THE DECAY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE

One case among many: Bill Clinton and Theodosius

In the last decades the behavior of the US, his government, his oligarchs and his citizens, seems to reveal a repetition of the signs of the decay of the ancient Rome. The corruption, the rejection of the aliens (the new barbarians), the lacking of cohesion in his society, reflected in a triple way, by one side, in the ghettos or urban areas divided by race or national origin, black Americans, Koreans, Jews, Spanish, not to mention the Indian American reserves; in a second form, its domestic violence, in some cases spontaneously expressed (indiscriminate shootings), in others an institutionalized repression; thirdly and last, but not least, by the abysmal increase of the difference of income between the rich minority and the rest of the population. But, above all, the most significant reproduction of a Roman symptom of decay in the modern United States comes from his criminal brutality on other nations, let alone that this brutality is not new at all when considering its foundational extermination of the Native American peoples, and more recently the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the systematic shelling of German civilians (jointly with the British), a carpet bombing of cities during the WWII.

The latter is not Roman, for the foundation or Rome would seem more like that of Russia. The bellicosity of Rome came from its constant defense from its surrounding adversaries¹, culminating, once it already became an emerging power, with his war against Carthage, being a very crucial moment of his history its ultimate resistance in front of them, when everything seemed to be against the very existence of Rome: when the Romans had nothing left to lose but their own lives and their nation, in the most absolute act of courage they decided to fight to the last breathe…, and they defeated the enemy. We can find a similar spirit in Russian history when, overwhelmed by the European alliance leaded by France in the early 19^th century, instead of surrendering its capital, they used the Fabian² strategy, burning and abandoning Moscow, whereupon coming back to destroy the enemy, pursuing them to the gates of Paris.

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The Very Particular Case of President Bill Clinton and Emperor Theodosius

Although it can be asserted that the flighty brutality and cruelty of president Bill Clinton more or less equals that of any other president of the United States, it is also true that in one of his murderous decisions there was a very particular behavior, one that reveals a very hypocrite and frivolous personality. I am referring to the bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, ordered directly by himself. His motivation, based exclusively upon a personal interest, lacking of any kind of economic or geopolitical domination, neither a retaliatory reason, nor any other possible interest for his country, and his feigned remorse, shown on the following next Sunday in front of the cameras summoned to broadcast his visit to church jointly with at the time First Lady, Hillary Clinton, somehow it all recalls the case of the Roman Emperor Theodosius.

The case of Theodosius has been considerably softened by many historians and contemporaries³ because of being considered the champion of Christianity⁴, a posture that has been criticized and contradicted by others, also historians and contemporaries, and should be taken with skepticism when considering his implacable repression against all the other religions, and mainly against the classic Greco-Roman paganism. His most awful case took place in Thessalonica, in the year 390. To describe it I will turn to a modern classic.

According to Voltaire, Nero never did anything comparable to the Massacre of Thessalonica: “The Cantabrian feigned to pardon the Thessalonians and, six months later he had them invited to some games at the city’s hippodrome in which there could stand at least 15,000 people, and there is no doubt that it was full. It is well known the people’s passion for the spectacles. Fathers and mothers carried those their children that yet barely could walk. As soon as the crowd filled the stadium, the emperor sent Christian soldiers to slaughter the elderly, the youngster, women, and children, sparing no one’s live”. And here is the similarity between both personalities, which we discover as our author eloquently explains what did the emperor did next as a consequence of his action: “this monster is praised by all our plagiarizing compilers because, they say, he did penance”⁵, meaning that he attended Mass⁶; just like Clinton did sixteen centuries later. A spiritual successor of Theodosius, being not an Emperor but the chief of a so-called Republic, which is so only by name not for real, thus the reality demonstrates that it’s an oligarchy with imperial projection.

The Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant was bombed on August 20^th 1998, using cruise missiles. The attack was ordered personally by Clinton one week after the Monica Lewinsky scandal and 2 months after the release of the film Wag the Dog, with the aim of distracting the public from both, its sexual misconduct with an apprentice and the film that exposes a president attempting to divert public attention from a scandal he is embroiled in by fabricating a conflict. The thing is that by doing so Clinton caused the death of thousands in Sudan, including children; a year passed after the attack, “without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan’s death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise… Thus, tens of thousands of people — many of them children — have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases… [The factory] provided affordable medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical products… Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant’s destruction…”. This action “continues to deprive the people of Sudan of needed medicine”⁷. And let’s not forget that the US blocked any UN inquiry on the case.

