ mothers…).

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

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By Brian E. Frydenborg, December 26, 2021 (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

SILVER SPRING—As I write this on Christmas Day (and the day after), to any thoughtful Christians, on this particular occasion and as they read this particular piece, I will not wish them a “merry Christmas,” but forcefully implore that they think of certain others, if but for a moment (yet hopefully longer). 

Much as some (hardly all and I doubt most) African-Americans and many (very probably most) Native Americans look at the Fourth of July—Independence Day—in America differently than other Americans, let us spare some effort to consider the “pagans” of Late Antiquity, those who lived to see Christianity come to dominate the Roman Imperial government and those who came after to see their way of life virtually exterminated, save for some brave folks, mostly in the most rural of countrysides or remote mountains, farther from the reach of Roman Imperial authorities.

Those “others” I ask to be considered are those who would have been the vast majority of the people living in the Roman Empire at the time from the era of Emperor Constantine’s rise to power in 312 C.E. (Common Era, an improvement, in my view, over the sectarian A.D.), in part due to his then-partial, not-yet-total, embrace of Christianity; these “others” over time would be much of the population through the next few centuries but declining as a portion as Christianity was forced upon the entirety of the Roman Empire—nearly every corner and nearly every person, certainly on anyone within clerical or Roman Imperial reach who was considered “pagan” (all non-Christian Romans who were not Jewish).

“Pagan” itself emerged as a Christian pejorative term, one the diverse range of polytheists and non-Jewish, non-Christian monotheists of the Greco-Roman world would never, ever have used to refer to themselves, as Catherine Nixey, author of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, is quick to point out in her brisk and energetic account of Christianity’s takeover of the Roman state, society, and culture.  In fact, in the Roman era before Christianity’s takeover of Rome, it was not at all common for people to define themselves primarily or in large part by their religion (Jews, of course, were a tiny exception during this period); the sharp delineation of people as being of one religion or another as a core part of or primary indicator of their identity was, in any widespread sense, an invention of the Christians of this era (and a rather regrettable one).  If you were a good citizen and obeyed the laws of Rome, before, Romans generally didn’t give a fig what gods you or anyone else worshipped.  You were free to ignore their gods just as much as you were free to adopt them or worship your own, and there was not a feeling that by believing in your gods that that meant you had to deny anyone else’s gods, let alone call them demons.  Apart from the sensitive situation with Jews and Judaism, identifying primarily by religion is essentially unheard of in this time outside Christianity.

But Nixey’s point is that it is essentially unheard of today because triumphalist Christian accounts have shaped our view of this distant era into, primarily, the following:

After centuries of fierce persecution at the hands of sadistic pagan Romans, Christians inevitably rose to dominate the Roman Imperial sate, destroy the false gods (actually demons serving the Devil) and old religions (cults celebrating evil and Satan) that had dominated the Roman world but never really captured the hearts and minds of the people, rose to free the people from evil and superstitious idolatry by benevolently bring the light of the One True Faith and One True God to them, and led mankind into a new era of truth, love, and kindness based on God’s Law and God’s Love.  And, all through the ages, the Church preserved the wisdom of the ancients by painstakingly copying their texts in monasteries that became centers of learning, scholarship, and wisdom.

The truth could not be further from this false account (apart from monasteries preserving some classical texts after Christians had destroyed nearly all the others), and Nixey is here to correct the record.

She quickly and skillfully dismisses any accounts of being biased for not focusing on the examples of kindness, compassion, and scholarship that Christianity has given to the world, as that story has been told by the Christian victors time and time again, ad nauseam and often greatly embellished, exaggerated, or omitting key context.  No need to tread well-trodden and built-up, tended ground; no, in her book, it is the suppressed, even obliterated, the voiceless and long forgotten, whose mantle she takes up to give voice to and whose feelings, thoughts, and very existence she is determined to present to us.

And she presents it well.  This is not a book of deep scholarship nor one that will meticulously trace the Christian revolution and the genocide (certainly by our modern legal definition) of “pagans” in its entirety, throughout the whole of the Empire, event by event, discussing the scholarly debates in detail about this and that motive or event.  Instead, she is keen to connect emotionally with her readers, recreating with literary dash what it might have been like to think, feel, and experience the times, places, events, and people about which she is writing, especially those perspectives long lost, suppressed, or ignored.  To this end, she selects a smattering of major events and narratives throughout the several centuries in question and throughout the empire, giving context and descriptive recreations for each, peppered with quotes from Christian and “pagan” alike.

And the picture she paints should give Christians and anyone not familiar with the truth pause, much in the way Americans who are not Native Americans might pause when thinking about Thanksgiving or Manifest Destiny, or, indeed, the very land on which they live.  This is because the ground on which Christians rose to control the Roman Empire and Western World was laid with a foundation of ash, rubble, and blood from the destruction of the existing world—ash, rubble, and blood that came from Christian violence, destruction, or murder of “pagan” books, temples, and worshippers.

A Record of Pious Sacrilege

Much like the later Crusaders, Nazis, Stalinists, Maoists, and ISIS, none of this is in doubt because these Christians gleefully recorded many of their atrocities and killings, immortalizing them in hymns, arts, and the texts of the early Church Fathers (indeed, they often sang joyously as they went about their destruction and murder).  Figures like Augustine and (even more so) John Chrysostom openly sermonized to their congregations to commit violence and murder against not just pagans who would not get with the program but any wayward or erring Christians, for doing so was not a net harm: it was out of love, since it was deemed better to harm the body in this life than to allow the soul to writhe in eternal hellfire in the next.  In the words of Augustine, “where there is terror, there is salvation… Oh, merciful savagery!” (240).  For Chrysostom, if a Christian heard a person blaspheme against the Christian god or Christian teachings, “go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so.  Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify thy hand with the blow” (234-235).  Similar sentiments would be proclaimed by many other bishops, priests, and monks.  For one eventual saint, the ends justified any means: “There is no crime for those who have Christ” (230).  It was clear that if any Christian zealotry broke Roman law or violated the legal rights of the target of their righteousness, such concerns were illegitimate when placed next to the laws of God.  In fact, if Christians were killed while attacking “pagan” temples, clergy, or worshippers, such “martyrs” would be richly rewarded in heaven and forever exalted among the faithful on earth.  Sound familiar?  It is Christian jihad in the ISIS sense.  And many of the men committing these crimes are saints even today in Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or both (even other Christian sects, too).

How did this revolution take hold?  In the smashing of temples and statues to rubble, the mass burning of books and the barging into people’s homes if they were merely suspected of having “pagan” art or literature, a hating of sex and sexuality, theatre, music, dance, and festivals, all of which were seen as the work of demons and punishable by violence and torture.  Shaving, for many, was a sign of “pagan” inclinations (even, too, any kind of colorful fashion, showing of skin for women, or taking especial care with bathing and hygiene).  Science, math, objective history, philosophy were also “pagan” demonic works since they did not neatly line up with Christian teachings, and scientists, surgeons, teachers all saw works of theirs purged and burned, their places of operation shuttered or destroyed if they did not adopt Christian ways (and for many of them, this would have made their work impossible or compromised their values and beliefs to a level beyond that which they could bear).  The stubborn or those who spoke out against these restrictions were forbidden from continuing their trade, tortured, exiled, or murdered, their property seized and their works obliterated from the face of the earth.  The intellectual and the worldly is despised.  Misogyny is pervasive.  Homosexuals were newly tortured, their genitals often cut off, often leading to death.

This, too, was an era of thought crimes, and absolute destruction of free speech, inquiry, and debate enforced by murder and torture, often with the full backing of the state but also often by mobs of incited and dispatched-by-a-cleric Christian lay folk for whom there was little to no accountability.  In her account of the terrible murder—just for having respect and influence as a non-Christian and a woman—of Hypatia, a female philosopher based in Alexandria and renowned throughout the Empire in her day for her brilliance and wisdom, sought after by local rulers and the sons of elites from across the Mediterranean—Nixey notes that her close confidante, the local Roman in charge named Orestes, is helpless with his small retinue to stand up to the hundreds of militarized Christians known as parabalani—“the reckless ones,” a sort of YMCA cohort but with a distinctly terrorist bent (135)—who enforce the will of their extremist bishop (Hypatia and Orestes’s tale is wondrously depicted in Alejandro Amenábar’s 2009 film Agora­, the two characters poignantly portrayed by Rachel Weisz and Oscar Isaac).

Terrifying Modern Parallels and Digging into an Ancient Mentality of Hate

Reading these accounts, one cannot but help see the giant overlaps with ISIS; indeed, these Christians come off as the ISIS of Christianity, Rome under their rule resembling Baghdadi’s caliphate or Afghanistan under the 1990s Taliban (not today’s apparently—for now at least—relatively kinder, gentler version).  Even today, Christianity celebrates these terrorists and murderers from its infancy.  The harshness of their rule; their hatred of free inquiry, joy, merriment, and women’s autonomy; their self-adoption of the roles of judges, jury, and executioners; even their appearance—both ISIS and the early Christian enforcers were generally severe young men in dark clothing with unshaved beards—bear such a distinct resemblance to the worst of ISIS and Taliban rule, the worst of the terrorists of our own era, that it is hard to see the difference between them as you read Nixey, hard to not see them as one in the same, with the most extreme of religious terrorists in our modern era clear inheritors of a clear tradition that more or less begins with these Christian fanatics (“saints”).

If you doubt this, consider that, after a statue of Athena in Palmyra at the ends of the Syrian desert was desecrated and mutilated by Christians in the 380s, the very same statue, partially restored and on display in the second decade of the twenty-first century, was similarly desecrated and mutilated when ISIS took over the city in 2015 (xxxi, 114).  Just like their Christian and Jewish religious forebears, they were simply carrying out God’s explicit, clear command to destroy “idols,” as had the Taliban in 2001 with two massive Buddhist statues.

But to truly understand the mentality of these hostile faithful from Rome’s era of religious tumult, we need look to nothing other than the Ten Commandments.  Depending on your religious sect or faith, the following either comprises the first two or first three of the Ten Commandments:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

You shall not have other gods beside me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol or a likeness of anything in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth;

you shall not bow down before them or serve them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their ancestors’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation;

but showing love down to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not invoke the name of the LORD, your God, in vain. For the LORD will not leave unpunished anyone who invokes his name in vain. —Ex: 20:2-7

Badmouthing or criticizing God?  The same punishment:

A man born of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father went out among the Israelites, and in the camp a fight broke out between the son of the Israelite woman and an Israelite man.

The son of the Israelite woman uttered the LORD’s name in a curse and blasphemed. So he was brought to Moses—now his mother’s name was Shelomith, daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan—

and he was kept in custody till a decision from the LORD should settle the case for them.

The LORD then said to Moses:

Take the blasphemer outside the camp, and when all who heard him have laid their hands* on his head, let the whole community stone him.

Tell the Israelites: Anyone who blasphemes God shall bear the penalty;

whoever utters the name of the LORD in a curse shall be put to death. The whole community shall stone that person; alien and native-born alike must be put to death for uttering the LORD’s name in a curse…

You shall have but one rule, for alien and native-born alike. I, the LORD, am your God.

When Moses told this to the Israelites, they took the blasphemer outside the camp and stoned him; they did just as the LORD commanded Moses. —Lev. 24:10-16, 22-23

You read Leviticus and Chrysostom correctly: the punishment applies even to those who aren’t Christian.

As an adult, I am struck by how these first commandments (including the Third or Fourth, depending, again, on the faith/sect, to keep the Sabbath holy)—three out of ten or four out of ten, no small portion—have absolutely nothing to do with morality, with right or wrong, but are about a jealous—even petty—God who will brook no competition or criticism, and, indeed, has ample punishments and miseries in store for those worshipping other gods or criticizing him in both Jewish and Christian (and Muslim) scripture (perhaps there is room for much improvement?).  Pagan idolaters are to be killed, their shrines and statues destroyed, murder and destruction ordered directly by God himself.  Just one example here:

If your brother, your father’s child or your mother’s child, your son or daughter, your beloved spouse, or your intimate friend entices you secretly, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you and your ancestors have not known,

any of the gods of the surrounding peoples, near to you or far away, from one end of the earth to the other:

do not yield or listen to any such person; show no pity or compassion and do not shield such a one,

but kill that person. Your hand shall be the first raised to put such a one to death; the hand of all the people shall follow.

You shall stone that person to death, for seeking to lead you astray from the LORD, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

And all Israel shall hear of it and fear, and never again do such evil as this in your midst.

If you hear it said concerning one of the cities which the LORD, your God, gives you to dwell in,

that certain scoundrels have sprung up in your midst and have led astray the inhabitants of their city, saying, “Come, let us serve other gods,” whom you have not known,

you must inquire carefully into the matter and investigate it thoroughly. If you find that it is true and an established fact that this abomination has been committed in your midst,

you shall put the inhabitants of that city to the sword, placing the city and all that is in it, even its livestock, under the ban.

Having heaped up all its spoils in the middle of its square, you shall burn the city with all its spoils as a whole burnt offering to the LORD, your God. Let it be a heap of ruins forever, never to be rebuilt. —Deut. 13:7-17

As a child growing up in America, these first few of the Ten Commandments always struck me as odd: everyone where I was (and, indeed, virtually all of America in the 1980s) was either Christian or Jewish, worshipping the same God if differently.  But back when Constantine began to favor Christianity in the early fourth century C.E., Christians were a small minority, surrounded generally not by other monotheists (the most notable exception being Jews concentrated in a few areas, though a considerable number of “pagans” practiced different monotheisms) but by polytheist worshippers of Greco-Roman gods or their Celtic, Germanic, North African, Egyptian, or Eastern equivalents.  The presence of competing “false” gods—Paul clearly states they are not just false, but actual evil demons—would have been overwhelming to a Christian.

So while we today shrug at passages about idols and pagans, in the context of early Christianity, nothing was more important than placing the Jesus/God before the myriad of other gods and God’s words were clear in this most important, most emphasized of Christian teachings: idolators and competing gods were not to be tolerated but utterly destroyed, their worshippers forced into submission and conversion or killed.  Thus, the most important part of being a good Christian was not loving your neighbor with kindness, but accepting the One True God in a way that demanded non-acceptance, confrontation, and violence with neighbors if they did not accept Christianity. 

We must go back in time to realize that, in daily life, it was almost impossible to escape the presence of these “demons”: giant, exquisite statues regularly lavished with public sacrifice and worship in the most prominent places of any village, town, or city.  For early Christians, they were living in a time of never-ending holy war, an age of terror in which, as laid out by scripture and endlessly repeated by Christian clergy, the evil demonic gods that surrounded them wished them harm, sought to steal and condemn their souls through temptation, and were challenging their own God for supremacy.

In this mindset, every painting in a bathhouse or a private home with naked people, every bit of incense, every statue, every book of “pagan” filth, was part of this never-ending campaign against Christianity and must be destroyed.  Even if the masses were not zealous enough, over the centuries after traditional Greco-Roman religion and philosophy were nearly wiped out, the stones of the remnants of the last “pagan” temples and marble of the remaining “pagan” statues would be broken up to build churches or repair houses or other infrastructure; Plato or Cicero would be erased and replaced or written over with Paul or the texts of the early Church Fathers.  So, to a large extent, these people and their culture were destroyed, often utterly.  That is why so few works of the art and literature from this era remains–less than ten percent of classical literature survives today, including only one percent of Latin literature [177])—that is why nearly every statue from the period shows hacked-off noses, gouged-out eyes, chipped-away nipples, or some other deliberate mutilation.

I am always amused when people claim Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, the latter’s texts and traditions containing similar injunctions, even with the behavior of Prophet Muhammad himself) is a religion of peace.  Christians will often say that “Jesus came to change the ‘bad’ stuff in the Old Testament (Jewish Torah), making Christianity all about love,” having obviously not studied their New Testament well at all, where Jesus clearly and repeatedly affirms the Old Testament laws (and while there are some New Testament examples apparently changing some Old Testament rules, they are not as forceful, clear, or as far-reaching).  And let us not forget that all those who do not accept Jesus as their God, Lord, and Savior are doomed for an eternity of fire and torture in Hell.  It is not a “misreading” or “taking out of context,” as these verses in favor of preserving the laws of the Old Testament are not parables, but crystal-clear affirmations.  After all, Christianity bases its entire legitimacy on fulfilling the prophecies of Jewish scripture and on the God of the Jews.

The Buried Ugly Truth of Early Christianity and Its Lessons for Today

It was the Christians who persecuted en masse, not the other way around; despite the popular image of Roman persecutions of Christians and feeding helpless mothers and children to the lions in the Colosseum, Nixey takes pains to point out that Roman persecutions of Christians were mostly few and far between, half-hearted and not widespread or intense, as low as “hundreds, not thousands” in their total victims, certainly far fewer than tradition has made it seem.  If Romans had really wanted to wipe out Christianity, it would not have been hard: the Bible would have been incredibly difficult and time-consuming to produce in those days, and a concerted effort to burn all the Bibles and silence the clergy would almost certainly have succeeded (indeed, later Christians would succeed in wiping out numerous other cults), and such success would have been an enormous obstacle for a religion based on the Word of God.

Yet for Christians then and too many of them now, like ISIS or even Trump’s Capitol insurrectionists, it is they themselves who feel they are and must be the victims and it is their victimhood that justifies their own extremism violent atrocities against innocents.  Whether it is Christian terrorists in America or Muslim or Jewish ones in the Middle East, the culture of victimhood elevates them and their narratives, to the exclusion of those they target.  In the end, the mentality of those who feel they must kill and destroy to preserve God’s will (really their own interests) reveals a pitifully weak “God” and a resentful, inferiority-complex-ridden class of warriors, traits consistent from the fourth century into the twenty-first.

It is for us, then, to remember these truths, even on a day like Christmas.  As perfectly articulated by the late and singular Christopher Hitchens:

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.

Let us close on that note, remembering how many Roman “pagans” were made offers they could not refuse.  While it is undoubtedly true many people did convert to Christianity willingly and with a true heart, many others converted “willingly” from a threat of loss of status or their livelihood; many others from threat of torture, murder, or execution.  Many were tortured and executed, many did lose their jobs.  Many, under such conditions, would succumb and convert outwardly, if not in their hearts; many others who loved their children would have raised them as Christians so as to spare them constant harassment and violent threats.  Some would have simply done publicly the bare minimum to avoid legal trouble, others publicly genuinely worship Jesus as another god and privately still worship their own gods.

Still, so it is that in a few generations, most Romans were “Christians” in a place where being a pagan had literally become a death sentence.  Under such conditions, it is doubtful a majority of converts over time were genuine or truly willing, but many of their lives were snuffed out, their voices obliterated to history.  As John Chrysostom joyfully noted in somewhat exaggerated fashion in one sermon, the written works “of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated;” in another, “Where is Plato?  Nowhere!  Where Paul?  In the mouths of all!”

More than we would have thought in remote parts of the now officially Christian Roman Empire, some “pagans” would have persisted in their traditional beliefs, quietly and illiterately.  But their world was dying out, their heyday long gone, they were the exception, not the norm, and they leave virtually no record.  The few words from “pagans” in their twilight are wholly depressing, often learned scholars living to see their teachings banned, their books burned, ignorance and credulity reign, knowing they are part of a world where the inmates have taken over the asylum.  For one Palladas, it is a time he and his kind were “men reduced to ashes… for today everything is turned upside down,” and he asks:

Is it not true that we are dead and only seem to live, we [who worship the old gods]… Or are we alive and is life dead? (xxvi).

At least in Nixey’s if not Christianity’s account, they live on and their voices are heard and remembered.

Whatever the properly understood teachings of Christianity or any religion, let us hope that all faiths and faith leaders can one day insist on changing these rules to allow for complete tolerance and non-violence towards all other faiths and people of no faith such that no people today suffer the treatment of Nixey’s “pagans;” for even in recent years, Yazidis have suffered like this under ISIS, such that one Yazidi survivor turned Nobel laureate, Nadia Murad, wrote a memoir called The Last Girl, as in she hopes she is one of the last girls to go through such an attempted religious genocide.  In the same vein as Paul and the early Christians, ISIS saw Murad’s Yazidis as “pagans” and therefore Devil-worshippers; Christians of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries would have been proud of ISIS for assaulting the “pagan” Yazidis (indeed, Islam has borrowed much from Christianity it would have been better off not). 

