Today's discussion in class centered on Thucydides and The Peloponnesian War. The last time I read it was freshman year in college in a class called Contemporary International Politics. I, being much younger, didn't pay much attention to CIP or its readings and had very little patience for the political theories that were being dished out at the time. I was much more interested in its application (which probably is normal for a historian; historians deal much less in theories than do political scientists).
Anyway, here's something cliffed from the speech that has disturbingly prescient relevance for a certain influential country in North America:
...are addicted to innovation, and their designs are characterized by swiftness alike in conception and execution; you have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention, and when force to act you never go far enough.
Again, they are adventurous beyond their power, and daring beyond their judgment, and in danger they are sanguine; your wont is to attempt less than is justified by your power, to mistrust even what is sanctioned by your judgment, and to fancy that from danger there is no release.
Further, there is promptitude on their side against procrastination on yours; they are never at home, you are most disinclined to leave it, for they hope by their absence to extend their acquisitions, you fear by your advance to endanger what you have left behind.
They are swift to follow up a success, and slow to recoil from a reverse.
Their bodies they spend ungrudging in their country’s cause; their intellect they jealously husband to be employed in their service.
A scheme unexecuted is with them a positive loss, a successful enterprise a comparative failure. The deficiency created by the miscarriage of an undertaking is soon filled up by fresh hopes; for they alone are enabled to call a thing hoped for a thing got, by the speed with which they act upon their resolutions.
Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life, with little opportunity for enjoying, being ever engaged their only idea of a holiday is to do what the occasion demands, and to them laborious occupation is less a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life.
To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.
The speaker in question was a Corinthian ambassador to Sparta, describing their mutual adversary of Athens in the year 432 BCE.It could just as easily describe the United States of America after about the third Monday of January, 2001.
The other lesson to be learned that stuck from the Peloponnesian War was that Athens, in the conduct of some twenty years of combat, had lost its moral compass. This is significant.
Case in point: five years before the end of the war, Athens gave the island of Melos an ultimatum of "surrender or be conquered." The conflict between ethical behavior versus force majeure is known as the Melian Dialogue, and is one of the fundamental teaching points for ethics in international relations.
Maybe it's more pointed in my mind having just seen Revenge of the Sith and its allusion to our current war and where it could lead. We must be mindful not to become that which we fear in the process of killing our enemies. The exercise of absolute power carries with it its own allure and at the same time, danger.
The Athenians, after receiving the Melian refusal to surrender, laid the city under siege and conquered it. The Athenians then put to the sword every man in the city and sold the women and children into slavery. Once that was done, they colonized the now-empty city of Melos. Mind you, that Athens was a democracy, and yet, there was no outcry in the wake of this event.
"So this is how liberty dies - to thunderous applause." - Padmé Amidala
No comments:
Post a Comment