‘The Greeks’: National Geographic documentary on the People Who Changed the World

By Tasos Kokkinidis -Sep 24, 2018 

National Geographic released a documentary series on how Greeks changed the world, highlighting how much one nation has given to the rest of the globe.

“On the culture that brought us democracy, the Olympics, Socrates, and Alexander the Great, this lavishly illustrated reference about ancient Greece presents the amazing history through gripping stories; maps of major battles and the rise and fall of the phenomenal empire; the powerful legacy left by ancient Greece for the modern world; and the new discoveries shedding light on these ancient people who are still so much with us,” says National Geographic.

“Even today, Greek art and architecture dominate our cities; modern military strategists still study and employ Hellenic war tactics; Greek poetry, plays, and philosophy are widely read and enjoyed; and science, mathematics, medicine, and astronomy all build on the fundamentals of early Greek thinking,” it says.

507 B.C. The Birth Year of Democracy

Ancient Greek Democracy

UPDATED:AUG 19, 2019ORIGINAL:AUG 23, 2018

Ancient Greek Democracy

HISTORY.COM EDITORS

Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

In the year 507 B.C., the Athenian leader Cleisthenes introduced a system of political reforms that he called demokratia, or “rule by the people” (from demos, “the people,” and kratos, or “power”). It was the first known democracy in the world. This system was comprised of three separate institutions: the ekklesia, a sovereign governing body that wrote laws and dictated foreign policy; the boule, a council of representatives from the ten Athenian tribes and the dikasteria, the popular courts in which citizens argued cases before a group of lottery-selected jurors. Although this Athenian democracy would survive for only two centuries, its invention by Cleisthenes, “The Father of Democracy,” was one of ancient Greece’s most enduring contributions to the modern world. The Greek system of direct democracy would pave the way for representative democracies across the globe.

Who Could Vote in Ancient Greece?

Ancient Greek Democracy
A marble relief showing the People of Athens being crowned by Democracy, inscribed with a law against tyranny passed by the people of Athens in 336 B.C.Leemage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

“In a democracy,” the Greek historian Herodotus wrote, “there is, first, that most splendid of virtues, equality before the law.” It was true that Cleisthenes’ demokratia abolished the political distinctions between the Athenian aristocrats who had long monopolized the political decision-making process and the middle- and working-class people who made up the army and the navy (and whose incipient discontent was the reason Cleisthenes introduced his reforms in the first place). However, the “equality” Herodotus described was limited to a small segment of the Athenian population in Ancient Greece. For example, in Athens in the middle of the 4th century there were about 100,000 citizens (Athenian citizenship was limited to men and women whose parents had also been Athenian citizens), about 10,000 metoikoi, or “resident foreigners,” and 150,000 slaves. Out of all those people, only male citizens who were older than 18 were a part of the demos, meaning only about 40,000 people could participate in the democratic process.

Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from Athens for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.

The Ekklesia

Athenian democracy was a direct democracy made up of three important institutions. The first was the ekklesia, or Assembly, the sovereign governing body of Athens. Any member of the demos–any one of those 40,000 adult male citizens–was welcome to attend the meetings of the ekklesia, which were held 40 times per year in a hillside auditorium west of the Acropolis called the Pnyx. (Only about 5,000 men attended each session of the Assembly; the rest were serving in the army or navy or working to support their families.) At the meetings, the ekklesia made decisions about war and foreign policy, wrote and revised laws and approved or condemned the conduct of public officials. (Ostracism, in which a citizen could be expelled from the Athenian city-state for 10 years, was among the powers of the ekklesia.) The group made decisions by simple majority vote.

The Boule

The second important institution was the boule, or Council of Five Hundred. The boule was a group of 500 men, 50 from each of ten Athenian tribes, who served on the Council for one year. Unlike the ekklesia, the boule met every day and did most of the hands-on work of governance. It supervised government workers and was in charge of things like navy ships (triremes) and army horses. It dealt with ambassadors and representatives from other city-states. Its main function was to decide what matters would come before the ekklesia. In this way, the 500 members of the boule dictated how the entire democracy would work.

Positions on the boule were chosen by lot and not by election. This was because, in theory, a random lottery was more democratic than an election: pure chance, after all, could not be influenced by things like money or popularity. The lottery system also prevented the establishment of a permanent class of civil servants who might be tempted to use the government to advance or enrich themselves. However, historians argue that selection to the boule was not always just a matter of chance. They note that wealthy and influential people–and their relatives–served on the Council much more frequently than would be likely in a truly random lottery.