Perhaps Nixey’s narrative can remind us no faith or people is exempt from the possibility of such horrid conduct meted either by or against them, and can add to the possibility that Murad’s earnest, deeply necessary plea is heard.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This bring us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

In the end, the novel-coronavirus should be a wakeup call for a number of reasons.  First, we can consider this something of a dry run for how we would handle a deliberate bioattack with even a mildly deadly infectious disease (and know that we failed and do must do much better).  We can also think of this as a wakeup call for the need to prepare far more for biodefense, either a bioterrorist attack or an attack launched with a bioweapon from a hostile state, because it is certain that those considering using bioweapons will take much hope and inspiration from the devastation COVID-19 has visited upon us, and even those on the fence will likely be inspired to dabble more with bioweapons.  Considering the dark history of bioweapons, biowarfare, and bioterrorism even before the coronavirus era, and considering the rapidly advancing technology that makes bioweapons research and development ever more accessible, we cannot continue with our current biodefense postures in a world where coronavirus is clearly a game-changer.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 6, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981), November 6th, 2018

AMMAN — With the unprecedented publication by The New York Times of an anonymous op-ed by “a senior official in the Trump Administration” hot on the heels of the release of preview excerpts from legendary journalist Bob Woodward’s upcoming damning exposé on the Trump White House—both showing that top Trump officials are deliberately undermining and ignoring him for, in their view, the good of the nation—something is clear that is not being acknowledged yet, even two months after these events, in the major coverage of these unfolding developments:

The presidency of the United States of America is, and has been pretty much since the beginning of the Trump Administration, operating extraconstitutionally, that is, outside the bounds of the U.S. Constitution. In American history—in the modern era, anyway—the only times we have been in waters this uncharted and this dangerous from a constitutional perspective were the final year-and-a-half of the Woodrow Wilson Administration from 1919-1921 and the very last days of the Richard Nixon Administration in 1974.

In the first instance, after Wilson became essentially medically incapacitated later in 1919, his wife basically secretly took on his duties as president behind the scenes. As Joel Goldstein noted in 2014 in the scholarly journal Politics and the Life Sciences, while “[t]he length of Wilson’s disability has been debated,” he quoted an assessment by historian John Blum that seemed to be broad enough to reflect much of the range of opinion: “for a month the United States had no President; for many months the country had only a shell of a President.”

In the words of Goldstein, the situation clearly demonstrated that in terms of presidential succession under certain conditions, “the Constitution was ambiguous in…numerous material ways.”

Decades later, looking back at this situation was a significant inspiration for the adoption of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, providing a path to transfer presidential authority away from a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” as well as to transfer (vice) presidential authority under other circumstances.

In the second instance, as the curtain was coming down on Nixon’s presidency in the face of coming impeachment amid the Watergate scandal, and even while Nixon was still legally the president, senior officials were prepared to ignore and defy him and did so. The crisis that forced Nixon to resign was largely a result of reporting by the duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in large part armed with information from an anonymous senior Nixon Administration official known then as Deep Throat and later revealed to be Mark Felt, then-Associate Director at the FBI, not unlike some of the officials working against Trump today, actions also revealed by Woodward.

*****

A major reason the Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted was to make sure a clear Constitutional order would continue even in certain rare and/or extreme circumstances.

The Roman Republic had a rarely-held office called the dictator that was only appointed in emergencies and only to fulfill specific mandates and/or last for a specific period of time and generally no longer than six months. It was essentially a way to temporarily put aside the Roman Republic’s normal working order while still preserving the Republic’s overall constitution, allowing both the law to be preserved during emergencies and regular order to be restored after them, with both happening under the same constitution. Marc de Wilde, writing for the journal History of Political Thought, noted that this system worked quite well for some three centuries as, in his view, during that period, “the dictatorship was never abused and turned against the constitution” (though, after a long hiatus, the rare later iterations proved far more problematic).

But the U.S. Constitution does not have the same flexibility. And what is happening now places the current U.S. government outside of the prescribed range of the functioning Constitution.

With the recent revelations, some have called the moves against Trump by his own people a kind of coup (including Woodward); in fact, it is impossible to argue that this is anything but that: the president leads the Executive Branch and is the Commander in Chief, and while, as I noted over a year ago, the system was designed by the Founding Fathers to empower officials under the president to defy him if he was violating the Constitution or the law, if the president gives an order that is not such a violation and he is still defied, the we are operating outside the legal bounds of the U.S. Constitution. While Trump is not medically and physically incapacitated like Wilson was for over a year-and-a-half, the nation is essentially being governed throughout Trump’s presidency like it was, briefly, in the final days of Nixon’s presidency, with senior officials under the president deeming him unstable and unfit to govern and that it may be and was necessary to defy and ignore him.

But the temporary state in which the Constitution was essentially illegally but practically put aside for a few days in 1974—a bad, and scary, enough, state of affairs then—it is terrifying for the health of the nation, the power of the Constitution, the world standing of America, and the staying power of democracy worldwide that the Constitution of the world’s oldest continuous democracy has essentially been put aside for coming up on two years since the beginning of Trump’s presidency because not just so-called “deep state” career bureaucrats, but even the president’s own most senior appointed officials chosen by him and his inner circle (including the author of the Times op-ed) deem him to be a madman unfit and unable to govern, and that it is necessary for the good of the country that they work to usurp his authority, lest he abuse it in such a gross way as to do serious damage to the country. 

Whether ignoring more extreme orders or swiping papers off the president’s desk to prevent his official signature from enacting terrible policies, those around Trump are unconstitutionally governing with some of the president’s constitutional powers along with the president himself but without the president’s knowledge or permission.

In other words, this presidency is by definition both a constitutional crises and inherently extraconstitutional.

Which begs the questions: Who is in charge? Who is making the decisions, how often, and when?  Who answers to whom? How aware is the president of any of this? How well can the president perceive the situation and understand the reality of his own White House? To what degree are America’s allies aware of all this and how is this damaging America’s relationships with them? To what degree are America’s rivals and enemies aware of this and how is this emboldening them and weakening American national security? If a major crisis erupts, if the U.S. is under attack, how would the country be led?

The disturbing and unacceptable truth is that we do not know the answers to any of these questions. We are like a ship unmoored with crew running around furiously to keep the ship from colliding or sinking but with no one at the helm. We have been fortunate—extremely fortunate—that so far, no major crisis has emerged to challenge this far-from-ideal modus operandi.

Some will argue that the officials undermining Trump are way out of bounds. Others will argue that Trump is so terrible that these actions are necessary. The great philosophical question—which will be debated as long as debate exists—is, do you stay true to the Constitution even as superiors destroy it, or do you violate the Constitution to protect it?

There is no easy answer, hence, we are where we are. 

Especially considering that Trump has not, as is also the case with his tax returns, released a recent credible and full medical record, a reality that is necessary to confront is that Trump’s age and physical condition make him an ideal candidate for “executive dysfunction” under conditions discussed by Mark Fisher, David Franklin, and Jerrold Post in the same journal issue as Goldstein’s aforementioned article. “Based on the known neuroanatomic localization of executive function and its well described age-dependent changes,” they write, “a significant proportion of political leaders over the age of 65 are likely subject to executive dysfunction.” Trump is 72 and can barely string together a complete sentence or stay focused in a meeting. Many around him question his mental state, and any honest view of video of a far younger Trump compared with President Trump makes it clear to all but the most fanatical that there has been some sort of mental degeneration in the interim.

However you feel, what is not in dispute is that the Constitution is being ignored and that the longer this continues, the more the American system and American credibility is undermined and the greater the chance that the American ship of state will run into disaster, with no guarantee it will be restored to its former functionality.  If America’s current extraconstitutional republic is not restored to a constitutional one, history will look back on Americans harshly, and justly so.

*****

Ultimately, this is actually all part of a massive “active measures” political warfare campaign by Russia, designed from the beginning to weaken and undermine American institutions from the top down, beginning first and foremost with the U.S. presidency but trickling down to all walks of American political life. To be sure, what I have termed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar—Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bold and unprecedented campaign to install Trump in the White House—succeeded wildly beyond what probably most Kremlin planners had dreamed of, and a president that literally broke the U.S. Constitution almost from the get-go for the duration of his first few years in office (and who knows how much longer) was probably not a specifically anticipated or designed outcome, especially within this timeframe. But it would have been within the realm of desired outcomes, as placing an agent of chaos—witting or unwitting—in the oval office can obviously produce a wide range of outcomes that generally destabilize and weaken the United States, which most certainly were the Russian aims in 2015-2016, and, as the just-released latest Justice Department criminal charges show, still are the goals as we head into the 2018 midterm elections, carried out by some the same overall agents as before. This campaign of Putin’s is still further part of his overall war against the West, NATO, and democracy, or the rise of what I call worldwide (small-d) democratic fascism. Taken together, this is a new form of (cold) warfare, using Twitter and racism instead of tanks and rockets, but it is warfare nonetheless. 

And it is warfare we are losing.

That a sitting U.S. president is essentially not necessarily in charge and is being constantly ignored and sidelined by patriotic underlings, that the U.S. Constitution has ceased to properly function as intended, that the Trump presidency is operating outside the bounds of the Constitution and the law, may all be an overperformance on the stage that Putin has set, but make no mistake about it, this is all part of the Kremlin’s overall designs to do short, medium, and long-term damage to American political institutions, rule of law, politics, standing, culture, and the norms that support them. The longer this all continues unchecked, the more success that will be enjoyed by Russia and the more damage to the health, even survivability, of the American political system and the U.S. Constitution. If the true functioning U.S. Constitution is not restored soon and Trump and his now cultish, sycophantic Republican party remain in power, perhaps Trump’s successor will operate within the Constitution, but perhaps not. Far better to check Trump and the GOP in these midterms, than leave it to chance, for the history of the Roman Republic shows that once precedents are broken and the longer they are broken, the greater the propensity that they will be broken again or swept away by new precedents, in Rome’s case, an autocratic emperor-based system operating under the guise of a democratic republic, and even that eventually gave way to out-and-out acknowledged autocracy. To maximize our odds of not repeating and falling down the same degenerative path, it is essential to restore the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law by first checking Trump and his Republican enablers during today’s midterms, and then Constitutionally removing him and them from power as soon as possible, whether at the ballot box or through other measures as allowed within our properly functioning constitutional system.

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

*****

Though I originally published this article in the fall of 2013 during America’s last government shutdown, it is a sad measure of how little progress has been made that I can repost this piece today to explain relatively unchanged dynamics leading to such a debacle. We can just substitute Trump, Tom Cotton, and the Tea Party’s offspring, the Freedom Caucus, for the likes of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party and substitute the issues of DACA children migrants and immigration for the debt ceiling and budget cuts. Even if a shutdown is averted, the dynamics of partisan brinksmanship are alive and well and threaten America’s republic just as they threatened (and destroyed) the Roman Republic.

Published on LinkedIn Pulse January 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) January 19th, 2018; originally published October 3rd, 2013, with the title “In Government Shutdown, Ted Cruz and Tea Party Are Lucky We’re Not Living in Ancient Rome” by then-PolicyMic, now Mic.

UPDATE 12:04 AM Jan 20th, 2018, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration: the government is now in a shutdown.

HBO. Rome’s forum—the equivalent of Washington, DC’s national mall—dirty and largely empty, closed for business during one of its many government shutdowns before the fall of the Roman Republic’s democracy.

AMMAN — As someone who’s written about ancient Roman history, I find these repeated Tea-Party-initiated shutdown and default crises amusing when, knowing that American troops might very well have their pay and benefits threatened, I think of how Roman legionaries would have reacted in similar situations and smile a bit thinking of Ted Cruz running through the streets of Washington with Roman troops in hot pursuit.

Contrary to popular belief, our Founding Fathers did not base our Constitution on the British constitutional monarchy, but on the Roman Republic. There were many historical and cultural similarities: from 509-49 BCE, the Roman republic functioned with a government based on popular sovereignty, with a deliberative legislative body called the Senate, with the people voting both for major office holders annually and yes-or-no on legislation coming from the Senate. Rome’s system was one of checks and balances, divided power, and compromise. The Republic needed its parts to cooperate, and the support of the people, to do much of anything.

Sound familiar?

And because of this superior system (so argued the ancient Greek historian Polybius), Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean world with it citizen-soldiers. But with amazing success came obscene corruption and partisanship, and from 133 BCE, after the first political violence in Rome since the early days of the Republic, Rome experienced internal conflict that would eventually destroy its republic.

Obstructionist (mostly) self-interested conservative elites — optimates — took on a group of (often) self-interested populist reformers — populares — for most of the next century. After decades of optimates stubbornly fighting all reform, when a conservative elitist general named Sulla and a populares former general named Marius (Caesar’s uncle!) had a major political falling out, Sulla marched his troops into the city of Rome in 88 — the first time Roman troops had ever marched on Rome — the streets flowed with blood, and there were years of civil war. Sulla later had himself appointed Rome’s first dictator since 202 (at the height of the Second Punic War), but gave those powers up a few years later after scrapping many hard-won populares‘ reforms.

Roman veterans were often left to languish in poverty or limbo by the conservative optimate-dominated Senate, fueling support for a major rebellion in 62-63. Even the most famous general of the day, Pompey “Magnus,” was rebuffed when he advocated for his own veterans. Julius Caesar, himself one of the moderate populares, was elected a consul for 59 but also found only obstructionism from the optimates, led now by Cato (namesake of today’s pro-Tea-Party, libertarian Cato Institute). One of Caesar’s major pieces of legislation also aimed to settle Pompey’s veterans, but Cato, who even admitted the bill was good, filibustered and obstructed every time he could to prevent its passage. Only some mild violence meted out by Caesar’s supporters, including Pompey’s veterans, against the obstructionist optimates and Cato during the assembly that voted overwhelmingly for its approval kept the law from being blocked on a ridiculous religious technicality.

An extreme member of the populares faction, Clodius, succeeded in terrorizing the city with increasing mob violence throughout the 50s, repeatedly causing major government shutdowns. Elections were long-delayed, important offices remained vacant, major scandals erupted, senior officials were attacked in public, and when Clodius was killed in 52, his supporters burned down the Senate with his funeral pyre. The Senate reluctantly authorized Pompey rarely-granted emergency powers to restore order, and soldiers were brought into the city under arms for the first time since Sulla.

Yet legionaries lining courts and public areas in Rome under a sole consul was not at all the way the Republic was supposed run. Cato and the optimates still hated Caesar so much that over the next few years they made clear to him that they would never let him rest and would do everything they could to drive him to ruin, including prosecution and exile. It was easy for Caesar to convince his soldiers that the Senate did not have the interests of them or the people of Rome in mind, that a mad faction had hijacked the Roman state and needed to be swept aside. 

After Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49, a new civil war erupted in which many senators were killed, and true republican government would never return to ancient Rome.

So when you say, “That couldn’t happen to America today!” realize that mass political violence, Roman armies marching on Rome, and government shutdowns had all either never happened or hadn’t in centuries, and were all unthinkable to Romans living before they actually happened; escalation begets escalation. That is what is so disturbing about the Tea Party today: its members’ willingness to do anything legal, even if unprecedented and previously unthinkable, to accomplish their goals against the will of the people sets dangerous precedents and deeply undermines the credibility of the government. And as we’ve seen with Rome, credibility that takes centuries to build can only take a generation to destroy. 

Learn your history, Tea Party.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Check out my related book chapter:

The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations (Chapter 10 in Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding)

See related articles:

Redistricting at Heart of DC Dysfunction: Gerrymandering Making Politics More Partisan

Trump, the Specter of Political Violence, & Lessons From the Roman Republic (Or, We Have a Problem America!)

Caesar & the Politics of the Fall of the Roman Republic: Lessons for USA Today

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 11, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 11th, 2017

Photo by author

AMMAN — More often than not, the situation whenever the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are involved in discussing their near-identity-defining, almost sickly-beloved conflict rapidly becomes a contest to see who can deny reality the most vehemently. In this conflict, you learn quickly that if one side has a choice between quietly enjoying some advantage or rising opportunity on one side and rubbing it in the faces of their rivals at the cost of sabotaging their own blessing on the other, the latter is almost always the choice; this makes you realize that spite, as much as anything else, is a motivating factor among too many in this struggle.

Photo by author

Typical Tribal Conflict… BUT GOD!

As a student, you read about this conflict and it fascinates you; as someone who has the opportunity to talk to the parties and live among them over an extended period of time, it depresses you and tires you out, even if you don’t have a vested interest in one side or another. You form a deeper respect for the suffering of both sides, even as you become exasperated by their stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge valid points made by the other side in a cycle of dehumanization that helps to explain the deadly and nasty nature of this conflict.

After enough time, you become good at asking people questions and getting them to talk, but this also results in your being accustomed to being usually disappointed in their answers. Occasionally, you hear voices of reason, then become even more depressed as you realize these are the minorities, often represented at pathetically low levels in the halls of political power, even when democratically elected.

Frequently, the more religious the individual, the less compromising they are in their views. And I have found that such people rarely consider things from the other perspective.

Should Jewish babies being born now in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa suffer because of the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers? No more than Palestinian babies born in Jerusalem or Ramallah or Hebron should suffer for the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers. And if your answer to those questions involves you saying that yes, innocent children being born in situations totally beyond their control do indeed deserve to suffer under occupation, legal inequality, or the constant threat or “retributive” violence and you somehow justify this response by citing your God or His holy texts, then your God is not worthy of worship and esteem but should instead be cast off into the obscurity and irreverence that has been the fate of most of the capricious and cruel deities of millennia past.

I confess I am not among those who would describe themselves as the faithful, and it is with increasingly robust pride that I describe myself as such in the face of more and more encounters with otherwise kind and generous souls who, when animated by discussion of this or that holy place they are told is to be their rightful inheritance by some ancient book of yesteryear, can and do find specific verses from said text that they claim (and they are hardly alone) justify some sort of violence to either take back what is “theirs” or prevent sharing sovereignty over what they now control.

God “gave” you this land? Funny, why don’t you control it now, then? Is it not His will that you lost it? Why not reserve your hostility for the God that allowed this to happen, rather than the people who are now in possession of what is supposedly “yours,” for are not those people instruments of His Will? Or are you claiming that these people are somehow successfully opposing the Will of God and that your all-powerful God needs you, a band of lowly primates, to somehow aid him in seeing His Will through? Or do you who now possess such holy places look at the mass of outside-your-tribe humanity that surrounds you and are also laying claim to said holy places believe that your God put these people here for you to displace, keep out, or even kill in large numbers just to maintain exclusive sovereignty? Am I to respect a God that is so tribal that He favors your possession and not sharing such sacred holy sites, that this God truly cares whether you or some other primates that are nearly identical in blood and DNA control some speck of a vast planet that is merely a piece of dust in the wider universe?

The truth of the matter is that there is no respectably serious answer that can be provided by any of the faithful who believe in divinely sanctioned violence to either maintain or retake such and such location. Believe me, I’ve tried to find one by personally asking many on both sides of this conflict, and the range and originality of the answers such a crowd can give you are narrow and hackneyed in the extreme.

It was extremely unfair to the Jews when the Romans slaughtered and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs in the first and second centuries C.E. amid vigorous Jewish revolts, and it was also extremely unfair to the Arabs who would become known as Palestinians the way first Ottoman Turkish and then British European colonial overlords oppressed them and also allowed the long-exiled Jews to return to their ancient homeland in a manner that did not consider asking or consulting those local Arabs how they felt about the matter and then, in the case of the British, wearily presented it as a fait accompli to the United Nations in 1947-1949. Wars were fought and won and lost, and, as is so often the case with such things, there is no full rewind button, try though many may to find it or claim they have.

It is also worth asking: by what right did the ancient Jews (at least in the Biblical telling) massacre and/or displace those who were in what is now Israel/Palestine when they arrived thousands of years ago? By what right did the seventh-century Arab conquerors take the land from the East Roman (Byzantine) Greco-Romans? The same questions about taking land can be asked of many others, including the Romans, Ottomans, Turks, British, and those who would become Israelis; the answer is the same for each of them: they and/or their leaders wanted to and they had the power to do so.

