Thucydides was a historian as well as a successful general of ancient Athens. His writings have surfaced again, this time in a question posed by President Xi Jinping to our would be US emperor, Donald Trump. Are China and the US destined to go to war because they are the two most powerful nations on earth?
Most of Thucydides' writing on the ancient war between Athens and Sparta has to do with the ill fated invasion of Syracuse. Athens had poured almost all of its wealth and power in trying to capture Sparta's colony in present day Sicily. Incompetent generals and greedy politicians had cost Athens its magnificent fleet as well as tens of thousands of its warriors.
Were Thucydides alive today, he would be building a bomb shelter. A war between the US and China would almost certainly be a nuclear one. Like members of our billionaire class today, the Greek historian would probably recognize the signs of disaster all around him. He would be joining the filthy rich in building bomb shelters in New Zealand, or surveying missile-silo conversions in the American midwest. Maybe he would be blasting off to a safer place in the universe with Elon Musk.
Are the rest of us, the 99.9 percent, destined to be left behind in a dying world? The billionaires and their class are crazy with the same hubris that has led to world wars in the past. Only this war will be our last.
Fred Nagel
