Recurrence

Glaukon: What are you reading?

Admetos: William the Silent--a biography of a sixteenth century Dutch prince and politician. What are you reading?

Glaukon: The Assassin's Gate--an account of America's ongoing misadventure in Iraq.

Admetos: They are both works of politico-military history, but other than that these books must be about very different things, yes?

Glaukon: No.

Admetos: No?

Glaukon: Our big-headed friend would say that they are about the same thing.

Admetos: He would?

Glaukon: Let me put it this way: Your book is about how the world's preeminent superpower sends the most powerful conventional military force the world had ever seen to occupy and reform a distant land. But the alien occupiers find themselves in a hostile land riddled with violent religious sectarians. The occupiers do not speak the language or understand the politics. Powerful local neighbors make lots of trouble. And the situation spirals downward. Right?

Admetos: You have it. That's what my book is about.

Glaukon: And that's what my book is about.

Comments

[Buce]

Maybe the Iraqis will break the dikes and drown us.

[otto]

Muqtada the Silent?

Does that make Dick Cheney the Duke of Alba?

[Tom Marney]

Please pardon my cluelessness, but who is "our big-headed friend"?

[Bruce Webb]

Because IIRC Plato put much of his argument into the mouth of his master Socrates. Where in point of fact the historic Socrates would be much more in sympathy with Max than Plato. Platonism hijacked Socrates in complicated ways because most of the latter was filtered through the former.

Plato was fundamentally a Fascist. To the extent that we understand Socrate's key message he was a free-thinking Democrat and was compelled to take that draft of hemlock because he was a little too subsersive to the Right who were then (and since and now) controlling the levers of power.

[masaccio]

According to I.F. Stone, in the Trial of Socrates, it is Socrates who is the fascist, the one who doesn't believe in democracy, and he dies because he doesn't want to live any more.

[Bruce Webb]

I don't have the ability to explain this tonight in any coherent way but the history of Ancient historagraphy has pretty much privileged Sparta to Athems (thank you Thucydides) and Aristocrats and the murderors of Caesar to the Gracchic and Caesar (well it started with Cicero but didn't stop there).

Funny for the last three sousand years and beyond those in control of capital controlled the printed message? Who knew?

[fatandslat]

dialectic aside, how did delong come to dame wedgewood's classic? i've always been interested in the connexions associated w/ reading lists.... how did this book come to you?

veronica is i think renowned for being an extremely sympathetic biographer. i always thought william's "tolerance" derived less from moral reasons than realpolitick triangulation. maybe my personal glass, darkly. anyway, definitely whiggish stuff as presented!

[radek]

Thucydides privilaging Sparta over Athens? Hmm, I don't see it. Though I'd agree on Appian and Plutarch with regard to the Gracchi

[Bob Violence]

Plato = Greek "Platon", which means "broad". Ancient sources say that this was a nickname that he got either because he had a broad forehead, or because his knowledge was wide. Both of these things result in having a big head.

If you think Caesar was a democrat, something has gotten into your head...the man was literally declared dictator for life. I'm not kidding, "dictator" was a Roman office, and the Senate made Caesar one permanently. It's just as bad as it sounds.

If our Iraq adventure is like Spain's low-country adventure, that gives a new and depressing immediacy to Marx's dictum that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." Of course, this isn't the second repitition--more like the 32nd.

[Bob Violence]

Oh, Thucydides loves Sparta. He loves Athens, too, but I think he wishes Athens had been more like Sparta. Of course, over the course of the Histories, Sparta acts more and more like Athens...

Ancient historians (i.e., the modern folks who study ancient history) tend to be pretty conservative in outlook, and therefore tend to be pretty sympathetic to Sparta.

[robert waldmann]

You wish Brad.
Who is the William the silent of Iraq ?

In spite of his un-William like devotion to theology (and un-William like ignorance of Ichthyology http://tinyurl.com/g4dta) I had my hopes for Sistani, but he seems to have become genuinely silent, leaving (as is right in principle) politics to the politicians (who are unfortunately unprincipled and not the right politicians)

Or to return to your original topic, what is the chance that Iraq will ever be the setting of a Whig history ?

[chris]

If you accept the convention that the first four dialogues (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo) are the closest to what S. actually thought, he seems to have been a managerialist - advocating a trained, professionalised administrative elite (which would have appeared quite an attractive option following the defeat of the democracy in the war and the experience of the 30 tyrants.)

Also, it's a feasible jump from there to P.'s later, much more structured and authoritarian, views.

[Karlsfini]

"Plato..a nickname that he got either because he had a broad forehead, or because his knowledge was wide."

Bob, could be, but it's more generally thought it was for his broad shoulders. When young he was an athlete and named before anyone thought his knowledge was very "broad."

Hubris and irony -- the Greek noticed fools are forever digging holes and then falling in them.

Saddam was our boy to keep Iran in its place, so we removed Saddam. Good move.

We now need China, Russia and India to help us with Iran, and pretty soon, Pakistan.

China should be a big help. It's increasing it's military budget by 14%, and two days ago "warned" us about supporting Taiwan. We can keep Iraq, and maybe bully Iran a little, but China gets Taiwan. Just to bring the point home, China let N. Korea try out some new missiles yesterday.

India gets all the nukes it wants. I'm not sure yet what payoff Russia has in mind.

Someday Cheney will fix himself a cocktail and say it was all an accident, Iraq was creeping up behind him, and...

[PQuincy]

There's one BIG difference!

