[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
A long time ago, when the Prime Minister of Greece Andreas Papandreou understood that the enemy of his country and of himself was the American Empire, and I was a member of his private office, he gave me a copy of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War to read – study carefully he said – over my August holiday in Crete.
Papandreou knew the lessons of overweaning US power and demonstrated how to defeat it – until he was defeated. His successors, starting with his senior son, proved their ignorance of the lessons and their state is now among the poorest, weakest, most scorned colonial possessions of the American Empire.
President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping lack Papandreou’s education and skill at empire fighting; they think they will escape his downfall.
The test of the latter (downfall) is time – Putin, 73, thinks he has about two years in which to prepare for the succession of 2030. Xi, 72, is president without limitation of term, for life; his father died at 88 so he may calculate he has another twelve years, ten to be on the safe side.
The test of the former (skill at empire fighting) remains what they have read and learned from Thucydides. Putin has prayed to the Greek gods on Mount Athos [3] (twice [4]) and in Athens [5], but those gods were Orthodox ones, not classic ones. He has never said he has read Thucydides, nor has he ever publicly quoted Thucydides.
Aloud, Xi has been mentioning Thucydides since 2014 [6]. According to Wang Zichen’s encyclopedia of the Thucy-Xi combination, there were four references through 2024, always to Americans.
Last week during his meeting in Beijing with President Donald Trump, Xi mentioned [7] Thucydides again. With the Americans, Xi has referred to the same line from Thucydides; or to be more precise, to the same American interpretation of one line. There’s no evidence that Xi has read the original History, or even the 32 sections, 3,000 words of Book V, Chapter 17, where the one line appears in the story of the ancient genocide, the Athenian empire’s slaughter of the Melians [8].
When Xi began his references in 2014 [9], he made sure his audience understood he was sinofying them. “One needs to read ten thousand books and journey ten thousand miles to gain understanding”, Xi said. “Since China is an ancient civilization with over five thousand years of history, sometimes we ourselves don’t even know where to start. There is a famous poem about Lushan Mountain that says when you view it from different directions you get a different impression. And maybe my own perspective has limitations. As the poem also says, you won’t have the whole picture of the mountain when you yourself are on it.”
The ethnocentric fatuousness of this escapes those China analysts who haven’t read English detective stories, seen the Rashomon [10] movie, or recognized the countless variations of the same idea stretching across all cultures. As Greek mountains go, however, Xi got closer to Thucydides than Putin on Mt Athos by visiting the Acropolis in 2019 [11]. But Putin had beaten Xi to the same spot in 2001. Xi has not climbed Mt Athos.
Because the American Empire has dominated Xi’s reading of Thucydides, there are some lines of Thucydides which it’s possible for Putin to hint at with Xi when they meet this week (May 19-20), at least privately when Americans aren’t listening, at least not directly.
Which of Thucydides’s lines Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov omitted to say as he announced [12] the obvious: “The [Beijing] agenda is clear: bilateral relations come first, including our special privileged partnership and impressive trade and economic cooperation, with its annual value consistently above $200 billion. Of course, active discussions of international affairs will also be on the agenda. [On President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing] we are closely following reports in the media, and we also expect to get information straight from the horse’s mouth [sic] once we are in China.”
There are seven Thucydides lines [13]for this Sino-Russian summit (in the Rex Warner translation of 1954):
- “So we are not to speak before the people, no doubt in case the mass of the people should hear once and for all, and without interruption an argument from us which is both persuasive and incontrovertible , and so should be led away” (section 85).
- “When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel” (89).
- “If we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power” (95).
- “Hope, that comforter in danger!…hope is by nature an expensive commodity, and those who are risking all on one cast find out only what it means when they are already ruined” (103).
- “Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law to rule whatever one can”(105).
- “If one follows one’s self-interest one wants to be safe whereas the path of justice and honour involves one in danger” (107).
- “Goodwill shown by the party that is asking for help does not mean security for the prospective ally. What is looked for is a positive preponderance of power in action” (109).
Each of these lines was what Thucydides put into the mouths of the Athenians. The Melians didn’t get the best lines — not those most remembered after two thousand years. Instead, it’s their fate which is remembered.
In Thucydides’s conclusion, speaking on the evidence he had gathered from those who had been present, he wrote: “[Athenian] siege operations were now carried on vigorously and, as there was also some treachery from inside, the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves” (116).
The usual footnote added in modern translations of the History of the Peloponnesian War is that the Athenians won the battle against Melos in 416-15 BC but lost the war against Sparta in 405 BC. Melos was then recovered by the Spartans and repopulated after twelve years. The island (Μήλος, Mílos) has been a part of the Greek state until it was taken by the Germans in the war of 1940-45, and then Athens by the Americans, so it is again a colony.
There is no footnote on the operational and strategic lessons for today. These are being learned at this moment: for example, sieges (by ground, sea, air) do not defeat targets without the betrayal of a Fifth Column; and on the strategic lesson that genocides end up badly for the killers because supremacists have life expectancies too. Winning wars against empires is surviving the submission and suppression.
For a discussion with Vanessa Beeley on the application of the Seven Lessons of Thucydides (and of the footnote on treachery) to Xi, Putin, Trump, and also to the war against the empire being fought by Iran, click to listen [14] or view on Thursday, May 21, Moscow and Beirut 2pm, London noon, New York, 7 am.
[15]Source: https://www.youtube.com/@journalistvanessabeeley/videos [16]
For the education Xi has not himself studied outside China, he, like his predecessor Deng Xiaoping in 1978 [17], sent his only child, daughter Xi Mingze [18], to Harvard for undergraduate and graduate studies, reportedly in psychology. There is no sign that the children of those senior Chinese officials who have been sent to US universities have studied ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Thucydides.
“Of course Thucydides is a virus,” the British classicist Neville Morley has explained to warn modern readers, including Putin and Xi, off the American professor’s one-line theory of imperialism. It is “spreading rapidly along modern channels of communication, turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides [19].”
[20]“Keep your distance or die… don’t stick the spear into them [Spartans, Athenians, Persians, Americans, Israelis, etc.]. Just maintain the distance. Put a shopping bag at the end of your spear. Keep them supplied. But just keep your distance” -- source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwWm-WDkoWw [21]
For the ready referencer to Thucydides in Russian, Chinese as well as Indian warfighting, read the archive [22].
[23] Top: https://johnhelmer.net/the-politics-of-the-slaughter-of-everybody/ [24]
Bottom: https://johnhelmer.net/narendra-modi-is-making-the-melian-mistake/ [25]