The Dikasteria

The third important institution was the popular courts, or dikasteria. Every day, more than 500 jurors were chosen by lot from a pool of male citizens older than 30. Of all the democratic institutions, Aristotle argued that the dikasteria “contributed most to the strength of democracy” because the jury had almost unlimited power. There were no police in Athens, so it was the demos themselves who brought court cases, argued for the prosecution and the defense and delivered verdicts and sentences by majority rule. (There were also no rules about what kinds of cases could be prosecuted or what could and could not be said at trial, and so Athenian citizens frequently used the dikasteria to punish or embarrass their enemies.)

Jurors were paid a wage for their work, so that the job could be accessible to everyone and not just the wealthy (but, since the wage was less than what the average worker earned in a day, the typical juror was an elderly retiree). Since Athenians did not pay taxes, the money for these payments came from customs duties, contributions from allies and taxes levied on the metoikoi. The one exception to this rule was the leitourgia, or liturgy, which was a kind of tax that wealthy people volunteered to pay to sponsor major civic undertakings such as the maintenance of a navy ship (this liturgy was called the trierarchia) or the production of a play or choral performance at the city’s annual festival.

The End of Athenian Democracy

Around 460 B.C., under the rule of the general Pericles (generals were among the only public officials who were elected, not appointed) Athenian democracy began to evolve into something that we would call an aristocracy: the rule of what Herodotus called “the one man, the best.” Though democratic ideals and processes did not survive in ancient Greece, they have been influencing politicians and governments ever since.

Modern representative democracies, in contrast to direct democracies, have citizens who vote for representatives who create and enact laws on their behalf. Canada, The United States and South Africa are all examples of modern-day representative democracies. 

“The trial of Socrates continue to this day.”

National Geographic documentary “The Greeks”

Article Title: Ancient Greek Democracy
Author: History.com Editors
Website Name: HISTORY
URL: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-greece/ancient-greece-democracy
Publisher: A&E Television Networks
Last Updated: September 30, 2019

BY HISTORY.COM EDITORS

‘I’m a faggot’: Félix Maritaud on reclaiming a term of abuse

– and his friendship with Béatrice Dalle

Phil HoadMovies

The star of 2018’s 120 BPM is outstanding as a hustler in his latest film Sauvage. He explains why making it was like an acid trip – and why he shouldn’t be described as gay @phlode

Thu 14 Feb 2019 (theguardian.com)

 ‘What’s dangerous in a film is to not give yourself completely, to want to control everything’ … Maritaud. Photograph: Swan Gallet/WWD/REX/Shutterstock

The Rue Saint-Denis has moved on. Twenty years ago, the central Paris thoroughfare was a notorious red-light district, with sex workers of every stripe giving it their all. Now, business has largely moved online, and only a sad-looking sex shop or two marks it out from the multicultural bustle that could be any up-and-coming quarter of London, Berlin or Lisbon.

“It definitely still exists out on the streets,” says Félix Maritaud. “Imagine someone living in precarious circumstances in which they don’t have internet access – there you go. It exists, and it makes the street workers even more precarious.”

The 26-year-old actor knows what he is talking about – he has just given an outstanding performance as a Strasbourg street hustler in director Camille Vidal-Naquet’s Sauvage. In the film, Maritaud alternates between walking the streets with a rock-star smirk – and surrendering himself to moments of deep tenderness.

He arrives for our interview dolled up with old-school Rue Saint-Denis panache: three-quarter-length leather coat, dark aquamarine leather trousers, leather backpack and an awesomely lurid top with a tiger, a masked Mexican wrestler and “Paradise-Pleasure” emblazoned on it. He compares acting to prostitution in its leasing out of the body, and says that his was immediately put to work in preparation for his character Leo (who remains unnamed in the film): Vidal-Naquet got him to faux-solicit in Paris’s Stalingrad district, and take dance lessons, in which he learned how to fall.

The result is a performance of utter rawness, intensified by the film’s procession of sex scenes. Some are funny, such as the opening impromptu handjob; others are mundane or exploitative. Undergoing all this, Leo comes across almost like a modern saint, only with a giant conical buttplug by way of ordeal.

Maritaud with Dalle at the Cesars.
 Maritaud with Dalle at the Cesars. Photograph: Swan Gallet/WWD/REX/Shutterstock

They didn’t want to “faire du chi-chi” [make a fuss] about filming the sex, because it is an ordinary part of Leo’s daily routine. “But beyond this banality, it was often an amazing experience,” says the actor. “You find yourself in this kind of intimate communication with an actor who you’ve never seen before in your life, most of whom weren’t homosexual.” (Maritaud is.)

Nevertheless, he was in a heightened state during and around the shoot – which was like an “acid trip”. At one point, when asked to act out a panic attack in the open, Maritaud found himself unable to stop crying for half an hour. “I was caught off-guard. I wasn’t even aware of myself. It was fantastic! What’s dangerous in a film is to not give yourself completely, to want to control everything.”