The explanation given by the White House, that Sudan was using the pharmaceutical plant to produce chemical weapons – sounds familiar? – was completely rebuked by every kind of proves and investigations, as the technical report mentioned by Lord McNair, UK member of parliament, confirms: “Professor Thomas Tullius, Chairman of Boston University’s Department of Chemistry, conducted detailed tests on the remains of the Al Shifa factory. The analysis, carried out in three accredited European laboratories, did not uncover a shred of evidence to support American claims that the Al Shifa factory was involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons”⁸.

In his parliamentary intervention Lord McNair remarks that “everyone, except for a few who cannot afford to face the truth, now accepts that Al Shifa was a factory producing a range of medicines” and that “even the American Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s own intelligence service, has admitted that the attack was a serious error of judgment”; such an “error”, paraphrasing the Agency, was immediately cleared by the quoted MP by using the proper words in the sense that “the attack was a foreign policy disaster which set the Islamic world against the United States and, by association, the United Kingdom. It was also a catastrophe for the Sudanese people because a factory that produced two-thirds of Sudan’s medicines at an affordable price was destroyed and has not been replaced”⁹. Neither replaced, nor repaired in any sense of this term, for no compensation was conceded to the harmed.

If we go further, giving credit to the statement issued by the American Intelligence, that it was a “misjudgment”, although it is impossible to believe that the US did not know that there were no weapons production coming from the Al-Shifa factory, whatever the case, as it was addressed in the British Parliament, both governments, the American and the British, had, “a few months earlier, pointedly refused repeated Sudanese requests that they examine a factory on the outskirts of Khartoum which the Americans alleged to have been involved in the production of chemical weapons”¹⁰. Here, doesn’t it sound familiar once again? When looking back at the Iraq War, when all the evidence indicated that there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Finally, may I bring on this matter the opinion of a prominent American intellectual, underscoring the double standard applied in the US concerning the so called preemptive and undeclared wars¹¹, not only from his Administration but from his society:

“The bombing of Sudan (…). It’s another one of those things that didn’t happen because we did it. The Clinton administration knew perfectly well that the target was the major producer of pharmaceutical and veterinary supplies for a poor African country. (…) They knew they were bombing a core part of the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, that’s going to have devastating effects. It was known instantly. We don’t know how much, because, again, we don’t investigate or care about the results of our crimes, which didn’t exist. But the few credible estimates that are available from the German ambassador –in a paper published in the ultra-left Harvard International Review and another in the Boston Globe by the regional director of the Near East Foundation, who had field experience in Sudan– both estimate several tens of thousands of deaths, which is plausible, maybe more, maybe less”¹².

1. Similar to what happened to Russia. ↩︎
2. Quintus Fabius Maximusused used the scorched earth strategy during the Second Punic War to stop the Carthaginians. ↩︎
3. And still now its figure is portraited avoiding or excusing his harsh repression on the dissidents, especially on religious basis. See for instance The Britannica, when assessing an edict issued by Theodosius on February 28, 380, prescribing a creed that was to be binding on all subjects: “There is no doubt that the principle of religious intolerance was proclaimed in this edict.  However – which should not be viewed simply as an isolated measure – it must be remembered that to the Christians Theodosius was emperor by the grace of God. While thus committed to defend the true faith, he by no means carried out his stated intention by force” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theodosius-I), being this a statement strongly contested by the facts registered/document by history. ↩︎
4. “See how all our unworthy chroniclers of Roman history kneel before Constantine and Theodosius, and with what baseness they downplay and justify their crimes”. Voltaire, François-Marie. ↩︎
5. “What penance, for God’s sake! He did not give an obol to the parents of the dead. But he attended Mass, sure. We have to recognize that the suffering is horrible when you don’t attend Mass, that God acknowledges it infinitely, and that it is something that redeems you from all crimes”.  Voltaire, F-M; Escritos Anticristianos, pp. 283 and 284; Diputació de València, 2021. (Translation by the author of this article). ↩︎
6. Although he had to wait 8 months because Saint Ambrose banished him from all the churches of Milan, the city in which he was residing. ↩︎
7. Jonathan Belke, Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 1999; cited in “Chomsky Replies to Hitchens”, https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/chomsky-replies-to-hitchens-by-noam-chomsky/ ↩︎
8. www.parliament.uk. House Session 13 oct. 1999. ↩︎
9. Ibidem. ↩︎
10. Ibidem. ↩︎
11. Paraphrasing Senator Rand Paul. ↩︎
12. Noam Chomsky interviewed by David Barsamian, International Socialist Review, Issue 37, September–October, 2004. ↩︎