The biggest myth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is some sort of difficult to understand Gordian knot, singular among world conflicts in its uniqueness and intensity, inscrutable to all but those most studied in it or closest to it.

The reality is that the conflict is remarkably banal: two tribes want the same land and contest sites that are particularly holy to them. You know, like what happened many thousands of times in recorded history and innumerable times from prehistory when we were barely more than upright primates.

Perhaps most obnoxiously, both Israelis and Palestinians often speak as if they are the only people to have been in a predicament like theirs. While many people around the world are stuck in conflicts and occupations the world has long forgotten—Tibetans under the Chinese, Kashmiris, the long-suffering people of Somalia, Hutus in Central Africa, and today’s ignored Yemenis—it seems even the slightest provocation involving anything Palestinian-Israeli generates front page news, drowning out other, more intense conflicts that have killed and displaced far more people in recent decades.

Photo by author

Jerusalem Is NOT the Center of the World

Before Trump delivered his ill-advised speech on Jerusalem, it finally seemed as if things had hit a critical mass of a point where the world might finally start paying attention to Yemen in the wake of the death of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president turned rebel leader. Before that event threatened to further destabilize an already incredibly unstable situation, Yemen was suffering from the worst cholera outbreak in modern human history, a man-made one wrought by Saudi incompetence and global indifference, with about one million cases and getting worse, and was also facing a food crisis that has put Yemen on the brink of the worst famine in the world in decades, with some seven million people at risk. It was thought that Saleh’s death might bring some much-needed attention to the neglected conflict, but two days later, Trump gave his speech on Jerusalem, and now Yemen’s war is at most an afterthought (if that) in much of the Arab/Muslim world and in global headlines, just as it has been for most of the war’s duration. In Jordan, where I reside, I haven’t seen a single mention of Yemen recently in social media among any of my regional contacts except from those who are Yemeni.

There is only so much oxygen to be shared among major stories during any given news cycle, and the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean coast know as Israel/Palestine consumes far more than its fair share of what is available. I was chatting with one Palestinian-Jordanian friend recently and complained about the disproportionate attention the subject got, but in her mind it was totally justified: “Jerusalem is very important to Muslims,” she said. “So a place is more important than millions who are on the brink of starvation in Yemen?” I asked? “Yes, of course!” she replied. I would cite here a piece I wrote a while back about how, on balance, religion intensifies conflict, not de-escalates it; religion may or may not “poison everything,” to cite Christopher Hitchens, but it more often than not certainly poisons conflicts, and quite irrationally so.

I will not excuse the many and severe misdeeds of Israel when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians under its control (and I have written about them extensively before, though that is not to suggest that Palestinians are blameless, either), but especially when it comes to white Europeans (and especially those from countries with backgrounds of strong anti-Semitism and fascist governments and/or fascistic leanings), one really does have to wonder why—when surrounded by conflicts in which human rights are being abused, from Western Sahara to northern Cyprus to Belarus to Crimea to Darfur to Syria to the Kurds to the Uighurs to the Rohingya to North Korea—so many of these Europeans are so virulently, almost obsessively focused on the misdeeds of Israel when it comes to human rights violations; some won’t even mention the word Israel, as if it’s a dirty word, and a good number come at their own expense to protest or document abuses in Palestinian communities.  After nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism dominating Europe, perhaps the idea—after a mere few decades of progress (and well under a century since the Holocaust was hardly a just a German, but a collective European crime)—that some level of residual anti-Semitism is a factor in current European views on Israel and Israelis, and the intensity and frequency of criticism of them, is hardly unreasonable.

America, of course, is more complicated: it has the largest Jewish population in the world (even including Israel) and a far larger population of extreme white Christian Evangelicals who literally believe that the Jews must control all of the Biblical “Holy Land” in order for Jesus to return, prejudicing them wholly against the Palestinians in favor of Israeli Jews, even more so than American Jews. And among major powers, it is the nation most supportive of Israel, one of only a few nations around the world that don’t view Israel negatively.

I’ve seen a number of Europeans express solidarity with the Palestinians by posting a Facebook profile photo frame showing the Dome of the Rock and with Arabic stating “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine,” almost as if to also deny that it is Israel’s capital. Is it so awful to post that Jerusalem is the capital of BOTH Israel AND Palestine? Few people I talked to here in Jordan wanted to admit that Israel has any claim to Jerusalem (Jordan controlled East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel drove the Jordanians out), still fewer that it could or should be Israel’s capital. While more Israeli Jews had mixed views when I’ve spoken with them in the past, the ones that felt Jerusalem could be divided and shared were generally a minority of disillusioned hippies not well-represented in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; those who were more mainstream politically—and therefore more empowered—were far less keen on the idea of a shared Jerusalem, let alone Palestine as a state.

Photo by author

The Reality of Jerusalem

The obvious (if painful for some) reality is that Israel has controlled much of Jerusalem since 1948 and all of it since 1967, something which ISIS (of all groups) surprisingly and ironically pointed out after Trump’s speech. This reality means that, for all intents and purposes, Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel’s state (a state recognized today by 158 nations, the vast majority of the world) since 1948, officially so in Israel’s view though unofficially so to the rest of the world. Because of the sensitive nature of the unresolved status of Jerusalem between two parties in conflict, the United States and the rest of the world have avoided recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s (or Palestine’s) capital. Yes, it practically is Israel’s capital, and everybody knows it, but Trump’s public acceptance of it violated basic principles of neutrality, and even while changing virtually nothing on the ground, it enraged millions of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

If the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims were smart, they would abstain from any sort of violent reaction to a speech that changes nothing on the ground for anyone except people who work at or need the U.S. Embassy as it moves from one city to another. They could unite on a focused, organized plan to engage the world community now that sympathy is more intensely with them after Trump’s incompetent oration needlessly kicked a hornet’s nest. In fact, Trump’s address needlessly weakened U.S. standing and credibility on this issue, enough that it might even be possible for the Palestinians to achieve some results even if they bypass America.

Yet instead, mass protests and beginnings of violence are the response. Young men rush towards nervous Israeli and sometimes trigger-happy troops, throwing rocks. The only tangible result of such acts will be destruction, injury, and death, and fatalities have already occurred. Not a wise move at all or one that will accomplish anything or have any effect on the status of Jerusalem or how Trump feels about his decision. Such acts are the surest way to lose a moral high ground that has been handed to them on a silver platter by President Trump and may prevent more positive measures that would help advance the Palestinian cause on the part of the rest of the international community. The protesters’ chants offer no hint that they could share Jerusalem or historic Palestine with Israel. 

As for Israel, having received a major boost and gift from America, it would be in a perfect position to reach out to Palestinians with a real offer of compromise, buttressed from a newly stronger position after action by their closest ally. Instead, per usual, Israel seems content to play their hand to their maximum advantage and to the Palestinians’ maximum disadvantage, as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments are wont to do.

Too many on both sides talk as if the city will be their exclusive sovereign domain. Jerusalem is the de facto practical capital for Israel while simultaneously being the symbolic capital of Palestine in the heart of virtually every Palestinian. It is also the emotional heart and soul of Israel for most Israelis and a practical capital for Palestinians, more of whom live there than in any Palestinian city except for Gaza City and with Jerusalem as the heart of Palestinian spiritual life. Too many on both sides want to deny these realities, living in a fantasy world where such practical, emotional, and spiritual concerns can be ignored in pursuit of total victory. Trump’s blunder is an opportunity for both sides to move closer to compromise, but, as can be expected in this conflict, it has only hardened positions and made compromise that much harder. Sure, blame Trump, but Israelis and Palestinians are reacting in just the ways that can compound Trump’s folly, rather than mitigate it.

The Arab and Jewish residents of Jerusalem, while hardly brothers, demonstrate a functional coexistence to any who visit, as they have for me repeatedly. If only a clear majority of Palestinians and Israelis could build on this spirit, rather than once again throw practicality to the wind, one could begin to feel hope. Trump’s stupidity should not be an excuse for stupidity from either Israelis or Palestinians, yet these types of conflicts often fall into predictable, repetitive, unproductive patterns, and that, sadly, is the case here with Jerusalem, the shared capital of Israel and Palestine, whether officially recognized as such or not.

Photo by author

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article by same author: Victory in Alabama May Run Through Jerusalem: Moore Likely at Heart of Trump Decision

See author’s Amazon eBooks here!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 8, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 8th, 2017; UPDATE: September 11th, 2017: Fortune favored Florida as Irma was not nearly as catastrophically destructive as it could have been, but it could just as easily have been otherwise, and next time, which may even be in a few weeks, fortune could just as easily abandon us.

AMMAN — We just saw Houston, America’s fourth largest city, become an underwater one, suffering extensive damage as Hurricane Harvey overwhelmed a region woefully unprepared for an event that had been warned about for years, even if it occurred with an unprecedented degree of historic, record-setting rainfall. Now, Florida, and, it seems, Miami, are in the path of another monster storm: Hurricane Irma, which may yet become the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic or on earth.

REUTERS/Richard Carson

Two or even more of America’s major cities may be underwater and severely damaged in the span of just a few weeks, and two catastrophic storms occurring within but a few weeks of each other will be responsible if that comes to pass; a third, newly formed hurricane, Jose, even may hit the U.S. after Irma, with a fourth hurricane now deluging the Mexican Gulf Coast and likely on course to bring more rain to Texas. For Houston, the damage is so extensive and severe and so difficult to recover from that there may never be a full recovery, just as New Orleans is not the same after Katrina, even over a decade later.

Is this the new normal, and, if so, what does that mean and what do we have to do?

*****

By new normal, I do not mean to suggest that these storms will be a weekly or monthly thing during hurricane season, as is the case this season. But I do mean to suggest that the U.S. could easily expect being hit by a catastrophic storm or two every year or every other year.

Catastrophic landscapes that were the realm of science fiction, in films like The Road and Interstellar, the original Planet of the Apes, even the Mad Max series and the Book of Eli, now seem to be a possible near-present reality. Often, these films showcase massive storms that are symptoms of planet-altering climate change amid a hopeless, depressing, desolate earth home to a dwindling and desperate human race.

Literature also contains more than a few references to catastrophic natural disasters, from Gilgamesh’s and Noah’s floods to Voltaire’s Candide’s reality-based Lisbon and the wave-swept Númenor of Tolkien. In real life, from tsunamis and floods to volcanoes and earthquakes, natural disasters and climate change have destroyed and weakened cities and civilizations alike, some of which never recovered; here in Amman, Jordan, I live not even a three-dozens miles’ drive from Jerash, a beautiful ancient Roman city that never recovered from a massive earthquake that devastated it in 749 C.E; it is haunting to walk through ancient city’s wide, colonnaded streets, once teeming with life and love, and shops and festivals, empty now except for tourists.

A once bustling city thoroughfare in Jerash- photo by author

Is this a fate that could befall cities like Houston and Miami?

In a word, yes, and, at this point, there is little we can do if that is what is to be.

Imagine Katrina, Harvey, and Irma-like storms striking the Gulf Coast every few years or worse: cities like Houston, Miami, and New Orleans devastated every few years by massive wind damage and flooding, a possibly permanent toxic mold problem—already difficult enough to deal with without recurring, frequent flooding—creating asthma epidemics and worse for anyone spending an extended amount of time there, insurance companies and local businesses overwhelmed, students unable to go through a normal school year or counting their blessings when they do, the sick and elderly not wanting to risk treatment or retirement there for fear of having to undergo a difficult evacuation. It would simply make no economic sense for locals to keep having to rebuild everything after massive frequent destruction; crops, oil refineries, fishing, tourism, all manner of industries would flop were hurricanes like Katrina, Harvey, and Irma to happen with any level of frequency within a decennial span. Insurance companies would be forced to up their rates on a population already struggling economically and now facing a daunting recovery effort, placing most of them outside of insurance protection (as is already the case). And how many times will the nation as a whole want to fund a recovery in the same region for the same disasters over and over again? 

In short, a large swath of the United States may become uninhabitable for all practical purposes within our lifetimes, its residents wholly unable to cope with the frequent fury of Mother Nature, and a society that will wisely decide it cannot fit the bill for what once termed “hundred-year events” that are now happening every few years. People will be forced to fend for themselves in inhospitable conditions or relocate unless somehow we create hurricane-proof, wind-proof, and flood-proof buildings (good luck with that).

Of course, maybe this won’t be the case. Unlike, say, global temperatures, for which we have data spanning the long-term, we only have a few decades of reliable records of hurricanes; we’re simply not sure of the full extent of the effects that the undeniable reality of man-induced climate change are having or will have on hurricanes, but there is a consensus that warmer temperatures and rising sea levels are going to increase the deadliness, destructiveness, and intensity of hurricanes. There is also consensus that we will see more storms of a higher intensity and fewer weaker storms, though there is not as strong a consensus that this will result in fewer overall storms, though that is still what research suggests. It is notable that the U.S. has never before been hit by two category 4 or 5 hurricanes in a single season, but that is about to be the case in a matter of days, with the most intense part of hurricane season just beginning and the possibility of a third or even more storms to come before season’s end.

I have personally experienced multiple hurricanes of various strengths, and would gladly go through five weaker ones than one monster storm, so I am not sure the fewer storms but more intense ones is a net gain in any true sense, and the research should not provide comfort to no one.

****

This year may very well be an exception, but it may not be, and it is quite possible that it is not; we will have to wait and see to know.

The Guardian

But we do not have to wait and see to prepare, to consider the worst that was once before unimaginable; over the past few years (and really for decades), we have been seeing the hottest years in recorded history, and we will be seeing more intense storms that will threaten not just the Gulf and southern U.S. Atlantic Coast, but also the mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. seaboard as ocean temperatures continue to rise and expand the zones in which the most intense hurricanes can maintain their intensity. We cannot stop these increases in the near future, but we can, with effort, try to limit greater damage further down the road, though, of course, Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement makes that all the more difficult.

But in the immediate near-future, the Southeastern U.S. is faced with a reckoning: for years, they have competed successfully with other regions in the country by offering businesses lower regulations and taxes and offering residents lower taxes, seeing economic and population growth partly as a result, as well as growing political clout in the U.S. House of Representatives. As Garrison Keillor eloquently noted recently, Minnesotans know they have to expect tough blizzards every winter; they have tougher regulations and higher taxes to be able to deal with these massive storms every winter and don’t expect a federal government handout when the inevitable happens. If massive hurricanes are to be a regular part of life in the Republican-led Southeastern United States, as in the case after any catastrophic natural disaster, changes will have to be made, sacrifices endured; this should mean that the long honeymoon this region has had disdaining the concepts of federal assistance (all Republican U.S. senators from Texas—Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—and Florida—Marco Rubio—voted against Sandy aid for the Northeast, as did the vast majority of U.S. House Republicans, including nearly every Republican from Texas and Florida), federal involvement in state affairs, regulation, and taxes should end now. Among the seven states with no state income tax are Texas and Florida, and other Gulf Coast states are among those with the lowest state income tax rates in the country; it is something of a shameless ask to request so much federal financial aid from other states willing to tax their residents more, to ask to those states to redistribute their wealth towards states unwilling to take responsibility by taking on their fair share of the burden and that opt, instead, to maintain an economic and population-attraction edge over the very states from which they are requesting aid. Those in the Southeast may also want to rethink their status as the most populous regional hotbed of both of man-made climate change and being among the most against actually enacting policy to do something about it.

America should come together and support our fellow citizens in those areas being devastated this hurricane season, but then we should demand a hard, honest look at the governing culture of some of the areas hit and demand hard, honest changes that will make them better prepared to handle what likely to be more frequent monster storms in the near future.

Those are the first few steps: the next will involve far tougher decisions about how different regions can continue on if such catastrophic storms end up happening far more frequently than has ever been experienced in recorded history. 

But if we can’t get the Gulf Coast to increase regulations that can save lives and institute the same taxes most of the rest of the country has in order to give themselves more resources that will better prepare their people and localities for disaster preparedness and response, good luck having any of those more challenging conversations down the road as we witness what is perhaps the beginning of climate change making devastation the norm for an entire region of the country.

Daniel J. Martinez / US Air National Guard

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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The Most Powerful Senator on Climate Change Is a Delusional Lunatic

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 10, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 10th, 2017

NBC News

AMMAN — In banana republics, in increasingly-dictatorish dictatorships like Egypt, when someone challenges the Dear Leader, they are removed from power. When the dictator feels far more powerful, like Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, that person may be executed with an anti-aircraft gun.

If liberals smug in their “accomplishments” in their marches (I’ve lost track of how many disparate marches there are) think they and the nation are winning against Trump now, it’s time for them to wake the *&^% up, put aside their “boutique issues,” and unite behind the Democratic Party (for all its imperfections), which is the only entity in the here and now able to stand up to Trump besides the bureaucracy within the government (a government that is clearly intent on and is in the process of carrying out a purge of that bureaucracy), before we succumb to what I label democratic fascism.

Liberals and America are not winning. Every temporary win is at the mercy of the presidents’ whims; the Muslim ban? Trump will have plenty of time to appoint new judges to do his bidding and an unusually high number of them. Flynn out? Trump is already souring on McMaster, his replacement, one of the few “adults in the room” in the “axis of adults” that non-Trump supporters desperately try to tell themselves and the public will moderate/are moderating the “madness of King Donald” (and remember, as quickly as Trump “moderated” on any particular issue, he can just as quickly un-moderate). Senate Republicans have zero women working on health reform after the House’s passage of Trump/Ryancare. What does the women’s march mean when women’s health services are gutted, when judges are appointed that will take away women’s access and ability to decide on how to handle their own pregnancies? And Trump and the unhinged überpartisan Republicans will now be able to appoint an FBI director (Giuliani? Christie?) who will, in effect, bury the FBI’s investigation into ties between Trump and Russia and the 2016 election.

To quote Gen. Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA chief, “I’m trying to avoid the conclusion that we’ve become Nicaragua;” to quote Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s all-star legal analyst, “this is not normal;” and to quote Bill Maher, to those of you who though Hillary Clinton was merely the lesser of two evils, “go &^%$ yourselves,” because we now have the worst threat to our system of government, to the survival of our republic as a republic, since the days of Nixon, mainly because you couldn’t bring yourselves to support a candidate who was easily closer to your politics and beliefs and instead saw that a serial-lying narcissistic monster of a man-child was installed in the White House after only winning 46.1% of the vote in what was a de-facto two person race, since far too many of you threw your votes away on non-Clinton non-Trump votes.

In fact, the only times anything like this Comey firing has happened with a president was during Nixon’s presidency, during the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the special prosecutor—Archibald Cox—investigating the Watergate scandal, and arguably when Andrew Jackson—Trump’s apparent historical idol—ignored the Supreme Court when it came to removing Native American tribes from America’s Southeast. In Nixon’s time, significant numbers of Republicans put country over party and helped to lead the fight against Nixon’s abuse of both office and power. 

Does ANYONE not drinking GOP Kool-Aid think that today’s farcical Republicans will do the same? Whether the “Benghazi” (really Clinton e-mail) “investigation” (really witch hunt) or the recent Russia hearings where the vast majority of Republicans focused on leaks and unmasking, it’s clear that, no, Republicans in Congress will not put country over party, even when it comes to vital issues of national security. Even as I write this, I am seeing Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell defend Trump’s firing of Comey using hackneyed partisan talking points that ignore the current context. I fully expect Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to do the same thing, and I expect the same as well from the vast majority of Congressional Republicans or at least expect their reactions to be far from condemnation, and so far, this has clearly been the case.

If you read Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s letter about Comey’s firing, you’d think that Trump fired Comey because of his unfair treatment of Hillary Clinton during the e-mail/server investigation, treatment of which I wrote about repeatedly before the election and which, all things being equal, seems to have cost her the election (not that other factors did not also play into the loss). So, yes, objectively, Comey should have been fired, but fired by Obama long ago, and yet, this would have looked so unseemly for Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats, and been such political suicide for Obama, that that was never really an option. Long after these events in question, Trump apparently expects us to believe that those reasons related to the handling of the e-mail/server investigation are why he fired Comey.

Nothing could be more absurd or further from the truth. 

