The Glory That Was Rome
Does history reflect a more glorious era than that of fabled Rome of yore? Its leaders were men of great vision and great enterprise, bringing Rome to the status of world power at a time in world history when other countries hosted tribes of roaming adversarial populations whose lives were rudimentary and brutal. Romulus and Remus had a vision, imparted to them by a she-wolf who promised them world dominance.Which was exactly what Rome aspired to and succeeded in achieving, during that faint historical time: dominance over much of the-then-known world. Her engineering feats in building towns, roads, bridges and armies were unsurpassed by any others in the ancient world. Her engineering techniques remain the marvel of modern technology. She introduced hygienic living conditions in her towns and cities, with a form of domestic plumbing far in advance of her times.
Her great amphitheatres and communal steam baths, the public infrastructure, the civic administrations of great renown and function, set her apart from any other known authority of the time. Rome had grand ambitions and she strove to extend her dominion, and then to control the results of her conquests, against the primitive hordes outside her borders.
Her legions of conscripts and generals, their war strategies and techniques which made them invincible through the use of projectiles and the storied phalanx, battering rams, siege machines and armour, the assembled throngs of endless shields to protect her troops, ensured she was the military scourge of her time. Rome advanced her agenda to grasp ever greater territories, to conquer her neighbours, and she ruled with an iron fist.
Where is Rome today? Her manifest destiny achieved, it was but a blink of time, and she went into swift decline, leaving the world evidence of her vast achievements; no one dwells too much on the corruption that beset her, the loosening of moral conviction and succumbing to an ongoing series of regicide, and the dissolving of the world power state of Rome.
She has her counterpart in the Middle East, when in the mists of history Persia and Phoenicia, and above all Egypt, displayed themselves as shining examples of human progress, paving the way for artistic endeavour par excellence: philosophy, engineering; the building of the enigmatic Sphinx, the burial places of the Pharoahs, the preservation of mummies, the Pyramids, the establishment of trade routes, and finally, the great advance of deicide in favour of monotheism.
Where is that geography today? Evaporated, lost in antiquity. Left behind is the pride in the memory of an accomplishment now denied its modern denizens. The vision and the talent, the ambitiously-capable functioning of state and enterprise - all of it dissolved into nothingness. What is left is the dross of mankind's worst nightmares of incapacity, inaction, mired in the swamp of resentment, disinclination, envy, anger and predilection to visit punishment upon one's perceived enemies.
Where the population that was once Rome has declined, they have yet metamorphized into a pacific people, generous and good-hearted, embracing their land as agronomists, farmers, grape growers, cheese makers. Their parliaments are fractious, short-lived and self-disabling. They gave birth to a different type of clan, a mafia of powerful cliques seeking control and personal enrichment with their inbred sense of honour and pacts among thieves.
Where the population that was once Egypt has declined, it is ruled by a despotic functionary class, the people humbled by their circumstances, fractious and complaining among themselves, yet given to hospitality and kindness as long as one is not identified as foreign or an enemy, and then they are relentless in their pursuit of revenge, befitting an Arab tradition of Bedouin existence living long past practicality.
In Italy, children are blessings and valued for the goodness that is inherent in mankind. They represent the hopes for the future, the culmination of marriages, the belief in the Catholic Church to be fruitful and multiply. They seem not to be destined ever again to produce the Renaissance genius of artistry that once they gifted the world with, nor one such as Leonardo da Vinci. But anything is possible, who knows what the future may bring?
Back to the Middle East, there is a large disgruntled, unhappy and dissatisfied population that also has many children, for Allah too encourages His flock to be fruitful and to multiply. There too mothers love their children. And a 2002 Palestinian Authority schoolbook written under the auspices of Fatah, leading the Palestinian Authority teaches tender young minds thusly:
"O heroes, Allah has promised you victory.... Do not talk yourselves into flight.... Your enemies seek life while you seek death. They seek spoils to fill their empty stomachs while you seek a Garden [Paradise] as wide as are the heavens and the earth. Do not be anxious to meet them [enemies], for death is not bitter in the mouth of the believers. These drops of blood that gush from your bodies will be transformed tomorrow into blazing red meteors that will fall down upon the heads of your enemies." (Reading and Texts Part II, Grade 8 (2002), p. 16)
The Director of the Palestinian Children's Aid Association admitted on PA television that PA schools indoctrinate children to love self-immolation in order to "meet...God". "The concept of shahada for the child means belonging to the homeland, from a religious point of view. Sacrifice for the homeland. Achieving shahada in order to reach Paradise and to meet God. This is the best. We also teach our children to protect the homeland, belonging and to reach shahada."Can there be much of a future for children taught the glories of suicide to favour a demanding God? Malleable, searching minds should be taught to question and to look for reasonable answers to what puzzles them; how to make their way in the world, to attain a future for themselves, to bring comfort and satisfaction to themselves and their societies, to reach for the meaning of life, not find meaning in death.
Labels: Middle East, Political Realities
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, June 27, 2007
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