Righteous idealism also falls fairly flat

when you consider that Athens apparently was every bit the cradle of slavery as it was of democracy. Democracy has always been borne on the backs of slaves, lofty goals held up by whipped backs and hungry mouths, Greece and Rome and the deep deep South. Usually the slaves come from somewhere else, so they don’t count as ‘human’. Historically, there are some favorite pools for capturing slaves, most specifically Africa and the Slav heartland in East Europe (hence the term ‘slave’). Colonialism had a prettier face, but the end result was still the same and it had little to do with race. Scar tissue is ugly whatever the circumstance; a little white powder can’t hurt. So slaves became Slavs, Mongols became moguls, blacks became blokes, and the rest became history. Personally I don’t want to fall into my own self-parody of the fool for whom “everything is the opposite of what it seems”. Still, the greater ignorance would seem to be the sheep-like blindness of those who follow their leaders unquestioningly without even considering the possibility of back-stage manipulations. Bottom line, a story presented as fact needs to be more than ‘compelling’; it needs to be true. Still, what is the measure of truth? I doubt that truth comes in discrete quanta. Love, maybe, but not truth. Welcome to Historical Relativity and the Political Uncertainty Principle (PUP). They can fight it out on the back pages of experiment. There, I feel better now.