Some Ramadan Reckonings

The following lesson from history, reproduced below and courtesy of The New York Times, is worth pondering. It has to do with a war on terrorism that sowed the seeds of destruction for the Roman republic.

And while listening to the unheeded voices of history, here's a relevant lament from much closer in time: from Baron de Montesquieu, the Frenchman who was one of the inspirations for the Declaration of Independence:

"France will be ruined by soldiers. A new plague is spreading throughout Europe. It attacks sovereigns and forces them to maintain an incredible number of armed men. This plague is infectious and spreads, because directly one government increases its armament, all the others do likewise. So that nothing is gained by it but general ruin.

"Every government maintains as great an army as it possibly could maintain if its people were threatened with extermination, and people call peace this state of tension of all against all. And therefore Europe is so ruined that if private persons were in the position of the governments of our continent, the richest of them would not have enough to live on. We are poor though we have the wealth and trade of the whole world."

Sound familiar? It's called the Arms Race, and it is still going strong, especially in America and Israel--thanks to a generalized state of fear, called the War on Terrorism. With Iraq war spending now at $330 billion, we can understand how the wealthiest nation in the world is in a state of ruin.

I kept thinking of men like Montesquiei when we declared war on French Fries in 2003 and started spitting at the French every chance we could get. "Montesquieu," writes Isaiah Berlin, "advocated constitutionalism, the preservation of civil liberties, the abolition of slavery, gradualism, moderation, peace, internationalism, social and economic justice with due respect to national and local tradition. He believed in justice and the rule of law; detested all forms of extremism and fanaticism; put his faith in the balance of power and the division of authority as a weapon against despotic rule by individuals or groups or majorities."

Montesquieu believed, wisely, that the greatest protection of freedom is the rule of law, not as it has become in America, the law of rule. The Declaration of Independence, which to me is the culmination of the Age of Enlightenment, is being torn to tatters. And the Constitution, which also gives great importance to treaties and international law, is also being shredded.

I fear America is becoming a Fourth Reich and it is, ironically, due, in significant part, to fanatically pro-Israeli Jews and Christians. For those of you who think my fears of a Fourth Reich are fueled by Ramadan deprivation, let me assure you that fasting brings with it incredible clarity and detachment.

Here's why I am deeply worried. Pro-Israeli friends of mine now suggest that it is worth repealing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to pass laws that give our president unparalleled power to ready us to face Iran and other 'enemies' of freedom (read: Israel and America).

Maybe, as some friends suggest and others accuse, I've got issues about my Jewish upbringing. But the emphasis is on upbringing not Jewish. I once saw a press conference conducted by a group of Jesuits who had converted to Islam. They said they had gone as far as they could go as Catholics and Islam was taking them on the next leg of the journey. Well, I feel the same about Judaism as a tradition in which I was raised. I went as far as I could go, and moved into a Hindu ashram, followed by membership in a Sufi lodge. As far as I am concerned, these are all tabs at the top of the screen marked 'David Federman: Son of God.'

God is to me the only thing whole and absolute, the unity encoded into us so that we are suited to inhabitance. All the religions that pretend to honor Him but fight one another are, to me, hypocritical, hollow, myopic and not worth any further attention on my part.

An anlogy based on my life experience as a jewelry journalist: God is a perfect diamond. Where and when Christianity is a facet on the diamond of humanity that is perfectly aligned with the other facets of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Bahai, you name it, and all the facets contribute to the sum of splendor, then I am a member of that faith ("I contain multitudes"). When all religions act as relays of light (i.e., truth and wisdom), one to the other, then all religions are one (as William Blake said). Humanity, too, is, or is supposed to be, a perfect diamond.

I am not a member of any faith that can become an ethnic or political prison. To worry about Muslim or Christian or Jewish threats to my well-being is to place fear above faith and to suspend judgment, reason and sanity.

The bottom line: I am not, as the neocons would have me do, about to give up my freedom to try to sate Israel's insatiable insecurity. I have lived with that insecurity all my life and it has only deepened.

Worry, my Zionist friends, all you want about Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah. But, this Yom Kippur, when you are committed to self-reflection and all fingers point at your own behavior, I beg you to entertain the possibly just consensus across the globe that the world has much greater cuase these days to worry about that dangerous 2-man league of nations that is American and Israel than any other alliance.

This Yom Kippur I ask my Zionist friends to fast from paranoia about Muslims and Iran and face sins of the country to which they give greatest allegiance--namely, Israel--against Palestine and Lebanon, committed in the name of "nameless, unreasoning fear."

Believe me, I am doing the same this Ramadan by trying to cut all ties to anything but God. Like Arjuna, asked to fight jihad by Krishna, I am having trouble with the thought that I have to slay half the people in my home town. But, of course, this is not literal--anymore than the sacrifice of Ishmael is literal. We are dealing with blood ties, the millions of thoughts, habits, possessions, co-dependencies that keep us polytheists instead of monotheists.

For me, Jerusalem and Washington both live in a state of rampaging fear and denial. Put Yom Kippur to good use this year, please. Look at the sins of the 'us' and 'we' rather than the 'they' and 'them.' You'll have 364 other days to point the finger at the goyem.

David


Pirates of the Mediterranean
By ROBERT HARRISKintbury, EnglandI

IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.

The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

“Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what am ounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone,” the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. “There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits.”Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his “war on terror,” which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey’s opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey’s genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, t hey could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as “soft” or even “traitorous” — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture, which forbids only the inducement of “serious” physical and mental suffering to obtain informati on; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey’s special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces bega n to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome’s democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended conseq uences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.

Robert Harris is the author, most recently, of “Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome.”