There are three real reasons for why Trump fired Comey: Russia, Russia, and Russia (and a fourth: Trump feeling he could not control Comey). And Trump made it clear that the investigation of both Trump’s ties to Russia and Russian election interference (cyberwar!)was at the center of his concerns when he mentioned that investigation in his own letter firing Comey.

It is fitting that Trump included what is virtually certainly a lie—that Comey thrice told Trump that Trump was not under investigation—in his own letter; still, I don’t believe nearly enough people are paying close attention; rather, I believe this is how democracy dies. So soon after Star Wars day, Trump is showing his authoritarian Emperor Palpatine colors faster than some would have anticipated.

Oh, and all this is the same day (just hours after!) that federal grand jury subpoenas went out in relation to the Russia investigation, just days after Comey had requested more resources to conduct his Russia investigation, just one day after Sally Yates’s testimony in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee had made it clear she was fired just days after she had warned the White House about Gen. Flynn being compromised by Russia, and with Attorney General Jeff Sessions—who had pledged to recuse himself from all Russia/election 2016-related matters because of his own misconduct—acting to help remove Comey, who had been leading the Russia investigation, despite Sessions’ vow of recusal.

This is where we are now, and this is the first truly tipping-point moment in Trump’s presidency: many years from now, historians will look at this moment and look at how the people and their elected political leaders reacted, in particular the leaders of the Republican Party now (especially in the Senate) and the American people when they get to weigh in during the 2018 midterms. If we don’t handle this appropriately, this moment will likely be seen as a moment when the system failed and a lurch toward tyranny happened; even if that lurch doesn’t put us firmly in the realm of tyranny and authoritarianism, it will be a tall task to lurch back in the right direction and it will put us ever closer to even more dangerous tyrannies that may yet be self-inflicted upon our body politic.

The ancient Roman Republic lasted far longer than America’s republic has thus far lasted; looking at its example of the erosion of democratic (small “d”) republican (small “r”) institutions and their eventual collapse, once centuries-long precedents were broken, the ensuing consequences proved fatal for a system that had been stable for longer than America has existed as a nation; this should all give us pause as we wait and see if, or to what degree, the United States has descended/will descend to the level of a banana republic under President Trump, his Administration, and with the help of his supporters, enablers and voters.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

Trump & GOP Destroying the Pillars of Democracy

The Trump-Russia-Mob Connections Details You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Trump’s flirtatious waltz with hints and threats of political violence cannot be ignored and should not be underestimated. Apart from echoing some of America’s own worst episodes in the South after the Civil War, such dangerous dancing brings to mind the lessons of the ancient Roman Republic, and how, after centuries of peaceful politics and peaceful transitions of power, one horrible incident of political violence begat many others in subsequent decades, culminating in civil war and the death of Rome’s democratic Republic; the Roman Republic far outlasted America’s republic (so far) even before that violence began, so anyone who thinks the United States is immune from a similar fate is suffering from a hubris that ignores history and human nature and the terrible consequences of precedent-shattering political violence.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 23, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED 10/26 to further discuss race & politics in America)

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Silvestre David Mirys (1742-1810) – Figures de l’histoire de la république romaine accompagnées d’un précis historique Plate 127: Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, presiding over the Plebeian Council

AMMAN — We have already had people being punched at Trump rallies, clashes with police, a mini-riot by Bernie Sanders fans inside a Democratic state convention in Nevada and that Bernie Sanders himself all but seemed to fully excuse at the time, and now, a firebombing of a Republican HQ in a county in North Carolina.

Trump Fanning Flames of Unrest

In the midst of all this Trump has convinced many of his supporters that there is a global top-to-bottom conspiracy to cheat him of the election and that this election—which is only just beginning—is already rigged against him and, by extension, his supporters (never mind how astronomically impossible that such a rigging as he describes it would actually be happening). In fact, he has been so successful at this that almost 70% of Republicans believe Clinton can only win by cheating and half of Republicans would refuse to accept her as president. At the final debate, he even raised serious doubts about whether he would accept the results of the election, putting in jeopardy an unbroken tradition going back to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in 1796-1797 of a peaceful transfer of power between presidents and the loser accepting the outcome, even in hotly disputed or controversial elections like those in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000. The day after the debate, he doubled down on this rhetoric and failed to alleviate the concerns he had raised the previous night, joking(?)/stating(?) that he would accept the election results “if I win.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump has been saying that there is a need for volunteers to “watch” polling places to make sure there is no “voter fraud” and is encouraging his partisan supporters to undertake this task that is supposed to be bi-partisan and non-partisan, and he and his surrogates are specifically suggesting monitoring of certain urban (code word for heavily-black) areas. In places like Texas and Florida, over 80% of Republicans think that voter fraud is a major problem, with zero evidence to support this but ample rhetoric from Team Trump and the GOP trumping reality yet again with their misinformation and disinformation.

Yes, angry, white, possibly-well-armed Trump supporters—people who number in the tens of millions, who are passionately convinced Trump is right and should be president, who are now talking of assassination, revolution, and coups should Hillary be elected—are already talking about descending upon minority-heavy polling areas on Election Day in an effort to make sure such shifty (in their view) minorities, prone to election malfeasance (in their view), don’t try anything funny; and yes, many of these people own guns and will show up openly armed because in many locations they will be allowed to do so, and yes, out of Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, we can certainly expect many thousands to show up as he has asked them to, and to show up in this manner, at polling places on November 8th, something that will more likely than not lead to trouble, especially in America’s increasingly racially-tense atmosphere. For those who don’t know their history, this was how white Southerners intimidated and usually prevented freed slaves and African-Americans from voting, from Reconstruction all the way through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Never mind that Republican and Democratic officials at all levels, including local election officials from both parties, have dismissed as absurd the idea that the election is rigged or that any local polling places are going to be compromised or part of a voter fraud scheme. Never mind that voter fraud is practically non-existent, and that campaigns claiming to want to deal with voter fraud are more about denying minorities the ability to vote than anything else (for actual voter fraud on a staggering scale, see Vladimir Putin’s Russia).

Unfortunately, this election is a moment of terror, and for many Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, and others, it must on a personal level be a terror that far exceeds any emotions I have on the issue as a white male. I am not sure if state and local authorities are up to the challenge, are aware of what could really happen in a realistic worst-case scenario here: thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Trump supporters, many who could be armed, are going to be seeking to either harass and intimidate people they falsely believe, with no evidence, are committing voter fraud—picking people out by skin color almost certainly—or maybe even just be flat-out seeking to disrupt voting in liberal precincts in an effort to suppress minority votes (again, nothing new in American history and something that has happened in living memory). Violence, riots, voter disenfranchisement—all are in the realm of realistic possibility on Election Day now. We have already recently seen what crowds and individuals can do when animated by racial animus, crowds on different sides of the debate, from crowds of mainly angry black citizens to crowds of paranoid police in a cycle that seems to have been reignited since Ferguson after decades of near dormancy.

I am not being hyperbolic. I am not being paranoid. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric to millions of his supporters that the election is being stolen from them and that they need to go “watch” polling places is not abating or going away; nothing inherent in American society makes it immune to internal violence or breakdowns of law and order. This is the reality mere weeks before Election Day, and I hope federal, state, and local law enforcement are planning accordingly; some are aware of these dire possibilities, but whether they are given the resources to deal with this possibility, or if their plans are competent, remains to be seen.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Lesson’s From Ancient Roman Politics

Is this a Rubicon moment for America?

HBO/Rome

Not really a Rubicon moment, but more of a Gracchi moment.

By a Rubicon moment, I am using a colloquialism of a point-of-no-return when a drastic action is taken. This word Rubicon in this case refers to the moment in 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar crossed south over the Rubicon River with his army, a river which marked the boundary between a province where his army was authorized to operate and Roman Italy proper where it was not after the Senate left him a choice between what would have been an unjust prosecution at the hands of his political rivals on one hand and starting a civil war (only the second since the founding of the Roman Republic in 509. B.C.E. but also the Republic’s last, the Republic itself not surviving this final round) on the other. But the Roman Civil War that began in 49 B.C.E. was merely the culmination of a number of awful trends that started in 133. B.C.E.

We are clearly not at a Rubicon moment in America, the second most successful republic in history after Rome’s ancient one.

But, still terrifyingly, we may be approaching a 133 moment: the snowball which starts an avalanche.

What happened in 133? After the Romans’s version of the Revolutionary War that overthrew the rule of kings in 509. B.C.E., apart from some minor incidents early in Rome’s history as a Republic that are more legendary than anything certain, Rome essentially had three-and-a-half centuries worth of relatively stable, democratic republican government; political violence was a minimum or nonexistent, and nothing like an officially directed assassination, civil war, or use of the military to settle internal political disputes ever occurred. Sure, its democratic qualities evolved over time and like even modern democracies there were factors that favored elites, much like in the United States, which did not even begin with allowing all white adult men to vote, let alone blacks or women. In fact, some states in America did not even have popular votes in the first presidential election, during which all had property-owning requirements for voting for president if there were popular votes at all, requirements that were only gradually abolished in the coming decades, starting with New Hampshire in 1792, though a greater degree of democracy was practiced at the state and local levels. Still, it was not until 1856 that all white male citizens in America were finally able to vote regardless of property ownership, and that was only 14 years before freed slaves and all adult males were given the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

By 133 B.C.E., common Romans had long had an important role in selection of the Republic’s senior magistrates, and, in particular, there was one office that from Rome’s earliest days was created to be a sacred, inviolable protector of the people: the tribunate. The tribunes of the plebs (short for plebeians, the members of the lower class) were elected each year and could prosecute any other government official for abuse of power, as well as veto any government act, and introduce legislation of their own accord and even bypass the Roman Senate and go directly to the people’s assemblies to pass their programs, even though this was against unofficial custom. The most powerful political officeholders were the two annually elected chief executives, the consuls (think of America having to co-equal presidents elected every year), who presided over the Senate and had more power than any other elected officials. These two offices are important to understand when looking at the events from 133 on, and the below chart I created gives a good idea of how the Roman government operated:

It is also important to understand the seismic changes going on in Roman society at this period in its history. After well over a century of on-and-off-again conflict, Rome had finally succeeded in literally wiping its greatest rival Carthage off the map in 146 B.C.E., a Carthage that was just a shadow of its former self long before that final last gasp. As a result of Rome’s successful wars, a huge influx of slaves into Roman lands meant that many small freeholding farmers were put out of business as wealthy elites created huge estates run by slave labor and greedily gobbled up the land of small farmers. Rome had gone from a primarily small-farming Republic to an overseas empire dominated by large slave-owning landowners. Roman cities swelled with newly landless urban poor, many of them veterans and their descendants, veterans who had been unable to maintain their family farms fighting for years at a time in long, overseas wars; Rome’s elites were clearly leaving the concerns of the poor masses unattended. 

While Carthage and others were a threat, the different classes of Roman society were forced to work together in a spirit of pragmatism to fend off so many existential foes (this is similar to the moderation and bipartisanship exhibited in American politics during its Cold War with the Soviet Union). But a new political culture of selfishness, greed, and ambition, each rising to new heights, was emerging in Rome with the destruction of Carthage. There was just so much unprecedented power to be had that the stakes of and how far people were willing to go in politics had reached new levels; competition became much stiffer as a few of the most powerful elite families were drowning out the other lower aristocrats. Corruption grew by leaps and bounds as a result, and the tradition of the abstemious, stoic, small farmer ideal had become just that, that ideal further from being a reality than at any time in Roman history and that gap only about to get worse. In fact, it got so bad that the governing Romans began to be worried that the military was going to lose its base of recruitment, at that point limited to landowners. And decades later in the first century B.C.E., the interests of large multinational corporations called publicani helped to put so much money into the political system that Roman senators could not be trusted to fight for the people over their own and publicani pocketbooks.  

Even at the time, many contemporary Romans of the first century B.C.E. were aware that the post-Carthage culture of Roman elites of greed, corruption, ambition, scorched-earth politics, and extreme partisanship bieing placed over both the common good and a spirit of compromise; this new culture was at the heart of the disease which led to the death of the Republic (nominally in 27 B.C.E. but really in 49 B.C.E.); in the words of the ancient Roman historian Sallust, it was peacetime, not war, which undid Rome:

“Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity took over. the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…

And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-10)

To place Rome’s rapid rise in perspective, consider that by 133, Rome had gone in living memory from surviving multiple existential threats from Carthaginians, Gauls, and Greeks, had gone from just controlling Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and some of Spain’s east coast to dominating nearly the entire Mediterranean either directly or indirectly; specifically, 133 was year of remarkable fortune for Rome: the late King of Pergamum—a wealthy Greek kingdom in what is now Turkey un western Asian Turkey—had actually willed his entire domain to the Roman Republic, and it passed to Rome upon his death in 133. Rome had already grown dramatically in size, wealth, and power, adding most of northern Italy, all of Greece, most of Spain, most of Southern France, and much of Carthage’s old African holdings to its domains. But Rome’s Western territories were far less developed than the older, fabulously wealthy cities and kingdoms of the East. The addition of the Asian Kingdom of Pergamum to the Republic’s empire had Roman businessman salivating as the prospect of the profits from the riches of doing business in the Asian east.

The Gracchi and Rome’s Descent Into Political Violence

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume- The Gracchi

The year this remarkable gift to Rome came about, one of the tribunes of the plebs that had won election for that year of 133 was an ambitious but high-minded would-be reformer: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, hailing from two very famous and elite Roman bloodlines. A champion of the masses, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch has GRacchus giving a passionate speech in which he lamented that while the

“wild beasts of Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in…the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else…The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own” (Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9). 

And this was the center of his program: doing something about the wealthy’s assault on the small-farm landowners who were disappearing as a class. But Gracchus was hardly looking to liquidate the rich: his proposal was to use a preexisting law that had been on the books for centuries that had long been unenforced, one which limited the amount of public land that any one individual could own. That limit was still quite large, but far less than what the ultra-wealthy had accumulated in the years of Rome’s great expansions, during which many Romans elites had used fake names to accumulate more than the legal limit. The excess land would be handed over to the poor, but in return for accepting this legal limit, all the legal-sized holdings would be formally recognized as legitimate and each son of these landowners would be given a portion of land equal to half the maximum size.

As would be expected, though, these wealthy landowners dominated the Senate, and they refused to go along with this compromise scheme even though the problems of ultra-concentration of land and wealth and the rapid rise of landless poor were all at a crises points.

Thus Gracchus, as was his legal-but-frowned-upon-and-untraditional right, called an assembly of the people and got his bill passed with the people’s enthusiastic approval. Equally as uncommon were for senatorial elites to orchestrate a veto of such a popular measure, but that the Senate did, co-opting one of the other nine Tribunes to veto Gracchus’ bill. Quite dramatically, Gracchus convened another assembly and had the people vote that tribune out of office: this dramatic move was extremely unprecedented, but was very likely still legal. The elites opposed to Gracchus were shocked at this move, and began a public relations campaign suggesting the Gracchus was out to make himself a king—just as offensive a suggestion to Roman sensibilities then as it would be to Americans today—and a portrayal Gracchus played into when he appointed himself and two of his relatives as the three-person commission to oversee the land reform. The Senate’s response to this was to refuse to allocate funding for Gracchus’s commission (if this sounds familiar to current U.S. politics on anything from Obamacare to the Zika virus, it should). In turn, Gracchus moved to get funding from future revenue from newly bestowed Pergamese lands in Asia, stepping into both financial and foreign affairs, policy spheres traditionally run by the Senate.

In pursuing his land reform and in its efforts to stop him at any cost, both Gracchus and the Senate were showing a willingness to discard centuries of compromise and precedent that had served Rome well, though Gracchus could at least in part be said to be acting on behalf of a Roman people and Republic in desperate need of land reform while the primary concern of the senatorial class was preserving their own power and obscene wealth. 

Against such odds, Gracchus did something no Roman as a tribune had ever done before: he made it clear he would stand for election again to serve a consecutive second term as a tribune, signaling to the Senate that it could not just stall in the hopes of outlasting him or hope to simply overturn his legislation when he was gone. A group of Senators, in part feeling this was a major step towards Gracchus moving to make himself king, and obviously acting to preserve their own power and wealth, marched on an assembly of the people where Gracchus was present and beat him, and hundreds of his supporters, to death; afterwards, other supporters of his were executed, imprisoned, or exiled without trial.

*****

This was a terrible turn for Rome: for hundreds of years and not since the earliest days of the Republic had anything even remotely like this happened, and even then nothing remotely this bad: tribunes were as a matter of religion sacrosanct and inviolable; to try to harm one was considered a terrible sacrilege. Elites, even members of the Senate, had resorted to settling a political dispute with mass murder, killing a major elected office-holder. And from this point, Rome’s politics would be driven by two main parties: the optimates—self-dubbed “best-men” who were the conservative leaders of the aristocracy and the Senate and generally acted against reform or anything that would redice their wealth and power—and populares—bold men from within the aristocracy who were willing to challenge the optimates, drawing support from the people with populist programs aimed helping the masses—and the conflict between the two would eventually destroy republican government in Rome altogether.

In order to prevent mass unrest, however, the Senate let much of Gracchus’ land law stand, but this was a temporary measure and the Senate stopped the reform in 129, to the dismay of not only Roman citizens; at this point, much of Italy was not so much directly controlled by Rome as by other Italians whom Rome considered allies and were not legally full Roman citizens, and it was clear to all that these Italians were the junior partners in the relationship; these Italians had not been consulted on the ending of the reform, to their consternation. This provided an opportunity for the murdered Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, who, it seems, sought to gain their support when they were shut out of the decision-making process by the Senate, apparently by supporting a bid to make many of them full Roman citizens. 

But when Gaius sought and won a tribunate for the year 123, this was only one of his many aims; he also ran for and won the tribunate for the next year, 122, without the cataclysmic reaction suffered by his brother for attempting the same thing. 

If Tiberius could be thought of as something of a Bernie Sanders of ancient Rome, then Gaius was going to take more of a Hillary Clinton-like approach, trying to build a broad coalition designed to appeal to many swaths of society instead of a more narrow populist program and to make it harder for the optimates to brush him aside like they did his brother. 

As such, Gaius Gracchus passed a law ensuring access to grain for bread to win over the urban poor; for the poor of the countryside, he suggested creating a new colony to settle people on the site where Carthage had once stood, in Africa; for an emerging middle-class of lower aristocrats and businessmen known as equites (who ran many of the publicani), he allowed them to bid for the lucrative tax-collecting contracts in the western parts of Pergamum’s former lands, now organized as the new Roman province of Asia (taxation was not undertaken directly by the government but was a task the Roman state contracted out to private companies); to this end, rather than have the bidding take place as would normally happen in the province itself (often abused by whichever Roman governor was there), Gracchus made sure it would take place in Rome, and instead of than splitting the taxation responsibilities for the province of Asia into multiple contracts, he made it a single contract for the whole province, an appeal to the support of the upper Roman business-class since only larger corporations could handle a contract on that scale (this move would have unintended blowback as it gave rise to the obscene growth in power of the publicani that would be such a huge problem for Romans decades later). 

On the legal front, he ensured capital trials could only be conducted through a law or people’s assembly, preventing the Senate from conducting trials by decree, and any senator or official who tried to bypass this restriction was subject to prosecution. He also brought equites into juries, so that the dominant portion of the pool from which judges and jurors in most civil cases were drawn were now equites over senators by a two-to-one margin; additionally, one of his allies passed a bill that made equites total replacements for senators on the juries of extortion courts that tried provincial governors and other senatorial-level officials for corruption (senators had generally avoided convicting their peers), and a permanent extortion court was established.

But in casting such a wide net, Gracchus made himself vulnerable as well; his wily Senatorial opponents used his effort to help Rome’s Italian allies against him, convincing many Romans that extending citizenship to these people would weaken the power of Roman citizens themselves, and the senators also used their individual patron-client ties with many of the non-Roman Italian to keep a good number of them from supporting Gracchus. They also preempted his attempt to win over the rural poor by having two of their own put forth bills to establish colonies. His support apparently undercut, Gaius lost an election in which he ran for a newly-unprecedented third tribunate in a row, and a fight broke out between some of his supporters and those of one of the current consuls, a consul who had bitterly opposed Gracchus and was a personal enemy of his; the fight resulted in the death of one of the consul’s supporters.

