Thucydides and Republicanism

"For though it be the part of discreet men to be quiet unless they have wrong, yet it is the part of valiant men, when they receive injury, to pass from peace to war, and after success, from war to come again to composition, and neither to swell with the good success of war nor to suffer injury through pleasure taken in the ease of peace. For him whom pleasure makes a coward, if he sit still, shall quickly lose the sweetness of the ease that made him so" (Thucydides: I: 120).

This might sound an ethic of an eye for an eye, but real political wisdom is at place here. Liberal pacifist ideas are so common these days, and especially among educated middle class young people, that what seems to be the most basic common sense is underestimated as simple chauvinism. War is never good from a moral standing point. But then, politics and morality depart when the most extreme circumstances come at play. When a country is attacked, or humiliated, or some external aggression is inflicted upon it, how can we expect it to lay down? As Thucydides accurately points out, that would be nothing but a cowardly behavior.

Another thing is at play. Peace and prosperity bring pleasure and laziness. Liberal thinking, again, at defending the individual's choice at all cost, render any kind of personal sacrifice (either for country or religion) as irrational, unnecessary or crude fanaticism. The problem of the ease of peace is that, by making men lazy, it makes them cowards; it softens their characters, making them fall in love with their pleasures; and when the time comes that their liberty to be lazy is threatened and the risk of being taken away by tyrants or conquerors, they are overthrown by panic or indolence, which result in crude slavery. Today's liberal ideas (and particularly libertarians'), are nothing but a very complicated set of political and ethical beliefs that are the truest road toward losing any liberty at all and falling into the longest period of slavery.

"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" John F. Kennedy, presidential inaugural address, January 20, 1961.