A small country riddled with internal factions and divided among competing religious movements of growing intensity, yes. That's the Low Countries in the 1560s.

And no doubt Spain was indeed the main continental hegemon, still possessing the best troops and the clearest policy, even though it was living far beyond its means, so that its bonds in foreign hands were a large and growing problem.

But here's the difference: in the system of the time, the Spanish Habsburgs actually had a pretty decent claim to be sovereigns in the various parts of the Low Countries, they had long-standing ties to the area, they had considerable support, especially among the local elite, and they governed through a disparate but quite functional set of agreements, treaties, "Graces" and other constitutional means.

What's the equivalent of THAT?

[Roger Albin]

PQuincy, you are correct. But, one of the reasons for the Revolt in the Low Countries was that the government in Spain began to overturn traditional arrangements in favor of more direct governance and taxation. Like many revolutions, this one began as a retrograde effort. Like all historical analogies, the one between the Hapsburg experience in the Netherlands and our present misadventure in Iraq is imperfect, largely useful for rhetorical purposes and not much more.

On the other hand, there are some general themes that the historical experience of Philip II's court can illustrate usefully.
From Geoffrey Parker's The Grand Strategy of Philip II:
"However,leaders in a state of high stress- like Philip in 1587-1588 -seem preternaturally disposed to accept data that support their preconceived ideas and to avoid anything that contradicts them, whether by banishing Cassandras from their courts, by dismissing or ignoring dissenting reports, or (worst of all) by distorting all incoming information so that it supports their previous assumptions."
Or how about this quote from one of Philip's courtiers on the problem with abandoning diplomatic methods, "...should the Italian states lose their respect for words, it will be hard to regain it with deeds."
Or how about the experience of the Armada. Parker documents well that Philip thought that if he made the effort, God would guarantee success, despite evidence of inadequate preparation and the rather risky nature of the whole enterprise.
Any of this seem familiar?

[Ari]

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6DA1F3DF93BA25752C0A96E948260

January 18, 1988

'The Trial of Socrates'
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

THE TRIAL OF SOCRATES.
By I. F. Stone.

SOCRATES' drinking of the hemlock in 399 B.C. must surely be counted among the most dramatic acts of human history. Yet is anyone clear on why exactly the ancient Greek philosopher insisted on accepting his death sentence from the Athenian court when he could probably have escaped into exile, or on what the events were that led to his indictment and trial in the first place?

Plato, who made Socrates the hero of his famous dialogues, seems to suggest his mentor got into trouble for exhorting his fellow citizens to virtue. Some classical scholars take literally the apparent language of the court's indictment, which, according to Plato's paraphrase of it in his ''Apology,'' read in part that ''Socrates is a wrongdoer because he corrupts the youth'' of Athens. Still others focus on the second part of the indictment, that Socrates ''does not believe in the gods the state believes in, but in other new spiritual beings,'' and suggest he was only the most famous victim in a wave of persecutions aimed at irreligious philosophers.

The issue has continued to tantalize posterity, and now I. F. Stone has joined the chase in his 12th book, ''The Trial of Socrates.'' Why is this maverick journalist, this dogged civil libertarian, this one-man investigative gang who put out I. F. Stone's Weekly for 19 years, this author of such books as ''Underground to Palestine'' (1946), ''Hidden History of the Korean War'' (1952), ''The Haunted Fifties'' (1964) and ''The Killings at Kent State'' (1971), suddenly grazing in the peaceful pastures of ancient history?

The answer is itself a complicated story involving the angina pectoris that forced Mr. Stone to give up editing his weekly in 1971 at the age of 64; a word processor producing bold enough type for him to overcome a cataract in writing the present book; a lifelong passion for philosophy that led him to fall ''in love with the Greeks,'' and a need to understand how the trial of Socrates could have happened in so free a society as in his beloved Athens. How could it have happened? One can give away his answer because there's so much more to his book than the conclusions he arrives at. Essentially, Mr. Stone reasons, Socrates was put on trial because he didn't believe in democracy as the city-state of Athens practiced it, but rather in an absolutist form of leadership by ''the one who knows.'' What precipitated his indictment at the age of 70 were the upheavals brought on by the Peloponnesian War and the threat in 401 B.C. of yet another takeover by anti-democratic people who had been students of Socrates and whose like had seized leadership in 411 and 404.

As for why Socrates refused to defend himself and provoked the court into imposing his death sentence: Mr. Stone believes that the philosopher wished to die in any case and that to have articulated the defenses available to him, such as the right of free speech, would have meant conceding democratic principles to a system he held in contempt.

Now, the portrait of Socrates that emerges from Mr. Stone's reasoning is far from flattering. In point of fact Western civilization's first great philosopher stands accused of snobbery, class prejudice, conceit, arrogance, negativism and coldness to his wife. Behind the famous irony lay an insulting sneer of contempt, or so Mr. Stone argues. The man's very philosophy stands condemned. ''Even at its best,'' Mr. Stone writes, ''the Socratic negative dialectic provided an irrelevant standard by which to judge the competence of statesmen, tragic poets, or shoemakers in their respective crafts. Above all, it was no way to question the right of common men to participate in the government of their own lives and city.'' ...

[Buce]

I think the one who privileges Sparta is not Thouk but Plutarch--in the first Century AD, kind of a sentimentalist antiquarian. Also part of the cultural landscape of those founding fathers who had classical educations.

A great storyteller, but oddly, a lousy writer. Genitive absolute piled on genitive absolute. My teacher told me that P is about the only Greek author who does not lose anything in translation.

[Damn]

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