There is a popular belief that history dooms the People’s Republic of China and the United States of America to some sort of conflict. The pundit-class slang term for this gloomy view is the Thucydides Trap.
The term Thucydides Trap comes from historian Graham Allison’s fascinating book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?Graham’s thesis is that when a rising power challenges a declining dominant power in a region a destructive conflict is inevitable.
To demonstrate his thesis, Allison turns to the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides. …
The world faces the danger of false normalcy as the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
False normalcy is the delusion that everything will return to normal fast after catastrophic change or massive disruption. People succumb to false normalcy because it is simple and comfortable.
An example of false normalcy is the belief that everybody will start going to the movies or shopping at the mall again when they make a coronavirus vaccine available. The reality, however, is that some people will return to the mall and the movie theater and others will not.
Yes, some shopping malls and movie theaters will survive…
The first declaration of independence
Can we see these historical influences today?
Many of our world’s major cities have become common in our vocabulary. Yet, some of them have been around for thousands of years.
From how we view them today, could we even imagine what they must have been like during ancient times?
Let us examine each of these five cities and see what clues their beginnings might provide:
London
Kubaba was the first female ruler who ruled over a vast and prosperous kingdom in antiquity.
As you know, women are regarded as an inferior being throughout history and Aristotle has even said: “that a female is an incomplete male or ‘as it were, a deformity’.” However, that’s not the case anymore, and even before Aristotle, there were women who proved to be more worthy than men in many regards.
We have seen queens ruling in antiquity, and they were of course powerful queens. We know some of them for their wisdom, such as the queen of Sheba. Some others have proved their mettle in war and had exceptional warrior skills for fighting that even they…
When even the Democrats thought Truman was a lost cause.
On November 3, 2020, against all odds, Joe Biden, last year’s quaint old anachronistic hopeful who had been slogging along at the far end of a long, long line of dazzling Democratic presidential candidates, won the election that might well become our country’s greatest game-changer. Even now there are some who still can’t believe it happened. And that includes Democrats.
So I’m here to remind my fellow Democrats about that time Harry Truman won an election nobody thought possible. He was the underdog right up until that moment when he wasn’t. (Don’t remind me that Donald Trump did the same…
Ahead of the general elections of 2021 in the Netherlands, I discuss a couple of interesting Dutch Politicians.
Thierry Henri Philippe Baudet is a Dutch politician, author, political historian, and lawyer.
After an academic career, Baudet founded the Forum for Democracy (FVD) think tank in 2015. A year later, he was one of the referendum initiators on the association agreement between the European Union and Ukraine and was one of the most prominent campaigners and drivers of the counter camp, which won the referendum.
Not long after the Ukraine referendum, FVD was transformed into a political party, with Baudet as the political leader. The party and Baudet's ideas are variously defined as liberal-conservative, national-conservative, or right-wing — nationalist…
Aphrodite is the goddess of feminine beauty, love, sexuality, and fertility in Greek mythology.
Several stories about the goddess's birth, like the other main gods, had her residence on Mount Olympus.
The Roman equivalent of the deity is Venus. The goddess probably evolved from the Phoenician goddess Astarte. However, the Greeks are said to have reformed the god to become a true Greek goddess eventually.
According to the historian Homer, Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and nymph Dione. Others believe she is the daughter of Uranus and goddess of the day, Hemera.
Still, others believe that Aphrodite emerged from the foam of the sea. …
What does it mean to be civilized?
Hannah Arendt’s classic Eichmann in Jerusalem expanded on articles she had written for the New Yorker while covering Obersturbannfuhrer SS Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem. Arendt described the effectiveness of SS deportations of Jews and other Untermenschen in various German-occupied or allied countries. She found that a nation’s pre-existing anti-semitism influenced SS efficiency at rounding up Untermenschen for transport.
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