A Warning from Ancient Rome

As stores and shops in our cities board up in anticipation of riots in the wake of our election, as groups like Antifa and BLM and their enablers among the progressive left threaten to destroy our institutions and erase our heritage, and, as less violent but equally corrosive forces permeate academia and our pop culture, this post, first put up on VP a couple of years ago, seems appropriate:

Here are words of a man who lived over two thousand years ago in circumstances not too dissimilar from those we find ourselves in today. His words might cause us to pause and reflect. The man is Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the chief citizens of Rome in the first century B.C. and one of the most famous of all Romans. He writes:

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

I hope Cicero was right that a nation can survive fools and the ambitious. I'm quite certain he's right, unfortunately, that a nation cannot survive corruption that starts and spreads from within. When the "pillars of the city," the institutions that bind us together and strengthen us as a people, are undermined we become like a massive tree that's hollowed out by years of internal decay and crashes to the ground in the next strong wind.

When people are conditioned by those who want to see us fall, people who want us to lose trust in our government, our courts, and our traditional freedoms, when our citizens, especially our young, are alienated, isolated and atomized by their obsession with impersonal technology, when the citizenry is encouraged to no longer value or respect family, religion, school and the Constitution, when everyone is propagandized to believe that a large majority of citizens is ineradicably corrupted by racism and every manner of phobia, and when what matters most is our own personal happiness best achieved through entertainment, hedonism and the accumulation of consumer goods, then we, like that tree, like ancient Rome, will be too corrupt to withstand stresses imposed either from within or without.

One way to avoid that fate, perhaps, is to recognize the many voices in our culture whose rhetoric is designed to erode our confidence and faith in the institutions and principles that made America great (I don't mean that to sound Trumpian).

The second thing is to stand up to those voices, to refute them, repudiate them or ignore them altogether.

The third thing is to get about the business of repairing the damage that has already been done to the "pillars of the city."

If enough people commit themselves to this project then perhaps we can avoid the fate that Rome suffered. If not, if, as Cicero puts it, we lose the will to resist the ideological toxins in our culture then how will we keep the human wolves at bay?