Lessons of History About Greek, Roman, and US Empires By Don Speakman

Lessons of History About Greek, Roman, and US Empires

By Don Speakman

Al-Jazeerah, August 31, 2006

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

Last Friday evening the History Channel showed a documentary depicting Alaric, King of the Visigoth, leading the barbarians to the Sack of Rome on August 24 in the year 410 AD. This proved to be the mortal blow leading to the decline of the Roman Empire from which she never recovered. One could not help but note the similarities of that event to those that occurred on September 11, 2001. Both leaders were absent from the target area. During the initial attack. The Emperor Honorius was holed up in the city of Ravenna and our Commander in Chief was visiting the Booker Elementary School in Florida.

This act on the part of the Visigoths was the first invasion of Rome in eight hundred years. The attack on the World Trade Center by the Bin Laden forces was the first significant act of war by any country to invade the mainland of the United states in two hundred years.

Both leaders, when informed of their respective disasters failed to respond with the proper degree of shock and horror and instead exhibited a demeanor of fatuousness beyond belief!

The Emperor Honorius when told by a courier that “Rome was dead” mistakenly interpreted this news that it was his pet rooster also named “Rome”. The Emperor remained enveloped in grief and inconsolable, until he learned that it was the real Rome that was dead and not his rooster. His sigh of relief echoes down through the ages.

Our Commander in Chief on being told by his White House Chief of staff, Andy Card, of a second airline crashing into the world trade center thus removing any doubts as to the clear and present danger to our country, Bush's facial reaction: Shock? Anguish? Disbelief? Awestruck? None of the above. At best only a bland indifference as he elected for the next 20 minutes to listen to the schoolchildren read about a pet goat!

One other parallel of history will suffice to make my point: the Greek invasion of Syracuse in the years 415 to 413 BC. Spurred on by the militant general, Alcibiades, the Greeks were willing to finance the most formidable force in history to engage in what was reported to be an easy pushover in the conquest to unseat the tyrannical regime of Dionysius. The historian Thucydides gives a graphic account of that ill fated expedition to Syracuse resulting in a disastrous defeat of the powerful Athenian army and the subsequent decline of Greek civilization.

Could Iraq now become America’s Syracuse?

Don Speakman, Bahama, N.C. USA

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

Apartheid Wall


The Israeli Land-Grab Apartheid Wall built inside the Palestinian territories, here separating Abu Dis from occupied East Jerusalem. (IPC, 7/4/04).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python. (Alquds,10/25/03).

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