Don't forget Caeser

The last time Gaius Julius Caeser stepped into the forum, he knew he was safe. He had systematically beaten the Senatorial forces on every battlefield they had run to. The plebs of Rome would riot rather accept the rule of a senate back under control of the optimates. In fact, the optimate senators themselves knew that without Caeser's protection, the mob would probably slaughter them and their families without hesitation. Caeser was unassailable. The only people who didn't know it were the spoilt sons of the optimate senators. They had been protected from the battles which had occured outside Rome. They thought that if they just killed this upstart traitor to his class, things would go back to the way they were. They were wrong, but Caeser was still killed.

The modern pleb, from the NATO side of the cold war divide, is a spoilt rich kid, and just as divorced from reality as any optimate's son. He/she has grown up protected from the realities of Borneo, the Falkland Islands, Korea, and all the rest of the activity which has maintained our comfortable, free status quo. And so our govts are given ever more power over us. The scarred survivors of the gulags, on the other hand, know what it means to give too much power to the state.