Peter Jones

Ukraine vs Sparta

Lessons from Thucydides on the present crisis

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 10 May 2014

As rebels, terrorists, fascists, foreign forces, activists, separatists, militants, militias, nationalist groups, Neo-Nazis, Right Sector forces — take your pick — spread civil war across the increasingly lawless cities of eastern Ukraine, a pro-Russian commander helpfully commented ,‘We have God in our hearts, and they have cockroaches in their brains’.

In 431 bc the so-called ‘Peloponnesian war’ broke out between Athens and Sparta. In 427 bc, pro-Spartan oligarchs attempted to drive pro-Athenian democrats out of Corcyra (Corfu), as a result of which civil war spread rapidly from city to city. It was described with horror by the contemporary historian Thucydides, who imagined war as ‘a schoolmaster in brutality’, with both sides taking lessons from precedents already set to go to far greater extremes of destructiveness.

So men of violence won automatic credibility, and evaluation of actions consequently changed: what in normal circumstances would be called ‘bare-faced insanity’ became ‘staunch manliness’, ‘far-sighted caution’ became ‘a nice way of describing cowardice’, ‘moderation’ became ‘a pretext for gutlessness’ and ‘ability to see all sides of a question’ become ‘total unfitness for action’.

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