Saturday Night Radio Drama - David Rudkin - Cries of Casement As His Bones Are Brought To Dublin

THERE ARE SEVERAL legendary radio dramas I've been able to post here such as the one I did a few weeks back,  Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood* and others I've wished I could, such as an English translation of Wolfgang Borchert's  Draußen vor der Tür, usually translated as "The Man Outside."  

One of the legendary ones I've long wanted to find online was broadcast on the BBC on February 4th, 1973,   Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin by David Rudkin.  The project began years earlier but it wasn't produced till then.  It dealt with the real life repatriation, sort of, of the remains of the hero of Irish independence who had been convicted of treason in 1916 who was hanged and his body buried in a lime pit,  despite the agitation to spare his life then the continuing pressure to have his remains brought to Ireland for burial.   

Roger Casement had been held as not on a British but a world hero for his exhaustive investigation and exposure of the enormous numbers of crimes against humanity of the Leopold II and his agents in Congo, murders, genocides, maiming, rapes, etc.   His work was almost certainly the inspiration of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Conrad turned against him when he was arrested for treason in trying to organize an army of independence for Ireland), his report on the horrors of the rubber industry there made him world famous as a great humanitarian, though Leopold and Pius X condemned his work as anti-Catholic lies on behalf of British imperialism, which would become quite ironic considering his conversion to Catholicism before his execution.  

Casement repeated the same exposure of similar and perhaps even greater crimes against Native Americans in the rubber industry in Peru in which the British financial interests were deep and controlling  One of the sources I read said at the time of Casement's exposure of that industry the company he exposed was the biggest one on the London Stock Exchange.   He was a world figure, an influential figure in Washington and around the world.   He was given a knighthood in 1911 for that work as he'd been previously honored for his work in Congo.

He was obviously not very impressed with such honors, he once threatened someone who called him "Sir" though I think that was before he decided to renounce his honors and work for Irish independence trying to work with the German government during WWI to raise a liberation army from Irish prisoners of war,  what led to his arrest when he went back to Ireland for the Easter Uprising.   One of the sleazier  features of his trial were the British government leaking diaries it said were Casement's (though their authenticity has been widely disputed) which indicate Roger Casement had a number of sexual relationships with other men.   Which figured strongly in dampening public pressure against his execution.   I think today the meaning of those diaries has turned 180 degrees and he is now considered a hero of LGBTQ+ history, though who knows how he'd have thought about that?    I suspect, given his life's work on behalf of those under subjugation that he may have been OK with it but there's no way to know.

I'll leave it to you to read more about him and just give you this link to a paper, one of many, about the play in question, From Fragments to a Whole: Homosexuality and Partition in Cries from Casement as his Bones are Brought to Dublin, by David Rudkin.  The play, itself, which was broadcast the year after the infamous Bloody Sunday massacre during the height of the grouples,  is sometimes considered a commentary on the partition of Ireland,  the symbol of Casement's purported bones (the rumor that they got some of the infamous wife=poisoner Crippen's bones in the coffin figures highly in the play) and the fact that the British government would't allow them to be buried where his family and he wanted them buried in Northern Ireland certainly makes one of many points in what is an extremely deep and complex play.  It has everything from very dark humor to tragedy and even some rather farcical episodes. 

That said it may be seen as fitting, though extremely frustrating to me, that only a half-hour of it is available to be heard.   The text has been published - you can read it on a 'to borrow" basis at Archive.org.    Since I think it's unlikely that there will be another audio production of it anytime soon and the attempt to bring it to the stage was a disaster, this may be the best you can get for a long time.  David Rudkin pointed out that much of the dialogue of the play happens in a box so it is appropriate that it be heard from a box.  Needless to say if I can find a full recording of it I will post it here. 

Cries of Casement As His Bones Are Brought To Dublin.  

The BBC broadcast of the play aired on February 4, 1973, and was produced by John Tydeman and starred Norman Rodway as Roger Casement.

Other members of the cast include:

Joan Bakewell

Sean Barrett

Kate Binchy

Michael Deacon

William Eedle

Kevin Flood

Martin Friend

Heather Gibson

David Gooderson

Sheila Grant

Michael N. Harbour

John Hollis

Fraser Kerr

Rolf Lefebvre

Peggy Marshall

Meryl O'Keefe

Irene Prador

David Rudkin

Henry Stamper

Eva Stuart

John Tusa

David Valla

Mary Wimbush

Joy Worth

You can consider this an early St. Patrick's Day post

* I would really like to repost one of the best ones I once posted, Gordon Pengilly's  Seeing In The Dark again.  Unfortuately, it was taken down from where I found it.  It's another of those plays I don't think can work anywhere nearly as well as on the radio. 

Andrew Hill - Smokestack

 

Andrew Hill - piano, Richard Davis - bass,  Eddie Khan - bass, Roy Haynes - drums

The angle of afternoon light here today made me think of this album.  I've always loved the two-basses with piano and drum. Not to mention Andrew Hill's great compositions.  Why listen to one cut when you can hear the whole thing?

History Is Not Only Rhyming, It Is Quoting Verbatim - Part 4

CONTINUING ON WITH the events of the oligarchic reigns of terror that led to the Athenians feeling the need to be rid of the anti-democrat, Socrates.

It would have provided a powerful argument for the defense at Socrate's own trial if he had been able to demonstrate that his followers were not all antidemocratic aristocrats like Critias and Charmides, but that there were democrats among them, too.  It is revealing that at the trial he was able to name only one.

Plato certainly realized the importance of this because in the Apology he had Socrates single him out and make a point of that disciple's pro-democratic record.  He was a man named Chaerephon.  He could not be called as a witness at the trial because he had already died.