The Senate’s response to this was swift and unprecedented: it passed an emergency decree against Gracchus, authorizing the consul to do anything whatsoever to take Gracchus down: Gracchus and thousands of his followers were killed in a brief yet bloody fight and subsequent executions.

From the Gracchi to Caesar: the Cycle of Political Violence Explodes Into Civil War

Sadly, violence would come with frightening ease and regularity over the following decades.

Close to four centuries had passed in Roman history without violent episodes other than some disturbances early in Rome’s history, but after the deaths of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121, violence increasingly became a political tool, beginning mainly with the Senate’s optimates’ efforts to squash would-be reformers challenging their power too much for their liking, first in 100 and again in 91, both used against tribunes and the latter being used on a man pushing for citizenship for Rome’s Italian allies; the assassination of their champion sparked a rebellion by many of Rome’s Italian allies called the Social War (91-88), which was only ended by Rome’s granting of most of them the citizenship they had wanted to achieve through peaceful means. But an actual civil war between roman military units fighting for supporters of one generally popularis consul (Gaius Marius) against the forces and supporters of another optimas consul (Lucious Cornelius Sulla)—Rome’s first civil war in over four centuries of republican government (consider it took the United States only 85 years before it had its Civil War from 1861-1865)—broke out the same year (along with a major overseas conflict in Greece and Asia). The period of conflict between supporters of Marius and Sulla would not finally end until 72 (and that foreign war not ending until 63). 

But no rest for the weary: one ambitious popularis tried to overthrow the Republic after losing an election in 61, and he and his makeshift army were annihilated in 62. As the 50s unfolded, tension was constant and bouts of mob violence frequent, while the many pressing problems facing the Republic were left unaddressed by obstinate optimates who showed a total disregard for the Roman people. (Gaius) Julius Caesar would be their champion as a popularis, but his foes in the Senate would never forgive him; with a veteran army after his victorious war in Gaul, the Senate issued its emergency decree again in 49, basically authorizing tCaesar’s death because he would not step down from office; but this was after intense behind the scenes maneuvering in which Caesar’s supporters tried to negotiate a way for him to take up a new office when his term as consul expired, without which Cesar would be out of office and therefore open to legal prosecution, which his enemies were certainly planning for him. Essentially, they were daring Caesar to start a civil war or accept disgrace and prosecution and who-knows-what-punishment, in addition to an untenable political situation for the Republic and its citizens.

Caesar chose civil war.

By the time the wars which grew out of the civil war beginning in 49 ended nearly twenty years later in 30 with Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Rome’s people were so exhausted by war that they didn’t mind that Octavian set up a dictatorship masquerading as a republic, and thus the Roman emperorship was born. There would not be another large-scale democracy or democratic republic with as much participation by the people until the United States of America grew to be a major power roughly 1,800 years later.

America’s Own Problems With Political Violence: Civil War to Civil Rights

Harper’s Weekly- October 19th, 1872

That time would roughly coincide with America’s Civil War. The war itself did not really end in 1865: during Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated federal government with its army acting as an occupying force put into place new state governments in the Southern states that had rebelled that enforced racial political and legal equality for freed slaves, but over the course of the next decade and then some, Democratic extremist terrorist white supremacists carried out insurgencies and violently overthrew almost all these governments, putting in place racist governments highly oppressive and violent to black Americans that lasted until the 1960s; southern whites finally negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops left in the only remaining states southern white insurgents had not violently taken over after the disputed election of 1876, an election, like so many others between 1865-1876, marred in the South by widespread violence, fraud, and voter suppression.

Harper’s weekly- “Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket:” White Democrats intimidate a black Republican,October 21st, 1876

With the exception of the election of 1948, in which many southern whites punished Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman for supporting civil rights for African-Americans and voted for racist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond, Democrats would continue to be the party of racists until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson embraced equality for African-Americans in the 1960s, causing the parties to swap positions on issues of race, with white southern voters then defecting en masse to the Republican Party mainly because of racism, where they are now the Republican Party’s primary base. And, disturbingly, most of the states where today the state-level government is leading the charge in suppressing black and other minority voters are former “Confederate” states in the South.

America is fortunate that apart from riots and strikes, many of them race-based, there has been very few period of civil unrest since the 1870s, the main exceptions being the sporadic taming of the “Wild West” and later the Civil Rights Era’s 1960s and early 70s. But now, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014 that was the first in a series episodes of racial unrest that have so far culminated in the dark days of racial tension of this very summer of 2016, we are seeing the most unrest this country has faced in more than 40 years.

Trump: The First Major Party Candidate to Stoke Unrest While Running for President?

And in the middle of all this is Donald Trump, the most polarizing major-party candidate since the election of 1860 that precipitated this country’s only civil war.

As history and even our own world today amply demonstrates, the sinister genie of political violence is prohibitively difficult to get back into its bottle once it has been unleashed; often, the attempt to rebottle it fails to succeed before the self-destruction of whatever state-structures were in existence, or before people turn to autocracy out of weariness of violence, with the violence itself often bred by a disintegrating public trust in major institutions. Most worrisome about Trump is that he is mixing subtle, implied threats of mass violence and/or intimidation with a very overt effort to obliterate trust in such institutions; just to recap, from the beginning of his candidacy and throughout, Trump falsely exaggerated how bad problems were with our institutions, even allowing for their increasingly problematic nature: first, he assailed the media and the party presidential nomination process as being “rigged” by elites to keep him down (that is, until he won and then stopped caring); added to this are his repeated allegations that the presidential voting system is rigged from top to bottom, with exhortations of his (largely white) supporters to be enthusiastic volunteer Election Day poll-watchers (in minority-heavy precincts), a task that only trained professionals are qualified to do (the parts in parentheses are understood even as candidate Trump does not emphasize them). Combined with his casual references to beating up dissenters at his rallies, his earlier threats/hints of possible violence (and his campaign’s preparations for intimidation tactics) were the Republican Party to try to deny Trump the nomination at its convention, his repeated musings as to what gun enthusiasts could show Hillary Clinton, especially if she were to be stripped of her Secret Service protection, and his stated desire to put Clinton in jail were he to be elected president along with his encouraging of chants of “lock her up” with crowds at his rallies, all Americans paying attention who have any sense of decency left should be feeling chills down their spines.

And yet for millions of Trump’s deplorable supporters, who are hanging on to every word in person at mass rallies, watching him on TV, or listening to him on the radio, they hear all this, easily understand all the implied subtleties about race and violence, and eagerly absorb every word joyfully, salivating at the very prospect of being able to assert their white dominance yet again on the political system, with far too many of these people also delighting in the prospect of political violence as a means to achieve these ends.

I wish I could say that I firmly believe such a prospect of political violence on anything other than a minute scale is a remote possibility, but I can’t; Trump’s recently far more sinister rhetorical turn is driving delusions and fantasies of violence in the heads of far, far too many of his flock, especially if that recent poll that had half of Republicans refusing to accept Clinton as president is even remotely accurate (and it probably is). I honestly don’t know what will happen, so extreme has Trump’s rhetoric become, so extreme have the views of many of his supporters been for some time, that I fear what will happen should this toxic mix boil over.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, in an atmosphere of increasing racial animosity and rumblings of political violence, should be afraid, and demand that Trump cease such rhetoric immediately, before it may be too late to prevent the unimaginable. But, as a consequence of all of this, we must begin to imagine the unimaginable, and prepare for the worst.

In some ways, that in itself is close enough to a 133 moment that we are in trouble regardless of what happens on and/or after Election Day.

Conclusion: A True Test for America, Its System, Its Leaders, Its People 

I want to also be careful here to note I am not arguing inevitability here: 133 did not make Sulla’s and Caesar’s civil wars inevitable, and Trump doesn’t make anything inevitable about today’s America. But each made and make, respectively, the possibility of really bad things happening far more likely: once such things occur in a society, they are far more likely to occur again than if society had prevented them from occurring at all in the first place.

Do I think Trump really wants to spark violence and riots? To undermine democracy? Maybe not, maybe it’s just bravado, but maybe not; either way, I do not think he appreciates or understands the raw hatred and emotion with which he is toying; in fact, the Republican Party did not realize how dangerous a game they were playing for decades stoking these fires, and Trump blew it all up right in the Party’s elites’ face. These forces are larger than Trump, and it remains to be seen if he can contain them, or if he even wants to. At the final debate, he said he wanted to keep us “in suspense,” and no matter what happens, we can all agree he has succeeded wildly on that front, and not for the good of our republic. The example of Rome’s self-destructive descent into civil political violence and strife is frighteningly instructive for our times, then, and should give us all pause, and we will have to judge ourselves very much on the basis of what happens over the next few weeks. In some ways, no less than the fate of our (and even Western) democracy itself is at stake.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 15, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 15th, 2016

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AMMAN — I’ve written repeatedly about 9/11 before: what it meant for me, what it should mean for Americans, how we have failed to properly honor the memory of the victims, how our nation has become worse, not better, since that fateful day, about all the missed opportunities. I think today it’s pretty clear that we as a nation still have not honored the memory of the victims through proper action, but what I could write about that now would be nothing new that I and others have not written before.

I’m not sure if it would make me feel better or worse to be able to write an article saying “9/11 helped to ruin us by starting a new style of politics that is ruining us.” In any case, I can’t, for while in many ways 9/11 must still clearly be regarded as a watershed, cataclysmic event in world history, let alone American politics and history, that sad truth is that the disgusting political gamesmanship of sucking in foreign policy and national security issues into the partisan maelstrom in the same manner as any other issue is not something that began (or ended) with 9/11, with the politics of 9/11 marking more continuity than change, just a larger example of growing partisanship amidst a rising tide of partisanship in post-Cold War America.

The big move towards consistent politicization in any significant way started almost exclusively with the Republican Party just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, beginning with its withering partisan criticism of Bill Clinton’s efforts in Somalia in 1993, criticism that was wildly inconsistent and undermined U.S. policy.  When Republicans began using 9/11 as a partisan wedge issue in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003 and in the 2004 presidential election, this was merely a continuation of the post-Cold War modus operandi of the Republican Party, which is only more extreme today. It is worth going through some of this history to better understand this dynamic besetting America today.

Bipartisanship During the Cold War, But Not For Bill Clinton

Somalia

In 1991, Somalia’s longstanding dictator, short of international support when he was no longer “needed” after the Cold War had drawn to a close, was overthrown, and the country fell into anarchy and warlordism. The political and security situation combined with a famine into one of the first great humanitarian disasters of the post-Cold War era. With the UN Security Council supporting a relief mission, and the Democratic-led U.S. Congress, including Republicans, urging support for such a mission, Republican President George H. W. Bush, though he had just lost re-election nearly two months earlier, announced on Dec. 4th, 1992, that he would send 28,000 U.S. troops as part of a peacekeeping force intended to ensure the distribution of food to hundreds of thousands of Somalis on the verge of starvation, a move supported by President-Elect Clinton. 

Not long after Clinton became president, though, Republicans especially began voicing strong criticism of Clinton’s efforts to sustain the mission, contradicting their earlier support for the mission under George H. W. Bush; while criticism was by no means coming from Republicans alone, they were generally particularly vocal and harsh in their criticism, exaggerating and distorting what was going on and using hyperbolic language to criticize a mission they were perfectly happy to support when commanded by a Republican president only a few months earlier. The mixed support of WWII veteran (and soon-to-be-Republican presidential nominee in 1996) Bob Dole was more the exception, rather than the rule, as Republicans were generally unified in opposing Clinton and succeeded in undermining public support and confidence in the mission, calling for an end to the mission and constantly threatening to cut off funding for the mission even while U.S. troops in the field were carrying it out, a mission that was far from a disaster and hardly a failure. Even when President Clinton announced a withdrawal date after the unfortunate October 1993 “black hawk down” incident, in which U.S. forces tangled with warlord forces and incurred relatively substantial casualties, many Republicans, rather than accept the withdrawal announcement as a sufficient political victory, pushed for a faster withdrawal than the one Clinton had called for; whatever Clinton did, these Republicans were sure to meet it with scorn and criticism. 

In the end, hundreds of thousands of Somali lives were saved by the mission, for all its faults. But Republicans seemed to be in lock-step with Osama bin Laden as viewing the mission as an American failure (even before the “black hawk down” incident), and sure helped to move public opinion in that direction despite the significant achievements of the mission. Perhaps even more hauntingly, the experience was a major influence on Clinton’s decision not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide that occurred only months later, in the spring of 1994.

Bosnia

Clinton was already clashing with Congress over the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1993, as well, as more and more reports of Serbs committing atrocities against Bosnian Muslims dominated the headlines. It was an odd mixture of Republicans and Democrats who said the Clinton Administration was doing too little, and Republicans and Democrats who argued the Administration was doing too much. Such wide-ranging bi-partisan criticism reflected how complex and difficult the situation was in the Balkans as Europe’s first real test of the post-Cold War era unfolded; against a backdrop of confused and divided U.S. lawmakers, European governments were nervous that any aggressive U.S. action would endanger their peacekeeping forces, already on the ground in the Balkans. In other words, there were no easy solutions and no single plan had widespread, bipartisan support or even strong agreement within one party. As president, Bill Clinton was in an unwelcome and lonely position in trying to craft a position on the conflict. This situation more or less continued through 1994, though after the November midterm elections, at least the leadership of the victorious Republicans signaled a desire for more forceful action.

But somewhat conflictingly, even as Republicans seemed to want to end the arms embargo to help arm the Bosnians (unwise for multiple reasons, e.g., that escalation could have prompted Russia to arm their Serbian friends, could have weakened the NATO alliance and prompted the UK and France to withdraw their forces from the region and force America’s hand in filling the void, measures that nonetheless also had some significant support from some Democrats; still, Clinton correctly noted that “…unilaterally lifting the arms embargo will have the opposite effects of what its supporters intend. It would intensify the fighting, jeopardize diplomacy and make the outcome of the war in Bosnia an American responsibility” and increased air strikes against the Serbs. But Republicans mostly balked when Clinton publicly weighed the idea of U.S. ground forces either assisting beleaguered UN peacekeepers or helping to enforce an eventual peace; thus, Republicans slammed him for not doing enough even while slamming him for raising the possibility of what would likely help the most. They also later balked at Clinton’s efforts to help support a new UN plan to create a rapid-reaction force of European troops to help the thinly-spread peacekeeping forces already on the ground.

When a cease-fire was finally negotiated in October 1995, and the U.S. held talks in November, a more partisan nature to opposing the president came into being, just when it was most crucial to achieve peace in the Balkans for Congress to support a long-term peace plan. Nearly every Republicans in the Senate but only one Democrat sent a letter to Clinton asking him to ask Congress for approval before committing any U.S. troops to a peacekeeping force; this was done just days before formal peace talks were to begin in the U.S., undercutting the president’s team’s negotiating authority at a crucial moment. Next, nearly the entire House Republican caucus voted on a successfully-passed (non-binding) resolution that spurned and disavowed Clinton’s promise to provide 20,000 troops as part of an eventual peacekeeping force, undermining the prospects of an agreement and an end to the war, but a majority of Democrats opposed this resolution even as a substantial minority voted with the Republicans. 

With negotiations between the warring parties underway on U.S. soil, House Republicans voted to prevent the deployment of U.S. troops without Congress specifically authorizing money to do so in what was largely a partisan vote, and even after the peace treaty was signed, House Republicans only narrowly failed in a bid to cut off funding for the mission (210-218) and Senate Republicans barely failed to pass a vote condemning the mission but “supporting” the troops (47-52). Another partisan vote passed just before the peace treaty was signed condemned Clinton’s decision to deploy troops, and another vote that would have offered language supporting the troops but not criticizing Clinton’s plan failed to pass pretty much along party lines the very day the treaty was signed. And in 1996, many Republicans rather myopically criticized both Clinton’s decision to provide substantial reconstruction aid for Bosnia and an extension of the peacekeeping mission. Despite Republican opposition, U.S. forces in Bosnia undoubtedly played a key and decisive role in forging and maintaining peace and stability in Bosnia and, in a larger sense, the Balkans and southeastern Europe.

Kosovo

Just a few years later, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was again threatening massive numbers of civilians, this time the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians in Serbia’s province of Kosovo. In response to a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, NATO launched airstrikes against Serb forces threatening Kosovar Albanians. House Republicans, in particular, engaged in behavior that could reasonably (certainly) be said to have undermined the Clinton Administration’s efforts during the crisis. Not long before NATO began its airstrikes, a substantially large majority of Republicans in the Republican-dominated House voted to bar the use of American ground troops: “American soldiers have been trained to be warriors, not baby sitters,” was how House Majority Whip and Republican Tom DeLay put it. The measure was defeated by nearly every Democrat and a minority of Republicans teaming up to vote down the amendment. Even after the airstrikes began, a tie vote in the House failed to give public backing to the airstrikes. While Republican leaders tended to prevent direct challenges to the president in these cases, especially in the Senate, it was clear that many rank-and-file congressional Republicans, including a clear majority in the House, felt differently. Thus, when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 and campaigned on pulling out of the peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans—making it clear how much value he placed on the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo—that position was not terribly surprising.

Of course, after 9/11, the Balkans receded greatly in importance in America…

9/11: More Continuity Than Change

Most people would have missed the fact that The 9/11 Commission Report, while produced ostensibly at a time when the nation was trying to heal and explicitly avoiding leveling particular blame with one administration or political party, nevertheless does make it clear how lax, unmotivated, and ill-prepared George W. Bush and his Administration were to deal with the crisis, and a careful reading (one which the general public did not even attempt or would even have been capable of attempting) showed that, while the Clinton Administration had not done everything it possibly could have done to go after bin Laden (after years of partisan Republican criticism whenever it had tried to act forcefully elsewhere!), it had increasingly focused on bin Laden as a threat over time and stridently recommended to Bush’s team during the 2000-2001 presidential transition to make bin Laden a top priority, advice which Bush’s people just as stridently refused to accept. Here is just one glaring example that exemplified both the Commission’s unwillingness to point fingers but willingness to still lay the clear picture there for those intelligent enough to follow the evidence:

“In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness. The next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred.” (6.5 The New Administration’s Approach)

Specifically, President Bush’s announcement that Cheney’s task force would be coming came May 8th, but presumably some thought and groundwork had occurred prior to this date. Then from May 8th until September 11th—more than four full months after Bush’s announcement—Cheney’s group had, famously, not met once; “The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred” is about as polite and diplomatic a way as possible to say that next-to-nothing had been done in those four months. One finds such an understated approach throughout the report, and an ability to look past it makes it clear a partisan gap, not in favor of senior Republican officials, in regards to the attention paid to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Much like after the terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, that killed 258 Americans (among others), after 9/11 Democrats supported the Republican president—tending to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton—and conspicuously avoided playing a partisan political blame-game in the wake of a major attack against Americans even though the way both Presidents Reagan and his administration and Bush and his administration handled the events leading up to and surrounding the respective attacks in 1983 and 2001 were objectively ripe for criticism.

Of course, none of this mattered to Republicans in general, who were quick to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton, continued to do so for years and still do so today, and who were also quick to politically weaponize foreign policy and national security as a partisan club with which to beat down Democrats into submission and defeat.  Especially as debate on potential and then actual war in Iraq intensified, those who raised questions, doubts, or criticism about the decision to go to war or even how the war was being prosecuted were loudly shouted down as “unpatriotic” and/or “not supporting the troops” (I had a reputation as one of the few liberals on my small conservative college campus back in the day, and late one night at a party in 2003 one drunken Republican angrily asked me “Why do you hate the troops?”). This happened in spite of the fact that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the prosecution of the Iraq war were far more deficient and problematic than the H. W. Bush/Clinton Somalia intervention and Clinton’s two Balkan interventions. Democrats also did not really intensify their opposition until it was quite clear that Iraq was going from bad to worse and the promised WMDs that were the main ostensible pretext for the invasion never materialized.

