This is just a rambling essay on my thoughts on the state of our Canadian humanity and political situation at the dawn of the Year 2023.
“The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.”
― Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Rome was one of the greatest empires in history, regardless of how we define greatness. She united the world and cast a vast shadow over everything that followed to our present day.
Don’t believe me? Look at our Canadian constitutional structure. Our Canadian concept of law and our very Canadian/Canadian military installation and deployments over the last 150 years. Our way of governing, as well as our colonization of the original inhabitants of this land – our vital allies we betrayed and decided to deem our “lesser.”
Yet to this day, we still shock the First Peoples of this land with our barbaric cruelty, savagery, and, indeed, Roman brutality. Not to mention our viewing of all others – and even the very natural world we rely on – as our enemy, which, due to profit, we still wage perennial war on.
We still stand in the shadow of Rome. Hell: We ARE Rome.
So what doomed the Roman Empire?
Was it lead pipes? Hardly. Was it Imperial military overreach? Was it the hubris and sanguine thirst of Rome’s Leaders? While that was a decided strength negator, it wasn’t a game changer. Look at modern history: we’re almost always led by murderous incompetents.
Or was it the fundamental force behind the entire Imperial project? The desperate and blood-soaked greedy and callous quest for Lucrum super Omnia – profit overall.
Such wealth.
This quest for profit has always been a bloody business, and judging by the vast numbers of Canadians now hovelling desperately beside our Wal-Marts and Shoppers Drug Marts – it still is. This quest for profit has always been a bloody business, and judging by the vast numbers of Canadians now hovelling desperately beside our Wal-Marts and Shoppers Drug Marts – it still is.
Rome – as do we today – tolerated slavery in sight of the icons and flowery words of liberty. As I write, Canadians are laboring for scraps of insufficient wages that can’t even feed their families while they are forced to live in cars. Teenagers – our future – are joining the Canadian Forces not for their country but as a path out of this desperate poverty imposed on them. Many still die for that same old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro-Patria more.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Sound familiar? pic.twitter.com/JF2Vrnm0eB
— Sharpest Wit in the West (@SharpT_wit) December 27, 2022
These are the same corrupt reasons that allowed Caesar the license to order his legions to rape and plunder the people of Gaul, Britannia, and Germania and later to plunge his homeland into an incredibly bloody civil war, the echoes of which still rock the world.
Profit – bloody silver – still reigns supreme.
But just as those who in the past quested for profit while disguising their true intent, today we have a vast media telling us why things like the war in Ukraine are.
I do not deny any people the right to self-defense, and I am firmly on the side of Ukraine in this struggle. But – this carnage should have never happened in the first place.
And although this is unpopular to state, it’s not all on Russia. Was I Ukrainian, I’d be fighting Russia as fiercely as they are. But the seeds of this war were sown decades ago in the “Partnership for Peace” and the NATO attempt to warp a supine USSR to their will.
When I was a junior officer at RMC, I could see how, in the 90s, our NATO policies would lead to a Russian retrenchment as surely as the Treaty of Versailles set the ground for the rise of Hitler.
But it seems: Profitieren über alles – Profit over all. And if you doubt capitalists are profiting from the death of the flower of Ukrainian and Russian youth – on both sides – you’re missing the point.
Our modern cultural lexicon and language justify capitalist carnage. Perhaps our foundation is still rooted in the 1930s – and we live it today.
But it’s all just as old as Rome. We celebrate and worship Bezos and Musk. Billionaires are given such “Amatus a popular”– shared love and privilege that Caesar would be green with envy of their reach and power.
Ego is the enemy. Lol. pic.twitter.com/6EiBVBxp1Q
— Dean Blundell🇨🇦 (@ItsDeanBlundell) January 4, 2023
Billions of dollars to subjugate the public space of Twitter? No problem! How magnificent you are, Sire.
Blast a shitty car with a defective battery into space on a whim? We worship you!
Building a fortune on your employees’ backs slaving in Amazon warehouses that Dickens – familiar with the horrors of an 1830s-Esque Workhouse – would recoil from in shocked horror? Well done – oh yea, Great Captain of Industry!
Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant! (We who are about to die to salute you!)
Meanwhile, most people supporting these vanities are succumbing to inflationary privation. They can’t keep their homes. Food Banks and homelessness become a more significant threat to the order. And emotional calls and directed anger towards a constructed “other” are cheaper than bread and circuses. So…we need distractions.
