History Rhyming From Greek To English - Part 1

DESPITE THE PIETY with which it is unthinkingly and rotely mouthed, "democracy" is a very dodgy word, used to describe both the only theoretically legitimate form of government, egalitarian democracy but also a whole host of gangster forms of government, from the merely bad, such as liberal democracy and many things down to some of the worst dictatorships in history.  Google "the peoples' democratic republic of" and you'll find a long list of that last kind of democracy.  Adding to what those of you who do that exercise find I'll mention the unmentionable fact that there are American states which have held elections continually since even before the U.S. Constitution was adopted and which have been continually under the rule of white supremacy, during de jure slavery, defacto Jim Crow slavery and terror, under the now dead Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts and up to today which have never had the legitimacy only had through the true equality of all of its citizens.  Not only the like of Mississippi and Alabama and Texas but many of the states on the Union side during the Civil War have no right to the status of being a legitimate egalitarian state.   And that is not to mention the period in which Women were denied the vote and in which other members of other minority groups were, by law or by violence, denied the right to vote.  My own state, Maine, to its shame denied the full franchise to Native Americans until after the Voting Rights Act was made law, and even then not for several years.*

One of my journalist heroes,  I. F. Stone wrote a book late in his life dealing with one of the great scandals, he thought, in the history of democracy, the Athenian democracy's legendary trial and execution by mandated suicide of that dodgiest of all secular saints, Socrates.  He came up with a pretty convincing case, based on the fragmentary and entirely non-objective evidence we have of Socrates, his elite, aristocrat followers, Athens and Greece and the surrounding area at the times, the end of the 400s BC.  What we have of Socrates is pretty slender as compared, for example, to Jesus, two not entirely convincing and somewhat contradictory accounts of two of his hardly objective students, Plato, in the most detail, and Xenophon, who wrote an account of the trial which differs from Plato's which is what most of those who know anything about it rely on.  In addition to them there is the comedy, The Clouds by Aristophanes and a few one liners from a couple of other comedians.  That's it.  

We can be fairly certain that the snobbish and aristocrat servicing Socrates didn't like the Athenian democracy because it couldn't measure up to his ideals, which he clearly really couldn't define.  I've noted before that I. F. Stone, his great admirer, pointed out that whereas the shoemaker who sparred with Socrates in one of Plato's set-up job tales could do his job and make a pair of shoes, the great Socrates and the entire Socratic-Platonic tradition has never, once come up with a "universal" that could stand on its feet.  I've always, from first attempting to find out what all the excitement over Plato was all about, thought pretty much everyone except a few of the minor, non-aristocratic characters (they are all characters, not People) were pretty much assholes, Socrates too.  

And what we know of the history of Athens in the time of Socrates proves that his students and their aristocratic boy friends and cousins (many of them were cousins) were anti-democratic, larcenous assholes not unlike those in the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and its like, the ones who have done to the United States pretty much what the Republican-fascists and, now Trumpzis are doing though on a much larger scale than what Socrates' buddies did.

I'm going to be going through some of what I. F. Stone said about it in Chapter 11 of his book, The Trial of Socrates because I think in his interpretation of the life and times and trial of Socrates you can discern the rhyming of history in our own time most clearly of any such account. If I could, I'd give you the whole book but I can recommend it to you.  I'm sure that today's classicists will give it as mixed a review as others did when it was published, lots of them resented a mere journalist working their beat.  But they're as far from unanimity of opinion as any other highly invested scholars grasping on to the shards of ancient history, but my interest is in how the objective outlines of that evidence enlighten recent American history.  

That's enough of me for now, here's what the original blogger had to say.

The Three Earthquakes

There was no public prosecutor in Athens.  Any citizen could file an indictment.  If anonymous accusations and the comic poets had been building up prejudice against Socrates all through is lifetime - as he claims in the Apology - how is it that no one filed a complaint against him until he was seventy?  The answer appears twofold.  First, Athens must have been extraordinarily tolerant of dissident opinion.  Second, something must have happened toward the end of his years to make it far less so.

What happened to turn the old jokes sour?  What converted prejudice into prosecution?  The answer, I believe, lies in three political "earthquakes" that occurred in little more than a decade before the trial, shaking the city's sense of internal security and making its citizens apprehensive.  But for these events, Socrates would never have been indicted even if twice as many comic poets had made fun of him.

The dates of those alarming events are 411, 404, and 401 B.C. In 411 and again in 404 disaffected elements in connivance with the Spartan enemy overthrew the democracy, set up dictatorships, and initiated a reign of terror.  In 401 B.C., only two years before the trial, they were about to try again.  The type of rich young men prominent in the entourage of Socrates played a leading role in all three civic convulsions.  

Familiar characters parodied in the Clouds and in the Birds, must have taken on a new and sinister significance.  The spendthrift young aristocrat, Pheidippides, who took a course of instruction in the Socratic "Thinkery" of the Clouds no longer looked like a harmless fop.  A chilling reality now colored his exultant little speech before thrashing his father:  "How sweet it is to become acquainted with the new clever ways, and be able to look down with disdain on the established laws."  The "Socratified" youth of the Birds with their Spartan-syle clubs no longer looked dashing and cute.  They had become the storm troopers with which the Four Hundred in 411 and the Thirty in 404 terrorized the city.

In the elegant and seductive phrases of his Apology, Plato does not allow these political events to obtrude on the reader, though they were fresh in the memories of the judges.  Nor does he mention them anywhere else in his many dialogues.  Since one of Plato's main preoccupations was the achievement of a virtuous politics,  this curious blank spot in his dialogues is itself a feat of selective political amnesia.

