Kim Jong-Un: Secretive, ruthless, egomaniacal, erratic at best, certifiably insane at worst. Commanding the world’s fourth-largest army–and a growing arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Given a lack of CIA “assets” within North Korea, the United States government has been forced to accept any scraps of reliable information it can get on Kim’s regime.
As a result, the White House, Pentagon and State Department may be forced to turn to another source in predicting Kim Jong-Un’s coming moves–and fate.
His name: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus–better known as Suetonius.
Suetonius, a historian and citizen of ancient Rome, chronicled the lives of the first twelve Caesars of imperial Rome: Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian.
His compilation of these biographies, The Twelve Caesars, is still available today.
Gaius Caligula was the fourth Roman to assume the title of Emperor and Caesar. His reign began in 37 A.D. and ended–violently–four years later.
Gaius Caligula
His full name was Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. “Caligula”–“Little Boots”–was a nickname bestowed on him as a child by his father’s soldiers.
Accompanying his father, Germanicus, on military campaigns, Gaius often dressed up as a soldier to “drill” the troops, who loved his enthusiasm for military life.
Tiberius, the third Roman emperor, adopted Germanicus as his heir, and many Romans considered him as Rome’s Alexander the Great because of his virtuous character and military prowess. There was widespread hope that he would succeed Tiberius when the emperor died.
But Germanicus died first, under mysterious circumstances. Some blamed illness, others believed he had been poisoned. Tiberius was widely suspected of having murdered a potential rival. And few mourned when Tiberius himself died in 19 A.D.
Upon Tiberius’ death, Caligula became emperor. The Romans welcomed his ascension due to their memory of his father, Germanicus.
His reign began well. He recalled those who had been banished from Rome by Tiberius, and publicly announced that “he had no ears for informers,” according to Suetonius.
He allowed judges unrestricted jurisdiction, without appeal to himself. To lighten the duties of jurors, he added a fifth division to the previous four. He also tried to restore the suffrage to the people by reviving the custom of elections.
He completed the public works which had been half-finished under Tiberius: the temple of Augustus and the theatre of Pompey.
But then Caligula underwent a change in character. Suetonius claimed that he suffered from an affliction that made him suddenly fall unconscious. The historian believed that Caligula knew that something was wrong with him.
He became increasingly egomaniacal. Among the titles he gave himself: “Child of the Camp,” “Father of the Armies,” and “Greatest and Best of Caesars.”
Eventually, he came to believe himself divine.
Without warning, he ordered one of his soldiers to execute his brother Tiberius. He drove his father-in‑law, Silanus, to commit suicide by cutting his throat with a razor.
Tiberius’ “crime” had been Caligula’s suspicion that he had taken an antidote against poison. “There is no antidote against Caesar!” Caligula is said to have raged.
In fact, Tiberius had taken medicine for a chronic cough.
Silanus died because he had not followed Caligula when he put to sea in stormy weather. Caligula believed he had remained behind hoping to take possession of Rome if he perished in the storm.
Actually, Silanus suffered from sea-sickness and wanted to avoid the discomforts of the voyage.
Caligula committed incest with all his sisters, and “at a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above.”
When his favorite sister, Drusilla, died, he announced a season of public mourning, making it a capital crime to laugh, bathe, or dine with one’s parents, wife, or children.
Having violated his sisters, he eagerly violated the wives of others.
At one wedding, he ordered that the bride be taken to his own house, and within a few days divorced her. Two years later he banished her, suspecting that she had returned to her former husband.
At gladiatorial games, he would sometimes match decrepit gladiators against wild beasts, and have sham fights between men who were “conspicuous for some bodily infirmity.”
Objecting to the expense of cattle to feed wild beasts for a gladiatorial show, he selected criminals to be devoured.
On other occasions, he shut up the storehouses for threshed grain and condemned the people to hunger.
“Let them hate me, so long as they fear me,” he often said. But he ignored the truth that hatred can override fear.
Just this happened among several members of his own security force, the Praetorian Guard. Caligula had repeatedly mocked Cassius Chaerea, one of its officers, for his weak voice, and assailed his masculinity.
On January 22, 41 A.D., Chaerea and other guardsmen attacked Caligula in an underground corridor of a gladiatorial arena and repeatedly stabbed him to death.
Upon hearing reports that Caligula was dead, Romans hesitated to rejoice, fearing that he had started the rumor to discover who wanted him dead.
If history truly repeats itself, Kim Jong-Un has good reason to be afraid.
