I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven’t been rejected yet. But I found out it takes up to a month to get a letter after submission so I might not know anything for quite a while. Well, patience is a virtue.
I listened to the ZMan’s Friday podcast today. It was on US Foreign Policy and he was making a distinction of a realistic foreign policy (meaning in the interest of Americans) versus one based on some kind of moralistic crusade like “making the world safe for democracy.” I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump’s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States. It was interesting and hearkened back to Woodrow Wilson and his attempt to restructure Europe in his image of what modern countries should look like, namely, the United States, which sounded a lot like every neo-con secretary of state for the last thirty years.
And all of that was good stuff. But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides’ “The Peloponnesian War.” And that always holds my interest. It’s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today’s headlines. He reviewed Pericles’ Funeral Oration and the Melian Dialog and showed how these stances mirror the foreign policy reality and the attendant justification that we see today from an imperial state. All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia. I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.
What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra. Here the Athenians and the Spartans encouraged the aristocrats and the peasants in Corcyra to back respectively the Spartan (aristocratic) form of government or the Athenian (democratic) form of government in Corcyra. And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn’t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.
“Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them. Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal supporter; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question incapacity to act on any. Frantic violence became the attribute of manliness; cautious plotting a justifiable means of self-defense. The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy; his opponent a man to be suspected. To succeed in a plot was to have a shrewd head, to divine a plot a still shrewder; but to try to provide against having to do either was to break up your party and to be afraid of your adversaries. In short, to forestall an intending criminal, or to suggest the idea of a crime where it was lacking was equally commended, until even blood became a weaker tie than party, from the superior readiness of those united by the latter to dare everything without reserve; for such associations sought not the blessings derivable from established institutions but were formed by ambition to overthrow them; and the confidence of their members in each other rested less on any religious sanction than upon complicity in crime.”
It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not. The last time was October of 2017. And since then, we’ve had the January 6th “insurrection” and Merrick Garland’s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building. It’s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow “citizens.”
But it’s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people’s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor. That’s why I’m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here. I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living. Well, that enough.