Robert Fisk's World: From the fourth century BC, words our leaders should heed

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisks-world-from-the-fourth-century-bc-words-our-leaders-should-heed-965479.html

Let us now praise famous men. And after yet another US presidential candidates' debate of awesome sterility – not to mention their shameless refusal to tackle the real, bloody issues that confront America – I'm referring principally to one of the first journalists to understand war and, so far as he could, to check his sources: Thucydides.


If only our masters would turn to his account of the Peloponnesian conflict they might even see their own faces – and their hideous mistakes – in the mirror of his prose.

I have to admit that I was inspired to reread the great man's fourth-century BC tract by Professor David Rovie of the Auckland University of Technology, who startled a weary Fisk in New Zealand a few weeks ago by pointing out that Thucydides' work contained all the lessons we need to learn about war, human rights, the treatment of prisoners, the cowardice of politicians, and the cold-hearted decisions of nation states.

Thucydides himself said – it is, of course, his most famous quotation – that it was enough for him that his words "be judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future".

His work, Thucydides wrote – and I am using Rex Warner's translation – was "not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public but was done to last for ever". Well, he can say that again. How many of our historians or journalists or novelists or playwrights work for those who will (despite the internet) still read them in 2,000 years' time? Tolstoy maybe, Shakespeare, I imagine. But will the historians of our latter-day wars – the Beavors and the Barnetts and the Bullocks, even the Churchills – be read in 4008? Certainly Thucydides would have had no time for newspaper reporters: "prose chroniclers", he sneers, are "less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked". Ouch.

At school, I found the 27-year war between Athens and Sparta, which began in 431BC, a very tiresome affair. Indeed, its miniature battles, in which a modern-day "surge" might involve only 200 men, are pretty boring. But Thucydides was also a soldier; by failing to save an Athenian colony from the Spartans, he was sent off to 20 years of exile. And his account of this ancient conflict contains a dark and chilling relevance today.

Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Michelle Bachmann is a Tin soldier

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mBW9bM9BEo

here, who would take the time to read it.

K&R.