Shot By Both Sides

Obviously the current febrile atmosphere in British politics lends itself to quotations from Thucydides’ account of the stasis at Corcyra (though I must remember to look up his narrative of the coup of the 400 as well) – but, been there, done that, still deeply depressed by the state of things. Instead, let’s quote mid-C20 Hungarian political and novelist Miklós Bánffy, who in his Transylvanian Trilogy (which I’ve never read, but clearly need to; this reference comes via the Twitter courtesy of @simonahac, as apparently his wife is reading it) looks remarkably as if he’s referencing Corcyra:

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Yes, it’s the ‘Centrists piss EVERYBODY off’ bit – those who presented themselves as reasonable moderates were the first to perish. It’s not an original reading, but it is the first example I’ve stumbled across from this period.There is ongoing sympathy in Thucydides for those who could be termed ‘collateral damage’ from the over-arching conflict, like the Plataeans – and contempt for those, like the Thebans, who take advantage of the situation to pursue their own interests. As I tried to say on BBC Radio 4’s Making History Programme this week – impeded by cold/flu and hefty doses of drugs – the problem with the ‘Thucydides Trap’ idea is that it strips out all the complexity and tries to reduce everything to a single dynamic, ignoring the roles of chance, uncertainty and any number of self-interested smaller players.

I wonder how far this theme is lurking beneath the surface in a newly-published poem – yes, it’s another episode in the very very occasional series of Thucydides-related poetry! (no, intoning the name of Thucydides over some electronic burbling doesn’t count…) – by Rishi Dastidar (see Magma Poetry).

Thucydides eats a macaron

by Rishi Dastidar

Once again we are facing the trap, the sea

which the continental sillies are trying

to claim as theirs rather than everyone’s;

and the old man is exceeding

his birthright by consuming civilizations

like so many macarons after a fast.

He’s indifferent to his conquests

yet obsessed by being conquered,

becoming irrelevant thanks to his desire

for omnipotence, a frog around an eternal

network, trying to enforce its forced meanderings.

You’d struggle too if all you had left

in the afterglow of European time

was a picture of reason subduing force.

Dashtar’s own explanation of the genesis of the poem is that he was visiting Nice at the same time as Emmanuel Macron was commemorating the terrorist attacks there, and was plunged into a deep depression about the state of the world:

I think we’ll avoid a global conflagration in some form in the next 50 years only if we’re very lucky. And if geopolitical amour propre isn’t the cause, a fight over access to ever-scarce resources, or the blow back of people being displaced by climate change, will be.

There seem to be definite echoes of Auden’s 1 September 1939 – “we must suffer it all again” – in the Thucydides Trap age. I’m really not sure who the old man is: war? time? Thucydides himself, driving states into conflict through his own insatiable desire for ever more events that he can explain? But I assume the frog is there to echo the old ‘frogs around a pond’ image of Greek cities around the Mediterranean: we’re all now frogs around the network, getting slowly boiled…