The Emperors Bush and Nero
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.April 2, 2002
Sometimes, I must interrupt my principal role, as an actor on the stage of making current history, to step out of the action for the moment, to offer the onlookers a soliloquy commenting on the deeper issues posed by the immediate course of current events on stage.
Witness the brutal methods of suppressing news reporting from war zones such as Afghanistan and the Middle East, and a virtual absence of actual news reporting by the leading media of the U.S.A. and elsewhere. When the citizen is no longer supplied factual accounts of breaking major developments, it would be not only silly, but immoral to propose to ask the citizen to judge the important issues of current situations from "the facts as I know them." Someone must step to the front of the stage, as Shakespeare sometimes prescribed, to bring the drama in progress into focus.
The currently dominant factions in both leading U.S. political parties, typified by President Bush, and Senators McCain and Lieberman, are committed to policies which would install eternal rule by a world-empire parodying that of ancient Rome. For that and some related reasons, it is more than merely appropriate to compare the tragic farce currently being enacted on the U.S. government's stage, with the process of precipitous degeneration of Rome under the successors of Augustus and Tiberius, most notably the cases of Caligula and Nero.
You will not, of course, find an exact model of what our two "Emperors" Bush represent, in the Rome of A.D. 37-68. However, the tragic principle is similar in both sets of cases, and the current policy-profile of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. displays, increasingly, some ugly similarities—minus the sexual orgies—to the "geometric" characteristics of Nero's reign. Read the accounts of Tacitus and others from that time, and you should be horrified by the looming similarities between the pattern as it developed there and then, and as it threatens to unfold with us now.
The important differences between the pattern exhibited by most of the leading players in the current administration, and the Rome of A.D. 37-68, are principally two. First, is that cultural heritage of the American Revolution which was nobly affirmed by Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Second, is the fact that world-rule by the universal fascism of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and Henry Kissinger, et al., is insurgent, but not yet triumphant. In fact, the Bush Administration were likely to disintegrate, as a consequence of its own defense of an advanced stage of that economic and cultural degeneracy which has been in progress here during more than thirty-five years. My responsibility, and yours, is to utilize those two exceptional factors as the strategic premise on which we mobilize to save this nation, and the world generally as well.
My task is to act to save our nation, when no alternative leadership qualified for that task is currently in view.
The Present Situation on Stage
The reactions expressed by the President, and by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, to the situations in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the still-accelerating collapse of the present world monetary-financial system, depict a nation whose government's head is not in the real universe; a nation obsessed with the willful lies being used to foster the delusion that a current economic recovery is in progress. Compare the events of the burning of Rome under Nero to the developments of Sept. 11 and following, to date. An illusion-ridden reign marches triumphantly, like a parade of the living dead, setting its pace to the drum-beat of its own increasingly hysterical, desperate delusions. The President screams, ritually, like the Queen in Alice's dream, "Off with their heads!" So, the cards will fall. The drumbeats from Afghanistan and the Middle East foretell the tragic doom of the U.S. economic and strategic policies of the current moment.
It is their doom, but also, probably, the doom of all of us as well, as the hecatomb of Nero's rage cut open the veins and hacked off the heads of so many of the ruling elite, and others, of Rome in that time.
The point of my aside to you here, is to prompt you to compare the evident mental state of the Bush Administration with that of Rome under Nero. As I have warned you above, do not attempt an exact match between Nero's and Bush's administrations. Rather, get the flavor of the ironic similarities, the common characteristics of what are otherwise two quite different specific circumstances. The key to sorting out the similarities and differences, is your recognition that the U.S. policy under the Bush Administration today, is predominantly a strategic orientation toward establishing a universal-fascist form of English-speaking world-empire, which is an attempted parody of the ancient empire of pagan Rome.
See popular opinion in our nation's capital beltway today, as you may recognize the disgusting, tragically foolish behavior of popular opinion in Nero's time. Compare the delusions of Nero and his circles, with those in hegemonic circles of the administration, Congress, and Federal Court today. See clearly the tragic fatality lurking for the U.S. in the implications of continuing U.S.A. Afghanistan follies, and the naked support for the fascist regime of Israel's Ariel Sharon. A popular opinion which would support such policies is the mark of a self-doomed world power.
Grasp the enormity of the folly of many among you, who are still duped into the wishful delusion of a recovery which does not exist. Recognize how your credulities are digging the hole which threatens to become our national catastrophe.
With those words, I return to my part in the unfolding world drama before you.