"You know Chaerephon, I fancy,"  Socrates says to the judges. "He was my comrade from a youth and the comrade of your democratic party, and shared in the recent exile and came back with you."

Notice that Socrates does not say "our," or even "the," demicratic party but "your," as if clearly to dissociate himself from the dominant political view of the jurors.  Note also that he does not say - as he might have, if if true - that despite the political prejudice against Socrates quite a few of his followers were of the people's party and then cite Chaerephon as one of them;  evidently he was the exception.  He is the only pro-democratic disciple mentioned anywhere in Plato or Xenophon.  Most of the followers, as Socrates himself describes them, were "the young men who have the most leisure, the sons of the richest men."

That "the sons of the richest men" were also, with that one exception, among the biggest supporters of the violent, larcenous anti-democratic reigns of terror is certainly significant throughout the history of the opponents of democracy.  Of course, that category doesn't only include "sons" but also in many cases the fathers of those sons as well.  So it was in the fifth century B.C. and so it is today. I would say that even among supporters of some kind of democracy, notably in the world today, the highly inadequate form of liberal democracy which is proving to be most vulnerable to undermining through the very "liberties" that are the basis of such liberal democracy, some of the most enabling of that undermining are the holders of great wealth, parents and children.  I think that's especially true among those who practice the legal profession and even more so those who are owners of and major figures in the media.  I think even those of more modest backgrounds have thoroughly acclimated to the facts of that reality in how far they are willing to go to accommodate the enemies of equality and democracy, the Republican-fascist party, before that the Republican party when it was merely oligarchic and today when it is most accurately seen as being in the hands of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists.  As I have mentioned here before, it was in the most elite of private universities that the basis of Trumpian fascism, as charted by the Heritage Foundation, the unitary executive theory of the American presidency was framed by the elite faculties of their law schools.  The same can be said of that other major wall in the foundation of Trumpian fascism, the absolute interpretation of the First Amendment to permit the media to lie with impunity.

Let's finally admit that media carried lies are the absolute foundation of Trumpian fascism and, before then, the electoral success of the less intellectually pretentious 20th century manifestation of the Athenian anti-democratic clubs. MORE LIES IN THE MEDIA IS WHAT ELON MUSK'S AND THE OTHER RICH SONS' MONEY BOUGHT.  Lies carried by the freest of free presses.  The entire basis of the finance reform laws that the goddamned Supreme Court overturned after those passed and were made law in the wake of the crimes of Nixon AND HIS CAMPAIGN committed, THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF THE ELECTORAL CORRUPTION THAT WAS WHAT ALL OF THAT DIRTY MONEY WAS ABOUT was the ability to tell lies in the media so as to gull a susceptible margin of voters into voting for Republicans when the truth would have almost certainly have led to them choosing to vote against them.   

The biggest reason that that corruption succeeds is that lying is so much a part of our politics, especially what is broadcast in the media, especially campaign ads bought with that millionaire and billionaire and duped-sucker middle-class and poor Peoples money.   It is lying told to produce bad government, a way to sandbag government for the benefit of the many to buy government for the benefit of the rich. 

When you hear someone tout  "free press" or "free speech" in this context, what they mean is allowing lies instead of the truth to determine the government of the United States.  No doubt the promotion of lies played a big part in the success of the anti-democratic putsches in ancient Athens, no doubt money played a big part in that.  

Democracy, whether in its legitimate form in egalitarian democracy or its riskier and far less legitimate form as liberal democracy, is as OR EVEN MORE VULNERABLE to a media which is permitted to carry lies as it is any enemy foreign or domestic, in fact, they are the ones most enabled by that line of Supreme Court cases going from Sullivan to Buckley v Valeo to Citizens United.  The "civil libertarians" have handed the most potent weapons against democracy directly to the ones who have the most to gain from the destruction of democracy and it's the same group mentioned above, "the sons of the richest men."  Well, lots of them are daughters, too, these days.  

To continue holding that that stand of "free speech-press" absolutism as some kind of virtue instead of what has brought us to where we are now is the major feature of the insanity of our culture, left, moderate, not-opposed-to-democracy right.  THE ONLY PART OF OUR BODY POLITIC FOR WHICH IT IS NOT INSANE ARE THE OPPONENTS OF DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT FOR THE PEOPLE BUT FOR THE RICHEST AMONG US. It's no wonder that the media, journalists as well as pseudo-journalists refuse to see that because it is in their direct financial and professional interest to not admit that or to even discuss it.  Well, the Congress did after the revelations of the crimes of the Nixon regime and Spiro Agnew, it was the black-robed legal priests of the Court, liberal as well as crypto-fascists who just couldn't see the problem with empowering lying with permitting its financing by the crooks who paid for it in the Nixon campaign.  The Court is and has been the most corrupt branch of the government. But they're innocents as compared to the journalists, the owners of the media and their civil-liberties lawyers.

Little Bobby Should Hear This Every Time He Appears In Public For The Rest Of His Life

 HEY, HEY RFK

HOW MANY KIDS DID YOU KILL TODAY?   

On The Claim That New York City Is A Sophisticated Place

THEY'RE EXPECTING TO GO FROM ERIC ADAMS TO .  .  . wait for it . . . ANDREW FRICKIN' CUOMO!? 

In all the millions of People who live there, they couldn't find anyone better than that?   Or at least one without the baggage he's got?   And after Eric Adams!?    Don't you guys ever learn from the most recent of experiences?  NYCADD.   We've had bad leadership here but we've had good leadership more times than like never in living memory.  We can't match the record of the most overrated berg in the western hemisphere.  