Putin is Putler. The Ukrainians are Nazis. Or, as in my time – the Soviets are the evil barbarians we (almost) destroyed the planet several times to “contain” (read: suppress and subjugate) the Soviets.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25663779-the-doomsday-machine
Back in 90-91, the Iraqi conscripts were the latter-day Schutzstaffel which is one of the reasons I joined. I, too, felt the same glowing, rising, profoundly personal, and passionate patriotic fever as every soldier has in every march to war in history.
I might as well have been an 1812 French Cuirassier fighting for La République or an 1870 Prussian Ulan. Or soldier in the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment of Foot before Waterloo. Or – as in my youthful romantic dreams – 1916 Canadian private pilot of a 1942 RCAF Lancaster or officer of an RCN Corvette. It’s all the fucking same!
You are out to defend civilization from chaos with your life!
I’m not religious, and I joined just before the Gulf War. But oh, how 20-year-old me YEARNED to see combat! To test me against the enemy, to stand against the snap of bullets around my head, and to lead my men through the screeching of shells and missiles.
It is intoxicating.
Later PKOPS – peace support operations – had to suffice, but I missed the Medak pocket and thought myself a lesser man for doing so. The later NATO bombing of Serbs (Kosovo International Air Show) was cheered for in the ’90s as justified, as these were latter-day Nazis.
Yet I was young, and the goal was inevitably the same as always: mobilizing nations to support the expenditure of vast social treasure to exterminate the Perfidious Barbarus, the “Evil Other.” But for what goal? The wasting of human resources slaughtering others.
After the shock of 9-11, where we were ridiculously planning the defense of Darlington Nuclear Power Plant with (what, in my mind, were holding hands – as small arms were useless against incoming Boeing’s), I felt as ready as could be. Despite severe reservations, even the Afghanistan mission harkened back to the Crusades regarding its perceived importance and ultimate futility.
But again, I must reach back to Rome and ask the fundamental question:
Qui Bono? Who benefits?
It’s not the soldiers who benefit—those who always do the dying and suffering never gain a thing.
Alors, là aussi j’accuse – I also accuse Veterans Affairs Canada and the Canadian government – regardless of the party in power. Every one of you damned souls who, since 1945, have voted in favor of government policy denying vets their rightful benefits have abjectly failed every Canadian Forces Veteran as badly as Hitler or Napoleon ever did theirs.
I know it’s not you personally… it’s the profits. Old soldiers are an expense to be dispensed with – not a trust to be honored because money is all that matters. Words are cheap. And I silently curse all of you who appear to lay a 20-dollar plastic wreath at a cenotaph and mutter your cheap words.
So while some mercenary leadership like Blackwater and Walther – those connected to power – might invariably make a profit, those doing the bloody work can only ever expect a pauper’s grave.
So again – Qui Bono? – who benefits from the capitalism that inspires these wars we are globally inflicted with?
It’s sure as hell not the civilians in the combat zones starving as their lives are exterminated by artillery and combat. And it sure as hell isn’t the unhoused peoples in “wealthy” nations like Canada, currently living under canvas because the wealth that could be better spent on their comfort is being used to buy bullets and shells to kill and unhouse other civilians in other countries.
One doesn’t have to go back to Rome to see that Major General Smedley Butler CMH – one of the most highly decorated officers in the US military – was 1000% correct in his assessment that “war is a racket.”
I refer you to the film Wag the Dog. It was a documentary about our age. This is where we are here in this bright new year of 2023. It might as well be 23BC, 223AD, 1123, 1423, 1723, 1823, or 1923 – the pattern’s all remain the same.
While I still ( for reasons probably of sentiment and perhaps to my eternal shame) am a proud holder of a Queen’s Commission, I can only clearly see that in this my 53rd year, the price of la Gloire -the
glory is but a frivolous and fleeting thing that only enriches those already far too wealthy at the expense of all other good people who do the dying and suffering for their wealth.
The quest for profit is merely a racket the wealthy use to consolidate their power, and war is just one of their swords. Their quest for profit over humanity will be our downfall as surely as every empire before us.
War is a racket. https://t.co/yCbmmvuiEk
— Joshua Sheats (@JoshuaSheats) December 30, 2022
We can do better. But how this happens is up to YOU. See through the fog of war. The true enemy is wealth, which causes suffering.
…Happy New Year.
American General Smedly Butler said it best, and I shall here leave you to explore his bitterly hard-won wisdom:
Hugh Culliton
