"the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"
I was thinking about this quote and google led me to this article.. I doubt that W even knows who Thucydides WAS, but his henchmen surely do.. This crew is as obsessed with "strength" as he was..
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The Influence of Thucydides in the Modern World
http://www.hri.org/por/thucydides.htmlThe Father of Political Realism Plays a Key Role in Current Balance of Power Theories
By Alexander Kemos
Thucydides, the Ancient Greek historian of the fifth century B.C., is not only the father of scientific history, but also of political "realism," the school of thought which posits that interstate relations are based on might rather than right. Through his study of the Peloponnesian War, a destructive war which began in 431 B.C. among Greek city-states, Thucydides observed that the strategic interaction of states followed a discernible and recurrent pattern. According to him, within a given system of states, a certain hierarchy among the states determined the pattern of their relations. Therefore, he claimed that while a change in the hierarchy of weaker states did not ultimatley affect a given system, a disturbance in the order of stronger states would decisively upset the stability of the system. As Thucydides said, the Peloponnesian War was the result of a systematic change, brought about by the increasing power of the Athenian city-state, which tried to exceed the power of the city-state of Sparta.
"What made the war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused Sparta," Thucydides wrote in order to illustrate the resulting systematic change; that is, "a change in the hierarchy or control of the international political system." Thucydides' realism has had a timeless impact on the way contemporary analysts perceive international relations. Adding to the works of Gilpin and Waltz, Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago viewed The Peloponnesian War as containing propositions that could be brought into a coherent framework and identified as "Thucydides' political philosophy" or serve even as the basis for a series of laws about the science of modern politics. In fact, political scientists have treated the work of Thucydides as a coherent attempt to communicate silent universals that have served as the basis for American foreign policy and security doctrine in the post World War II era.
Thus, on one hand, Thucydides was the first to describe international relations as anarchic and immoral. The "Melian dialogue" best exemplifies Thucydides' view that interstate politics lack regulation and justice. In the "Melian dialogue," he wrote that, in interstate relations, "the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept." For him, international relations allow the mighty do as they please and forfce the weak to suffer as they must. On the other hand, Thucydides illustrated the Cold War phenomenon of "polarization" among states, resulting from their strategic interaction.
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Moreover, during the polarization of the Cold War period, policy-makers equated America's power to Ancient Athens' glory, as told in The Peloponnesian War. Thus, in 1952, Louis J. Halle, at the time Director of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, wrote that "the present, in which our country finds herself, like Athens after the Peloponnesian wars, called upon to assume the leadership of the free world brings him
virtually to our side... It seems to me that since World War II Thucydides has come still closer to us so that now he speaks to our ear."
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