They Send Me Links - Uh, Yeah, Duncan, I'd Bet On Most Of The Democrats In The Senate Being Smarter Than You

I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE of what the thinking of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate is about the continuing resolution thing but I suspect they may be counting on Trump and the Republicans totally tanking the economy and they figure if they're going to do that anyway they shouldn't give them any slogans about Democrats forcing a government shut down to distract the extremely distractable and gullible electorate.   

I am absolutely certain that Sheldon Whitehouse is smarter than you are, he didn't spend last year talking down "the Dems."  And far from just last year. 

Hate Mail - Why I Capitalize Most Everything But "white" and "male" and "men" and "straight"

BECAUSE UNLIKE VIRTUALLY EVERYONE ELSE no one has to be reminded that straight, white men are human beings of equal standing and the holders of equal rights.  

I'd originally started capitalizing "People" because materialists, especially those supreme idiots, the eliminative positivists, are in the business of demoting People into material objects and that's guaranteed to them being seen in terms of utility (which would get me started on that atheist-materialist and so academic ersatz substitute for revealed morality, utilitarianism) and their economic valuation (which would get me started on the theory of natural selection and, so, the various final solutions of scientistic, materialist academic atheism).   I gradually expanded it as I realized that the treatment of Women and minority groups, especially People of Color had literally always been thought of that way in Western and many other world cultures   

Not a comprehensive answer but one that's sincere.   Well, there is that I was pretty sure it would piss off cis-gendered, straight, white males and the white gals who figure on riding them to their own advantage.   I love pissing off those kinds of people.   It's why I've gone back to using B.C .and A. D.  To piss off the materialists. 

On The Twelfth Anniversary Of Pope Francis' Election As Pope

THERE HAVE BEEN TWO great Popes during my lifetime,  Good Pope John XXIII and Good Pope Francis,  both of whom were said to have been elected as space-keepers between what would have been intended as more significant Popes.   Well, Francis has endured for twelve years now.   I don't know how much that intention of space keeping was real within the body of Cardinal Electors who voted on either of them and how much of it was wishful thinking in those who commented on their elections but I remember it being said of Francis and have read of it having been said of John XXIII. 

St. John XXIII, of course, initiated the most significant change in the Catholic Church by calling the Second Vatican Council which I think of as the start of the re-Christianization of the Catholic Churches which, since it first became an established political power,  had become ever farther from the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets in the accumulation of tradition, politics and theological baggage - much of it from the First Vatican Council in the 19th century but, even more so, at the Council of Trent in the 16th century.    You can get an idea of how much of that baggage there was by the fact that as late as 1903 Franz Joseph I of Austria successfully exercised the, by then, illegal jus exclusivae - the power granted to certain  secular monarchs to veto the election of a Pope -which resulted in the election of the pretty regrettable Pius X - though Pius did finally, the very next year, definitively put a ban on that interference by monarchs in the election of a Pope.   Now the electors have to swear an oath that they will not be swayed in that way.   For the record,  I think it's quite possible that the one who was vetoed,  Mariano Rampolia may have turned out to have been worse in effect than Pius X.   I think he'd have been an even worse version of Pius IX.    

Anyway, the election of Francis twelve years ago today surprised me.   I'd been prepared for the Cardinal Electors, most of whom had been appointed by the reactionary John Paul II and his chosen successor, the good academic theologian but really bad Pope, Benedict XVI (really, really bad), to choose another in that line of bad popes.   

I happened to be taking care of our very old mother the day of the election, she had TV on and as soon as it was announced that a Pope had been elected she switched to one of the 24-7 "news" stations,  I think it was CNN and know it wouldn't have been FOX, she hated FOX.   When they announced in Latin that it was Cardinal Jorge Bergolio of Argentina who had been elected I was surprised but not as surprised as I was when they said he'd chosen the name "Francis."   It hadn't occurred to me till then that no Pope had taken the name of that very great and most beloved saint. *  But it wasn't until Pope Francis first appeared, not in the putrid scarlet and gold get up that is traditional on that occasion but in a simple white cassock, that I had the sense that this was not going to be a Pope in the royal tradition, certainly not in the style of JPII or BXVI.    As I found out he was going to live in an apartment in an apartment building instead of the Papal apartment, I had a real feeling that he was going to be a Pope I liked.  

And he didn't disappoint in that.  Though he certainly hasn't put in many of the reforms I'd hoped for, the expansion of the priesthood to married men and Women high among them, his theme of mercy and charity over legalism and judgment has been a far more significant extension of the work of St. John XXIII than I could have hoped for.  He has, in a modest but significant way, extended power in the Church outside of the ordained clergy and hierarchy.   His Encyclicals are masterpieces of radical theology, radical because of their adherence to the Gospel, the Epistles, The Law and the Prophets in terms of modern life,  few of those which intervene between the great and monumental Pacem in Terris of John XXIII will be much read sixty or more years later but I'm sure the ones by Good Pope Francis will be often read and cited. 

As an LGBTQ+ man,  the mercy and charity of Francis has revolutionized the practice of the Church so much that even this morning I listened to a sermon given at mass by a priest in good standing praising his inclusion of my people as welcome members of the Catholic Church, something I never thought I would ever hear in my lifetime.   Granted I would like there to be complete equality for same-sex marriages within the Church but I never, even after he was elected and started to extend charity to us, would have believed a Pope would approve of priests blessing same-sex unions. 

