How should we imagine the Athenians at Melos – coldly rational technocrats, bombastic neocons, sardonic British imperialists..? (As I’ve mentioned before, one of my embryonic projects is to explore different ways of presenting the Melian Dialogue, to bring out different facets). One obvious – probably too obvious – possibility is the comic book supervillain, not least because this draws attention to the ultimate hollowness of their words – we know that there’s going to be a weak spot in their master plan, probably intimately connected to their arrogant self-confidence, even if there’s a lot of explosive special-effects destruction to come first. Conversely, comic book supervillains do have a tendency to talk like bad versions of the Melian Dialogue, in capital letters: “MWAHAHA! SOON MY DEATH RAY WILL DESTROY METROPOLIS! THE STRONG DO WHAT THEY WANT AND THE WEAK WILL BOW BEFORE THORAXIS!”
Is this a Thucydides reference, as a lot of people on the Twitter have been suggesting? Almost certainly not; yes, there’s the reference to the Strong and the Weak, but in boilerplate supervillain terms rather than anything actually resembling lines from the Melian Dialogue (even the Athenians don’t claim that the weak will all be slaughtered; that’s their fate only if they get ideas above their station and try resisting the demands of the strong). At the most, we might see the influence of a very crude version of C20 Realism, influenced at some remove by a crude reading of Thucydides – but even in crude Realism terms, let alone anything else, this is basically nonsense.
Far from being a source of Netanyahu’s thinking, the Melian Dialogue offers a basis for a critical reading. Thucydides provides a primer in the rhetoric and self-delusions of the powerful; contempt for anyone perceived as weaker and any behaviour perceived as weak, belief that only ‘equals’ merit respect or consideration, confidence that strength can never be a problem and hidden fear that one’s own strength might not be as unassailable as believed (cf. the Athenians’ admission of the fragility of their own empire).
Believing in an anarchistic dog-eat-dog world becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as every state is terrified of being, or being thought, weak, and so acts as aggressively as possible to present itself as strong – which pushes others to act the same. That way leads to mutual destruction (or at the very least a lot of collateral damage); Thucydides invites us to consider whether there is an alternative, a way to break out of the cycle – to make Woodrue recognise his own delusions…
Sphinx 
I would not discount the possibility of Bibi inheriting a tangled stream of Hobbes / Thucydides / Leo Strauss, captured in the phrase “strong survive.” He would not be the only one. But agree on all of the above.
Impossible to disprove, agreed, but at some point an influence is so diluted that it’s more or less homeopathic. Other than the IR context, one could make an equally plausible case for the influence of Jerry Butler’s Only the Strong Survive…
This jives with the articles I’ve been reading about the realignments in trade agreements around the world in response to Trump’s trade policies.
Although Netanyahu is awful, it’s a little strange to cite his words and make no reference whatsoever to the influence on his words of two millenia of Jewish and, indeed, Israeli history.
Yes, if I were trying to offer a complete account of his words – I’d need to talk about their immediate context as well. But I was carefully focusing just on the question of whether this can be tied to Thucydides, or at least to a Thucydides-derived IR theory, as a lot of people on Twitter are claiming.
Sure. Perhaps over-sensitive because in general there seems to be a rising lack of any sensitivity at all in relation to these matters Interested to discover that Pericles’ oration, which Karl Popper uses as a touchstone against Platonic-oligarchic “totalitarianism,” is closer to this history than I realized.
It’s not remotely my field, which is the obvious reason I tried to stick to what I do know about, but I can imagine how this sort of thinking could be driven by a reading of Jewish history – not just the need for a country in the face of persecution and Holocaust, but the need for a militarily strong and aggressive country in the light of repeated attacks by its neighbours – which I assume is what you’re getting at. But clearly that isn’t the only possible response to that history, and it may well be a self-defeating one.
And yes, there are a lot of aspects of the Funeral Oration that might be regarded with suspicion – I tend towards the line of thought that, far from it being a celebration of the wonderfulness of Pericles, Thucydides intended us to be struck by its oddness and the disturbing implications of some of this rhetoric.
Much to agree with here including the challenging text of the Funeral Oration. On Israeli history and Bibi, certainly worthwhile to look at his Revisionist Dad, a historian closely associated with Jabotinsky, whose “iron wall” between parties in Israel fits well with the recent Bibi speech.
This passage, bristling with acknowledgements of Thucydidean knottiness, seems worth mentioning:
It is odd that so many of Thucydides’ most important authorial comments should be hard to translate .… Did Thucydides find these personal judgments particularly awkward or embarrassing to formulate? … Andrewes, … admirably cautious, says … that it is ‘likely enough’ that Thucydides subscribed to the view that the domination of the stronger is one of the ‘less attractive constants’ of human nature. But it must be insisted that NO AUTHORIAL STATEMENT CAN BE PRODUCED TO PROVE THIS [my caps.], and Andrewes’ ‘likely enough’ is a recognition of that absence. Hornblower Thucydides (1987) 186-7 n 100.
Hornblower being characteristically mild in the English manner. It’s not just that we have no such authorial statement; the statement we do have is put in the mouths of people with big flashing warning lights not to tame their claims at face value. But of course that hasn’t stopped generations of Crude Realists making the same argument…