A message from Greece

I am currently reading Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War. Just yesterday I came across a passage that gave me chills. The passage is from a speech given by Pericles, in 431 BC, to honor those who had fallen in the first year of the war. The passage reads:

“If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our openness, trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; while we advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbor, and fighting upon a foreign soil, usually vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of our entire people. And yet if with habits not of labor but of ease, and courage not of art but of nature, we are willing to encounter danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.”

I was stunned by how closely the words of Pericles could be correlated to the US fight against the Islamo-Fascists in the first half and then to the defeatism and attempt at the Vietnamization of the entire War of Terror by both the leaders of the Democratic party and the Main Stream Media in the second half of the passage. You have to admit that it’s rather eerily similar. Though that’s not what gave me the chills. What gave me the chills was the thought, after noticing the similarities, that Athens lost.

UPDATE: I have decided to make this my "official" July 4th post.