The elite have supplied America with bread and circuses to keep the impoverished masses content in their deprivation, just like the ancient Roman emperors used to do.
Americans are now landless, impoverished and unemployable peasants in a bankrupt land whose industry has been exported to other countries and whose corporations are beginning to physically moved to other countries to do business.
How do you keep the peasants from rising up. How do you keep the frog from jumping out of the pot until its goose is completely cooked?
Why Bread and Circuses, of course.
Keep the population fed and distracted while you gradually leave them homeless, penniless and absolutely dependent on the government.
This is what happened in Imperial Rome.
The proud Roman Citizen Farmer was gone by the time of Julius Caesar.
This was the same tough and brave Roman Citizen who had fought to make Rome great.
And how was he repaid?
In his place stood gigantic estates (the equivalent of gigantic corporations) tended by slaves (the equivalent of cheap foreign labor) owning all the land and wealth that used to belong to the Roman citizen.
And the Roman Citizen?
A useless relic.
All he used to do was now done by cheap slave labor - from farming to shoes to construction.
There was nothing more to be done with the useless mass of Roman Citizens except keep them under control and manipulate them into forming fawning political masses for the oligarchs…because they had already become completely dependent on the welfare emanating from the state.
Sound familiar?
Ergo Bread and Circuses – welfare and entertainment.
The Roman masses were housed, fed and entertained by the state, and used as a mob when it was required to show support for this politician or that, or when a show of support (or violence) was required.
The illiterate, impoverished Mob of Rome.
How history repeats itself.
Look how they keep us passive with cheap cable television, mesmerizing video games and the hypnotic Internet.
Look how they keep us glued to the screen of the Computer, the TV and the Cell phone. Check out the circus-like programming full of cheap stunts, emotions and phony made up theater.
Hungry?
Plenty of cheap government-subsidized corporate food to keep you happy – dollar meals, cheap pizzas and 99c food stores stacked to the top with junk food.
And isn’t our increasing illiteracy matching our increasing poverty and our government dependence as you read this?
Government dependence?
Yes!
Look at all the people getting Welfare, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and Food Stamps.
Look at all the so-called ‘employed’ people.
Look at all the people employed by local, state or federal governments.
If you are working in any field connected to education, medicine, farming or technology, it's government subsidies that are paying your salary.
To a large extent, directly or indirectly we are all government-dependent now, just like the mob of Rome.
Hey, our Cops are even starting to resemble those old Roman Legionnaires with their short batons and big shields as they…crush the Mob of Rome when it gets out of control.
Our ‘Army’ (the Legion) is starting to speak in so many accents that it’s sometimes hard to understand its freaking radio traffic.
It is said that in the Rome of the Emperors, Latin was only rarely heard. Check out our less affluent neighborhoods, what language are you hearing? English?
We have been sold down the river and our wealth confiscated, just like the Ancient Romans.
Our jobs have been taken over by slaves.
Our ‘Republic’ has turned into an empire which is gradually filling with the babbling masses from a thousand foreign lands…just like Rome.
The original population of this country is going extinct and being replaced by minorities which neither know nor care about our culture…just like the Romans.
Hey, our Senate is turning into a Roman bacchanalia –hear all the sex scandals lately?
History does indeed repeat itself.
The final days of the (Roman) republic are being repeated once more...
...right here in America...
...as we transition from a Republic...
...to an Empire.
Interesting post. Well, actually frightening is a better word.
ReplyDeleteBut the analogy to latter day Rome is a fitting one.
We have a culture of death like Rome did (Abortion/infanticide at one end and assisted suicide/euthanasia at the other).
And we are like you mentioned becoming more state-dependent. And the fight to replace government over the role of the family unit for control of beliefs and financial support was a subject of the public square recently.
We've just had the collectivist idea of Hillary Clinton's "It takes a village" to be rehashed by MSNBC's Melissa Perry-Harris. And of course conservative news (Fox News and Rush Limbaugh) hit her hard for those anti-family innuendos. It was just a 20-sec ad for 'Leaning Forward' but it was a sneaky way to get a "Your children belongs to all of us" message in. Not during her show but just a promo.
Her quote:
"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it's everybody's responsibility, and not just the household's, then we start making better investments."
She is a Unitarian Universalist and pretty liberal so actually a lot of ideas that freak out many Americans (Socialism, Government dependence) don't bother her.
I think that you are correct. That the American Republic is in its waning days. We may escape its fall in our generation but it's coming soon.
Rampant pornography, sexual escorts in every major city, adultery and fornication the norm rather than the exception. We are a hyper-sexualized culture that wants to remove any last remnants of prohibitions against immorality. Moral decay will cause us to fall from within.