It’s hardly the most important thing, but, as many people have observed, events in Israel and Palestine this week have really brought home how far the enshittification, in Cory Doctorow’s term, of the thing that used to be Twitter has progressed. It’s symptomatic that the first I heard of the Hamas assault was not on there but via old-school legacy media; and, while I then did try to follow events via the platform in my customary manner, it proved more or less impossible to find reliable on-the-ground accounts in the way that used to provide real insight into what was going on – and this entailed wading through such quantities of vileness and mendacious bullshit that it didn’t seem worth it, so I stuck to following updates from accounts I already trusted.
Even the window onto the world provided by searching for mentions of Thucydides on a daily basis isn’t very illuminating any more. It’s been the case for some time that this practice no longer sheds much light on contemporary ideas of Thucydides and his work, but in the past (indeed, the recent past; cf. the study of Thucydides references in the invasion of Ukraine) one could learn something from patterns of people using him for different purposes and to support different positions. This time, not so much; there has been no particular upsurge in T. references in response to events, and indeed those that do make a link to the Hamas attack and Israeli retaliation are substantially exceeded in number by reference to the recent meeting of US senators with Premier Xi and the inevitable invocation of the Thucydides Trap.
What have we had? ‘The strong do what they can…’, both as an explanation that power is simply the way of the world and as a condemnation of Israeli force (incidentally, one of these offered a new variant, ‘The strong will do all that they can and the weak will suffer as much as they must’, which I don’t recall from any publshed translation and which doesn’t show up in a Google search; author’s own, or automatic translation?). Reference to fear/honor/interest as universal principles, again mostly as justification for a general ‘why is everyone shocked, this is the way of the world’ vibe. To be honest, compared with Ukraine last year, it feels as if no one is really trying – and maybe that is precisely the case, highlighting how far last year’s barrage of Thucydides and Realism references involved a prepared army of disinformation specialists trying to influence western policy deliberations and public opinion. Or maybe Ex-Twitter is just crap now.
One thing which did strike me in the last few days, not for its prevalence or particular relevance to events but the simple fact that it’s new, was a repurposing of the familiar ‘Scholars and Warriors’ misattribution to target diversity in the US military – or rather, to be completely clear, the sort of people who like quoting that line, often in response to discussions of weightlifting or Jordan Peterson tweets or the need to raise one’s sons as chad-alpha-sigmas, are now quoting it in response to a picture of US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a face mask (“THIS is the current Secretary of Defense; tells you all you need to know”) or to a picture taken at a 2014 conference for transgender people serving in the military with the caption “Want to know why the Biden government didn’t anticipate the attack on Israel? Because this is what his cabinet looks like.”
As ever, they are disinclined to be told to credit William F. Butler instead, but can’t even summon up an entertaining counter-argument for how Thucydides must actually have said it because it’s the sort of thing he would have said. Twitter just isn’t what it used to be.
Update 11/10: this may, or more probably may not, turn out to be at all interesting, but this morning brought another variant on the Melian Dialogue line that doesn’t show up in a quick Google search: “The strong advance as far as their power allows, and the weak retreat as much as their weakness dictates.” Given the clear shift towards a focus on movement and territory – advance/retreat is quite different from do/suffer or exact/endure – it doesn’t seem likely that this is simply a variant translation. It could be a deliberate variation to suit a specific point, using the familiar structural contrast – the strong drink their coffee as black as the endless abyss, the weak drink skinny lattes – but if so it’s not obvious why, as it narrows the scope to no particular end and certainly not in a way that illuminates the situation in Gaza. Anyway, I’ve asked the poster, though without any great expectation of a reply.
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