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mindsets, bread and circuses....

 

Studying archaeology, alongside Greek and Roman Civilization, for my bachelor’s degree has given me a pessimistic outlook on the world. At least that’s what my dad told me in June 2001 on a drive from Istanbul to Dublin. Yet he’s to blame for my studying the science after bringing me to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the cinema. The romantic career turned quickly into something different, when learning about ‘panem et circenses’ [bread and circuses] and standing knee deep in medieval human waste in the middle of an Irish bog.

 

Make Rome fall again

Trump’s UFC spectacle turns America’s birthday into a bloodsport metaphor for imperial decline

BY Alan Moore

 

As much as I enjoyed the classical world and knowing that the best finds usually emerged from cess pits, when I began covering sports the transition into the cess pit that is mixed martial arts (MMA), and especially the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), was a transition too far. For those offended by my words, then combat sports are not for you.

For 20 years I boxed up to international level, winning many medals, titles, and sharing the ring with legends like Wayne McCullough (Olympic silver medallist and pro world champ), Jake Matlala, Istvan Kovacs, and Naseem Hamed (all pro world champs). Punching someone in the head while they’re on the ground, or writhing about in tight shorts on the back of another person while trying to choke them, is not my cup of tea. I respect MMA fighters and coaches, but not their sport. Then again, seeing men beat up women for Olympic medals and ‘influencers’ beating up pension-age ex-boxers has stolen my fate in modern boxing too.

So, when I heard that there would be a UFC ‘event’ held at the White House, the Washington version, my archaeological senses took over and I immediately went back to the collapse of the Roman Empire. UFC Freedom 250 is the most appropriate event to celebrate 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, because it is another step down the path to self-immolation of the US Empire.

How Rome fell

As we close in on the bread and circuses in Washington D.C., a reminder of the signs that Rome’s time as a global power was ending.

- Debasing the currency: Reducing the amount of silver in coinage while increasing the amount of coins until they became worthless and debt levels soared.

- Self-serving government: From governing for the people and republic, senators and civil servants increasingly went into politics to enrich themselves, their friends, their backers, and their families.

- Outsourcing military: Instead of producing and providing for their armies, they put it all out to tender, without corruption checks. Not to mention hiring mercenaries.

- Infrastructure failure: Roads, bridges, ports, aqueducts etc were all neglected, with a focus on building follies and vanity projects.

- Populace disengages with civil life: Disillusioned, feeling unrepresented and ignored, the people turn away from trusted institutions. Not from apathy, but by choice. Increasing civil disobedience.

- Increased focus on bread and circuses: Keeping the plebs satisfied with bribes and/or entertainment became the norm. The more debased, outrageous, and insane the better.

- Divide to rule: The empire splits to manage it better, resulting in equal but different halves of the same entity. Externally, the entire structure looked weak to predators.

- Borders lose meaning: Security and stability are overlooked with occasional attempts by rulers to enforce rules of passage into and through the empire. But when it was generally accepted, it was too late, borders simply became lines on a map.

- It went bang, with a whimper: In 476 AD, Romulus Augustus was deposed and Odoacer simply informed Constantinople that the West no longer needed an emperor.

And there you have an annotated recap of how the Roman Empire fell. Can we see parallels with the US? Dollar debased, soaring debt levels, civil disobedience, belated attempts to secure the border, bridges collapsing and railways in disrepair? Big pharma reaping rewards from ‘zombifying’ citizens? The ‘circuses’ are coming hot and fast with a FIFA World Cup and Summer and Winter Olympic Games to come within the next decade. Yet, staging a UFC event on the White House lawn, not even Juvenal, who first used the term bread and circuses in 100 AD, could have expected that.

What is the UFC

Think WWE wrestling with less class and more blood. Which is funny as it’s owned by the WME Group, which also owns the WWE. The WME Group is headed by Ari Emmanuel, brother of Democrat insider and former White House Chief of Staff and US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel. The UFC is a closed shop, a ‘promotion’ or company with a limited stable of fighters under contract who take on opponents in an octagon-shaped cage. Entertaining the mob is vital and the more blood spilled, the louder they bay!

The CEO of the promotion, Dana White, is a long-time friend of the US president and played no small part in helping Trump win in 2024. For White, money talks and politics are only important when they make him richer. However, Dana sees through geopolitical bluster and contracts Russian fighters, knowing that his audience simply want to see action.

