MOTUS A.D.: Beware The Ides of March

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

There is more than one reason to be wary today. It’s Super Tuesday II and, yes, it is the Ides of March - the day Julius Caesar was assassinated by a coalition of his friends and family.

Butt that’s not the only significant political take-down that took place on March 15; in 1917 Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate his throne thus ending the 304-year-old Romanov dynasty that ushered in Bolshevik rule. He and his family are taken captive and later executed before a firing squad.

So a little heads up for politicians and proletarians alike: when the people finally get fed up enough they take matters into their own hands. And that doesn’t always work out so well either so let’s be careful out there.

The Democrats have their own kind of quandary; they have to choose between an old socialist and an even older socialist. The Republican options are less clear. Removing one Caesar won’t necessarily solve Rome’s problem:

The men who murdered Caesar considered themselves as “liberators” of the republic. Whatever may have been their motives, they seem to have taken little thought as to how Rome would be governed after they had killed their tyrant. If they thought that the senate would take up the powers it had lost, and successfully rule the republic, they were grievously mistaken. The only leading man of the senate who had survived the last civil war was Cicero; but Cicero with all his learning and eloquence could not take the place of Caesar. What Rome needed was what the liberators had taken from her, a master mind of broad views and of great executive power. We need not be surprised that the death of Caesar was followed by confusion and dismay.

And we all know how badly the Bolshevik Revolution turned out: