As this is the pond's last post for a little while, and - it goes without saying - also the day that Our Heroic Homeric Henry strides on to the scene - the pond wanted to end with a "western civilisational" bang, not a woke whimper.
What better inspiration than liddle Marco's speech in ancient Greece, echoing ancient Greek wisdom down through the ages to arrive at a corrupt Kimberley and a mad king irritated because only he can do corrupt in his court.
For those coming in late, or those who've already forgotten, liddle Marco delivered what he imagined was a presidential speech, designed to launch his 2028 bid, and orchestrated against a carefully chosen backdrop, though he could have achieved the same effect by staying in Washington and using a green screen:
The pond won't bother to link to the speech - it's easily found, and it was meretricious tosh and revealed liddle Marco to be a tone-deaf twit - but the pond was agog at the notion that Our Henry might rise to the challenge and demolish Marco.
Certainly others did ...
...again and again, Rubio wandered back to a precarious theme, that history is decided by “great men” who defy adversity and conquer lesser peoples.
He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.
He almost seemed to be writing out text for a video game (Super Mario?), offering “an arena for great men to test and prove themselves”, where they can show off “fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory”.
There was also this in Salon, though alas the pond can't quote it all ...
Rubio’s Greece speech is MAGA’s latest classical cover story
The Trump administration keeps borrowing ancient prestige to make its brutality look noble
By Curtis Dozier
The Trump administration keeps borrowing ancient prestige to make its brutality look noble
By Curtis Dozier
...scratch the surface of the history Rubio cited, and those ideals look about as worthy of celebration as a new data center being built in your hometown or having to pay $6 a gallon for diesel.
The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker.
Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power.
Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world.
In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.
But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide.
You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history.
The secretary’s examples of Western heroism were the Spartans at Thermopylae and the philosopher Socrates, both of whom, he said, illustrate the “Western” willingness to “pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.” But the Spartan militarism that Rubio so admires came to define the city state’s culture only because they had no choice but to devote all state resources to maintaining an army sufficient to suppress the revolts of the massive number of enslaved fellow Greeks upon whom the Spartan economy depended. And the most plausible explanation for why Socrates was executed is that he had been an intellectual mentor to several of the men who ruled Athens as a violent, dictatorial junta in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian war; it was Socrates’ student Plato, who devoted his talent to sanitizing the political reputation of his teacher by painting him as a courageous free-thinker.
Rubio mentioned the influence of Plato as a key link between ancient Greece and the founding of the United States. But Plato’s influence upon the framers of the U.S. Constitution consisted primarily in legitimizing their conception of the new nation as an inegalitarian state in which only those whom they deemed worthy would have access to political power.
Yes, Socrates taught and Plato wrote, as Rubio said, in the Parthenon’s shadow. But when ancient Greeks looked at that temple they saw a monument not to democracy but to the wealth and power Athens had amassed for itself by its coercive, imperial treatment of their fellow Greeks. The construction of the Parthenon was funded by income from the lopsided, extortionate alliances into which Athens bullied other city-states on the pretext of providing protection against the defeated Persians coming back to impose slavery upon the Greeks. It almost seems that Rubio knows this, because his warning to Europe sounds a lot like that ancient Athenian propaganda: “The course we take will determine whether the West . . . resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.”
Oppression and exploitation of marginalized groups, promotion of authoritarian rule, imperial domination and wealth extraction; these aren’t aspects of “Western Civilization” that anyone should be proud of. But Rubio is, or said he is, because these are the aspects of that heritage that correspond most closely to the Trump administration’s view of the world.
In fact, the secretary’s speech was pretty direct about this. When Rubio decried how, before Trump, “we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history,” he can only be referring to the removal of Confederate statues that served to celebrate white supremacy. His grandiose description of America before European colonization as “an open and wild land” that “became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition” erased the role of genocide and displacement of Native Americans people in this process.
But why should anyone be surprised to hear something so egregiously shameful from a Trump administration official? This is the very history that Trump has worked to suppress in museums, including the Smithsonian, and national parks nationwide.
You can sense the desperation for legitimacy in Rubio’s choice to give this speech in Athens, where he hoped the ruins of the parthenon would lend prestige to his claims. You can sense it in the fulsomeness of his praise of “Western Civilization,” as if just repeating “virtue” or “honor” enough times will paper over the corruption scandal surrounding U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle. These visual and rhetorical clichés are intended to make Trump’s policies look respectable, but all they do here is reveal the profound weakness of the administration. They can’t point to any genuinely positive accomplishments. Going into the midterm elections Trump and his party have nothing to run on. So instead we get a speech like this — a ham-fisted appeal to the die-hard MAGA base, the kind of people who actually want to live in a dictatorial, corrupt police state and to delude themselves about history.
And liddle Marco also aroused the ire of Xians, as in this outing in the WSJ ... though alas this day the intermittent archive decided to have one of its hissy fits, "too many requests" being the excuse du jour ...
The Pagan Nationalism of Marco Rubio’s Athens Speech
The secretary makes serious arguments, but he leaves out Jerusalem. (*intermittent archive link)
By
William A. Galston
The secretary makes serious arguments, but he leaves out Jerusalem. (*intermittent archive link)
By
William A. Galston
This time it was the Xians getting their noses out of joint ...
...Mr. Rubio characterized this relentless struggle—fueled by what the Greeks called thumos, “the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride”—as the “heart of great civilization.” Without it, he declared, nations lose their will to fight, even to survive. In our times, he said, Europe has abandoned thumos for comfort and safety, rejecting the pursuit of excellence in the name of an egalitarianism of mediocrity. The Continent can save itself only if it can “awaken from its long slumber” and again embrace the “fire” of times past.
But Europe’s era of fire led to colonialism—and to the backlash against it that has shaped world politics up to the present day. In the 20th century, national self-assertion generated two conflicts that devastated Europe and left few parts of the globe untouched. The European Union, which President Trump regularly reviles as an anti-American plot, represents a collective decision to prevent the recurrence of such conflicts.
Under the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio says, the U.S. has made a different choice, “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” coupled with the understanding that power requires not only the economic, technological, and military means to exercise it but also the demonstrated willingness to use it when prudence and diplomacy fail.
The power to do what? Mr. Rubio (or his speechwriter) seems to have read Thucydides up to Pericles’ funeral oration but no further. Fifteen years later, the Athenians sent their navy to the neutral island of Melos, demanding that the Melians abandon their neutral stance, join the Athenian-dominated Delian League, and pay tribute to Athens. The Melians refused, appealing to justice. The Athenian envoy dismissed their appeal. In the real world, he replied, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
It was in this spirit that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ridiculed Canada’s refusal to knuckle under to U.S. trade demands: “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.”
Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris.
Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete.
In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other.
In 2022, Nate Hochman, the young man who is now Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter, published a prescient article tracing the decline of the religious right in the Republican Party and the rise of a less religious form of conservatism that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity. Mr. Rubio’s speech is evidence of this shift.
Years ago, I was the token liberal at a conference dominated by conservatives of various stripes. When I expressed concern about the rise of Christian nationalism, a traditional conservative acquaintance replied, “If you’re worried about Christian nationalism, wait till you see the pagan version.”
I’m beginning to understand what he meant.
But Europe’s era of fire led to colonialism—and to the backlash against it that has shaped world politics up to the present day. In the 20th century, national self-assertion generated two conflicts that devastated Europe and left few parts of the globe untouched. The European Union, which President Trump regularly reviles as an anti-American plot, represents a collective decision to prevent the recurrence of such conflicts.
Under the Trump administration, Mr. Rubio says, the U.S. has made a different choice, “the unapologetic pursuit of national power,” coupled with the understanding that power requires not only the economic, technological, and military means to exercise it but also the demonstrated willingness to use it when prudence and diplomacy fail.
The power to do what? Mr. Rubio (or his speechwriter) seems to have read Thucydides up to Pericles’ funeral oration but no further. Fifteen years later, the Athenians sent their navy to the neutral island of Melos, demanding that the Melians abandon their neutral stance, join the Athenian-dominated Delian League, and pay tribute to Athens. The Melians refused, appealing to justice. The Athenian envoy dismissed their appeal. In the real world, he replied, “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
It was in this spirit that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ridiculed Canada’s refusal to knuckle under to U.S. trade demands: “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.”
Untethered from law and justice, overweening power becomes dangerous not only to those on its receiving end, but also to those who wield it. The Greeks understood that when daring and pride go too far, they mutate into reckless and self-destructive hubris.
Egged on by demagogues, Thucydides narrates, Athens embarked on a war of choice—the Sicilian expedition, the disastrous failure of which contributed to Athens’s eventual defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Hubris leads people and nations to overestimate what their power can accomplish and to underestimate the effectiveness of their opponents’ response. This lesson isn’t obsolete.
In his celebration of Greek virtues, Mr. Rubio ignored their opposite—religious virtues. The Bible praises Moses as the humblest man on earth. In Proverbs we read that “pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” There is considerable daylight between the secretary of state’s paean to power and the Sermon on the Mount—which isn’t to say that I would bet America’s survival on the proposition that the meek shall inherit the earth. I suggest, unoriginally, that what we call the West emerged from, and is sustained by, the continuing tension between Athens and Jerusalem, not either in isolation from the other.
In 2022, Nate Hochman, the young man who is now Mr. Rubio’s chief speechwriter, published a prescient article tracing the decline of the religious right in the Republican Party and the rise of a less religious form of conservatism that embraces national self-assertion over any form of universalism, including Christianity. Mr. Rubio’s speech is evidence of this shift.
Years ago, I was the token liberal at a conference dominated by conservatives of various stripes. When I expressed concern about the rise of Christian nationalism, a traditional conservative acquaintance replied, “If you’re worried about Christian nationalism, wait till you see the pagan version.”
I’m beginning to understand what he meant.
Even the National Review showed contempt, again with an Xian spin ...
Marco Rubio’s Earnest, Flawed Defense of the West
By Joseph Loconte
By Joseph Loconte
...Rubio’s narrative is hobbled by both historical and conceptual errors that create, at best, a misleading (and MAGA-friendly) account of the American story.
“Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution.
Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization.
There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order).
Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.”
The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.”
Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.”
The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end?
In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals.
It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.
These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal.
Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.
“Here, in Athens,” Rubio said, “we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.” They include “fierce individuality,” “relentless ambition,” “daring exploration,” and “a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory.” Here is a secular account of Western civilization that might have come from the pen of Voltaire on the eve of the French Revolution.
Left off the list were the transformational concepts of the Jewish and Christian traditions: the biblical teachings about men and women bearing the image of God, about man’s alienation from the Creator, and about God’s redemptive vision for humankind. Without these beliefs, there would be no Western civilization.
There are also important factual errors in the speech: the claim that the Greeks offered us a model of republican government (Greek democracy was decidedly not a republic, a fact that terrified the American founders about the prospects of direct democracy); that “the Greeks gave us history itself” (the Jews were writing narrative history roughly a thousand years before Herodotus); or that the Greeks invented the idea that “there is a rational order to the cosmos” (the opening chapters of the book of Genesis in the Bible establish the rationality of God and his created order).
Given his audience in Athens, Rubio can be forgiven for failing to draw attention to the implosion of Greek democracy. It, of course, ended in the most brutal and protracted war of the classical world: a 25-year bloodbath between the Athenian empire and Sparta and its allies. In their two-volume defense of Western civilization, The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition, co-authors Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins underscore the moral damage resulting from Athenian self-interest, the appetite to dominate others, and the inordinate love of honor. As they summarize it: “The Greeks, so proud of their superiority over the Persians, had turned themselves into barbarians.”
The Greek historian Thucydides, the most reliable contemporary chronicler of the Peloponnesian War, was relentlessly honest about the catastrophe. Greeks committed atrocities against fellow Greeks; women and children were enslaved; prisoners were slaughtered; cannibalism occurred during the sieges. “Love of power operating through greed and through personal ambition,” he wrote, “was the cause of all these evils.”
Yet Rubio sidesteps this dreary history and comes very close to turning the vices of the ancient world into virtues. The architects of the Parthenon, representative of the Greek spirit, “held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others” and to be engaged in “that constant struggle for distinction.”
The greatest of the Greek philosophers would take issue with this view of human flourishing. “Justice in the life and conduct of the State,” wrote Plato, “is possible only as it first resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.” Aristotle, in his Politics, also viewed the character of a political society as dependent on the character of its citizens. “For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote. And the aim of political life? “Justice is the bond of men in states, for the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society.”
The concepts of virtue and justice, however, appear nowhere in Rubio’s account of the achievements of the West and of the American political order. There are references to “heroism, honor, duty,” but they are extracted from any moral or religious context. There is a nod to Christianity and “the empire of Christendom,” but no hint of the civilizing impact of the Christian gospel on the Greco-Roman world. Rubio thus praises Achilles for his “pursuit of eternal glory” but seems unaware that it was Achilles’s cruelty, uncontrolled rage, and ego — his hubris — that led to his undoing. Maybe the reason for Rubio’s silence about these vices is that they match too closely with those of the president he serves.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Rubio’s speech is the total lack of any democratic purpose to American foreign policy. Instead, the nation’s great aims are to “reindustrialize our economy,” “rebuild our factories,” and “fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.” Again, the unanswered question recurs: toward what end?
In Reagan’s Westminster speech, he made the defense and promotion of democracy the moral lodestar of America’s engagement on the world stage. “So let us ask ourselves: What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan said. “And let us answer: free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” On display was Reagan’s profound belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that America’s national interests must be framed — and constrained — by its democratic and religious ideals.
It was this belief, rooted not in Greek philosophy but in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, that helped the United States to defeat imperialistic Japan and Nazi Germany in the Second World War; create the Nuremberg Trials to bring to justice the Nazis for their human rights atrocities; launch the Berlin Airlift to rescue West Germany from Soviet tyranny; design the Marshall Plan to provide an economic lifeline to Western Europe; and support the democratic Solidarity movement in Poland, which set off a series of democratic revolutions that ultimately brought down the Soviet Union.
These facts seem to be lost on the Trump administration. Rubio’s answer to Reagan’s question — “What kind of people do we think we are?” — will do little to restore America’s self-identity as an indispensable defender of human freedom. Quite the opposite. The “moral imagination” of America and the West, as described by the secretary of state, lacks the moral ballast of biblical religion: the true source of both American greatness and national renewal.
Without it, American exceptionalism — like Greek exceptionalism — will lie buried under the ruins of a once-great civilization.
That's about the biggest build up the pond has ever done for a reptile entrance, but it was all there, Greeks, Thucydides, Aristotle, Xians, etc. etc.
What a chance to rise to the challenge, what a golden chance to deliver stern denunciations and profound references.
So what did Our Heroic Homeric Henry do?
Blew it bigly ... and stayed full Trumpian ICC-hating Zionist, with just another rabid rant for the Australian Daily Zionist News.
Talk about a major disappointment ...
The header: By Henry Ergas
Nobel Peace Price: Purveyors of hate poison legacy of Holocaust
Nobel Peace Price: Purveyors of hate poison legacy of Holocaust
The plea to listen to the bot: Listen to this article
8 min
8 min
The caption for a snap designed to evoke fear and loathing: Former ICC judge Navi Pillay, who was awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Picture: AP
The plea to pander to the G bot: Make us preferred on Google
Our Henry decided to offer a bog standard defence for the ethnic cleansing that's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention southern Lebanon and Syria. The cheapest trick is to argue about the definition of genocide and drag in the Holocaust, and Our Henry is the cheapest of tricksters:
The award of the Nobel Peace prize to South African jurist Navi Pillay, who has spent decades as one of Israel’s most strident critics, comes as no surprise.
Unlike the committees that award the other Nobel prizes, which are drawn from Sweden’s learned institutions, the peace prize committee is appointed on a party-political basis by the Norwegian parliament. Politics is not incidental to the process; it is encrusted in its nature.
Nor is it a coincidence that the committee that awarded Pillay the prize is chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the Labour appointee whose term ends in December. A longstanding critic of Israel, which he considers an “apartheid state”, Frydnes called the accidental killing in Gaza of Al Jazeera “journalists” (who moonlighted as terrorists) a “grotesque attack on the freedom of expression”. Crowning his chairmanship by canonising Pillay can only enhance Frydnes’ adulation by Norway’s vehemently anti-Israel left.
The underlying issue, however, is neither Frydnes nor Pillay. Both are symptoms of a broader disease: the chronic abuse of the term “genocide”.
Unlike the committees that award the other Nobel prizes, which are drawn from Sweden’s learned institutions, the peace prize committee is appointed on a party-political basis by the Norwegian parliament. Politics is not incidental to the process; it is encrusted in its nature.
Nor is it a coincidence that the committee that awarded Pillay the prize is chaired by Jørgen Watne Frydnes, the Labour appointee whose term ends in December. A longstanding critic of Israel, which he considers an “apartheid state”, Frydnes called the accidental killing in Gaza of Al Jazeera “journalists” (who moonlighted as terrorists) a “grotesque attack on the freedom of expression”. Crowning his chairmanship by canonising Pillay can only enhance Frydnes’ adulation by Norway’s vehemently anti-Israel left.
The underlying issue, however, is neither Frydnes nor Pillay. Both are symptoms of a broader disease: the chronic abuse of the term “genocide”.
How feeble was the outing? No Thucydides, just Francis:
Centuries ago, Francis Bacon warned about the “shoddy and inept application of words which lays siege to the intellect”. In the case of “genocide”, the siege began at the word’s birth.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, he devoted a mere 16 pages of a 671-page book to it, producing, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt puts it, “an indictment rather than a clear delineation” of a crime.
When Raphael Lemkin coined the term in 1944, he devoted a mere 16 pages of a 671-page book to it, producing, as historian Anton Weiss-Wendt puts it, “an indictment rather than a clear delineation” of a crime.
A snap of an alleged villain followed: The Head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, right, speaks with the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navanethem 'Navi' Pillay via video link at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo on October 10. Picture: AFP
And so to avoiding what's going down in Gaza and the West Bank by way of semantic and pedantic quibbling, with bonus Holocaust, always a reliable diversion and distraction:
Genocide, for Lemkin, could be “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral”. The concept’s sweep was as vast as its boundaries were indistinct.
That lack of precision reflected, at least in part, how indelibly the nature of the “crime of crimes” had been burnt into the public mind. If Auschwitz gave it a name, the photographs of the camps gave it an unforgettable immediacy: heaps of emaciated corpses, survivors scarcely distinguishable from the dead.
The new term therefore meant something far worse than a massacre. What it meant, wrote Helen Fein, in one of the works that defined genocide studies, was the killing of “people in captivity, people who have surrendered, or people without a state or political organisation that can offer a credible threat to the perpetrator” – or, put more formally, “the asymmetrical slaughter of an unorganised group by an organised force” serving no military purpose.
That had been the fate of the Jews of Europe, transported across a continent solely to be murdered. Their extermination continued as defeat closed in on Germany, the machinery of death consuming the resources of a collapsing regime. “Mere Jewish survival”, as historian Steven Katz puts it, “was the active enemy”.
So too in the Armenian genocide, which had featured prominently in pre-war discussions of the crime Lemkin named. Yes, thousands of Armenians, armed by Russia, deserted to the enemy or rose in revolt against the Ottomans; in the fighting that broke out at Van in 1915 neither side took prisoners.
But their extermination as a people occurred after they had been defeated, their weapons seized, their resistance broken. The Armenians, said Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, “can live in the desert but nowhere else”. Some 300,000, mainly women and children, were driven to the wastelands of Der el Zor; by September 1916, barely 12,000 remained alive. They, too, were then butchered, as were those who had escaped the death marches.
Nor did the Ottoman regime spare the Syriac Christians, who had played no role in the hostilities. Utterly defenceless, they were mercilessly slaughtered. Far from punishing the crime, the Turkish parliament granted pensions to the perpetrators’ families in 1926.
That lack of precision reflected, at least in part, how indelibly the nature of the “crime of crimes” had been burnt into the public mind. If Auschwitz gave it a name, the photographs of the camps gave it an unforgettable immediacy: heaps of emaciated corpses, survivors scarcely distinguishable from the dead.
The new term therefore meant something far worse than a massacre. What it meant, wrote Helen Fein, in one of the works that defined genocide studies, was the killing of “people in captivity, people who have surrendered, or people without a state or political organisation that can offer a credible threat to the perpetrator” – or, put more formally, “the asymmetrical slaughter of an unorganised group by an organised force” serving no military purpose.
That had been the fate of the Jews of Europe, transported across a continent solely to be murdered. Their extermination continued as defeat closed in on Germany, the machinery of death consuming the resources of a collapsing regime. “Mere Jewish survival”, as historian Steven Katz puts it, “was the active enemy”.
So too in the Armenian genocide, which had featured prominently in pre-war discussions of the crime Lemkin named. Yes, thousands of Armenians, armed by Russia, deserted to the enemy or rose in revolt against the Ottomans; in the fighting that broke out at Van in 1915 neither side took prisoners.
But their extermination as a people occurred after they had been defeated, their weapons seized, their resistance broken. The Armenians, said Talat Pasha, the Ottoman interior minister, “can live in the desert but nowhere else”. Some 300,000, mainly women and children, were driven to the wastelands of Der el Zor; by September 1916, barely 12,000 remained alive. They, too, were then butchered, as were those who had escaped the death marches.
Nor did the Ottoman regime spare the Syriac Christians, who had played no role in the hostilities. Utterly defenceless, they were mercilessly slaughtered. Far from punishing the crime, the Turkish parliament granted pensions to the perpetrators’ families in 1926.
Throw in a snap of another villain: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Picture: AFP
Erdogan provided Our Henry with another chance to avoid mentioning what's been going down in Gaza and the West Bank courtesy the current government of Israel:
None of that has troubled Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Having assured the world that “a Muslim cannot perpetrate a genocide”, he now accuses Israel at every opportunity of committing one. The history of his own country is absolved by assertion; Israel is condemned by incantation. For him, as for Pillay, the mere fact of Palestinian casualties tars Israel with the “crime of crimes”.
The Genocide Convention’s drafters had recognised the danger: that civilian losses in war would be conflated with genocide. “In modern war,” the official commentary on the draft convention noted in 1947, “the civilian population inevitably suffers severe losses.” Yet “even heavy losses on the civilian population in the course of operations of war”, it stressed, “(do) not as a rule constitute genocide”.
The fundamental distinction was between war’s dreadful toll on civilians and the deliberate elimination of a people in cold blood. The State Department confidently believed that the requirement of “an overall plan to destroy a human group” would ensure that was understood. It had reckoned without Stalin, who meticulously revised each of the Convention’s successive drafts.
In June 1948, a confidential State Department report noted that the Soviet bloc had secured “what they frankly described as an ‘educational’ document, not for ‘jurists’ but for the ‘peoples of the world’, in other words, a propaganda weapon”.
Soon enough, that weapon was turned on the United States. But it was against Israel that the venom flowed most freely. Of the 1037 references to genocide published by Pravda between 1948 and 1988, fully one-fifth were aimed at Israel – twice as many as concerned the Vietnam War.
Thus, in 1952, Soviet fronts claimed Israel was pursuing a “genocidal campaign” against the Arabs; within a week of the Six Day War, the Soviets demanded an end to Israel’s “genocide against the Arabs”, and; on June 6, 1982, they branded Israel’s entry into Lebanon “a policy of genocide against the Arab people”.
As the accusations multiplied, the word’s meaning dissolved. By 2015, some 80 countries, home to four-fifths of humanity, had been accused of “genocide”, with the term’s infinite varieties covering everything from the extinction of languages to the disappearance of often barbaric cultures. “Genocide” had become, concluded Weiss-Wendt, “a hollowed-up vessel that could be filled with any meaning”.
Yet drained of precision, the word retained its power, which fed on the memory of the greatest slaughter of Jews in history: the more sacred that memory became, the more potent its appropriation. Turned against Israel, the accusation consummated an outrageous inversion: the murdered Jews supplied the moral authority for demonising the Jewish state. And what more damning charge could there be than to charge the people marked for annihilation of perpetrating the same crime against others?
But the dead cannot be conscripted into that monstrous travesty without falsifying how they died. Nor can the parallel be sustained without suppressing how this war began and whom Israel was fighting.
That beginning was the massacre of October 7. As for the enemy Israel confronted, it was heavily armed, had vowed to repeat the atrocities “again and again”, and did nothing to protect, and everything to deliberately imperil, Gaza’s civilians from the wars it had chosen to unleash.
That is the war Pillay’s commission branded genocide; that is the verdict the Nobel committee has now enshrined, lending its authority to “A wash of lies / That eats like acid at the feet of men”.
And with it, a prize for peace has desecrated the memory, and tarnished the legacy, of those who perished in war-torn Europe’s darkest crime.
The Genocide Convention’s drafters had recognised the danger: that civilian losses in war would be conflated with genocide. “In modern war,” the official commentary on the draft convention noted in 1947, “the civilian population inevitably suffers severe losses.” Yet “even heavy losses on the civilian population in the course of operations of war”, it stressed, “(do) not as a rule constitute genocide”.
The fundamental distinction was between war’s dreadful toll on civilians and the deliberate elimination of a people in cold blood. The State Department confidently believed that the requirement of “an overall plan to destroy a human group” would ensure that was understood. It had reckoned without Stalin, who meticulously revised each of the Convention’s successive drafts.
In June 1948, a confidential State Department report noted that the Soviet bloc had secured “what they frankly described as an ‘educational’ document, not for ‘jurists’ but for the ‘peoples of the world’, in other words, a propaganda weapon”.
Soon enough, that weapon was turned on the United States. But it was against Israel that the venom flowed most freely. Of the 1037 references to genocide published by Pravda between 1948 and 1988, fully one-fifth were aimed at Israel – twice as many as concerned the Vietnam War.
Thus, in 1952, Soviet fronts claimed Israel was pursuing a “genocidal campaign” against the Arabs; within a week of the Six Day War, the Soviets demanded an end to Israel’s “genocide against the Arabs”, and; on June 6, 1982, they branded Israel’s entry into Lebanon “a policy of genocide against the Arab people”.
As the accusations multiplied, the word’s meaning dissolved. By 2015, some 80 countries, home to four-fifths of humanity, had been accused of “genocide”, with the term’s infinite varieties covering everything from the extinction of languages to the disappearance of often barbaric cultures. “Genocide” had become, concluded Weiss-Wendt, “a hollowed-up vessel that could be filled with any meaning”.
Yet drained of precision, the word retained its power, which fed on the memory of the greatest slaughter of Jews in history: the more sacred that memory became, the more potent its appropriation. Turned against Israel, the accusation consummated an outrageous inversion: the murdered Jews supplied the moral authority for demonising the Jewish state. And what more damning charge could there be than to charge the people marked for annihilation of perpetrating the same crime against others?
But the dead cannot be conscripted into that monstrous travesty without falsifying how they died. Nor can the parallel be sustained without suppressing how this war began and whom Israel was fighting.
That beginning was the massacre of October 7. As for the enemy Israel confronted, it was heavily armed, had vowed to repeat the atrocities “again and again”, and did nothing to protect, and everything to deliberately imperil, Gaza’s civilians from the wars it had chosen to unleash.
That is the war Pillay’s commission branded genocide; that is the verdict the Nobel committee has now enshrined, lending its authority to “A wash of lies / That eats like acid at the feet of men”.
And with it, a prize for peace has desecrated the memory, and tarnished the legacy, of those who perished in war-torn Europe’s darkest crime.
A minor quibble.
Shouldn't Our Henry's thumb bio start this way?
Henry Ergas AO is a rabid ranting Zionist who learned nothing from his sojourn in Europe, before returning to Australia to deliver weekly Zionist rants to the Australian Daily Zionist News.
Instead the reptiles offered this ...