Seven fights, thus far, have been confirmed for UFC Freedom 250 and while no Russian fighters are due to perform, there is a chance that lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan might be called up. While musical groups and artists have been forced to shy away from Trump-related ‘250’ celebrations, they are rolling out the talented country singer Zac Brown to sing the national anthem. Not since 2001 has the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ been sung live at a UFC event.

The event will be broadcast on Paramount+, which is part of Paramount Skydance, the company run by David Ellison. Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire, and friend of Benjamin Netanyahu, Larry, also heads up CBS and CBS News. David is a nepo baby supreme. Despite Daddy’s largesse in funding movies for him to act in, he flopped on screen before Larry’s cash set up Skydance Media. This company would go on to produce and finance superb big screen hits like ‘World War Z’ and ‘Mission Impossible – Fallout’. The Ellisons are heavily supportive of Trump, Israel, and making….money. If there were a better media partner for this event than the Ellisons, and metaphor for the end of empire, then I’d love hear it.

What to expect

Hard to say, since I’ve not watched any UFC for a decade and before that a single full fight in 2007. I was back in Ireland on a working holiday from Croatia, ironing a shirt and watching Mirko ‘Cro Cop’ Filipovic get knocked out. From what a good friend and colleague, who covers ‘fight sports’ for an Irish national newspaper told me “You’ve an unbeaten Georgian-Spaniard [Ilia Topuria] fighting a likeable Trump-supporting American [Justin Gaethje] topping the card, with the latter poised to ‘win’.”

When I asked why he emphasized ‘win’, my friend laughed and said “No comment.” He went on to talk about the Irish-American Sean O’Malley who is also on the show and the “controversial but entertaining Trump-loving Josh Hokit.” Hokit, unbeaten thus far in his UFC ‘career’, has been outspoken on trans issues and accused US basketball star Brittney Griner of being a man. ‘The Incredible Hok’, as he is nicknamed, previously said the same about former First Lady Michelle Obama.

The Griner comment came this January, the first UFC event to be broadcast by Paramount+, at ringside following a fight and drew “laughter and cheers” from the crowd, with his interviewer Joe Rogan joining in the mirth.

The more outrageous, shocking, insulting, debased, and violent UFC Freedom 250 will be, the higher the ratings for David Ellison, the better the reaction for President Trump, and the quicker the empire will collapse.

The sun sets on every empire. My years of study and work in archaeology and history proved that to me. The Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, British, and many more in the modern era thought they knew how to beat the odds. But they all went the way of the Greeks, Incas, Romans, Macedonians, Aztecs, and Persians. Though none did it live on air, from the back garden of the presidential palace.

https://www.rt.com/pop-culture/641495-make-rome-fall-again/

 

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

war hats...

 

GUSNOTE: "PEACEFUL" AUSTRALIA — ALWAYS AT WAR WHEN THE POMS AND THE YANKS GO TO WAR.... WHICH IS NEARLY ALL THE TIME.... PRESENTLY [WE] AUSTRALIA SUPPORTS THE NAZIS IN YUCKRAINE BECAUSE... WE HAVE BEEN TOLD TO BY AMERICA AND MI6... WE SUPPORT "ISRAHELL" DESPITE HAVING DECLARED WE WANT A "PALESTINIAN STATE"... OUR DIPLOMACY REEKS OF WARMONGERING AS WE WAVE THE FLAG OF DISHONEST DIPLOMACY....

 

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Parliament ponders the way Australia goes to war
16 October 2022

 

When Australia became a nation on 1 January 1901, it was at war in South Africa and China.

The six Australian colonies had sent militia and bushmen contingents to the Boer War (1899–1902) and dispatched troops and ships to the Boxer Rebellion (1900–01).

The Commonwealth of Australia was blessed with its own continent and the most peaceful act of national creation. The federation was formed by agreement and referendum. Yet the Commonwealth inherited a foreign military tradition at its birth.

The first military unit established by the new federal government was the ‘Australian Commonwealth Horse’, which served in the final stage of the South African conflict. They were the first Australian troops to wear the rising sun badge, clipping the brim of the slouch hat. One of Australia’s most questionable fights, the Boer War, has one of Canberra’s most striking memorials—a patrol of four mounted soldiers edging their bronze horses down a slope to Anzac Parade.

The memorial has a verse from the journalist-poet Banjo Patterson, who served as a correspondent in South Africa:

When the dash and the excitement and the novelty are dead,
And you’ve seen a load of wounded once or twice,
Or you’ve watched your old mate dying—with the vultures overhead,
Well, you wonder if the war is worth the price.

Patterson’s ‘worth the price’ question often recurs in considering the nine times Australia committed to war in the 90 years from 1914 to 2003. What he reported as an imperial war would become alliance wars. The distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity is fraught, yet the Boer War counts as our first war of choice — Vietnam and Iraq are later additions to that column.

Australia goes abroad to fight for its alliance, to help set the central balance, and for what we now call the rules-based global order. We send our diggers offshore. Statecraft meets strategy as the expeditionary force sets out.

Australia has spent much of its history, as Coral Bell masterfully recounted, as a ‘dependent ally’, but it is a finely calculated reliance. Dissecting Australia’s strategic culture and way of war, Michael Evans observed that our pragmatic politics meant this ‘dependency has always been clever, cynical and calculated’.

The Boer War heralded another constant in the way the nation goes to war—the lack of any initiating role for the federal parliament. When Australian troops first sailed for South Africa, parliament didn’t even exist. In every war since, it has been the ghost with no formal voice in the most fundamental choice a nation can make. The executive has almost unfettered war powers.

The prime minister declares the deployment or announces the conflict and the military march. This is the leader’s most profound prerogative. The prime minister confident of cabinet and party can act without any authorisation or resolution from the parliament.

All this frames the just-announced parliamentary inquiry into ‘how Australia makes decisions to send service personnel into international armed conflict’. The review will wrestle with issues that echo down our 120 years of federation.

Previous pushes to give parliament a voice over war powers have come from minor parties in the Senate—the Australian Democrats and the Greens. This time, the discussion has been set in motion by a new government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government is acting on the platform it took to the May election. Under the heading ‘Armed conflict’, the Australian Labor Party’s national platform conference resolved:

that an Albanese Labor Government will refer the issue of how Australia makes decisions to send service personnel into international armed conflict to an inquiry to be conducted by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Trade.

The terms of reference set by Defence Minister Richard Marles ask the inquiry to consider:

  • the approach of similar Westminster-system democracies around the world
  • parliamentary processes and practices, including opportunities for debate to provide greater transparency and accountability on the deployment of the Australian Defence Force
  • the security implications of prenotification of ADF deployment that may compromise the safety of ADF personnel, operational security or intelligence and/or have unintended consequences
  • any related matters.

The terms of reference point to the inevitable tensions: secrecy and security versus what a democracy needs from its parliament. I’ve written a series of columns on the prime minister’s profound prerogative and the Australian way of war. My minimalist solution is not to push against executive powers, but to formalise conventions to ‘parliamentise’ the war powers.

Aim for a checklist if not a legal check when war is launched. And use the checklist for greater parliamentary oversight of the way war is waged. Over the past two decades, prime ministers as diverse as John Howard, Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard have offered footholds on which parliament could build conventions.

A greater role for parliament will respond to seismic shifts in Australian politics. The two ‘parties’ of government—Labor and Liberal–National—must adjust to the change in the way Australians vote.

John Howard defines that shift in his new book:

When I first became active in politics in the early 1960s, what I described as the 40–40–20 rule obtained. This meant 40% always voted for the ALP, 40% for the Coalition, and 20% floated between the two, or voted for minor parties or independents. In recent years, I have commonly remarked that the old 40–40–20 rule has been replaced by a 30–30–40 rule.

At the May election, Howard’s new equation ‘came remarkably close to reality’—one-third of the primary vote went to Labor, one-third went to the Coalition, and the rest went elsewhere. The preferential system means ‘Australia remains firmly with the two-party paradigm’ in forming government, as Howard notes.

In that 30–30–40 world, the relationship of the executive to parliament will alter. We will have more minority governments in the future than we’ve had in the past.

In that future, the prime minister’s prerogative for war must, at the least, nod to the views and voice of the parliament.

https://www.aspi.org.au/strategist-posts/parliament-ponders-the-way-australia-goes-to-war/

 

GUSNOTE: AS MUCH AS WE HATE ASPI, A WARMONGERING ORGANISATION WITH ITS BRAINS MANAGED BY THE US EMPIRE AND THE WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS, AS MUCH AS WE SEE THE RISE OF THE KILLERS OF DEMOCRACY, THE HANSONITES, AND THE DOWNFALL OF THE LIBS [WITH A RETURN TO TURDY ABBOTT LEADING THE CHARGE], THE ARTICLE ABOVE IS FAIR TO A POINT. 

PEACE.

 

READ FROM TOP.

PLEASE VISIT:

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

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