If I keep reading Thucydides is my brain going to turn to stinky blue cheese and leak out my ears?
OK, I admit I'm a tad bit slow sometimes making connections when it comes to names. Kagan. That's the neocon, I know that. In fact, it seems there are more than one of them. That's where my problem comes in. Last night, I'm reading ryan t's diary about PNAC, where he lists some of the original members, and I see: Donald Kagan.
Donald Kagan??? Is that right? No, that can't be right. It's Fred, isn't it? Or Robert. So I go to the bookshelf, look at the titles of the definitive modern history of the Peloponnesian War, full of my bookmarks, notes, underlinings. That Donald Kagan? The classicist? The historian? Say it's not so!
It's so. It's the same Kagan! The others are his spawn, but he's the original neocon. I never made the connection. It never occurred to me that this could be the same guy.
And Kagan's not the only one. Take Victor Davis Hanson. Another classicist. Greek historian. I first saw his book on hoplite battle tactics, fell upon it with wonder and delight. Bookmarks, notes, underlinings. It was a big success. Hanson started whoring himself on the basis of it, writing a lot more books. I bought them, though they tended to be overpriced popularizations with more pictures and less text. Then I noticed he was making a lot of strange remarks about contemporary US society in comparison to the Greeks. Wandering outside his field. Then he started punditizing in the newspapers, the most loathesome neocon drivel.
I threw out his books. Threw them in the trash so innocents wouldn't happen upon them in a used book sale and have their susceptible minds corrupted. [OK, I admit I kept the hoplite book].
But Kagan. This is no Hanson, no jumped-up punditizing whore. This is a historian. And how could I throw out his Peloponnesian War?
Let me tell you about the Peloponnesian War. People with any knowledge of ancient history usually recognize the parallels between the Roman Empire and the US Hegemony. It is, for anyone with the brains to see it, a Cautionary Tale. Because we all know what happened to the Roman Empire - it fell. The victim of its own bloated success.
But the Peloponnesian War meant the downfall of the Athenian Empire, and that, too, is a Cautionary Tale. It was Athens, more than every other Greek state, who was responsible for defeating the Persians when they attempted to conquer mainland Greece. It was Athens who made itself the champion of the Asiatic Greek cities and defied the Persian Empire, it was Athens who led the Greek fleet to defeat the Persians in the naval battle of Salamis, and it was Athens who emerged from the war as the leader of the free Greek world. It was Athens who decided to form a defensive league of Greek states to defend against further Persian aggression.
Sound familiar? WWII? NATO? The Cold War? And who was on the other side of that cold war? Sparta. The guys with the land army, with the hoplites. No one could accuse the Spartans of loving freedom.
But what did Athens do with its leadership? Did it spread freedom far and wide? Not hardly. It started to strong-arm the smaller Greek states for tribute - in the name of the common defense. As Thucydides put it: "The growth in the power of the Athenians, and the alarm this gave the Spartans, made war inevitable." When the island of Melos declared it wanted to remain neutral, Athens gave them the choice: submit or die; they killed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery to prove the point to the rest of the Greek states: You're either with us, or against us.
Sound familiar?
In Greek tragedy, the overweening pride that brings on doom is called hubris. This was the pride of Athens, that led to its doom. It was going to be a New Athenian Fifth Century. They were going to spread democracy [ie, anti-Spartan governments] across the Greek world. They were going to be a Great Power to rival Persia. Instead, Sparta won the war. Athens was ruined and humiliated. In the next century, the Macedonians conquered the lot of them.
In our history, the US defeated its Spartans, the Soviets, leaving it the sole superpower on Earth. If ever there were a breeding ground for hubris, it is in Washington DC - in the White House, in the Pentagon.
And if anyone should know this, it's a classicist, an ancient historian. Especially one who has written the definitve modern history of the Peloponnesian War. If there is a single lesson to be learned from this history, it is that excessive reliance on power is the hubris that dooms nations and empires. How, then, can Kagan declare that the mistake is the failure to use power?
There is only one possible answer: blue cheese. Leaking out the ears. Brain rot.
And here's the final proof. On the back cover of Kagan's book On the Origins of War I find a blurb praising it from: Joseph I. Lieberman, US Senate.