The rancor of the debate in 2002 and 2003 was just a warmup for the 2004 general election campaign between Democratic Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who was wounded twice in action, and incumbent President George W. Bush, whose stateside service in the Texas Air National Guard was largely understood as a way to keep him out of having to serve in Vietnam. A group calling itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacked Kerry on his very Vietnam record, disputing his heroism, his accounts of what happened during his service, and his worthiness of receiving any of the medals he did receive with a bevy of shamefully false and misleading accusations, most notably displayed on prominent television ads and myopic media coverage that damaged Kerry’s candidacy greatly with various segments of the public and maybe was the greatest single factor contributing to his defeat at the hands of Bush that November. Lies, not truth, prevailed in 2004. Some of the impetus behind those attacks on Kerry had to do with the fact that Kerry, then as a recently decorated combat veteran, famously and prominently came out against the Vietnam War just after he had served in it and while that war was still very much ongoing. Even years after the election, Kerry found that he was still having to defend his reputation against those 2004 lies about his service in Vietnam. The attacks were so damaging that the term “swift boat” came to be a phrase commonly used to describe extreme and false political attacks.

This was just another chapter in the right’s attempts to both “own” national security as an issue to the exclusion of Democrats and serving up caricatures of liberals as haters-of-the-military and extremist hippies, caricatures that served as straw-man phantoms and that bore little resemblance to reality. Other recent chapters had been 1992’s and 1996’s attempts by the Republicans to portray Bill Clinton as a raging antiwar pot-smoking draft-dodging hippie unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Recently, It’s Just Getting Worse

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

While the rise of Obama occurring hand-in-hand with an increasing, newly dominant anti-war feeling in America meant such fault-lines, concerns, and lines of attack would recede as they became increasingly ineffective (especially after the Obama Administration successfully took out Osama bin Laden; Mitt Romney barely mentioned, or challenged Obama on, foreign policy during the campaign homestretch in 2012), when the Arab Spring really turned for the dramatically worse and ISIS burst into view, Republicans, once again, found effective returns from investing in familiar tactics.

Yes, back were the days of Republicans using national security and foreign policy in hyperpartisan politicized attacks during Obama’s second term. The baseless, repeatedly-proven-to-be-false accusations trying to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya—including our then-Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens—is perhaps the best example of this shameful disgrace of abuse of the concepts of oversight and political discourse (especially when contrasted with how Democrats responded to the 1983 Beirut and 2001 9/11 attacks, as discussed above). Other great recent examples of Republican weaponization of foreign policy and national security politics include trying to blame Obama for both the rise and success of ISIS, both accusations being quite factually incorrect, as well as pretty much the entire Republican/Trumpian critique on immigration and the despicable demonization of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s refugee policies (and refugees, for that matter; the previous five links are to my own detailed rebuttals of each criticism). The irony is lost on Republicans, too, as they criticize Obama both for being feckless on Syria but for doing too much on Libya, when criticism of one of those policies begs the very response of the one they are criticizing in the other, take your pick; the same can be said when they try to blame Obama for Ukraine’s crisis, even though Russia’s Putin also invaded and annexed parts of Georgia under W. Bush’s watch. The irony in their criticism is also lost on Republicans because they themselves either have terrible alternative “policies,” if they have any at all, a reality simply augmented terribly by their terrible candidate for the presidency but a reality that is very much the status quo in today’s Republican Party even without Trump.

Conclusion

Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

One thing that is certain is that the trend of Republicans hyperpartisanizing and politicizing national security issues as a party began under Clinton in the 1990s with Somalia, not with 9/11. To a very large extent, national security and foreign policy were bipartisan issues during the Cold War, but that did practice not survive after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ancient republican (small “R!”) Roman historian Sallust hits the nail right on the head with the hammer describing this dynamic some 2,000 years ago in his Roman Republic:

“…the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of Carthage, mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the Roman Senate characterized the government. Among the citizens, there was no struggle for glory or domination. Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-5)

With the U.S., we can simply replace Rome with ourselves and Carthage with the Soviet Union, and that’s pretty much where we are today. While we faced the more-or-less existential threat of the Soviet Union, bipartisanship governed much (though hardly all) of our politics when it came to foreign policy and national security, and American victory in the Cold War was largely the result of decades of bipartisan policy and internal Soviet dynamics, hardly just because of the efforts of one man named Reagan, as many conservatives would have you believe.   Since then, largely because of the Republican Party (at least until the rise of the Bernie Sanders crowd), good practices are very much on the decline, not least of all in terms of how politics and issues of both foreign policy and national security have become toxically mixed, and we can’t blame this on 9/11, for it was a disease already growing in our body politic years before.

Today, there is hardly anybody left in a Republican leadership position who is someone like Bob Dole, who, though often opposing Clinton, put American interests and productive outcomes in foreign affairs ahead of partisanship and political gain, often acting to reign in his unruly Party members. There does not seem to be any new blood among Republicans who are capable of leading and cooperating like Dole, which means this untenable status quo of today is something with which we will be stuck for some time to come.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 19, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 19th, 2016 UPDATED August 21st to include information on “evidence” against Gülen

tccb.gov.tr

AMMAN — Since the failure of the dramatic coup attempt in Turkey, we are witnessing the methodical destruction of everything democratic about Turkey, save the exception of the majority’s ability to impose its will on the nation as a whole through periodic voting: a true Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority”  empowered and sustained through Orwellian means.

Erdoğan’s Mob Rule: The Tyranny of the AKP Majority

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly using rhetoric that credits he and the people with “victory” over the coup plotters.  The lesson: Erdoğan is the people, and the people are him; they are one: he speaks for them, they speak for him.

Using such rhetoric, Erdoğan for weeks exhorted his followers to engage in nightly demonstrations since the coup failed, providing free public transportation to—and free food and water at—the rallies throughout to encourage mass attendance and culminating in series of final, massive rallies in 80 cities on Sunday, August 8th, including one with millions of people in Istanbul that might have been the nation’s largest rally ever. Though these rallies received robust support and encouragement from the government, the country’s main Kurdish political party—the HDP, the third-largest party in Turkey’s parliament—was excluded.  Considering that many other demonstrations not favorable to Erdoğan’s agenda are banned and met with force at the hands of the police, considering that Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party is using government funds to stage repeated, continuous political rallies that exclude a major party representing a minority with which the government is in a brewing mini-civil war (or insurgency, if you like, which is claiming lives even now) in Turkey’s southeast, this must certainly be considered an improper use of power in a country that is supposedly a “democracy.”  

Kayhan Ozer/Presidential Press Service via AP

The again, this should not be a surprise, as Erdoğan is a man who seems to have deliberately stoked violent conflict with the Kurds as a way to reverse his party’s June 2015 electoral setback in which it lost its parliamentary majority, and the country’s Kurdish HDP won seats for the first time; in response to this, the Turkish president campaigned on fear and offering to be a strongman for Turks against the Kurdish militants (whom he falsely blamed for ISIS attacks); he and his party reveled in the ensuing divisiveness and conflict and the ploy would succeed in increasing support for the AKP in time for new elections. 

The new elections came about because a coalition failed to form in time after the June elections for the first time in Turkish history, and many saw Erdoğan violating the constitutionally-mandated neutrality the president is supposed to observe during the coalition-forming process, as he aggressively pushed for new elections (an unprecedented move) rather than exhaust the options for coalition-building, declining to ask the main opposition party to form a coalition after his own party failed to do so, clearly hoping that his AKP would perform better if given another chance in snap elections.  His AKP was able to erase those setbacks to the tune of catapulting itself to a solid majority in the ensuing November 2015 elections while the Kurdish party lost some seats.  Notably, that election’s legitimacy was questioned both in terms of the run-up to the election suffering from a climate of government hostility to Erdoğan’s and his party’s critics in the press and in terms of violence in the country’s southeast, which made it difficult for many of the country’s Kurds to vote.

The recent post-coup rallies were also taking on a sort of cult-like quality, as the populist overtones merged with a passionate devotion to the singular man, Erdoğan, with signs at the rally held by participants displaying such slogans as “You are a gift from god, Erdoğan” and “Order us to die and we will do it.”  Official banners advertising the rally, besides emphasizing the free transportation, noted “The triumph is democracy’s, the squares are the people’s,” a slogan also emblazoned on massive banners hung from major buildings and bridges.  In texts to his supporters, Erdoğan has made it explicitly clear he wanted these rallies to “To teach the traitor, the terrorist, a lesson,” referring to Gülen’s supporters and Gülen himself, whose movement Erdoğan has for some time dubiously labeled a terrorist one.  The lesson is clear: Democracy and the people have “won,” they support Erdoğan, and the people and Erdoğan together now own the public square and have a monopoly on acceptable discourse and demonstrations; the message behind all that is that those with a different message are not welcome and are being put on notice, including Gülenists and Kurds, together consisting of a huge chunk of the existing opposition to Erdoğan’s politics.

As expected, these rallies and this message have had a chilling effect on Turkish citizens who don’t support Erdoğan and his brand of populist, religious, and chauvinistic nationalism.  As Tocqueville wrote two centuries ago:

“Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.””

The Recently-Unprecedented Numbers of Turkey’s Purge

CNN

Even more ominously, these rallies are also set against the backdrop of a massive purge, a crackdown not seen in the world for years and not seen in a democracy for much longer, one drawing comparisons to the purges in more (relatively) recent history of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and following Iran’s 1979 revolution.  As of August 2nd:

• Almost 9,000 police have been fired
• Over 10,000 soldiers have been detained and almost half of the top generals and admirals have been arrested or fired
• Over 2,700 members of the judiciary have been suspended
• Some 21,000 private school teachers have been suspended
• Some 21,700 staff members of the Ministry of Education have been fired
• Some 1,500 university deans—every university dean in Turkey—have been made to resign
• Some academics who added their names to a petition calling for an end to Turkey’s war against Kurds were suspended
• Over 100 news media outlets were forced to close
• Over 1,500 ministry of finance officials were suspended

Overall, about 35,000 people have been held for questioning, with about half of those undergoing formal arrests and facing trials and over 81,000 officials have been suspended or fired from their positions.  The aforementioned major Kurdish political party has had its offices raided and some its people detained, as well.  The arrests are continuous and ongoing, include non-servile religious clerics, and as of just this Monday, the judiciary’s preeminent Palace of Justice was raided, with well over 100 people there being detained, and the same is just now beginning to happen to dozens of private-sector businesses, with well over 100 executives now being sought to be put in detention.

And the thing is, all this has been planned for years.

A Far-Reaching Purge Long-Planned

Erdoğan’s people have been anticipating potential coups for years, even claiming this recent one has been something that has been building up for decades.  Whatever their assertions, what is less debatable is that Erdoğan’s people in the government have for years had plans and lists of people ready to be acted upon were just such an event like the recent coup to occur, and possibly even in its absence (indeed, Turkish officials admit preparation was already underway before the coup).

In other worse, this purge is not a natural, organic reaction to a surprise event. Erdoğan even referred to the coup attempt as “a gift from God,” which makes total sense once you understand what he is doing with Turkey’s current purge.

The ostensible targets are people who seem to support, no matter how vaguely or minutely, the movement of reclusive Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in a sort of self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and whose movement the Turkish government accuses of a massive, society-and-government-wide fifth column infiltration of Turkey, with the government using rhetoric reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s manner of describing vast conspiracies of supposed enemies of the Soviet State.  In reality, the current Turkish purges go far beyond coup plotters to anyone who is pro-Gülen and clearly even beyond that—all this is even by Turkish officials’ admission—and Erdoğan is clearly using the purge to blunt opposition and cement his own hold on power.  Even nearly 100 Turkish soccer referees have been accused of being coup plotters, and drama around the coup has even ensnared one of Turkey’s soccer greats who was key in Turkey’s remarkable 3rd-place finish in the 2002 World Cup as well as a Turkish NBA basketball star, with Turkey recently issuing an arrest warrant for the former.  

In fact, so many people are being arrested that Turkey has decided to release tens of thousands of non-violent criminals from prison to make room for all the judges, teachers, lawyers, journalists and others who have been arrested as part of the purge, since the prison system is now newly over-capacity because of the purge.

Gülen and Erdoğan: From Allies to Enemies

Selahattin Sevi / Zaman Daily News via EPA

Ironically, Gülen and his movement were allied with Erdoğan and his AKP years ago; each side operated on a platform of religious reformers pushing back against Turkey’s longstanding secular establishment elite in the early ’00s, and Erdogan and his party needed Gülen’s and his movement to get enough public support, to have the bodies to carry out purges of many of the secularists, to provide the manpower to replace those purged.  

However, the more restrained and more moderately-Islamist Gülenists eventually became alarmed at Erdoğan’s lurch towards authoritarianism and when they moved to prosecute close allies of Erdogan for very real corruption in 2013 (the largest corruption scandal in recent Turkish history), the two had a massive falling out, with Erdoğan’s government since questionably labeling Gülen’s movement as terrorist group.  

It seems in Erdoğan’s Turkey, there is no room for rivals or shared credit: in seeking to discredit Gülen’s movement, Erdoğan is trying to rewrite the narrative of history that saw Gülen and his movement work hand in hand with Erdoğan and his AKP to reshape Turkey and wrest control of it from the secular elite establishment put in place by Atatürk when he founded the modern Turkish state from the post-WWI ashes of the Ottoman Empire; much like the ancient Roman occasional tradition of damnatio memoriae of trying to wipe disgraced (or sometimes just rival-to-the-new-ruler) figures from history, Erdoğan is seeing to it Gülen and his followers are removed from the story in any positive light, that only he and his AKP supporters (“the people,” as the pro-Erdoğan language characterizes them, as if there are not patriotic Turks who are against Erdoğan) will be seen as the founders, builders, and saviors of the new Turkey.  As Orwell wrote in early 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Having now pushed Gülenists out of the public sphere and electrified his base, Turkey’s president can rely on his supporters, then, to help stifle current and future dissent through social pressure, easing the burden on the government, which, of course, will still be there to use force when social pressure fails.  The failed coup has given Erdoğan and his rather unlettered, chauvinist, now loudly-assertive AKP crowd the ability to control even more so Turkish education, police, courts, media, even the military—essentially, all the tools needed to have a stranglehold on societal mechanisms used to form public opinion—so that over time, the ease and ability to stridently go against the majority will be limited, indeed (in case you’re wondering, the government already had a strong dominance over the country’s clerical religious establishment).  For Tocqueville: 

“When an opinion has taken root among a democratic people and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the community, it afterwards persists by itself and is maintained without effort, because no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false ultimately receive it as the general impression, and those who still dispute it in their hearts conceal their dissent; they are careful not to engage in a dangerous and useless conflict.”

Gülen’s Extradition: A (Useful) Excuse for Anti-Americanism

The fact that Gülen is living in Pennsylvania is extremely convenient for Erdoğan, who has decided to play the anti-Western, anti-American card for fairly full effect in Turkey.  Most Turks actually think that the U.S. government was behind the coup, a belief amply fed by senior Turkish officials directly accusing the U.S. of supporting the coup, by wild reports in the Turkish media, and by even Erdoğan himself implying the U.S. at least supported it in some ways: the Turkish president  went so far as to accuse a top U.S. general of “siding with coup plotters” and to exclaim that “This coup attempt has actors inside Turkey, but its script was written outside. Unfortunately, the West is supporting terrorism and stands by coup plotters” (ironic because it is Turkey that seems to actually be supporting terrorism, according to evidence).  Such accusations made by Erdoğan are more or less red meat for his base, and he has been rhetorically issuing ultimatums to the U.S. government, offering a stark choice: hand Gülen over to Turkish authorities or lose your relationship with Turkey.  

Erdoğan’s repeated calls for the U.S. to hand Gülen over are basically a well-orchestrated ploy to drum up anti-Americanism in Turkey: the U.S., of course, will only seriously consider a formal extradition request with compelling evidence, and Erdoğan can keep repeating these calls without submitting a formal extradition request and keep fomenting anti-Americanism in the process.  In fact, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım even explicitly linked the future level of anti-Americanism in Turkey to whether or not the U.S. handed over Gülen, saying “Whether or not the anti-Americanism in Turkey will continue is…dependent on this.”   There is certainly some truth to this, but it is also hard to imagine Turks suddenly having a dramatically more favorable opinion of the U.S. just because the U.S. would hand over the government’s prime suspect in a coup for which America is being blamed as a major player anyway.

What is certain is that there is no shortage of people who will be absolutely convinced that the U.S. is siding with Gülen and that it support the coup, and America not immediately handing him over only adds fuel to that fire.  This is a winning situation for Erdoğan: he gets to keep fanning anti-Gülen and anti-American sentiment, and especially since Gülen is still safe in Pennsylvania, Erdoğan can keep Turkey on a crisis footing, allowing him to easily continue his abuse of power, since Gülen, shielded by American non-extradition, can be framed by Erdoğan as a continual threat justifying extreme measures.  Clearly, then, Gülen is infinitely more useful to Erdoğan as a distant, U.S.-residing boogeyman than as a vanquished (possibly even executed) “traitor” in Turkey.  

August 21st UPDATE: Thus far, while Turkey has submitted documents related to Gülen, the U.S. did not consider the first batch it has reviewed to comprise a formal extradition request, and, in the words of one Justice Department official, those documents only detail “allegations of certain alleged criminal activities that pre-date the coup” effort, that “[a]t this point, Turkish authorities have not put forward a formal extradition request based on evidence that he was involved in the coup” plot; in other words, zero evidence about Gülen’s involvement in the failed coup has been provided.

While it is theoretically possible that Turkey will be able to provide a formal extradition request with evidence sufficient to merit the U.S. honoring an extradition request, I would wager that this will not happen.  For one thing, there may be no such evidence in existence; another point to consider is that if Turkey did have such documents, Erdoğan and other Turkish officials would not likely be so intensely publicly pressuring the U.S. to hand Gülen over; if they had a rock solid case, it would be an unnecessary rocking of the boat.  Instead, because they are seeming to lack the appropriate evidence, Turkey’s president may be hoping that his leverage on issues related to Syrian refugees, to ISIS, and to NATO will be enough to get the U.S. to cave in under pressure (thinking that is likely hubristic and a course of action that is not likely to happen without evidence).

Then again, maybe Erdoğan seeks anti-Americanism and drama with NATO for its own sake…

In NATO Marriage, Erdoğan (Turkey’s Putin) Flirts with Putin

Photo by Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

Another more devious game would be that Erdoğan might even be seeking to court Russian favor; if Erdoğan is not delusional, he has to realize his increasing authoritarianism may very well eventually earn Turkey an expulsion from NATO, at which U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently hinted.  The Turkish president is already making nice with Putin even after Russo-Turkish relations reached a nadir late last year when Turkey shot down a Russian combat jet after a series of repeated Russian violations of Turkish airspace on the Syrian border.  It should not go unnoticed that the pilots who shot down Russia’s jet were arrested shortly after the coup for allegedly being part of it, with the arrests announced after Putin had earlier quite forcefully condemned the attempted coup and had personally called Erdoğan to offer his support.  Perhaps this was a quid pro quo that lay the ground for their August in-person meeting, in which both leaders signaled the beginning of a new, more positive phase in their relationship.  Perhaps Erdoğan is warming up to another potential ally—one very similar to himself—in Putin, even as he distances himself from current allies that are very dissimilar to him.  In in the next few years, if I read that Turkey has left or been forced out of NATO and joined a military alliance with Russia (which would only be a dream come true for Russia on so many levels), I will hardly be surprised.

Make no mistake, Erdoğan is Turkey’s Putin now, just more impatient and without Putin’s relative charm and subtlety.  No wonder the two seem to be patching up their differences and coming together: they operate in very similar ways.

Conclusion: In Erdoğan, A Tyranny Orwell Would Recognize All Too Well (and One that Is Here to Stay)

Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

For now, Turkey is clearly becoming a repressive society, and the moment of the failed coup marks a decidedly rapid increase in Erdoğan’s program of centralization, consolidation, repression, Islamicization, and anti-Westernism/anti-Americanism.

