I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven\u2019t been rejected yet.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Well, patience is a virtue.<\/p>\n
I listened to the ZMan\u2019s Friday podcast today.\u00a0 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 \u201cmaking the world safe for democracy.\u201d\u00a0 I guess this was a discussion sparked by Trump\u2019s recent foreign policy statements that centered around the self-interest of the United States.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And all of that was good stuff.\u00a0 But the end of the show was a discussion of Thucydides\u2019 \u201cThe Peloponnesian War.\u201d\u00a0 And that always holds my interest.\u00a0 It\u2019s uncanny how the war between Athens and Sparta in the 5th<\/sup> century BC can reverberate down the millennia and ring warning bells over today\u2019s headlines.\u00a0 He reviewed Pericles\u2019 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.\u00a0 All very relevant and instructive for anyone looking at our relationship to Europe and its relationship with Russia.\u00a0 I commend the ZMan for his use of this timeless lesson from history.<\/p>\n What it reminded me of was that other bit from Thucydides work, namely his chronicle of the Civil War in Corcyra.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And eventually the familiar escalation into class warfare reached the heights of insanity where even blood relation wasn\u2019t enough to save someone from partisan hatred and murder.<\/p>\n \u201cWords 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.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n It seems I trot out Corcyra every seven or eight years whether I need to or not.\u00a0 The last time was October of 2017.\u00a0 And since then, we\u2019ve had the January 6th<\/sup> \u201cinsurrection\u201d and Merrick Garland\u2019s crusade to jail unarmed people who trespassed in order to protest in a public building.\u00a0 It\u2019s hardly Corcyra where at the end of the revolution people were dragged out of a temple and butchered in the street by their fellow \u201ccitizens.\u201d<\/p>\n But it\u2019s good to remember how all these things degenerate when people\u2019s rights start getting trampled in the name of revolutionary fervor.\u00a0 That\u2019s why I\u2019m glad that freedom of speech and the other freedoms seem to be making a comeback around here.\u00a0 I think they do more to restrain government and make life in this country worth living.\u00a0 Well, that enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I found out that Ark Press does send rejection letters on submissions so therefore I haven\u2019t been rejected yet.\u00a0 But I found out it takes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[856,857,415,1139,284,886],"class_list":["post-32508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-trump","tag-civil-war","tag-civil-war-at-corcyra","tag-corcyra","tag-foreign-policy","tag-thucydides","tag-zman"],"yoast_head":"\n