In the last years of the 5th century BC, Athens was on the rocks. The Peloponnesian War against Sparta had been rumbling on since 431 BC. In 414 BC, the Athenians planned a bold offensive against Sicily. Before the navy departed, however, two outrages occurred. First, there were rumors that a religious cult, the Eleusinian Mysteries, had been profaned. Second, a shocking act of religious vandalism occurred — sculptures of the god Hermes, hundreds of which stood around Athens as protectors of thresholds, were hacked and mutilated. These were unpropitious omens for the Sicilian expedition: It ended in defeat for Athens, with almost the entire navy lost. In the febrile atmosphere after the mutilation of the Hermes sculptures, an anti-democratic conspiracy was feared and the charismatic, handsome and desperately unreliable aristocrat and military commander Alcibiades was blamed. After the Sicilian disaster, democracy was briefly overturned and replaced by an oligarchy in 411 BC. In 404 BC, after Athens’ final defeat, came the reign of terror of the Thirty Tyrants, characterized by mass killings. After a few months, democracy was restored. In 399 BC, Socrates was tried on charges of impiety and of “corrupting the youth” of Athens. Critias, one of the tyrants, had been Socrates’ pupil, as had Alcibiades. Historians and philosophers still debate how anti-democratic Socrates’ teachings were; the execution of Greece’s greatest philosopher was at least partly an act of scapegoating for the actions of the politicians whom he had educated.
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
With the manipulations of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it is no surprise that this year’s budget plan would make government operations difficult. The KMT and the TPP passing malicious legislation in the past year has caused public ire to accumulate, with the pressure about to erupt like a volcano. Civic groups have successively backed recall petition drives and public consensus has reached a fever-pitch, with no let up during the long Lunar New Year holiday. The ire has even breached the mindsets of former staunch KMT and TPP supporters. Most Taiwanese have vowed to use
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
About 6.1 million couples tied the knot last year, down from 7.28 million in 2023 — a drop of more than 20 percent, data from the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs showed. That is more serious than the precipitous drop of 12.2 percent in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the saying goes, a single leaf reveals an entire autumn. The decline in marriages reveals problems in China’s economic development, painting a dismal picture of the nation’s future. A giant question mark hangs over economic data that Beijing releases due to a lack of clarity, freedom of the press