I recently joked to one of my sisters that whereas the Vatican measured progress in centuries the Orthodox and Eastern Churches measured it in millennia.  It's only this year that Francis said he would make good on a promise that the successor of St. Pope John XXIII,  Paul VI made  more than half a century ago that if the Eastern Churches could finally agree on a common date for celebrating Easter, the Roman Church would go along with it - a dispute that literally is almost two millennia old.  If I live long enough to see that promise made real it will probably put the start of Lent well after I like to see it - this year was too late for my taste - but it's a good thing.   

That's the kind of thing you have to expect as a measure of the rate of change in those traditions.   On that scale the papacy of Francis has made progress at the speed of light.   

I seriously question the canonization of the show-biz Pope,  JPII, who I think had one of the worst papacies in the modern period and whose actions often made him seem more like a CIA asset than the pastor of the largest Christian denomination in the world.   His sins against the victims of fascist military dictatorships and the Reagan and Bush I administrations in Central America were deep and, if any sins are, mortal.    I think the scandalous papacy of Benedict XVI will, like that of Pius IX, delay or exclude him from the church calendar.   I tend to agree with Thomas Reese that Popes should not be officially canonized because there are so many dodgy figures among those who already have been - I'm not big on the canonization of saints.   But I don't doubt that Francis will be a saint because of who he is and how he has lived.   Only I hope not too soon, unlike those like Timothy Dolan who I hope is retired by Francis as soon as he's feeling up to it.   Robert Barron, too.    When talking about the papacy of Francis you can't do that without taking into account the number and poor quality of his enemies, the ones who David Bentley Hart correctly said opposed Francis because he had the odd notion that the Catholic Church should be a Christian church.   That's the best summation of his papacy I can think of off hand this morning.   I think the nature of the enemies of Francis, within and outside of the Church will become ever more apparent as the wave of fascism that Trump is part of continues and the members of the Catholic church take sides in the struggle against it or with it. 

I hope we're celebrating this day one and two years from now.  I hope his successor continues his work.   I hope Francis does until he finally gets to go home. 

* I remember being on line that day and getting into several discussions among clearly anti-Catholic bloggers and would-be lefty commentators who seemed to hate the fact that "Francis" meant the beloved Francis of Assisi.   They wanted it to mean St. Francis Xavier or St. Francis de Sales.    I had to disabuse them of that notion because no Catholic who merely said St. Francis would ever mean anyone but St. Francis of Assisi.   I said I was almost entirely certain that those who named both of those other saints would have been naming them for the beloved St. Francis.   Some of the same blog commentators immediately repeated the accusations of collusion of Cardinal Jorge Bergolio  with the junta of generals during the dirty war made by the quasi-Marxist media - which turns out to have been lies not atypical of such Marxists and the pseudo-lefty media that follows them.   It's ironic to remember that considering Pope Francis has turned out to be far more economically radical than all of those Marxists put together and a more effective opponent of fascism than any of them.    

I'll Finish With The I.F. Stone In A Few Days

I RE-INJURED my shoulder yesterday and it needs some rest.  Knew I should have gotten that wi-fi keyboard-mouse combo when I first wrecked it.  

They Send Me Links

Steve Simels, blog malignancy
RCS and then some.
12 hours ago

It's no surprise I love that guy.

I should add that a certain former Atriot/current idiot (whose name I won't mention, but whose initials are Anthony McCarthy) thinks Wilde is some kind of incoherent asswipe, despite the fact that he's, uh you know, a major hero gay-rights-wise.

Which is also particularly funny given that McCarthy has serious problems with the English language.

Simps has said similar things for years and I've corrected him several times.  Considering his reading comprehension is closer to Trump's than to mine, as he has demonstrated online for two decades, I have to smile at this variation.   Just for the hell of it, here's what I said to Simps Wednesday, December 16, 2015

On The Importance of Being Earnest

Oh, yeah, there's no question that Gertrude Stein was an active Nazi collaborator, through her connections with the puppet Vichy government.   They protected her and Alice Toklas and, probably more important to Stein, her art collection, and allowed her to live in comfort in occupied France even as Jewish children a few miles away from her were being sent to their deaths.  She attempted to produce pro-Vichy propaganda to be marketed to the American audience, I would think it was supposed to keep America out of the war.  It was amazing stupidity that fit right in to her pre-war proclamations about how Hitler was no danger because he was a German romantic and how war was like dancing, going back and forth.

“Hitler will never really go to war. He is not the dangerous one. You see, he is the German romanticist. He wants the illusion of victory and power, the glory and glamour of it, but he could not stand the blood and fighting involved in getting it. No, Mussolini—there’s the dangerous man, for he is an Italian realist. He won’t stop at anything.”

Like so much of the common received wisdom, right and alleged left, and especially among the ersatz intellectual class of the unlightenment, the reputation of Gertrude Stein is a total PR cover up job which people repeat in complete ignorance of her actual production and her putrid and self-centered life. That such an abominable record of stupidity, superficiality and phoniness is still the common conception of Gertrude Stein seventy years after she died only shows what a phony, superficial and stupid thing our so called intellectual class is, these days.

--------

Yesterday's comments made the accusation that I dissed Oscar Wilde.  Well, you see that little search box at the top of the screen?   If you type Oscar Wilde and search my blog you will find I've mentioned him three times.  My thinking on Oscar Wilde is a bit more complex than that.

Once in a piece pointing out, among other things, the biological and epidemiological fact that anal sex was and still is a risk to the health of the people engaging in it.

Not having yet seen K.J. Dover's book about intercurral sex as depicted on Greek pottery or knowing that Oscar Wilde and a number of other famous gay writers had rejected anal sex, I didn't argue the issue on those grounds.

The second, in reference to one of his not unproblematic The Soul of Man Under Socialism, was far from a slam.