Henry Ergas Columnist
Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.
Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.
For once there were a few cracks in the hive mind. A few weren't on board, though there was also the usual reliable collection of full-blown loons...
Luckily there was also a recent infallible Pope to hand ...
As for the rest of the reptiles this day, the pond stayed shattered.
With the intermittent archive doing a bunk, all the pond could do was note some seminal contributions, and provide a url ...
There was an outing on the Canavan caravan ...
‘Worst’ trade deal sells out Aussie jobs
European steel tariffs stay at 50 per cent, cheese subsidies remain intact – yet Labor is calling its EU free-trade deal a win for Australia.
By Matt Canavan
Contributor
European steel tariffs stay at 50 per cent, cheese subsidies remain intact – yet Labor is calling its EU free-trade deal a win for Australia.
By Matt Canavan
Contributor
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fcoalition-demands-urgent-changes-to-eu-trade-deal-amid-growing-backlash-from-farmers%2Fnews-story%2Fe297381d5721cdb32605ae2866dab5a2
Worth hanging around for when the archive comes good?
Australians want less immigration. Universities can’t keep ignoring it
As public support hardens for lower migration, the hardest choices can no longer be dodged, especially by universities that have turned international students into a business model.
By Greg Craven
Columnist
As public support hardens for lower migration, the hardest choices can no longer be dodged, especially by universities that have turned international students into a business model.
By Greg Craven
Columnist
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary%2Fno-amount-of-cash-will-satisfy-our-aristocratic-unis%2Fnews-story%2Fdc938b5b8bd91190ecdeac79fbcb789c
The pond would have cut him short anyway ...
Does the gormless one fancy he's a member of the 'leets, or does he fancy himself as a dissident 'leet at one with the common herd, or is he just a humbug down with the fake ranga?
What's weird is that embedded in all that is the notion that News Corporation is stuffed full of "sensible people" ...
With vulgar youff dancing in the streets with Killer, it was on to bashing the poor buggers who decided to put themselves in harm's way for no particular benefit. Who wouldn't be traumatised at the entire waste of time the Afghanistan adventure produced?
Even Killer Creighton was off his oats ... but as this is the last post for a while the pond thought it should attempt a little completism, especially as in the first gobbet Killer attempted to swim against the reptile tide ...
What's weird is that embedded in all that is the notion that News Corporation is stuffed full of "sensible people" ...
Luckily in his next gobbet, Killer decided to bash old folks, as if ageing wasn't already doing the job (note the fancy way the reptiles are now using sub-headers):
With vulgar youff dancing in the streets with Killer, it was on to bashing the poor buggers who decided to put themselves in harm's way for no particular benefit. Who wouldn't be traumatised at the entire waste of time the Afghanistan adventure produced?
And that was that...and as for the "news"of the day? It was just greenie bashing and more celebrations of the fake ranga, what with the splitters everywhere these days ...
It was a never no mind for the pond, what with the Greens having decided that Australia should offer no military support to Ukraine ...
“The Greens have been clear from day one that we’re a party of peace and non-violence, and we don’t support military aid to the Ukraine,” Shoebridge told this masthead in an interview in his Sydney office, referring to a party position that has not gained significant attention. (here, paywall)
Looks like the pond will have to find the latest iteration of the Happy Birthday Party at the next election, but it does segue to the latest immortal Rowe ...
The Greens in bed with the mad King, Uncle Leon and Vlad the sociopathic invader?
Who would have thunk it, but then again in times past they did manage to cut off their carbon tax nose to spite their climate science face ...
As for liddle Marco, Jamelle Bouie had a few thoughts - he comes from the both siderist NY Times, but nobody's perfect ... Marco Rubio does not know a thing about "Western civilization"
Lordy lordy, that the pond should be approvingly quoting Rory.
For those wanting to avoid the rest of the blather, just after the 22minute mark Rory begins talking about liddle Marco, comparing him to a Victorian headmaster blathering on to his students about the glories of the British empire ... How does Marco Rubio’s Parthenon speech fit the Trump administration’s ideas on European “civilisational erasure” – and how does it depart from traditional Republican rhetoric?
