According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
Archived at https://archive.is/He9O6
It was not what he did before declaring himself ‘Emperor for life’, because Caesar never declared himself Emperor.
The initiation of the civil war was not because Caesar decided to deploy troops as a matter of suppressing popular dissent, but because the Senate, at the behest of the ultraconservative Cato the Younger, was hell-bent on having the reformer Caesar executed for behavior of his that the Senate had already sanctioned, and preventing the democratic popular assemblies from saving him.
Caesar, quite famously, did not repress his political enemies, even during the civil war; those political enemies who remained in territory he controlled were left unharmed and unimpeded; those who fought against him were unconditionally pardoned. Many of them went on to stab him several years later, so it’s not like he was pardoning just the harmless ones.
Caesar’s appointment as dictator in perpetuity was not preceded by military crackdowns.
You just love ruining our Ancient Rome arguments with reality, don’t you? 😝
It’s an addiction. ROME’S HONOR MUST BE DEFENDED