I intend to be as underservingly poor as was imagined by Oscar Wilde and as outrageously insistent on facing the most inconvenient and uncomfortable reality of intentional liberal failure as Marilynne Robinson in her great, ignored essay, Mother Country.

There are huge problems with Wilde's conception of socialism,though no more of a problem than the socialists conception of socialism.  Beginning with his opening sentence which is about as anti-socialist a statement as it's possible to imagine.

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody.

Well, no, that's the chief desideratum of the opposite of socialism, even as found among many socialists, and it is the opposite of any system that even has a decent society as its goal.  Wilde had a few good ideas and was able to write some biting satire on upper class British society but he wasn't a deep or systematic thinker.  He did, though, see through the grotesque hypocrisy of much of British social welfare which was the upper income doing the minimal amount of good to the poor while extracting the maximum of shame, embarrassment and petty cruelty to the recipients of its incredibly stingy largess.   He might have been superficial but he saw something as desirable that the establishment social thinkers of Britain couldn't bear the thought of, economic equality.  

If by the word "charity" you understand the kind of stuff that the British establishment did to the poor, his use of the word makes complete sense.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

Perhaps he didn't consider there is another kind of charity that doesn't have the goal of the giver having the satisfaction of lording it over poor people, the sadistic pleasure of making them feel ashamed of needing to take their crumbs and the other and many ways in which the British establishment at its most "charitable" was just the other arm of its hatred of poor people.  There is a conception of charity as the just distribution of wealth and the benefits of society and culture on an equal basis for the benefit of the poor.  That is the concept that is behind the economic content of Jewish prophesy, in both the First and Second testaments of the Bible, the economic ideas that I've come to see as entirely superior to just about any definition of socialism I've come across, it is far more radical than Marxism and the opposite of that putrid pantomime of socialism, Fabianism.  

But this is the passage I was referring to, again keeping in mind that he was talking about Victorian and Edwardian Britain and its pathological notion of charity.

The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. 

The third time I mention Oscar Wilde one ties up this post.

The reports of [Gertrude] Stein nominating Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize are convincing.  She was a right winger, a rich trust-fund baby, decadent, superficial fraud, promoting her "genius."  Her declaration of her genius is the only thing distinguishing about her and she stole even that act from Oscar Wilde who did so much more to earn the title, though I wouldn't hold him as having actually been one.   He was certainly deeper on those occasions he wasn't playing the fop.  Stein was only a fop and her act grows really tedious through the sameness of her production.

You see, Simps, I've read both Stein and Wilde and I've read some history too.  It's not enough to just repeat lines you've read in the foppish magazine journalism of the smart New York set, or, more likely, in pretentious movies and TV shows.  There's more to life than entertainment, in fact, there is more to politics.  I've never gone far into the corrosion of the left through people being distracted by stupid stuff but it's probably as bad as anything in producing that effect.  We are in a country in which one Hollywood B-list actor was given the power to destroy everything Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson did to produce egalitarian democracy.  We are in a year in which there is a real prospect that the man who most of his followers know through The Apprentice is a front runner of one of our two parties.  That's not just a coincidence.

clandestine conspiracies waiting for an opportunity to overturn the democracy - Part 3

To understand how he events of 411 and 403 must have changed popular attitudes toward Socrates, one need only recall how the democracy was twice restored.  As in so many revolutions, like the fall of the czar and the kaiser in World War I, and the collapse of the Greek junta and the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1980s, the political overturn followed military disaster.  For Athens in 411 it was the defeat at Syracuse;  in 404, it was Athens' loss of its fleet - through treachery or unbelievable incompetence - at Aigospotomi and its surrender to Sparta.

I don't know if the fact that in the United States the fall of Republicans is solely due to their economic policies of maximum enrichment of the already filthy rich, that money coming from the lower economic classes and their consequent crashing of the economy marks us as better or worse than the ancient Greeks.   I do know that, once Democrats have righted the economy once again, the media, mostly the mass media but also much of the boutique media and the millionaire-billionaire propaganda outfits,  make sure that everyone forgets who tanked the economy and caused so much pain to everyone.  That has been a pattern since the 1920s though the Great Depression that Republicans caused was severe enough that its lessons really took and kept Republicans from power for an unprecedentedly long period.   It's clear from the media, from the most august, the great gray whore of the New York Times and its level down to FOX Lies and lower, sandbagged the most economically competent president of our lifetimes, and I mean those in their 80s and maybe their 90s as well as everyone younger, in favor of the stupidest, most recklessly stupid and irresponsible, convicted felon and sex criminal,  and the consequences of that could well bring on another Great Depression.   No doubt the mass media, freed by the Supreme Court to lie with impunity will try to repeat recent history as soon as a Democrat pulls their money out of the fire, again. 

Though, as Bush II shows, the incompetent, economy crashing Republicans are fully capable of waging terrible, entirely unjustifiable wars that cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps ultimately millions of lives, even as they crash the economy.   That our media and a majority of American voters either don't care about or support those wars - often on media fed ignorance and lies - is an indictment of our national character.   As the major stain on the Biden presidency of allowing and supporting Israeli genocide against the Palestinians shows, that that character flaw and the media's role in promoting and maintaining it, has consequences that extend beyond the criminal party, the Republicans.  

In the wake of these defeats, there ensued not a struggle between rich oligarchs and poor democrats but a three-cornered class struggle.  Those led by Critias represented aristocrats who had been organized in clandestine conspiracies waiting for an opportunity to overturn the democracy.  A second faction spoke for the middle class, the third, for the poor, who provided the labor force and owed their achievement of political equality to the role they played as sailors and light infantry - the marines - in the navy on which the imperial power and trade primacy of Athens rested.  