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AMERICA’S BRUSH WITH ARMAGEDDON: PART ONE (OF FOUR)
In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on August 11, 2017 at 12:10 amNorth Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un has threatened to launch possibly nuclear-tipped missiles at Guam, an unincorporated United States territory in the Western Pacific Ocean.
And President Donald Trump has responded with a threat to bring “fire and fury” to North Korea if it does.
Will their exchange of threats lead to all-out nuclear war?
The last time that Americans faced such a threat came 55 years ago, during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy.
On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro swept triumphantly into Havana after a two-year guerrilla campaign against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Fidel Castro
Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of Cubans began fleeing to America. The first émigrés were more than 215,000 Batista followers. The exodus escalated, peaking at approximately 78,000 in 1962.
In October, 1962, Castro stopped regularly scheduled travel between the two countries, and asylum seekers began sailing from Cuba to Florida.
Between 1962 and 1979, hundreds of thousands of Cubans entered the United States under the Attorney General’s parole authority.
By 2008, more than 1.24 million Cubans were living in the United States, mostly in South Florida, where the population of Miami was about one-third Cuban. Their sheer numbers transformed the state’s political, economic and cultural life. And not entirely for the better.
Many of these Cubans viewed themselves as political exiles, rather than immigrants, hoping to eventually return to Cuba after its Communist regime fell from power.
The large number of Cubans in South Florida, particularly in Miami’s “Little Havana,” allowed them to preserve their culture and customs to a degree rare for immigrant groups.
With so many discontented immigrants concentrated in Florida, they became a potential force for politicians to court.
And the issue guaranteed to sway their votes was unrelenting hostility to Castro. Unsurprisingly, most of their votes went to right-wing Republicans.
John F. Kennedy was the first President to face this dilemma.
During the closing months of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA had begun training Cuban exiles for an invasion of their former homeland.
The exiles’ goal: To do what Castro had done—seek refuge in the mountains and launch a successful anti-Castro revolution.
But word of the coming invasion quickly leaked: The exiles were terrible secret-keepers. (A joke at the CIA went: “A Cuban thinks a secret is something you tell to only 300 people.”)
Kennedy insisted the invasion must appear to be an entirely Cuban enterprise. He refused to commit U.S. Marines and Air Force bombers.
The invaders landed on April 17, 1961 at the Bay of Pigs—and were quickly overwhelmed, with hundreds of the men taken prisoner.
Kennedy publicly took the blame for its failure: “Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” But privately he seethed, and ordered the CIA to redouble its efforts to remove Castro at all costs.
To make certain his order was carried out, he appointed his brother, Robert—then Attorney General—to oversee the CIA’s “Castro removal” program.
Robert F. Kennedy and John F. Kennedy
It’s here that America’s obsession with Cuba entered its darkest and most disgraceful period.
The CIA and the Mafia entered into an unholy alliance to assassinate Castro—each for its own benefit:
The CIA wanted to please Kennedy.
The mobsters wanted to regain its casino and brothel holdings that had made Cuba their private playground in pre-Castro times. They also hoped to use their pose as patriots to win immunity from future prosecution.
The CIA supplied poisons and explosives to various members of the Mafia. It was then up to the mobsters to assassinate Castro.
The CIA asked Johnny Roselli, a mobster linked to the Chicago syndicate, to go to Florida in 1961 and 1962 to organize assassination teams of Cuban exiles. They were to infiltrate their homeland and assassinate Castro.
Johnny Roselli
Rosselli called upon two other crime figures: Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana and Santos Trafficante, the Costra Nostra chieftain for Tampa, for assistance.
Sam Giancana
Giancana, using the name “Sam Gold” in his dealings with the CIA, was meanwhile being hounded by the FBI on direct orders of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
The mobsters were authorized to offer $150,000 to anyone who would kill Castro and were promised any support the Agency could yield.
Giancana was to locate someone who was close enough to Castro to be able to drop pills into his food. Trafficante would serve as courier to Cuba, helping to make arrangements for the murder on the island.
Rosselli was to be the main link between all of the participants in the plot.
The available sources disagree on what actually happened. Some believe that the Mob made a genuine effort to “whack” Fidel.
Others are convinced the mobsters simply ran a scam on the government. They would pretend to carry out their “patriotic duty” while in fact making no effort at all to penetrate Castro’s security.
The CIA’s war against Castro was known as Operation Mongoose–the mongoose being a traditional enemy of the cobra. And those entrusted with this assignment were known as the Special Group.
“We were hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara later testified before Congress about these efforts. “And there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.”
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