Melissa on war, politics… and Thucydides.

i first read the history of the
peloponnesian war by thucydides approximately three years ago now today i decided to look at my notes again i haven't looked at them in quite some time but i decided i wanted to make a video about this topic at the time i felt intimidated by the text and i never recorded a youtube video i kept thinking oh i need to do more work i need to prepare slides i need to prepare something to make a video about it however that just meant that i pushed it off and pushed to the side other things took up time and i never got back to it i'm tired of that excuse making i'm tired of that being the story of my life that i keep saying oh i'd like to read this and make a video about it and i struggle to hold myself accountable have standards for myself and actually meet those standards so i'm trying to hold myself countable by talking about some of these texts that i've been reading the past three or four years so thucydides lived from 460 bc to 400 bc that makes this text approximately 2500 years old thucydides is an historian of the peloponnesian war which was fought between the peloponnesian league led by sparta and the delian league led by the athenians from 431 bc to 404 bc thucydides began recording the events of the war immediately prior to the war beginning he participated in the war himself so the war is between the peloponnesians and the athenians peloponnesis is the region where the city of sparta is located the term lysodamians is another way to refer to spartans i remember when i was reading i had to remind myself that unless thucydides was mentioning the athenians he meant the spartans at the start of the book thucydides predicts that this is a war that will affect most people everywhere in the book he says nothing great happened in or out of war before this which i questioned a bit because surely warfare is as old as civilization itself and there were civilizations prior to the greek civilization however the peloponnesian war was the most important in the greek world and it led to the end of the golden age of greece unlike a lot of history textbooks that are included in the curriculum of high schools and middle schools i think thucydides was a great historian because he included both sides he presented events through the perspective of the lysodamians or the spartans and the athenians he gives a balanced view of both sides that to me is what makes an historian reliable that's why i think this book still holds up after all these years thucydides believes that the main reason for the war is the growth of the athenian empire he provides explanations from both sides as to how the growth of athenian power has affected the lives of people throughout greece one quote that i really appreciated from thucydides was the search for truth strains the patience of most people who would rather believe the first thing that comes to hand some people might ask why would you read something so old how can it be relevant to today's politics how can it be relevant to the wars of today fair question i think that for me the ignorance that i had about world history for a long time i thought i was too young or because of how people viewed me i think they didn't expect me to have any authority on a subject i faced quite a bit of resistance when i did try to talk about politics when i tried to argue when i was in conversations with my family members about political issues i was ignorant i really didn't know very much about world history i didn't really know much about world politics i didn't have the basis for an opinion like there are some things that to me were self-evident or that seemed obvious that i would argue about with them but yeah i see now that they weren't so obvious and the more that i learned about history the more pieces to the puzzle start to fit in people only have so much time people have only so much they can care about certain issues it seems to me that people really do care about political issues they share infographics they talk about these issues based off of what they've read from these infographics maybe they've read a book or two about the subject but still it's easy to make a post online and spark some conversation about a political issue of the time but it's really difficult to have an opinion that's based off of substantial hard work and time and effort that you've put into reading something and digesting it and being able to present the information certain things that i have developed over the last three or four years i think they're lacking in people's discussions about political situations these days and the historical side of it also i think is severely lacking in the public sphere i think what took me quite a long time to develop is a certain level of skepticism for the text that i'm reading and realizing that every book is just written by a human hand i think part of human nature is to be comfortable in your circumstances and especially when someone like me grows up in circumstances that are really comfortable compared to most of what human beings have had to endure reading about these texts puts life in perspective for me my life is and has been incredibly easy compared to most of the people who participated in the peloponnesian war it is important to keep that in perspective sometimes i think i forget and i become really comfortable i haven't lived through a lot of these things that are talked about some of these realities were palpable in the discussions in the history of the peloponnesian war just the brutality of war the brutality of empire right now we really have been living through a period of time when there was a pandemic when in human history has it been more comfortable to live through a pandemic i think really we have this tendency to think that we have it worse than anybody else the reality is that we have it better than most people in human history if that's the only thing that you get from reading history it's keeping things in perspective and realizing that for the most part the civilization that we live in now terrible as it may be difficult as it may be it's got some advantages to the civilization that people lived with two thousand five hundred years ago there's a section in speech of sith and latest i'm not sure how to pronounce it after the speech the lysadamians shouted their votes then were instructed to stand on one side of the room if they wanted war in one side of the room if they did not want more and those who wanted war were the majority approximately 20 years ago i was a child and i lived through the terrorist attacks on 9 11. it was a great tragedy and most people were furious however at the time in america there was no referendum about going to war there was no chance for the american public to decide and there wasn't a big public debate like we see and can read about in thucydides in our american democracy we had nothing like that we can read these speeches from the peloponnesian war and we can put ourselves into the shoes of a spartan or an athenian and we can come to the conclusion ourselves do we find their speech convincing what