In 411 and in 404 the democracy was overthrown by a coalition of he aristocrats and the middle class against the poor, whom they disfranchised.  But that coalition twice broke down when the aristocrats tried to disarm and disfranchise the middle class as well as the poor, and to establish a dictatorship rather than an oligarchical or "republican" government based on a franchise limited to property owners.  In 411 and 404, the conduct of the aristocratic dictators proved cruel, rapacious, and bloody.  Never in the history of Athens were basic rights and property as insecure as in those two interludes.  Both times the middle class in its own defense had to form an alliance with the poor and restore democracy.  

In the context of the United States "the poor" has both an economic BUT ALSO AN OVERRIDING RACIAL COMPONENT.   It has been the major tactic of the American aristocratic-oligarchic faction to leverage the racism of poor and middle-class whites to make sure that a united underclass doesn't overrule their rule.  And enough poor whites and middle class People are perennial suckers for that and have been going back to before the Constitution was written and adopted.   Those of us who theorize about "democracy" don't take into account the universality of character flaws, prejudice,  hatred, greed, etc. having to be reckoned with when the government is by the choice of The People in whole, and the fact that it is the principle of  EQUALITY not "liberty" is the remedy for that congenital disease that destroys democracy.   The libertarian principle leads to such atrocities as the idea that there is a "right to lie," a "right to promote prejudice and hate" and as we have seen in the late 20th and 21st centuries, such "rights" find their biggest, fattest champions in exactly those who hate democracy the most.   I have never heard a "free speech-press" champion who is really much bothered by the consequences of their position, no matter how many members of targeted groups are oppressed or even murdered.* 

I think if it became clear to poor and middle class voters that they've been weakened by their prejudices, that it was in their interest to give it up, some, not all of that effect could be blunted.   I think that if Lyndon Johnson had pulled off the Great Society instead of being sidetracked by the Vietnam War that could have been the result, though it's certain that the lying post-Sullivan media would have fought against that, tooth an nail. 

That tactic of harnessing hate is not confined only to race but has worked for the oligarchs with a number of groups subject to destructive prejudice,  LGBTQ+ People have been the focus of the same kind of beneficial hate campaigns, collectively or, as now, focusing on one of our coalition.   While I. F. Stone doesn't bring that up in the context of Athens, perhaps texts focusing on that haven't survived in explicit enough form, it was almost certainly part of the politics of that non-egalitarian democracy in what was effectively an ethno-state.  Though we do know that something similar with was in effect in that an accusation made that a citizen, a member of the enfranchised, native Athenian male population had taken the passive ("female") role in anal sex could lead to their disenfranchisement.   One suspects that accusation was used as a tactic of control by the enemies of Athenian democracy, such as it was.

The restored democracy in 403 acquitted itself with magnanimity.  Except for a few aristocratic leaders who lost their lives, the contending classes and factions were reconciled on the basis of a sweeping amnesty that won the admiration of antiquity.  Aristotle, though he himself favored middle-class rule based on a limited franchise, paid his tribute to the restored democracy.  "The Athenians," he wrote, about a half century after the overthrow of the Thirty, "appear both in private and public to have behaved toward the past disasters in the most completely honorable and statesmanlike manner of any people in history."  In the cities the losers were often massacred and aristocratic landowners lost their estates to the landless.  But the Athenian democrats, Aristotle notes with evident wonder, did not "even make a redistribution of the land."

But Socrates, during those fateful conflicts and their human resolution, did not take his stand with the aristocrats, or his own middle class, or the poor.  The most talkative man in Athens fell silent when his voice was most needed.  One possible reason is simply, that he did not care enough.  He seemed wholly to lack compassion.  Nietzsche, who began as a classical scholar, once described the logic of Socrates as "icy." Gregory Vlastos, one of the foremost Platonists of our time, once wrote that while Jesus wept for Jerusalem, Socrates never shed a tear for
Athens.

There are several pages after this that I'm tempted to go through, I.F. Stone going to the Euthyphro dialogue as a means of exploring Socrates' indifference to the suffering of others, especially those who the secular saint didn't figure were on the same social level he or his associates were on.  I'm very tempted to go through it because back during the new atheism fad of the 00's I got into an argument over that particular piece with one of the second-tier celebrities of its online manifestation.  But I'm not really interested in Socrates' personality,  I'm far more interested in what those who participated in political life and the law in Athens did, how their customs and courtesies to the aristocratic, the wealthy, those of what they considered good families and what those practices enabled.  I'd say those encouraged the two reigns of terror, the clearly inadequate "noble" response to both the first and second ones that led to the last of the three "earthquakes" that Stone says led the Athenians to finally have had enough of Socrates and decided they needed to be rid of him and his tail-chasing pursuit of "universals."  The lauded philosophical tradition of Socrates was,  in effect, a democracy eating moral nihilism.   I think the major weakness in the Socratic tradition is that in the end we can't base our choices in absolute logical certainty but have to take responsibility by coming to a conclusion on the evidence available informed by morality.   And morality often requiring self-sacrifice, isn't a guarantee of being as gratifying to the one taking responsibility.   The elevation of pure logic, as if there is such a thing, over moral responsibility is intellectually as well as morally dishonest.

