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Democracy and War (II)
The real difference between the war loving Athenian Boomers and their contemporary American counterparts is the Athenians didn't personally shirk from battle, they engaged it. Nothing better defines the degraded politics of America than the ceaseless advocacy for war by those who came to power in the last several decades after they had all run from battle when it was their turn – Clinton, Gingrich, Bush, Cheney, Biden, Obama, Trump, the list is endless.
In their lust for power and glory, Athens' young radicals increasingly disregarded the ethos and eventually the very structures of Athenian democracy. In part, this change was instigated by a new generation of Greek thinkers known as the Sophists, whose part misinterpretation of nature and society, not unlike the survival of the fittest, to the victor belong the spoils, and might makes right of popularly superficial thinking today, rejected Athens' founding democratic traditions of justice and equality.
This new thinking increasingly shaped Athens’ actions on the war. As example is the debate on retribution to the Mytilenians, former allies who revolted against Athens' rule. Mitchell writes,
“By the time of the Mytilenian debate the tone had changed. Cleon presented the crude, hardline message that imperial rule had no place for compassion or moral concerns. The law in all its severity must be applied. But the opposing speech of the cultural Diodotus is just as chillingly amoral, accepting that the Athenians must make their decision on grounds of expediency, not on the grounds of right and wrong. He differs from Cleon only in his view of what is expedient in this case, arguing that is not always expedient to resort to the full rigour of the law because there is a force in human affairs more powerful than the law: the impulses of human nature (phyis anthropeia).”
The Mytilenians manage to avoid the severest consequences, unlike the Melians a dozen years later when Athens' young radicals are in full power. Mitchell writes the Athenian envoys argument to Melos removes “issues of justice from the debate and insists both sides must face the inescapable fact that the strong do whatever they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.” The Athenian Assembly votes to kill all Melos' male citizens and enslave the women and children, tragically illustrating Athens' amoral turn, at the same time rationalizing while weakening the defense of their empire.
Over the last seventy-five years, the Mytilene and Melos debates are most popular amongst America's National Security State intellectuals. It is the thinking first promoted as Realpolitik by Mr. Nixon and his great Sith Lord Henry Kissinger as they dropped more bombs on three small countries in Southeast Asia than were dropped in total in World War II. Realpolitik as a term has pretty much been dropped, but as thinking behind American imperial actions it’s more popular than ever.
Increasingly, these immoral justifications, if not despicably enough in words, certainly in deed, herald America's perpetual blood-spilling. Summed-up nicely by Boomer cultural revolutionary extraordinaire Secretary of State Mrs. Clinton’s nihilistic Caesarian quip on the killing of Libya’s Qaddafi, “We came, we saw, he died.”
Mitchell notes, “Only after the Peace of Nicias young nobility began to reach high office, sophistic thought became the tools of young radicals in reviving the traditional zest of the demos for war and dominion.” Led by Alcibiades, one of Athens' and history's most charismatic and talented failures, the young radicals end the Peace of Nicias.
Alcibiades is publicly known as the Beautiful. Thucydides says of Alcibiades,
“For the position he held among the citizens led him to indulge his tastes beyond what his real means would bear, both in keeping horses and in the rest of his expenditure; and this later on had not a little to do with the ruin of the Athenian state.”
Mitchell writes,
“Thucydides acknowledges his (Alcibiades) exceptional ability in public affairs and as a military commander, but highlights his excessive personal ambition in love with success and directed at conquests, glory and wealth. His later career was to show him as an unprincipled, single-minded egoist, with no sense of patriotism and no loyalty to the democracy that he once described as acknowledged folly.”
The greatest difference between our contemporary politicians and Athens is amongst our once formerly young radical generation, you'd be hard pressed to point to one with any great ability in public affairs. Not surprising in a political era overwhelmingly defined by television, where image is the alpha and omega. Similarly, American military prowess of the last 75 years is so explicitly due to overwhelming technological superiority, it is impossible to judge any individual's strategic capability. However, excessive personal ambition, unprincipled, single-minded ego, with no sense of patriotism and most imperatively no loyalty to democracy, defines America's once young radical generation to a T.
