Where are you going, America?

In a speech given to the House of Commons in 1948, Winston Churchill issued — the hot breath of war still blowing on the neck of Europe — a warning to the world: “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

The phrase was not his; he borrowed it from the great Spanish-American philosopher and poet George Santayana who in his “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress” proclaimed: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  

 “Progress,” Santayana said, “far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness,” that is, on a society having an accumulated body of knowledge derived from capturing the truth of what appears before the eyes. 

He added that, when a society fails to retain the lessons of the past, “infancy is perpetual” and making no “improvement,” it moves a step closer to its demise, certainly to a disfigurement beyond recognition.

In my own way, I say the same thing in my most recent work “Veni, Vidi, Trucidavi: Caesar the Killer; A Man Who Destroyed Nations So He Might Be King.”

The title is a play on Caesar’s famous “Veni, Vidi, Vici”: “I Came I Saw I Conquered.” 

Mine says, “I Came I Saw I Slaughtered,” referring to the pall of death caused by the vast military machine Caesar produced to mow down the native tribes of Gaul during his nine years as governor there.

The premise of “Veni, Vidi, Trucidavi” is that a grand jury is convened to determine whether Caesar committed genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes or maybe them all, to satisfy an innate drive to become the king of Rome.

Every reader of the book is asked to be a member of the grand jury and — after listening to the evidence the prosecutor presents — moi — to determine what crimes Caesar should be convicted of.

The blurb on the back was offered by the esteemed classicist James O’Donnell, who wrote: “Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times in the most dramatic and spectacular assassination in all recorded history. Dennis Sullivan makes it twenty-four, with a compelling account of the man and his many crimes. He brings Caesar to life as his fans and apologists have never been able to do. Learning to do justice to the great villains of history can help us cast a cooler eye on the malevolent leaders who have swarmed onto the world stage in our time.”

Modern historians have called attention to the many similarities between the Republic of Rome and the Republic of the United States, often intimating that the history of Rome toward the end of the Republic’s life, has lessons for the United States if it wishes to keep its democratic boat afloat.  

Caesar hammered the last nail in the coffin of Rome’s republican government by putting his own needs above the city’s collective identity — a way of life Roman citizens cherished since 509 B.C. when it ousted its last king.

Many writers and historians have called attention to the desire of the current president of the United States to be a king as he keeps hammering nails into the coffin of American democracy.  

In her Jan. 9, 2025 article in The New Yorker called “King Donald and the Presidents at the National Cathedral,” Susan Glasser refers to the five former chief executives of the United States who were present at the funeral service of President Jimmy Carter, four of whom she calls “president,” the other a king.   

How amazing she says that, “at a pre-inaugural press conference as if … he had been elected not President but Emperor, [he spoke about] how he wanted to annex Canada, take over the Panama Canal, and force the sale of Greenland to the U.S. — and he would not rule out the use of coercion against the U.S.’s allies in order to do so.”

Such goals are achievable today because a lobotomized America has lost her memory “spread out against the sky,” to give a nod to T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “like a patient etherized upon a table.”

The republican Rome of Caesar was similarly anesthetized having forgotten the lessons Lucius Cornelius Sulla sent, the man who started Rome’s first civil war, who set himself up as dictator for life, and the first citizen to seize the presidency of the republic by force.

What is worrisome to many Americans now is that nominees for upcoming federal cabinet jobs admit there is an “enemies list” while the man nominated to head the FBI, Kash Patel, says he will “come after” journalists and all enemies like them.

Outgoing president, Joe Biden, took the retribution threats seriously, so that on Monday, Jan. 20 — his last day in office — he issued preemptive pardons to those threatened with social extinction: Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley, and the lawmakers who served on the January 6th Committee.

On Nov. 2, in 82 B.C., the day after Sulla took full control of Rome (Italy) by force, he went to the Senate and asked the lawmakers to sanction his proscription list, which entailed killing or banishing citizens who disagreed with the way he exercised power.

When the Senate rejected his proposal, the dictator went to Rome’s popular assembly — essentially our House of Representatives — and there got the OK to proceed with the slaughter.

Sulla began by publicizing a list of 80 of the highest-ranking public officials — the Liz Cheneys, Adam Schiffs, and Adam Kinzingers of the day — whom he wanted dead and, a day or two later, came out with a second list of 440 more names.

The streets of Rome were already damp with blood because right after he took over, Sulla ordered the slaughter of 6,000 Samnite prisoners, the cries of their bodies being hacked apart within earshot of the gathered Senate, terrifying everyone. Sulla said the hub-bub was “nothing more than the screaming of a few criminals paying the just penalty for their crimes.”  

The property of anyone proscribed was confiscated and put up for sale, the same for his descendants who lost their civil rights and were then banished from the country.

Every Roman knew who was on the death list because the names had been prominently displayed in the Forum. It signaled the beginning of a bounty hunter’s paradise. 

That is: Everyone who killed one of the proscribed received a large monetary reward and was immune from prosecution; those who informed on a black-lister also received a gift, and slaves who “took out” someone were freed. Monies to pay for the bloodbath came from the aerarium, the public treasury, thereby making every Roman citizen an accessory to the fact.

In order for a “hit man” to receive compensation, he had to produce the head of the demised; indeed, Sulla had groups of heads paraded through the streets raised high on pikes, the artifacts later put on display at the communal speakers’ platform, the Rostrum; there was to be no burial for the traitors and no public mourning was allowed; heads and bodies were left for the birds of the air.

The French historian François Hinard remarks, in his classic work on the subject “Les proscriptions de la Rome républicaine” (1985 )— the detail he offers is chilling — that the monies changing hands with all the killing exceeded two million sesterces.

The insatiate pig in the crowd, Marcus Licinius Crassus, bought so many of the confiscated properties that he was on his way to becoming the richest man in Rome, worth, in today’s market, well over two-hundred-million dollars.   

Sulla said the extermination was his response to what the other party had done to him and his: the Republican and Democratic factions of ancient Rome having been reduced to dealing with ideological differences through extermination. 

In his monologue on the television program “Saturday Night Live” for Jan. 18, stand-up comedian Dave Chappelle said he hoped the incoming president would “do better [than he did the last] time” and asked all avowed Sulla-like retributivists in his camp to “not forget your humanity … please have empathy for displaced people, whether they're in the Palisades or Palestine” or must every American be looking over his shoulder like Satchel Paige?  

Quo vadis, America? Quo vadis?