*  The indifference to suffering that I. F. Stone justifiably charges that academic-secular idea of a saint,  Socrates with, is certainly as present in the elite members of the legal profession,  the "justices" and many of he judges and certainly is rampant among lawyers.   It is why, for example, a Sandra Day O'Connor could OK the execution of someone who may have been innocent based on the schedule that paperwork was required to be filed.  That kind of indifference to justice by "justices" is hardly unknown in many other cases, as well.    I suspect their professional training promotes that indifference though, since lawyering is mostly motivated by self-enrichment of those who take it up, it may just be a profession that self-selectively attracts such amoral People.   It is a huge mistake of the U.S. Constitution that it has allowed the Supreme Court to override the elected legislative and executive branches to the unique extent that ours does, not only through the inadequate Constitution but through its usurped Marbury powers.   But, then, it was lawyers who wrote the thing and lawyers who were on the Court when it made that power grab. 

partly by persuasion, partly by force, we shall contrive to overreach with impunity - Part 2

The subversive strategy of the aristocratic clubs in normal times is frankly set forth by Adeimantus in the second book of the Republic.  Adeimantus is usually identified as the brother of Plato.  "With a view to lying hid, " Adeimantus explains to Socrates, "we will organize societies [synomosiai] and political clubs [hetaireias] and there are teachers of cajolery who impart the arts of the popular assembly and the court-room.  So that, partly by persuasion, partly by force, we shall contrive to overreach with impunity."

Plato in the Laws provides the death penalty for anyone who would organize conspiracies or clubs to subvert his own ideal city.  But Athens was more tolerant.  The right of association was safeguarded by an Athenian law that went back to the days of Solon.  No legal action was ever taken against these aristocratic "clubs," although, as Gomme's monumental commentary on Thucydides points out, "only enemies of democracy need secret organizations."  

Here I will break in to point out that our equivalents of these aristocratic anti-democratic, terrorist organizing clubs, the terrorist organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan, white supremacist organizations, etc. similarly are protected by our equivalent to the Code of Solon, the Constitution* and, especially, the Bill of Rights and the conventions that have arisen and been promoted primarily by our elites.  That they have acted mostly against the enslaved and formerly enslaved is certainly a part of why they were not only tolerated under the Constitution and Bill of Right, the very Bill of Rights contains things put there to not only protect their assembly but to arm their like under the Second Amendment.   No such protection of rights was ever equally allowed to the enslaved under the U.S. Constitution.   Not even white abolitionists ever really had the equal protection of the law.

You will notice what I pointed out here the other day, that democracies are, by convention,  under some daffy notion of liberty, supposed to make themselves vulnerable to attacks and dangers that anti-democratic governments, criminal rackets of by and for a criminal syndicate who want to oppress, rob and terrorize and kill those outside of it won't feel they are morally obligated to risk.  Which is one of the stupider things about the theory and practice of much democracy.  The protection of actual equality and genuine democracy is a right to which all of the People who live under those have a right to.   Certainly more of a right to that than the right of those who would destroy equality and genuine democracy "partly by persuasion and party by force" to pursue their goals.  There is no right to impose illegitimate rule over anyone or to do things to impose that rule.  This is something our idiotic liberal democratic ideology can't navigate. Ironically, enough, even the anti-equality, anti-democrats among us benefit from the very thing they seek to destroy and we stupidly protect the means they use to destroy it for everyone else.  

The first mention of synomosiai in Thucydides is in the famous affair of the mutilation of the Hermae [statures of Hermes] just as an Athenian armada prepared to set out against Syracuse.  Statues of Hermes, the patron divinity of (among other things) travel, stood in front of Athenian homes.  In one night they were all mutilated.  An oligarchic conspiracy (synomosia) was suspected behind this ill-omened affront against the god, calculated to bring bad luck on the expedition.

After the disaster at Syracuse, an aristocratic conspiracy was indeed set afoot.  Thucydides tells us that a treasonable general Peisander began by reversing Athenian policy in the subject cities, abolishing the democracies Athens had fostered and replacing them with oligarchies.  These revolutions in the subject cities soon provided troops of oligarchic sympathy for the overthrow of democracy in Athens itself in 411.

Thucydides relates that when they reached Athens the conspirators found that much of their "business had already been accomplished" by the aristocratic secret clubs.  "Some of the younger men" in these clubs had organized squads of assassins to deprive the people of its leaders and to create an atmosphere of terror.  They "secretly put to death a certain Androcles," the historian tells us, because he was :the most prominent leader of the popular party.  Others opposed to their plans they secretly made away with in the same manner.  "Terror spread. People no longer "spoke against them, through fear and because it was seen that the conspiracy was widespread; and if anyone did oppose" them, Thucydides says, "at once in some convenient way he was a dead man."  These were the prototypes of the death squads the military used in Argentina, El Salvador, and Chile in our own time.

Domestic security broke down.  "No search was made," the historian continues, for those who did the deed, nor if they were suspected was any legal prosecution held."  On the contrary, Thucydides observes,  "The populace [the demos] kept quiet and were in such consternation that he who did not suffer any violence, even though he never said a word, counted that a gain."  The terror had a multiplyer effect. "Imagining the conspiracy to be much more widespread than it actually was," the democrats were "cowed in mind."

"All the members of the popular party," Thucydides explains, "approached each other with suspicion."  This was not mere paranoia.  There were unpredictable treacheries, as some switched sides from cowardice or opportunism.  "There were among them men whom one would never have expected to change over and favour an oligarchy."

It was these turncoats, the ancient historian relates, "who caused the greatest distrust among the masses and rendered the most valuable service toward the few in securing their safety by confirming in the populace this distrust of their own people toward each other." This was not ancient history to the Athenians when they put Socrates on trial.

