Before the Romans and Caledonians clashed in the Battle of Mons Graupius, a warlord named Calgacus delivered a speech to his men, an opprobrium of Pax Romana. The Romans had come to lay the garlanded chains of civilization on the countryside of what is now north-east Scotland, home of free Celtic tribes.
“To robbery, slaughter, plunder,” Calgacus said, “they give the lying name of empire; they make a wasteland and call it peace.”
This was a first-century rejection of the “bitter clingers” view articulated by Barack Obama in our time. Small town Americans, like those in the Midwest bearing the long brunt of globalization, he said, tend to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The plunder of neoliberalism, from Ronald Reagan to Obama, left a wasteland called “progress.”
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