Last year, in between the two Turkish parliamentary elections, we saw how professional official investigators were stating certain attacks were very likely ISIS attacks, while Erdoğan claimed they could be the work of Kurds and/or the Assad regime, twisting the facts to suit his own end and contradicting his own officials in his own government.  I would not at all be shocked if it turns out those law enforcement officials have just been purged, and Erdoğan will almost surely make sure that now, any government official will speak one thing and one thing only: whatever Erdoğan wants to be said.  Now, when there are terrorism attacks in Turkey, the world should not give much credibility to whatever information comes from official Turkish channels; those interested in the truth are gone from the picture, because those remaining, as the propaganda slogans remind us, are there to serve Erdoğan, because his will is the people’s will and those who don’t agree, who are not on board with the program, are traitors and terrorists.  Just like Gülen and anyone who even sympathizes with them…

It seems again appropriate to return to Orwell, who was only too well aware that dictators will do everything they can to control language.  In his famous “Politics and the English Language” essay, Orwell remarked that “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  This purge shows that that is exactly what Erdoğan is doing, and I, for one, won’t be trusting much of anything the Turkish government says from now on because I know I won’t be hearing the words of professional public servants, but acolytes to Erdoğan’s increasingly Stalinist-like cult, all while Erdoğan seeks to eclipse Atatürk both as the preeminent modern Turk and and as the embodiment of Turkey itself, a Turkey he is now successfully remaking in his autocratic, religious image, pushing aside the democratic, secular values of Atatürk.

Orwell realized that systematically attacking basic freedoms of expression was, in effect, a demonstration of contempt for rights and people in general when he wrote that “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

Before the outcome was certain, the coup attempt was, I noted at the time, the definitive battle for the soul of Turkey and its future.  Well, for the foreseeable future, that soul and that future will be embodied by Erdoğan and be devoid of most democratic norms, respect for human and minority rights, a free press, and honest political discourse.  We seem more and more surely to be approaching a point where it will be impossible to say otherwise about Turkey, if we have not already arrived at or passed by it.

Long after the Roman Republic’s political functionality and integrity had crumbled, Caesar was said to have remarked that “The Republic is nothing—just a name, without substance or form” (Seutonius Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 77).  Today, the substance and form of Turkey’s republic is in dire straits, the prospects for its survival quite poor, its future for anyone concerned with democracy bleak; such is Erdoğan’s Turkey.  For me, Erdoğan’s resilience and increasing power was one of the big stories of 2015, and I noted at the beginning of the year that Turkey’s would-be sultan was poised to be quite a problem in 2016, and thus far, he has certainly exceeded even my grim expectations.

See related article: The Definitive Battle for the Soul of Turkey & Its Future Is Happening Right Now & It Is This Coup

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Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 10, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 10th, 2016

Matt Slocum/AP

AMMAN — As the story swirling around the Russian-hacked, Wikileaks-released body of e-mails from seven staffers of the Democratic National Committee (abbreviated as DNC and the braintrust/leadership organization for the Democratic Party) unfolded just before and during the Democratic National Convention, it came to light that some of these staffers had discussed Bernie Sanders in a critical manner and discussed ways to bring negative attention to his candidacy.

Cue one of the most overblown “scandals” in recent memory.

Much Ado About Nothing

A point lost in much of the commentary surrounding the leaked e-mails is that, rather than show any kind of specific smoking gun, they either showed explicit instructions not to act on these ideas/discussions or failed to provide any evidence that they were acted upon.

The e-mails are basically internal musings of private individuals working for a private organization, much like thoughts in a person’s head bouncing around but with something along the lines of telepathic communication at work between several individuals. Like any groupings of individual e-mails as part of any public or private organization, they don’t represent the organization as a whole or its official policy, but represent private discussions of private individuals who do work for the organization but are simply expressing private thoughts not meant for public consumption that nevertheless do represent their thoughts as individuals within a massive organization, yet we don’t know if they are meant to be 100% serious or more tongue-in-cheek than anything else, whether they are joking or maybe just playing devil’s advocate for something they’d like to see but know won’t ever materialize; basically, we know far, far less about the e-mails than what the people involved know, but they seem to give us a window into glimpsing the thought process of several DNC staffer, nothing more, nothing less. Sure, questions are raised, but drawing firm conclusions from these e-mails that there was any substantive action taken against Bernie Sanders and his campaign is not possible.

But such details and many others were lost in much of the media coverage and on the many, many Bernie Sanders supporters who ranged from leaning toward believing in an anti-Bernie conspiracy to “knowing” in their hearts that there was one, as they now “knew” they had the information they needed to give solid form to their dark, brooding thoughts, to lose it and go absolutely ballistic on the DNC, the Democratic Party, and Hillary Clinton.

Both the absurdity and the petulance of this genuine yet myopic outrage deserves to examined in detail.

Non-Democrat Tries to Take Over Democrats & They Don’t Like It… YAWN

First of all, I must, again, quote a friend of mine and his pithy yet spot-on social media post in which he wrote “so, lemme get this straight: some staffers from a national political committee expressed personal political opinions on their work email? ok, gotcha.” Perhaps Sanders supporters feel this is being unfairly dismissive, but as someone who has been a registered Democrat for my entire adult life, I beg to differ. For one thing, the vast majority of Clinton’s votes in the Democratic primary came from registered Democrats who preferred her 64% to 35% for Sanders, while the vast majority of Sanders’ votes in the Democratic primary came from independents, who preferred him 64% to 34% for Clinton. Last time I checked, the Democratic Party was a well-defined private organization with its own beliefs and people, with the full rights and freedom to control its membership and participation and pathways to both in order to prevent outside people and influences from hijacking it. 

In fact, Bernie Sanders was not even calling himself a Democrat until he decided to run for president over a year ago. So, for one thing, everyone, including Bernie Sanders supporters, needs to admit that Bernie was declaring himself to be a Democrat not because he had suddenly discovered newfound love and appreciation for the Democratic Party, its politics, and its officials; no, the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history—one who had very often run and campaigned (and campaigned hard) against Democrats—was very much and very cynically using the party’s national-level apparatus and organizational strength as a way to project his ideas, his approach, his candidacy, and himself in marked contrast and in opposition to said party. Sanders even made it clear in the middle of March of this year that he was doing just this, explicitly saying that he ran as a Democrat to get more media coverage and money, musing to his interviewer that this interviewer “would not have me on his program” if he was running as an independent and further musing:

“Look, here’s the truth. You’re right, I am the longest serving independent in the history of the United States Congress…Do you run as an independent? Do you run within the Democratic party? We concluded– and I think it was absolutely the right decision, that, A, in terms of media coverage– you have to run within the Democratic Party.

Number two, that to run as an independent, you need– you could be a billionaire. If you’re a billionaire, you can do that. I’m not a billionaire. So the structure of American politics today is such that I thought the right ethic was to run within the Democratic Party.”

Sanders even had to be intensely pressured by his inner circle to run as Democrat, something he really, really didn’t want to do, and not an independent, which was his initial plan, before his advisors insisted he do an about-face. Even today, his official Senate website proudly touts his career as an independent in the second sentence of his “About” page and labels him currently as an independent. His was to be a hostile takeover, whose very campaign was fueled by and defined by his longstanding disdain and contempt (even encouraging of hatred) for the Democratic Party and its standard bearer, Hillary Clinton. And even in the middle of the Democratic National Convention, Sanders announced that he would be returning to his work in the U.S. Senate not as a Democrat, but as an independent.

Thus, the undeniable truth is that while Sanders ran as a Democrat for not quite 15 full months (and he really only declared himself full a Democrat for not quite 9 of those months, doing so in November, in time to be eligible for the New Hampshire primary while also pledging to run in future elections as a Democrat, a pledge which he apparently just went back on in in claiming to be an independent again), he wanted to take over the Democratic Party rather than join it. That means that other than in a purely opportunist sense for these last 15 months and in no deeper sense at all over the course of his 25-year congressional career and of his overall 45-year political career has Bernie Sanders ever really been a Democrat. 

So while Sanders is perfectly within his rights to attempt a hostile takeover within certain bounds, the Democratic Party is also within its rights to protect itself, its interests, and its people from such a hostile takeover within certain bounds.

The Right to (Political) Self-Defense, in Praise of Political Elites, & the Limits of Democracy/”The People”

Does this Democratic Party, which had its own accustomed ideas and approaches different from those of Sanders, have a right to organize itself in such a way as to help prevent a hostile takeover? Of course it does, which is why a good chunk of primaries (including those of very populous and thus electorally important states like New York and Florida) are closed primaries, where only party members who have registered to be in a party well before the primary can vote in that party’s primary.

As Andrew Sullivan noted recently, too much democracy and too open a system actually creates fertile ground for tyranny and chaos. The Founding Fathers were explicit: the people were not to govern, but their representatives as chosen by them were. In the American system of government, political parties run by political elites familiar with the complex machinery of government play an important role in the running of a system that negotiates the many competing views and interests of any diverse, modern democracy, and just as their role should not eclipse and supplant that of the people, the role of the people should not eclipse and supplant this important role played by elites. 

This idea of balance is not anything new, and such balance between people and elites was what the ancient Greek writer Polybius saw as the secret to ancient Rome’s success over 2,000 years ago. Whether reading the ancient advocates of republican government or The Federalist Papers, it is clear that a dominant philosophy is one of checks and balances, with both the government and the people checking each other and themselves being seen as ideal; yes, the people, hardly infallible, need to have their power checked, too, no matter how angry that idea may make some. And if ever there was a time for elites and the system to check the often temporary, misguided will of the people in American electoral history, it is today with Trump as a serious contender.

In America, elites today are basically the only thing other than the Constitution that stand between at least the semblance of orderly governance on one side of the spectrum and, on the other side, a system that would “operate” much like a room full of many people with very divergent views arguing endlessly on an issue and finding they are unable to come to a collective decision save for the majority simply imposing its will on the minority: a Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 55,” “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” 

Doing away with political elites’ powers as gatekeepers and stewards for political party operations and nominations goes hand-in-hand with the process of those same elites’ role of performing the key negotiative function in the American political system becoming increasingly eclipsed by elites’ almost servile fidelity to the momentary whims of the masses, measured by ever more ubiquitous and frequent public opinion polls (polls that increasingly determine a politician’s course of action, rather than inform it). While such elites in America have tended to rely on support from diffuse interest groups and populations in the past, the more open electoral system of late has seen a move towards support from more vocal, passionate extremists, most recently characterized by the rise of the Tea Party, and, after that, Trumpism and Sandersism. With the backroom an increasingly rare space for deal-making and being replaced by a laser-focused public spotlight that leaves less flexibility and often loses sight of the bigger picture, posturing has come to be more and more a substitute for deal-making, the true essence of governing.

Fairness and Earned Advantages

An important role for political elites and party apparatuses doesn’t mean they should be able to do anything regardless of how their rank-and-file members feel and the public as a whole feels; it doesn’t mean that the party can, or should, make it impossible for major change, prevent new ideas and new candidates from competing, seek to formally disqualify new blood, or work as an organization in its entirety to stack the deck as favorably as possible against a competitive insurgent. But it also sure doesn’t mean that they are going to roll out the red carpet for a candidate like Sanders, do everything to his liking, make it as easy as possible for him to compete, and not throw up some obstacles or play some defense.

Fairness doesn’t mean you start off with an equal voice at the table to one of a political party’s longtime standard bearers, and it sure doesn’t mean that people at the table aren’t and don’t have a right to rally behind that standard bearer. The crowd of people who choose to not be registered Democrats covetously standing around the table sure doesn’t automatically get to control the table, its menu, dishware selection, doilies, tablecloth color, and music selection, no matter how loud and proud they are. Yes, like any new member of a sports team or business or organization, there are dues to be paid, and the people who are already there and there for some time have certain natural advantages that come from their relationships with the parts of that organization and the people working in it. The blood, sweat, and tears borne of these ties, earned over time, are themselves example of the dues these people paid over the time they have put in and sacrificed. 

To suggest that a new person should immediately be given such benefits without actually earning them, or that the people who have such benefits should forfeit them even though they have earned them by building relationship over time through sacrifice and teamwork, is, frankly, absurd in the extreme. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any institution anywhere that allows for such a system where the neophyte is given the same respect, access, and support as the veteran. What is fair to expect is that the rules governing their behavior be the same in the event of competition; but the athlete who puts in more time, training, and works better with his teammates has every right to such advantages, having earned them, just as much as the new athlete has every right to expect that the rules on the field (if not the locker room) will be the same for all.

The Case of (& for) Superdelegates

The question is all about degree, and the superdelegates are a case in point: should Party leaders—those who are most loyal, work the hardest, have put in the most time, and have been in the trenches for years—have an actual say in the Party’s nomination process? Well, of course, why shouldn’t they!? And why shouldn’t they collectively have a meaningful say, separate from their votes as private citizens and being able to endorse candidates and weigh in on the race throughout? This is not giving them any more power voting-wise in a general national election than any other citizen, for we are talking about their own Party’s nomination process, not the general election. 

Think of corporate boards: the board votes on major decisions, not the employees. Well, the Democratic Party basically gives employees the main say, but has a small board that also weighs in. I actually like the idea of superdelegates, because it shows the Party actually is and means something, that it carries a certain weight; in this way, then, the Party is more, far more, than simply the sum of its voting members’ collective will and whatever its voters decide at any given time. Superdelegates allow the Party to have a rightful say as an organization in their organization’s nomination process. The people’s voice still reigns supreme in the outcome, as delegates bound by voters’ votes (“pledged” delegates) represent over 85% of all the delegates, with superdelegates accounting for less than 15%. And throughout the entirety of sueprdelegate history, a majority of superdelegates has never, ever voted for anyone other than the candidate who had secured the most pledged delegates. 

For the next presidential election, Clinton and Sanders supporters on the Party’s rules committee have agreed to, and are moving on, a proposal that would bind about two-thirds of the superdelegates to the results of the state voting contests but would still allow Senators, House Representatives, Governors, and other prominent Party leaders to vote as they please, preserving the identity of the Democratic Party as something more than just the temporary will of voters at a given point in time.  

One thing is for damn sure: Republican Party officials sure wish they had had superdelegates who could have stopped Trump, and if the Democratic Party nomination process had resulted in someone like Trump, I sure hope the superdelegates would have gone against such a candidate, as intended. 

Another scenario is worth consideration: what if Sanders had gotten essentially a tie with Clinton or even earned slightly more votes and pledged delegates than she did, but, as is currently the case, she still won the vast majority of registered Democrats and Bernie Sanders won on the backs of non-Democratic independents; in such a situation, there is a good case to be made that the superdelegates should favor her and push her over the edge to victory since 1.) they would be acting to shore up the will of the actual members of the Democratic Party 2.) independents are far less reliable voters than Democrats and their turnout is consistently lower, too 3.) the Party owes actual Democrats far more than independents, whose support is fickle 4.) both Sanders’ approach to politics and his actual policy proposals are objectively delusional given political realities 5.) Sanders would certainly do worse than Clinton in a general election given that his views and methods are so far out of the mainstream and so far to the left of most Americans in a country where 47 out of 50 states contain more self-identified conservatives than liberals and since the polls that earlier showed him as performing better than Clinton in a general election are demonstrably historically inaccurate. Of course the Party would be smart to (and would likely) move their positions a bit closer to those of Sanders and his independent backers in an effort to win them over, but to back Sanders for the nomination, for all these reasons, would have been a bad move, even a suicidal one. However, if a majority of registered Democrats had picked Sanders, the case would be much harder to make that the superdelegates should support Clinton and they likely would not have enough votes to give her the nomination, all things being equal.

The Case for Closed Primaries

Yes, Americans have constitutionally guaranteed rights to vote for their representatives and their president, but no Constitutional or inherent right to weigh in on who the political parties will provide as their candidates for president; that’s for the parties to decide.

Basically, independents are lucky when they get to participate in a party’s nomination process, but it is their decision to not affiliate with a party that prevents them from voting during a party’s nomination process if they live where there is a closed primary. If a person chooses not to affiliate with a party, that’s a good indication that that person does not share the values of that party nearly as much as the people who do choose to affiliate with it. And political parties are all about citizens with shared values organizing to gain political power for like-minded purposes. So what gives an independent and inherent right to participate in any party’s nomination process? Nothing, nothing at all, except it a state party organization feels generous and, instead of a closed primary, it holds an open one.

Sometimes this can lead to mischief: according to various exit polls, in West Virginia’s open primary, anywhere from a huge minority of Bernie Sanders voters to a significant majority of them indicated they would be voting for Trump in November; as Trump had already basically won the Republican nomination contest, it is possible some of Trump’s supporters wanted to hurt Clinton, who had also virtually won the nomination but was in a much tighter race with Sanders, by voting for Sanders. With restrictions on primary participation, such mischief is more than possible…

In addition to this mischief, open primaries prevent parties from having any control over who weighs in on their nomination process in those contests, leaving them open to possible takeovers, and kill the major incentive for people to register and become real members of a party, supporting it over time. It essentially weakens the middleman roll that parties and elites play between voters and individual candidates, leaving them more susceptible to demagogues and increasing the likelihood of voting based on personality rather than on a set of shared values and principles.

Conclusion: Fair Does Not Mean Surrender to the New Guy & We Still Need Political Parties to Be an Actual Thing

The point is, the Party and its officials have every right to support the candidate they think best represents the party’s ideas and values, who has supported the Party through thick and thin, and has the best chance of winning and the best ability to govern. As the conservative RedState pointed out, with this e-mail “scandal,” people were complaining about the Democratic Party doing what the Republican Party already does openly and to a far more intense degree. In fact, virtually any political party anywhere will favor its own longtime loyalists over outside critics; if there was an American “Democratic Socialist Party” that was the only major U.S. political party besides the Republican Party, and Hillary Clinton was a “democrat” trying to push the Democratic Socialist Party hard towards the center, you can sure bet that the people at the Democratic Socialist National Committee (DSNC) would be discussing ways to marginalize her and protect their favored candidate. This is just basic, elemental politics and basic, elemental human and organizational behavior.

In the end, allowing a fair vote (sometimes only among registered Democrats and sometimes allowing independents, per those local decisions), laying out and enforcing the same rules for all candidates, and not directly giving one candidate material resources that another is not offered is about all that can, and should, be expected. Asking people working within the Party to not privately express or have preferences, to avoid discussing strategy to benefit one candidate or another as part of private internal discussions that mention actions that will be given no official sanction or approval by the party apparatus, or to not put up any even informal resistance to a hostile takeover is an absurdly delusional expectation that goes against human nature and the modus operandi of any organization.

Well, going back to the DNC e-mails, Bernie was allowed to compete in the Democratic Party primary even though his actual standing in said party for this election was questionable; both he and Clinton had to compete under the same rules, and while the Party “favored” her in so much as the vast majority of registered Democrats supported her and obviously the vast majority of officials in the Democratic party supported her, there is zero evidence that any of the voting was conducted in a way designed to benefit Clinton over Sanders and suppress Sanders voters, or that any material benefit was given to the Clinton campaign that was not offered to the Sanders campaign. Clinton won because more people voted for her (especially more Democrats), giving her far more pledged than Sanders. Not the DNC, not anybody or anything, “stole” the election from or “rigged” the election against Sanders.

Many Sanders supporters are furious that these e-mails showed that DNC staffers did not like Bernie Sanders. But he didn’t like them or the Democratic Party well before he decided to run for president. Without any other evidence of anything substantive actually coming from these e-mails, there is no “scandal,” just passionate supporters—mostly people who aren’t even Democrats—of a losing, outsider candidate furious that they were not able to succeed in a hostile takeover of a party they generally both already did not like and with which they chose not to affiliate…

Nothing terribly newsworthy here, let along surprising or improper.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse May 13, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 13th, 2016

AMMAN — The more I watch the current American political proceedings, the more I am increasingly convinced of an increasing chance that the presidency of George W. Bush will be remembered as the moment when American democracy began rapidly unravelling.

Our Unravelling, “Unwinding” Democracy

The trends that resulted in this unravelling (or, to use George Packer’s word for it, “unwinding”) could be traced back decades to the so-called Reagan Revolution, coupled with the political incivility and onset of hyperpartisanship that resulted from the so-called Gingrich Revolution. Later, with tax cuts that went almost completely to the wealthiest 1% after we had a surplus, the damage of the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing grossly mismanaged wars, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession after the mortgage and financial crises at the end of Bush’s presidency, George W. Bush had a record of disaster unmatched in modern times and was one of the worst presidents in all of American history, at least if one is to judge according to the effects of his policies.