Though it's certainly worth reading them, I am going to skip over the next three paragraphs about how history rapidly repeated itself under the terror regime of the Thirty in 404 and Socrates weak defense of himself at his trial, notably made after he had been convicted and sentenced.  Socrates then claiming he wasn't involved, having chosen to remain aloof from the oppressive actions of his students and their friends and cousins to preserve his integrity.  Such integrity as he maintained hardly seems to recommend the character of the one who polishes it up for show.  I am sure the lawyers up to including the Attorney General are proud of their maintenance  of every scrupulosity put on paper in the rules of conduct at the so-called department of justice in the past four years, too.  I am sure that most of the lawyers who obstructed justice on both sides don't have much to worry about in being held to account.  It's the rare occasion when the legal profession, up to and including judges and, especially, "justices" are required to take responsibility for the consequences of what they do and what they choose out of professional habit, don't do.  I'll amend this if the current U.S. Attorney for DC, Ed Martin is disbarred for his clear violations AND IF THAT DISBARMENT HAS ANY EFFECT IN REMOVING HIM.   I have a feeling that lots of our aristocrats are going to be covering their asses as the cowardly free-press have in Trump II.  Especially the DC press whores.  

I'll leave that point aside because I want to raise a different one in regard to these aristocratic clubs which were certainly widely known among the conspirators and certainly had to have been the extent to which they worked together in ancient Athens to thwart the non-egalitarian, old-family, slave supported, Athenian male rule on what was clearly a too broad for some oligarchic system which was the lauded and famous Athenian democracy.  Certainly the antics of Socrates and his "Socratified" boys club wouldn't have been tolerated if they hadn't been an eccentric and glib member of the middle-class and a coterie of aristocratic boys.  An egalitarian conspiracy of lower class men or slaves certainly wouldn't have been allowed the liberties granted to Socrates and his fellow anti-democrats for as long as they festered in Athens.  We certainly have examples of such lower-order subversive groups against white supremacy and concentrated wealth which were not tolerated under the First Amendment right to "peaceably assemble" even as those who assemble violently have flourished as long as they not only supported but imposed inequality and thwarted democracy.  Which is one of the greatest differences between egalitarian democracy and the liberal democracy which is not and never intended to be equal.

The anti-democratic, even anti-liberal democracy movements among the aristocracy and, especially, the legal whores in the Ivy League level law schools and their students who became judges and then "justices" has been an ongoing effort for more than half a century, with the financial support of millionaires and billionaires and with the blessing of our civic stand-in for a priest-class, the elite universities.  It is one of the many ironies of American history that as anything like a subversive movement in the law that supported socialism or anything that would endanger the wealth of the super-rich has been effectively marginalized, anything like efforts in the law to promote equality have been effectively swept aside by Supreme Court fiat, the most effective conspiracy against egalitarian democracy - like most of the efforts to wrest equality and real democracy from the Constitutional order - have succeeded beyond the wildest fever dreams of Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist and all of those corrupt law school profs who have promoted the unitary executive way to oligarchy.

It is a conspiracy which relied on the "liberal justices" being complete chumps going back sixty one years and, in among the clearest parallels of all to ancient Athens, with the support of the longest standing enemy of the United States, a neo-Stalinist Russian dictator - one conveniently shed of those pretenses of "socialism" as were clearly the only real problem the American establishment ever had with the original Stalin, not the every oppression of Russians or, now, even his attack on Ukraine.  That that irony is embodied in what was the most anti-Soviet Republican Party who has given control of the United States to Putin's puppet, the corrupt, criminal idiot, Donald Trump shows how corrupt not only our law but the media, the free-press that enabled and, in fact, propelled this whole thing is even as compared to the anti-egalitarian and so doomed to repeat its failures, Athens.  

I am certain that I. F. Stone of even 1988 would disagree with me on the democracy destructive character of the modern interpretation of the First Amendment, though this recapitulation of the destruction of a type of democracy was well under way the year the white collar crime rich Reagan administration would be succeeded by the equally criminal Bush I years.  The United States is bigger and more diverse than ancient Athens was, the parallels are in a larger time frame and on a larger scale. But I think the weaknesses inherent to an anti-egalitarian democracy are exactly the same.  And the weakness to fall for lies and propaganda and persuasion to choose what is worse for us are exactly the same and the same thing which has led us, twice, into the biggest phony and criminal idiot to have ever held power here, Trump.  Like the Athenians in the wake of the Four Hundred reign of terror, we have proven incapable of coming to an effective evaluation of what led us into Trump I and taking action to prevent it's even worse repeat in Trump II.  Though in our case the Supreme Court nullified the effective means that the post-Civil War Congress put into the Constitution to prevent exactly this, and it wasn't only the Republican-fascists on the Court who did that.  That's exactly what I mean when I say our system is, by choice and custom and habit incapable of learning from even the most terrible experience.  Or, rather, our aristocratic elites don't want to make such learning as had once taken hold to prevent disaster now.  And that stupidity is embedded as deep in the culture of the law as it is practiced by our highest court.  

No doubt Stone would have held that we should risk an oligarchic tyranny, as was already taking hold, so that the slogans of the "civil libertarians" wouldn't be contradicted.  I do have to wonder if he'd think that was worth it in 2026.   I have to wonder how many of us will still think it when things get far worse than they are right now.  

* Looking at the Code of Solon to compare it to our Constitution might be an interesting exercise but I don't have the time to do that right now.  As would comparing both to The Law of Moses. 

 

 

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. 

Wish I'd Said That First - Comment from another place

 ln5493

4 hours ago

If Donald Trump doesn't insult your intelligence, It's because you don't have any!

"I cannot tell a lie" - George Washington

"I cannot tell the truth" - Donald Trump

"I cannot tell the difference" - MAGA