What’s Freedom To A Slaver?

My 10 cents

indi.ca
6 min readAug 22, 2024
A rare coin celebrating the tyrannicide Brutus and the assassination of Caesar

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I grew up in America and Freedom™ was branded into my brain. But that was just more branding on more slaves. America always cribbed its branding from Rome, from the slavery to the shameless talk of freedom. Take, for example, the coin Brutus minted to commemorate his assassination of Caesar in 44 AD.

The Brutus coin shows the cap given to a freed slave, between two daggers for the kingslayers. But Brutus freed no slaves. He merely led a bunch of oligarchs in a petulant rebellion against a monarch, like American ‘revolutionaries’ did centuries later. It’s all, as my historical thesis goes, same shit, different day.

As Ramsay MacMullen said in Enemies Of The Roman Order:

Most of the conspirators, if their innermost ideas had been examined, would no doubt have meant by it only “free” opportunity to exert the weight of their family in the old ways; “free” movement of power among all members of the traditional oligarchy, without constraint by faction or tyranny; in short, free access to the political trough for all the usual company of nobles and retainers.

This was, indeed, all the American revolutionaries were fighting for. Oligarchic privileges for slavers against a distant tyrant. They wanted the right to keep…

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indi.ca

Indrajit (Indi) Samarajiva is a Sri Lankan writer. Follow me at www.indi.ca, or just email me at indi@indi.ca.