Some people read a lot into Obama’s election that I did not: many saw it a sign that we had dramatically changed. I saw the election of a black man like Obama, born to and raised by a white mom and who ran as a centrist and went out of his way to not talk about “black issues,” but, rather, to be post-racial and post-partisan, more as an example of the type of minority candidate America would vote for in stark contrast to more outspoken, consciously racialized minority candidates that America would not vote for (Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio are examples in this year’s election cycle who share this approach of campaigning mainly away from their ethnic/racial identity along with Obama). To white America, Obama, Carson, Cruz, and Rubio are “less black” and “less Latino” than other candidates who would not earn as much support from them (if Obama was the exact same person but looked and spoke like Cornell West, does anyone think white America could have supported him at the same level? If Cruz and Rubio were exactly the same but looked and spoke like George Lopez, does anyone think they would have the same support with Republicans that they do now?).

But I realized something else that Obama’s rise and victory represented: the only way that Obama was able to win in 2008 is because the Republicans and George W. Bush has messed up so badly and so completely that America was absolutely desperate for whatever was the least-Bushlike thing they could find. Bush was such a categorical disaster that people wanted to reject the system and class that had produced Bush as a leader as much as possible: the less it acted and sounded like Bush, the better. Without Bush and his presidency creating such a terrible series of crises, it is impossible to imagine that voters would have been willing to try out such a wild card like Obama in 2008. In 2016, it’s incredibly in vogue to talk of candidates as “Establishment” and “anti-Establishment.” That sentiment was not described then the way it is now, but undoubtedly, much of Obama’s support came from people who were desperate for something new, desperate for something different, desperate to reject the past eight years, desperate to reject a system that had done what it had done to us (never mind that WE, first and foremost, empowered those people who ran the system so badly). Basically, at least in 2008, a President Obama was not possible without a President Bush. While many were celebrating Obama’s win in a way in which they were giving American voters an enormous amount of credit, I was saying that it was kind of embarrassing that things had to be that bad before we elected a black president.

The American electorate is funny; in 2000, they more or less rejected Al Gore because he was too “nerdy,” wasn’t “cool” and affable like Bush (I bet they’d take that surplus and invest it now into Social Security in a “lockbox” as Al Gore said he wanted to do in 2000, when he was ridiculed for saying so!). In 2004, they chose Bush to continue his wars his way; in 2008, they voted for someone to get American out of Iraq just 4 years after they voted for someone to keep us in there. In 2010, voters empowered the Tea Party; in 2012, voters rejected multiple Tea Party extremists, which dragged Romney down, in favor of allowing Obama to continue a modest recovery from a historic recession and rejected Republican arguments that Obama’s national security and foreign policies made America less safe. Now, in 2016, voters think Obama is not tough enough on ISIS and many of them chose Donald Trump to be the nominee of one of America’s two major parties and are flirting with a democratic socialist to be the nominee of the other (yes, Clinton will win, but by a narrower margin than many thought would be the case). Fickle, indeed.

How America Took a Huge Gamble on Obama (and Mostly Won)

I voted for Obama in 2008. But not before: I had voted for Hillary Clinton in my local primary. I am still convinced that Hillary would have been a better president, that she would not have made the same rookie mistakes Obama made, that should would have accomplished more with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, but, as I wrote recently, that does not mean I don’t think Obama did not do a good job: I think he did do an overall good job and deserves a lot of credit, even if I think he could have, and Hillary would have, done better.

The thing is, experience counts. Hillary had a lot of it, Obama did not. And what was frustrating for me in 2008 was that so many voters got caught up in the story and style and “coolness” factor with Obama, and paid so little attention to his lack of experience. We basically elevated a man to the highest office in the land who had no executive experience, who has spent precious little time on the national stage, and with whom we as a people had very little familiarity. We did not properly vet him and fell in love with him partly because he was the new guy with an inspiring story and amazing stage presence.

America basically dodged a bullet with Obama. With someone who was so new, and who had so little experience on the national stage, it could have turned out much worse than it did. But in Obama, a man of vast intellect, poise, calm, and composure, and who understood history and the system well from an academic standpoint, if not from an experiential one, the United States of America made out pretty well, and is well on the path to recovering from the calamitous W. Bush presidency even if that recovery is slow, understandably slow, though, since Obama took office in the midst of the worst American and global economic crises since the Great Depression.

Yes, Obama overpromised and oversold ideas of postpartisanship, but he never promised anything ridiculous in terms of policy.

One thing the history of the ancient Roman Republic teaches you about democratic politics is that once a certain type of character rises to certain political heights, it paves a way for others who are similar; once certain behaviors succeed in propelling someone to power, it paves a way for such behavior to used in the same way again; once certain traditions or rules are circumvented or ignored, it paves a way for those traditions and rules to be pushed aside even more forcefully in the future.

Obama, Trump, et al.: The Experience Factor, 2008-2016

The rise of Obama and the fact that his candidacy was able to triumph over both Hillary Clinton and John McCain, both seasoned political hands that were objectively more qualified resume-wise for high office, opened the door for candidates with historically low levels of national-level or executive political experience. In fact, during this election cycle, the Republican Party fielded three candidates—Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Dr. Ben Carson—who had never, ever held elected office or any political office whatsoever; Trump won, and Dr. Carson was one of the top-polling candidates for most of the election season (even briefly leading), before he was one of the final candidates to drop out, outlasting twelve other candidates; Fiorina, too, was even one of the top-tier candidates, if only briefly.

This tells us something very simple and very disturbing: American voters care less about experience and qualifications than they possibly ever have, and this trend is only increasing. “Outsider,” “anti-‘Establishment’” politics have become wildly popular and wildly successful. 

There were signs that this was coming. 

With the Democrats, before, we he had a freshman U.S. Senator (Obama) defeat two of the most recognizable, experienced hands in American politics (Clinton, McCain) in 2008. 

On the Republican side, we saw signs with the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 and after—including some of the most unqualified, looney people ever to make it into Congress—and with seasoned, major political figures in the Republican Party being “primaried” and defeated from their right—people like veteran Sen. Dick Lugar of Indiana and House Majority Leader (arguably the most powerful legislative position in Congress after Speaker of the House) Eric Cantor of Virginia, the latter losing to an obscure college professor. In 2012, only Herman Cain had never held political office before among Republican presidential candidates, and he still led in the polls for close to a month; still, the field was dominated by people with decent to serious experience in executive government positions or national-level politics, but the nomination contest felt more like a ritual, a wooden Mitt Romney never generating much enthusiasm (Trump must have looked at how weak the 2012 field was and realized there was a chance for someone with charisma and personality to really make a mark). 

In this 2016 cycle, the Republican field had three freshmen U.S. Senators and three candidates who have never held national-level or executive government office, representing over a third of all candidates, and the last man standing, Trump, has never, ever held a position in government.

What will be the situation if trends continue on this path in 2020? 2024?? 2028??? 2032!???! Will the typical office-holder of 2016 bear any resemblance to his or her counterpart of 2032? Given today’s situation, the answer is very likely no.

*****

Trump & Today’s Scary Precedents for Presidential Politics

Time

Only once in American history has the nominee of a major party never held government office: in 1940, when Republicans nominated businessman Wendell Willkie to challenge Franklin Delano Roosevelt as fascism was taking over the world; when Willkie lost, he became a huge supporter of FDR’s war effort in an extraordinary show of bipartisanship; in other words, he was no Trump or Tea Partier.

Only once, that is, until now, until 2016, when Trump is already the de-facto nominee.

I am scared far less of Trump than I am scared about the barriers he has broken for men seeking high office, the behaviors he has set up as examples of ones that lead to political success, and the traditions and decorum he has smashed. I am scared far less by this election and its smashing of precedent in 2016 than by what—and who—this election paves the way for in the future.

In 2008, the winner of the presidency was a freshman senator with little national-level experience and no executive experience in government. In 2016, about one-sixth of Republican candidates were freshmen senators who had no national-level or executive government experience prior to entering the Senate (Cruz, Rubio, Paul), and roughly one-sixth had never held any government office before (Trump, Carson, Fiorina). All but one (Ohio Gov. John Kasich) of the final five Republican candidates were in one of these two categories, and the man who essentially has the nomination, Trump, has no government experience. How much larger proportionally will such candidates be out of the whole field in 2020, 2024, and beyond? How many people, like Rubio and Cruz, are going to run for the House or Senate and care little for the office they seek, but, rather, seek to use it merely as a platform to run for president? Instead of one-third as it was in 2016, will be in half in 2020? Two-thirds? While people have complained about the dumbing-down of American politics for years, perhaps with what is now happening today it has never been more inarguably clearly so.

Make no mistake, as I have written before, Trump is a threat to Western civilization and democracy as we know it today. But a big part of what is scary about him—is the most frightening—involves not Trump himself whether he wins or loses, but what comes after.

A case in point from ancient Rome: for nearly four centuries, that Roman Republic’s evolving democratic (small-r) republican system avoided any serious internal political violence until 133 B.C.E., when a Pandora’s Box of political violence was unleashed; less than half a century after that was the Roman Republic’s first civil war, and less than a half-century after that, its final one between Caesar and Pompey that would see the destruction of republican government in all but name.  The point is, once precedents are broken, there are serious consequences, especially when new “norms” delve into dangerous territory.

Another case in point: the Romans very much valued experience, and they had not only age requirements for someone to hold their highest political office—the consulship with its two annually elected consuls, on which the American presidency and vice presidency are based—but also required the holder of that office to have been elected to and held two other lower offices (praetor and quaestor) before being considered eligible (see Part II here). Considering that the Roman Republic lasted roughly twice as long as America’s republic has thus far existed, Americans might want to take note of this.

In Conclusion: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

Even without the specter of political violence (at which Trump has lightly hinted and at whose rallies there have been sporadic incidents of mild violence), the precedents of 2016 and especially Trump will be remembered collectively as a watershed moment. But this moment would not have been possible without the extraordinarily destructive policies and gross incompetence of the experienced career politicians of the George W. Bush Administration, without which the stage would not have been set, the desperate hunger for something different established, for the precedent-breaking candidacy of Barack Obama, whose victory was both the beginning of a shift of large portions of America turning away from the familiar in favor of the risky and a harbinger of a much larger shift in this direction to come. 

With Obama, the American people certainly gambled on an unknown but came out pretty well in the end, but it was still a big risk. Without the W. Bush Administration disaster, it is hard to envision American voters in 2008 taking such a big risk in an election. But if electing Obama can be said to have been a risky gamble on the part of the American people, Trump’s winning the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016, powered by voters and grassroots support above all else, as well as his having a real shot at winning the presidency, is a move of a far greater level of risk on the part of the American people, one that is unlikely to pay positive dividends like 2008’s gamble did, and is far more likely to damage us in ways many of us now cannot even begin to imagine.

Right now, the new political rulebook clearly states to win as a candidate to be the nominee of one of America’s two major political parties, Trump, Trump’s behavior, and Trumpism are all acceptable, when literally less than a year ago, they were not (and far from it!). 

These are dangerous and exciting times we live in, but, then again, when any society take a giant leap forward towards self-destruction, there is always plenty of excitement. There was plenty of excitement when Rome’s republic fell, as was the case in Revolutionary France, Russia, and China. As many voters are feeling the energy for candidates like Trump and Sanders, hoping they will tear down the current system, one can only hope that the more passionate and frenzied political noise-makers will be outnumbered by the moderates who will back Hillary Clinton over Trump in the end. People are angry and suffering today, but as Hillary Clinton knew since her days as an undergraduate, and as Barack Obama recently told graduating Howard University students, “Change requires more than righteous anger.” He also told them “It may sound like a controversial statement—a hot take—given the current state of our political rhetoric and debate, but America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college. It also happens to be better off than when I took office, but that’s a longer story.” 

And he’s right; and these improvements were accomplished not by disruptive and divisive anger, not by the far left castigating everyone who is not immediately on board to seismic reforms, but, in reality, by “Establishment” politics, seeking not to destroy the system, but to work within it. 

This is the approach Obama took once elected, and it’s the approach the Hillary Clinton has taken her whole career. It’s not as exciting as promising free college and that millions of new manufacturing jobs will be won from renegotiating all of our existing trade deals, but unlike the other promises, Clinton’s promises of working within the system are not in the realm of laughable fantasy. Declaring war on reality might please many voters, but it also pushes more and more people to give up on a system that, even creakingly and grudgingly, has delivered an enormous amount of positive change across generations, if imperfectly and unevenly. But politics is always imperfect and uneven, regardless of what candidates like Trump and Sanders pump into the heads of their oft-rabid followers. And the solution is not to give up on the successful if sometimes frustrating incremental success of successful reforms of the past century, but to realize that all those increments add up over time into something big and revolutionary; heck, even revolutions take many years and are hardly instant. And yet those who are the youngest voters often seem the most impatient for change; yes, we face many problems now, but our chances of success are far less if we give up on the system and allow our leaders to destroy our confidence in it, if we forget how and why America has been great, how it is still relatively great though currently in serious decline and in sore need of improvement, and how the past shows us a recipe for making American even greater than before if we can roll up our sleeves to work towards reasonable expectations and can do so with a degree of patience as well as optimism.

With Trump and even Sanders, we have creaked open the door to demagoguery, which thrives when people have low to zero expectations for the system and foolishly high expectations for their savior who will deliver them from it. When a population moves too far away from the politics of the system to the cult of personality, the health of democracy is unquestionably in decline. It is not clear how many of Obama’s supporters fell more for his personality and style than his substance and intellect, but I imagine it would be a level that is higher than with which many would be comfortable; when it comes to Trump, we can be certain his supporters are not behind him for his intellect and substance.

Americans should be concerned. Only now are we truly seeing the political consequences of the calamitous two terms of George W. Bush and other trends in place for decades before; I shudder to think of what seeds are being sown today in the era where Trump could win the nomination of the party of Lincoln, and may even win the presidency.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Sudden, shocking, disturbing, and largely self-propelled trends in America and Europe are doing more damage to Western democracy today than Soviet armies or nuclear missiles ever did during the Cold War

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 17, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 17th, 2016

Clockwise: Photo/Agencies, Cheryl Evans/The Republic, AP

AMMAN — Roughly a quarter-century ago, the world seemed poised for a triumph of democracy and human rights unprecedented in human history. As Francis Fukuyama famously noted in “The End of History,” the end of the Cold War marked the end of thousands of years of ideological struggle, and the spread of Western democratic capitalist ideals all around the world was inevitable with the demise of the Soviet Union. It was the end of history as we knew it: nothing could stand anymore in the way of the West and its triumphant march forward through history.

Except, apparently, the West itself.

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Not a New Problem

The West and democracy being their own worst enemy is hardly a new thing.

As one historian wrote:

“The pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen…It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of…[our chief rival power], mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the…[governing elites] characterized the government…Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and [our political system], which had been our common ground, was mutilated…And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.”

The above quotation is not from a Western historian of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries; rather, it is the ancient Roman historian Sallust writing in the first century B.C.E. in his The Jurgurthine War (41.1-10). He was writing of the slow self-destruction of the democratic Roman Republic, which lasted nearly 500 years, after its final triumph over Carthage. He lived to see his Republic crumble politically, dying a few years before Octavian would become first of the Roman emperors.

HBO

American Founding Father and (second) President John Adams wrote in the early nineteenth-century of democracy being its own worst enemy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

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“Flet victus, victor interiit” (The conquered mourns, the conqueror is undone)—Latin proverb

Much like ancient Rome, the West today exercised relative restraint in domestic affairs when faced with a mighty foe as the Soviet Union functioned as its Carthage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the United States seemed poised to dominate the world for the foreseeable future and the European Union was on its way to producing a unified Europe that would also be a dominant global power, working in tandem with the United States to spread and maintain peace, democracy, and capitalism.

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Just a few decades later, in 2016, that vision appear to be fading.

In the United States, the presidency of George W. Bush squandered a massive budgetary surplus, the result of a prosperity not seen since the years after WWII, when Eisenhower gave America a globally-unprecedented highway system and a military that ensured it would be the dominant player in the Cold War; Bush opted to use America’s prosperity to pay for lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy and then prosecuted two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose costs he added to the deficit and debt, and the latter of which destabilized the Middle East more than any event since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.

At home, his administration (and other officials) failed miserably in addressing Hurricane Katrina as it humbled and partly destroyed New Orleans, a great American city, and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a possible total meltdown of the global financial and economic systems).

Now, America’s first non-white president, Barack Obama, has encountered a level of obstructionism and partisanship from Congress unseen since the Civil War; the elation and hope of the election results of 2008 has given way to a level of dysfunction and gridlock that calls into question America’s ability to govern itself regardless of who sits in the White House.  As of now, the U.S. may have a vacant seat on its Supreme Court for close to, or more than, a year, the longest vacancy since the 1840s and the result of partisan obstruction on the part of the Republican Party.

Over the last few months, that Republican Party, one of America’s two main political parties since the elections of 1856, appeared on the verge of melting down in the face of the candidacy of businessman and TV personality Donald Trump; just a few days ago, it seems it reluctantly accepted that he is near-certain to be its nominee. In a few months, the United States might be able to be said to have gone in a mere-quarter century from victor of the Cold War to electing a President Trump.

Jan Kruger/Getty Images

In Europe, even in the 1990s it was demonstrated twice in the Balkans that Europe was incapable of dealing with major conflicts in its own backyard without help and, more importantly, leadership from the United States. Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and migrant crises unseen in the world or Europe since WWII; Europe’s response has been grossly inadequate and the influx of refugees has been one of the main catalysts for the dramatic rise all over Europe of far-right political parties that border on being fascist; they are often against the European Union and are forcefully hostile to immigrants and refugees.

Leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to show kindness and compassion to refugees, may be ousted sooner by politics rather than later for her troubles, and other governments balk at attempts to coordinate regional refugee and economic policies. In France, a rising far-right party funded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may possibly come to control France in the coming years. Poland seems to be in the process of destroying its democracy.

A series of complacent governments in places like Greece, Italy, and Spain set off dramatic economic, finance, and debt crises that have severely weakened confidence in the European Union as well. There was, and still is, talk of a Greek exit (“Grexit”) from the EU. Now, there is talk of a “Brexit,” as, even after unprecedented concessions by the EU to Britain (concessions that severely undermined the EU), Britain’s public may still vote to leave the EU in a matter of months. The United Kingdom itself only recently narrowly avoided disintegration by secession from it by Scotland, a possibility which, it was just announced, will be pursued again.

AP

Even in Israel, considered a bastion of Western democracy in the Middle East, the public and government are becoming increasingly okay with the erosion of democratic values and a deeply undemocratic military occupation of the West Bank as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stifles Israel’s left and drives its people further to the right. The assault on democratic norms in Turkey by its government is far worse. Still worse in that region, the Arab Spring has, in general, become a massive tragedy.

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Additionally, democracy by no means appears stable or secure overall in either Sub-Saharan Africa or in Latin America.

Failing the Test?

Fighting in Ukraine in 2015—Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons

As The Economist pointed out, Europe has its “little Trumps;” America might install its Trump as president. A deeply divided American public is desperate for functionality from its government, but seems incapable of electing a Congress that can produce this; after only a few years of near-total gridlock, it may turn to Trump. If there is an ensuing period of longer dysfunction, it is terrifying to imagine what Americans might opt for then.

Likewise, in Europe, as leftist leaders are challenged, weakened, and/or ousted one-by-one and are replaced by governments whose missions are resisting pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to envision its future, too. An autocratic Russia sits on Europe’s edge, poking and prodding from the outside, funding right-wing extremist parties in Europe that look to Putin’s Russia as a model, even while that democratic model has become a farce.

Make no mistake, Western Democracy is on trial; if Hillary Clinton does not enter the White House this next January, who or what, then, will encourage Europe to rethink its own rightward march, and what will keep America’s Trump-led “house divided against itself” from following, even encouraging, Europe’s lead? What will that ultimately mean for democracy and its viability worldwide as this century progresses? 

That is not to say that it is certain Mrs. Clinton can solve all of these problems.  But at least with her, there will be a sincere effort from the most powerful nation on earth to push back against the downward spiral on both sides of the Atlantic; with Mr. Trump, that downward spiral will only be encouraged and accelerated.

AP

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)