Alcibiades and his cohorts advocate Athens abandon the peace and launch and ill-conceived invasion of Syracuse in Sicily. In one of the Assembly debates, Nicias defends the peace, astutely damning Alcibiades,
“And if there be any man here, overjoyed at being chosen to command, who urges you to make the expedition, merely for ends of his own--especially if he be still too young to command--who seeks to be admired for his stud of horses, but on account of its heavy expenses hopes for some profit from his appointment, do not allow such a one to maintain his private splendor at his country's risk, but remember that such persons injure the public fortune while they squander their own,”
Alcibiades replies with an argument which should be familiar to every American today,
"Be convinced, then, that we shall augment our power at home by this adventure abroad... we shall either become masters, as we very easily may, of the whole of Hellas through the accession of the Sicilian Hellenes, or in any case ruin the Syracusans, to the no small advantage of ourselves and our allies.”
The Assembly votes to restart the war. Amusingly, just as the invasion is launched, organized clubs of young radicals spend an evening defacing the statues of the god Hermes every Athenian home has at its entrance. The demos look at this as not only blasphemous, but the beginnings of a possible attack by the young aristocrats on democracy itself. In an uproar, fingers point at Alcibiades. He's recalled from Sicily, though flees, along with any possible hope for Athenian victory.
From the beginning things go bad for the incursion. Nicias, who is in command of the troops, writes back to the Assembly to cut their losses, but the war spirit of the demos will not be quenched. Once again disregarding Nicias’ wise counsel, they foolishly double down, leading to one of history's greatest inglorious military defeats. Thucydides writing of the Sicilian defeat states Athens is “utterly defeated on every front and whose suffering in every respect was large scale. It was utter destruction for the army, the navy, and everything else. Only a few out of the many made their way home.”
Again, the Athenians refuse to sue for peace. For the next 8 years they manage to continue to keep fighting, even accomplish certain gains, including, with the reinstatement of Alcibiades — who first fled to the Spartans, then the Persians — destruction of the always inferior Spartan fleet. Thucydides account ends abruptly with Alcibiades’ reinstatement. The rest of the war was chronicled by a number of others.
Internally, the Sicilian disaster led briefly to an oligarchic coup by 400 people, expanded to 5000, but democracy is soon fully restored. The Spartans find an exceptional commander in Lysander, who in a couple years is able to defeat the Athenian fleet, lay siege to Athens, and in 404, twenty-seven years after the war began, bring about Athens' surrender. The Spartans instate the “Rule of Thirty Tyrants,” which is massively unpopular. Athens is able to reinstall their democracy in two years. Over the seven decades after the war, Aristotle claims democracy in Athens reached its highest order, yet inexplicably and regrettably kept its war fever, again and again repeatedly choosing battle when peace would have better served their interests.
Mitchell writes the comedic playwright Aristophanes comments ten years after the war’s end on Athens' continuing tragic war-lust, when it “comes to launching ships, the poor vote in favour, the rich and farmers vote against.” The creation of the great Athenian navy during the Persian War also created a large block in the Assembly of oarsman, who reliably vote for war. Mitchell notes Athens continual 4th century BC predilection for bellicosity leads to “a society ruled by an erratic demos eager for war, that increasingly selects worthless types as leaders,” and just as relevant to our political era, “by a populous who do not trust those who want to help them, and fawn on those who do not...The imperial urge had returned to Athens.”
It would take Phillip of Macedonia and his son Alexander in the sixth decade of the 4th century to truly end democracy's classical era — democracy's first and defining period. A century and half later, Athens falls under the rule of the unquenchable militaristic opportunism of the Roman republic, in return, the infiltration of Greece’s contemplative intellectual tradition gradually helps undermine the democratic system of the decidedly non-introspective Romans, despite their claim of the republic being directly descended from Athens’ democracy.
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