Syrians, Assyrians, and Americans

Early yesterday, I posted the following comment on Facebook.  I had intended to expand upon it on this website, but I spent much of the day making Julia Child's Catalan Beef Stew, which we had not prepared for decades.  After the culinary labors, I could only muster the energy for reading several chapters of Echart Fram's history of the Assyrian Empire and waiting with impatience for the magic hour when I could drink two dry Manhattans with my son-in-law Nick, who insisted on making a third.  By that point, I could easily declare my Catalan Beef Stew a triumph.  Here, at any rate, is my one sentence on the great democratic victory in the Middle East:

Now that the Merchants of Death have overthrown one more moderate leader, we can hold our breath a few hours before the rebels’ mass murders and persecution of Christians will be the reason for doubling down on all the money we spent to get rid of Assad.

Even before Assad's prisons were opened, our official media were predicting instruments of torture and all the other accoutrements of a Gothic novel.  Who knows what is true and what is fictional?  Anyone who expected to maintain rule in Syria or Iraq or Iran--or Israel, for that matter--cannot afford to be  too delicate.  The Sumerians and Akkadians and the Babylonians who inherited their civilization were tough enough, but the Assyrians--for whatever set of reasons--were extravagant in their boastings of violence.  While some historians have sought to treat their rhetoric as mere propaganda, the excavations of their scenes of conquest--Ashdod, for example--confirm even the quaint habit of cutting babies out of the wombs of expectant mothers.  Assyrian reliefs even depict their favored method of execution--flaying alive.

Assyrian rulers, like their American imitators, claimed to rule the four corners of the world, and under their Empire pushed into Phoenicia, Anatolia, and Egypt.  Increasingly their kings appropriated semi-divine honors and shared authority and glory with no one.  Despite building the first serious road system and taxing their subjects heavily, they could not keep the empire together.  Internal rivalries, coupled with the resurgence of Babylon and the emergence of the Medes and Persians did them in.  As Empires centralize power in one man and his accomplices, struggles for succession and civil wars become inevitable.  Isn't that the point of real bitterness between our two political parties?  Infatuated with alliteration, we might even be tempted to say:  Better boodle embitters battles.

Frahm waxes sarcastic about peoples living on the fringes of the Assyrian Empire, and dismisses the Ionian Greeks as pirates and mercenaries whom latter day Europeans regard as creating their civilization.  In his scenario, the Ionians play the role of the primitive egg-eating mammals who in the modern Creation Myth helped to kill of fthe great and powerful Old Ones we teach our children to worship--I mean of course the terror-lizards, the dinosaurs.

Years ago, when I made a small noise by proclaiming "the end of the American century," a semi-Straussian professor I used to have lunch with tried to set me straight by repeating his friend Harvey Mansfield's warning that a nation that wanted to survive had to be great and powerful.  All my gabble about the Greek polis and the Medieval Italian city-states was beside the point.  To survive one had to rule.

He was right, of course, so long as mere existence, mere survival, mere success and power were all that mattered, though I might point out that the greatest empire--the Empire of Romans--has been correctly described as a confederation of city-states, and that the larger though less great Empire of Britain granted as much local self-government as the people were capable of.

Good empires aside, I'd prefer Athens in the early fifth century to Nineveh or Napoleonic Paris.  Even the historically obscure hickville capital of Judea would be more satisfying than Washington.

"For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness."

There is a not entirely successful sonnet by an obscure poet on the subject, which I am posting.