American People facing same problems Roman People faced over 2,000 years ago
From Rocky Montana
"We are taxed in our bread and our wine, in our incomes and our investments, on our land and on our property not only for base creatures who do not deserve the name of men, but for foreign nations, compliant nations who will bow to us and accept our largesse and promise us to assist in the keeping of the peace--these mendicant nations who will destroy us when we show a moment of weakness or our treasure is bare, and surely it is becoming bare! We are taxed to maintain legions on their soil, in the name of law and order by the 'Pax Romana', a document which will fall into dust when it passes our allies and our vassals. We keep them in precarious balance only with our Gold. Is the heart-blood of our nation worth these? Were they bound to us with ties of love, they would not ask our gold. They take our very flesh, and they hate and despise us. And who shall say we are worthy of more?
... When a government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent; it is a usurer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honorable men of their substance, for votes, with which to perpetuate itself."
--Cicero, 54 B.C.
"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 he carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among 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 no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victims and he wears their face and their garments, and 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 a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared."
--Cicero, 54 B.C.
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Resource: 'HANDWRITING ON THE WALL', Phoenix Journal Express, February 1991. http://www.phoenixarchives.com/express/index-1991.html
Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC) was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist.
During the chaotic latter half of the first century B.C. marked by civil wars and the dictatorship of Galius Julius Caesar, Cicero championed a return to the traditional republican government.
Cicero became an enemy of Mark Anthony, attacking him in a series of speeches. He was proscribed an enemy of the state by the Second Triumvirate and subsequently murdered in 43 BC.
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Resource: Wikipedia
August 6, 2010