July Celebrates Genocide Month

[By Lionel Royer - Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay, Auvergne, France]

As we’re reexamining our history (both American and bipedal) and deciding what we want to memorialize and honor, July is a good time to reflect upon the fact that the entire month commemorates a guy who carried out genocidal slaughter in the heart of Europe. Not referring to Hitler here, but rather Julius Caesar.

There’s a new translation out of Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul, called this time The War for Gaul, so it’s a good occasion to get past those Latin 101 lessons about how Gallia is omnis divisa in partes tres and recall that JC was a bloodthirsty imperialist who marauded through the forests of what we now call France to make himself a fortune and please the homies back in Rome with some new provinces. Some of the tribes tried to avoid or slip out of the Roman yoke while others bowed to the inevitable, but Caesar still found ways to dispatch somewhere around 700,000 to a million “barbarians” in his pursuit of glory. And he didn’t even need to discover America to achieve it.

In a sane world, this behavior would be considered deeply pathological, but instead we have no problem marveling at Caesar’s accomplishments, which also included another million Gallic civilians sent south into slavery. Plutarch in one passage reports that after a battle “the destruction was such that lakes and deep rivers were filled up with dead bodies and became passable to the Romans.” Imagine if they had had nuclear weapons or even gunpowder.

Caesar didn’t rule as dictator for very long (49-44 BCE), but he did manage to revamp the old Roman calendar into what became known as the Julian version, in which Quintilis posthumously turned into Iulius (July). Therefore, we still blithely mark our mid-summer frolics with the name of a man so notorious for mass slaughter and the slave trade that Robert E. Lee looks positively benign by comparison.

The point is not to morally relativize the Confederate slave-drivers and -traders but to revisit how easily we swallow the heroics of male bipeds whose behavior in its modern form is driving us quickly to species eradication. There is a statue of JC overlooking the Naples coast, and I gather it would occur to few Italians to remove it while plenty would be scandalized at the thought of one celebrating Mussolini. But Caesar helped Rome build its mighty empire, so Dante put his turncoat assassins Brutus and Cassius in the deepest circle of Hell, stuffed feet first into two of the three mouths of Satan himself. (Judas Iscariot got the third socket).

Human populations think it’s cool if their particular team (ethnicity, city-state, nation, empire) rules the roost, and they evidently experience little moral disquiet about how that control is maintained. Just to pick on the Romans a bit more, here’s one set of estimates of how many people died in their various campaigns to broaden and sustain the Empire: First Punic War (264-241 BCE) 400 thousand; Second Punic War (218-202 BCE) 770 thousand; Genocide of Carthage (146 BCE) population reduced from 500 to 55 thousand; Social (internal Italian) Wars (91-88 BCE) 300 thousand; Mithridatic Wars 400 thousand; Servile Wars (slave revolts) (134-71 BCE) 1 million; Gaul 700 thousand; British revolt 150 thousand; Jewish Wars 350 thousand; and so on. This doesn’t count the considerable numbers of Romans who died after falling into disfavor nor the estimated 3.5 million gladiators who died over seven centuries of games at the rate of 8,000 per arena-year. Boys will be boys.

This was obviously a polity whose elite was quite comfortable with the mind-boggling level of destruction required to sustain its dominance. But before we succumb to pride, let’s consider if there’s any reason to think that humanity or our benighted slice of it has advanced beyond such indifference—though the immediate motivations among those at the top may well have changed. For example, on the presumably incoming Biden team we find not war heroes hungry for triumphal processions to parade the captured enemy chieftains and stolen loot but Beltway sleaze merchants angling for a fat government contract for their buds in the armament industries, to which end they are determined to keep all the wars going and, better yet, to start new ones. The essential bloody-mindedness hasn’t changed, just its form.

Another variation is the sophistication of modern propaganda, but that turns out to be nothing so novel either. Romans were aghast at their unruly subjects getting a swelled head or forgetting to pay tribute and regularly sent out generals to slap down the provincials by skewering a few hundred thousand, that is, when they weren’t busy crucifying backtalking household servants. In modern times, we rely on our own interpreters of sheep entrails at the Temple of Jupiter, i.e. “intelligence sources” who whisper gnomic phrases about Russians paying off treacherous subjects to slip a dagger into a few centurions here and there. We display no greater skepticism at these oracular pronouncements from our pontifex maximus on the Potomac than the Romans did when massing their legions for a campaign against Carthage or the rebellious Helvetii.

At a less dire historical moment, one could be resigned to the incorrigible failings our of hyper-developed species and retreat to one’s garden. But when the preservation of our habitat hangs in the balance facing multiple threats, looking away from our cruel record is not an affordable luxury. We must question far more deeply, refuse easy answers, and demand nothing less than the reordering of the human spirit. Or die.

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