Ah yes...

The main thing I was going to talk about on the prior entry was to note the date. Today is the International Holiday called the Day of Nostalgia and Melancholia. Today is the day that we recognize that zealous do-gooders will lynch a strong leader simply because he is a strong leader, and that they will almost inevitably end up with something worse.

Julius Caesar was the great proto-Fascist, a man who saw the impending chaos of a crumbling Republic, and did what he had to do, including some dirty work, to preserve the Common Good. Julius Caesar was the great prototype of a range of political actors, ranging from the Saintly: Francisco Franco or Antonio Salazar, to the diabolical Adolf Hitler. In between, representing a generous mingling of the good, the bad and the ugly were Mussolini, Saddam, Pinochet, Tito, Lincoln, Peron and de Gaulle. These middle characters, the deeply flawed heroes, are probably most in the mold of Julius Caesar.

In many ways I have always emulated certain traits of Caesar: for instance, I never joke about politics, although I might present political ideas in the manner of a joke. In this I look at how Caesar dealt with the pirates who kidnapped him. I recognize that the most arrogant people, the most megalomaniac, the Ralph Nader's, will do almost anything to put on a disguise of humility, something that Caesar never did. He was a general who became dictator, not because of his own ambition, although he was certainly human, but because Rome needed a dictator at the time.

The dirt punks of his day, the sort of people who fill the ranks of Indymedia, the Green Party, Code Pink, the Red Brigades and countless other anarchistic cells (not to mention neocons), killed him in the hope of bringing about some glorious democracy. In the end they got civil war and empire.

We will always have dirt punks like Brutus and Casca: pierced and wolfish looking, with lean and hungry looks, an inhuman zeal in their eyes, tatooed, ready with truncheon and dagger to join the next tittilating cause, and they will always destroy the order for the sake of whatever utopian vision they have bought from whatever Nader or Moore who has sold it to him.

So, what could be more proper on this Day of Nostalgia and Melancholia, but to quote from the Bard on this great proto-Fascist leader?

O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.
Thou are the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy --
Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue--
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful obects so familiar,
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quartered with the hands of war,
That this fould deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

This is the reality of revolution and the madness of frenzied democracy: blood and destruction, domestic fury and fierce civil strife. This is the payment demanded of those who think they can bring about utopia on earth by their disorder and misbehavior.

Certainly we should not stand in blind admiration of the great dictators, and we may even find huge aspects of the rule of many of them repulsive. And while we cannot condone evil, especially when it is done for the sake of good order, the riotous evil that stirs men's hearts to base action should be doubly condemned. Again we turn to the Bard to help us understand how to evaluate men like Caesar and Pinochet:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend my your ears.
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious.
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest --
For Brutus is an honorable man,
So are they all, all honorable men --
Come I to speak at Caesar's funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me.
But Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill.
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept.
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And Brutus is an honorable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious,
And sure he is an honorable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause.
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!

Bear with me.
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it comes back to me.

Now, this is obviously well-known as a piece of "crowd-swaying" oratory, and it is. However, there is another dimension at work here, and that is the awakening of the crowd from a mass-hysteria, a blood thirst that chanted the word "ambition" and could only be quenched with the blood of the great leader. The point isn't that Antony moved the crowds, but that the crowds were moved first by such a clumsy speaker as Brutus, who was armed only with a sentimental attachment to a failing democracy and a couple of loaded words, with which to stir the envy that smolders in the heart of every mediocre man: every future Sandinista, every potential Red Brigade member, every PIRG activist, every Liberation Theologian, every DNC faithful.

Brutus is the clumsy fool, so smitten with his half-baked democratic ideology that he encourages the mob to befoul their own living rooms. So it is with modern man, and so it shall be until the end of time.

So, on this day, the Day of Nostalgia and Melancholia, say a prayer for a fallen dictator, a flawed hero. Some may have gone on to their deaths unrepentant, unbaptized, hostile to the Church, in the clutches of a False Religion, but we can never know, so go ahead, pray for Saddam. Some may have died in a state of Grace (Pinochet was attended to by priests in his last days - go ahead, pray for Pinochet. If you spring him from Purgatory you will have one eternally grateful soul in Heaven on your side). But do take a moment to pray for the soul of a deceased dictator today.

Posted by erik at March 15, 2007 9:09 AM