We have graphic contemporary descriptions of what happened.  Thucydides is our authority for the events of 411 and Xenophon' Hellenica for those of 404.  The first dictatorship - that of the Four Hundred - lasted only four month, the second - that of the Thirty - eight month.  But each crowded many horrors into a short and unforgettable span.  N.B. The Trump cult's attempt to overturn the presidential term limit for his second regime.

The horrors were not accidental.  All through history the narrower the base of dictatorship, the more dreadful is the terror it feels necessary to maintain itself i power.  In 411 and 404 democracy was not overthrown by a popular revulsion but by a handful of conspirators.  They had to use violence and deceit and to work hand in glove with the Spartan enemy because they had so little support at home.  It is against this background hat we can better understand a curious denial entered by Socrates in Plato's Apology.  There he says that all his life long he had avoided taking part in synomsias.  That is translated as "plots" in the Loeb [translation], and in Jowett.  But the word deserves fuller explanation if we are to get the significance of this denial.  It derives from a Greek verb that means to take an oath together.  It is applied to the more or less secret clubs or conspiracies in which aristocrats bound themselves by oath to each other and to work against the democracy.  These synomosias, Burnet explains in his note on this passage in the Apology, "were originally devised to secure the election to office of members of the oligarchical party and their acquittal when put on trial, and which had played so great a part in the revolutions at the end of the fifth century B.C."

These aristocratic clubs were notorious.  The earliest reference to them is in the Knights of Aristophanes where the Paphlagonian says, "I'll go this instant to the Council-board/And all your vile conspiracies [synomosias] denounce."  The comedy won a first prize in 424 B.C., thirteen year before the first overthrow of the democracy.  

Significantly, Socrates felt it necessary to deny membership in such conspiracies.  There is no reason to doubt Socrates' denial of membership.  But he and the synomosiai shared a common dislike for the democracy.  Socrates' denial that he himself had ever joined a synomosia is the only point in the Apology where he touches - though ever so lightly - on what I believe have to have been the real political issues behind his trial. But Socrates does not - and unfortunately could not - deny that some of his most famous pupils or associates had taken part in these conspiracies.  

There are a few ways to fit the characters in the destruction of America's non-egalitarian, liberal democracy into the form of this account but I think virtually all of them can be better understood when those comparisons are made.  There has clearly been a failure in the United States to even admit the illegitimacy and anti-democratic character of much of what we have swallowed at the behest of such institutions as the New York Times and Washington Post, perhaps starting with the Supreme Court putsch of  Bush v. Gore in 2000, certainly in the failure of the legal system to hold Trump and his aristocratic backers to any consequential AND DECISIVELY PREVENTATIVE responsibility for his and their crimes.  We haven't even done anything to protect the integrity of the voting system. NO ELECTION THAT DEPENDS ON THE LIKES OF MUSK'S STARLINK CAN BE SECURE AND RELIABLE and ours are vulnerable to his and his incel-boy synomosia ratfucking of it as well as the demonstrated and clearly intentional jim-crowing of it in Republican-controlled states.

The Athenian groups undermining and conspiring against democracy have their clear parallels in many of the millionaire-billionaire financed groups inspired by that 1971 blueprint for white supremacist, oligarchic rule written up by Lewis Powell and are clearly running the mass media in the United States.  The American innovation of using broadcast lies to gull the vulnerable, most reliably racist American voters to undermine even the non-egalitarian, libertarian-racist liberal democracy is something which would not have a parallel in Athens of the 400s B.C.  But the failure of the legal system to hold the bulk of the aristocratic criminals to account for their crimes - they didn't even reclaim the property they stole - has its clear parallel in the failures of the legal system, from crooked, lying, lawbreaking lawyers to the slow, often obviously purposely slow judges and the anti-democratic majority on the Supreme Court are exactly the same in having set us up for our 404 B.C. Trump II.   I'll go into that as I continue, unless I get a cease and desist that I believe is credible.  

One thing I'll point out in making those comparisons is that the scales of size and population need to be taken into account.  What a handful of conspiracies and conspirators did to terrorize and control one small city-state in ancient Greece needs to be understood in the size of the conspiracies to do it in 21st century nation-states.   In the United States that conspiracy didn't need to violate the law, it used the slave-power, aristocratic anti-democratic features of the Constitution and subsequent law (much of it Supreme Court made, not legislated) to achieve the same things.
 

*  From the Maine Historical Society:

James Eric Francis Sr., Director of Cultural and Historic Preservation for the Penobscot Nation, described activists Lucy Poolaw and Florence Shay with Florence’s son, WWII and Korean War veteran Charles Norman Shay, attempting to vote:

"In 1952, Native American voters arrived in Old Town to vote. Veteran Charles Norman Shay arrived wearing the silver star that he earned on D-Day. He and everyone else were denied the vote. The Maine Suffrage for Native Americans Referendum was finally passed on September 13, 1954."

According to the U.S. Constitution, states manage elections, and many did not immediately implement the Snyder Act. Maine was one of the last to create a path for Indigenous people to vote in federal elections. Using Maine’s 1820 Constitution that considered people living on reservations as non-taxpayers, Maine denied them suffrage until 1954. Maine delayed voting in state elections even longer, holding back Wabanaki participation until 1967.

The Constitutional provision that leaves it to states to determine how elections are conducted are good in states in which white supremacy and other fascist ideologies don't reign but in the ones they control, it is a guarantee that Black People, Native Americans and others will be denied the vote.  The Roberts Court destroying the Voting Rights Act on the pretense that Obama being elected meant racism was over have knowingly and purposely reimposed Jim Crow on the entire country.