would we decide although i think most people had an opinion about the invasion of afghanistan i feel like that was really lacking at the time there wasn't a referendum in america ultimately it was decided by one man although most of my generation grew up in comfort it came at a cost the cost i think is a lack of pride in our nation although i was a child when 9 11 happened it was never discussed with me that i would join the army it was an option for me but it wasn't never discussed with me nobody in my family would have expected it for me i have to wonder what if i had what if i had felt so inspired and so proud to be an american that i wanted to join the military isn't it a great failure of the society that i grew up in that i didn't even consider joining the army in reading the history of the peloponnesian war you get a lot of impassioned speeches people who are willing to fight and die either for the athenian empire or to defend themselves against the athenian empire i can't really say that about most of the people in my generation i think most people are not willing to fight and die for the american army we've grown up entitled and expecting so much out of our government and expecting so much day-to-day what we find completely intolerable would be a joke to most people 2500 years ago although i had the sense that the americans were heroes of world war ii i didn't have the sense that in the wars in the years following that the americans were heroes i had the impression that the vietnam war was a huge disaster a failure for the americans and most of the wars afterwards and most of the military conflicts i didn't feel proud of what the american military had done throughout the world since world war ii and in reading this you get the perspective of people who are proud people who devote their lives to their nation to their country so they care enough to make it their mission to give speeches about these things look the amount of effort that people these days put into forming their opinions about political situations but they can't talk about them i i don't know if i'm especially unique in my generation maybe i am maybe i'm just poorly spoken but i do find it difficult and these past 10 years of being an adult um yeah i still struggle with it i still struggle with being able to speak in an authoritative way and feel that my opinion means anything and i think fundamentally it's because most of the time what's on our mind is not about war it's not about the conditions that we're living in if it is and i think most people have been frustrated by their conditions these past 12 months 13 months i guess it's getting on 14 or 15 months that we've been dealing with this situation this pandemic yeah i think people do complain about the minor inconveniences in their lives due to the pandemic people watch the news every day to find out what's new with the pandemic people have all lived through this they have their own experiences and i think it might define the next generation but it does stand in pretty striking contrast to the sort of things that my generation lived through 9 11 was a terrible tragedy but i think most people in my generation wouldn't be able to say anything worth a damn about what happened and they're all fairly ignorant about the ensuing 20 years of war you know unlike the pandemic which is on the news every day growing up i didn't see the news every day about the war the war wasn't being commented on every single day and i think if it was if it was in the public perception as much as the pandemic has been um maybe my generation would have grown up caring more about the war they would have grown up being able to say something about it have some kind of opinion on getting out of the war what's what's the strategy when we listen to the news we don't hear our representatives we have the ability to elect people into congress or senate but are we listening to their speeches do we know what they have to say about the war now more than ever it's easier to find what our representatives have to say they can all have their own youtube channels they can all upload what they've said in congress and we can hear their speeches but will they be recorded will they stand the test of time like thucydides like the history of the peloponnesian war growing up living in ignorance about this situation i am learning more every day about the past 20 years and how this war has affected not only america and the middle east but also central asia i've been reading about and it affected the whole world the whole world has changed because of this 20-year war in afghanistan like the peloponnesian war this might be the end of the golden age of the american empire but does anybody care are our citizens listening to speeches from politicians who talk about this war are we willing to fight and die and live through plague for the sake of our country there are a lot of really valuable reflections on democracy on empire in these speeches and they're very valuable to read for anybody who wants to have any opinion about history politics because this is one of the most important wars in human history but for the most part people are ignorant of this war and people are ignorant about the speeches that have been made uh to discuss these wars why it is that america was involved in the wars that we have been involved in i think very few students in high school have to listen or read speeches from politicians during uh world war ii for example i think in 2020 we had a bit of some political activism that i'm not sure if it would have happened or if it would have happened to this degree if it weren't for the pandemic there's a quote from the history of the peloponnesian war the great lawlessness that grew everywhere in the city began with this disease i wonder if this disease will be the start of people finally making changes wanting change politically i hear so much about getting back to normal but what was the normal in terms of political engagement do we really want people to get back to normal or was this a period of time where people were really starting to come to terms with the reality of their situation there were just fewer distractions fewer things that were taking up their time the title of the chapter is the plague human nature laid bare by natural disaster there's a quote prayers and temples questions to oracles all practices of that kind turned out to be useless also and in the end people gave them up i wonder w will people give up what they're used to was the pandemic really enough or are we able to maintain enough stability enough comfort that there won't really be any lasting change maybe some things like people working from home will become more common but for the most part this was a period where more people became concerned about world politics and world events and i don't know if that will continue i think people are eager to get back to normal which is doing everything they can to ignore these realities of human nature ignore what justice means and ignore some of these really huge concepts that are covered in the history of the peloponnation war [Music] you