It all sounds pretty method, although Maritaud has had no formal acting training. A former art student, he was preparing to take up gardening as a job in Metz when he was spotted at a bar and asked to audition for Robin Campillo’s powerhouse drama about 80s Aids activism, 120 BPM. Judging by his description of why he likes gardening, there was already an actor in him ready to germinate: “I like plants a lot. They’re a really interesting form of life. Plants are in total awareness of their environment – they sense vibrations, the air, earth, the moods of people passing – they capture everything.”

Maritaud wound up playing Max, one of the firebrands from the ACT UP group always pressing for more radical action. “Examining the politicisation of the body is something I know about [from my studies]. And on top of that, I like to have fun and I’m a fag. So when Campillo saw my photo, he said: ‘He could have been in ACT UP.’ And it’s true.”

Maritaud (right) in 120 BPM.
 Maritaud (right) in 120 BPM. Photograph: BFI

Acting seems to have flowed directly out of his own life. He says, that like Leo, he has a wanderlust that saw him leave home in the village of La Guerche-sur-l’Aubois, 175km (110 miles) south of Paris, at 15. “Let’s say I had a need for experiences I couldn’t inflict on my parents. I don’t know, pure freedom or something. Which meant anything from travelling to living on the margins, drugs … But always happily, not something grim.” He spent time in Belgium, Lille and Montpellier, but was happiest on the roadside, “when I was thumbing rides. The moment when I was alone with myself and everything was possible.”

120 BPM, Sauvage and a third feature – Yann Gonzalez’s Un Couteau Dans le Coeur (A Knife in the Heart), in which he has a supporting role as a porn actor – have made Maritaud France’s hot young actor of the moment.

He bridles at this, criticising the labelling and commodification of gay culture. There is one label, though, that he wears as a badge of pride: “Je suis pas gay, je suis un pédé. [He switches to English.] I am a faggot.” I tell him how uncomfortable I am with the term, a slur derived from pederast. But he compares it to the earlier reclamation of queer, or black people’s use of the N-word. “Society has spent its time describing me like that to put me to one side. Me, I’m empowered enough now to lift up my head and say: ‘Yes, I’m a fag.’”

Maritaud took time to recover from the making of Sauvage, saying that in its wake he developed a reflex fear of abandonment. He has a couple more roles lined up and is thinking of publishing a book of his photos, which often feature derelict places. He has been taking career advice from the redoubtable Béatrice Dalle, whom he met in a bar and later asked to be his “godmother” for a recent Césars (the French Oscars) ceremony for 2019 hopefuls (“Just because I wanted an evening out with her,” he says).

They sometimes exchange books: the last one he gave her was about angels, and she gave him a poem by Rimbaud. He says he thinks there is a biopic in development, with Dalle playing Rimbaud’s mother. Whoever gets the lead would need a very particular skill set: poetry, vagabondry, an interest in sexual revolution, a touch of the dark side. With his friend already attached, surely a ready-made Rimbaud is sitting opposite me.

Sauvage is out on 1 March, with Q&A previews from 26 February

Franz Kafka on responsibility

Franz Kafka

“By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.”
–Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1942) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. Wikipedia

Baba Ram Dass on enlightenment and meditation

Baba Ram Dass

“Think you’re enlightened? Go spend a week with your family.”
~Baba Ram Dass

“The quieter you become, the more you can hear.”
~Baba Ram Dass

Ram Dass, also known as Baba Ram Dass (April 6, 1931 – December 22, 2019), was an American spiritual teacher, academic and clinical psychologist, and author. His most famous book, Be Here Now, has been described as “seminal,” and helped popularize Eastern spirituality with the baby boomer generation in the West. Wikipedia

This is where our country is headed

This mass surveillance and control of the population is assured here in the US because most citizens prefer convenience and security over freedom and government Of The People. If it’s easier to buy a hamburger with facial recognition, without giving it a thought as to the consequences of that submission, they will leap wholeheartedly. Their limited critical thinking capacities will only see the immediate gratification choice and run with that.

Imagine, as it is in China now, you use a public toilet. When you enter you are issued an 18 inch roll of toilet paper through facial recognition. That’s it. You can get more if you wait nine minutes. If you attempt to get more in less than nine minutes, the toilet paper dispenser will notify you that you are being denied.

This technology, now a part of China’s landscape, is the future for us. They already have millions of cameras in place and adding more.

Think of the US with 5G technology.

Throw away your wallets and purses. Reach out and embrace your own servitude to the State.

–Bob of Occupy

Already too late? The argument over ‘the great collapse’ of humanity

By: François PICARD |Alessandro XENOS|Juliette LAURAIN (france24.com)

Is it already too late? Is the great collapse already in motion? Even the ominous chants of Extinction Rebellion activists who shut down the heart of London in October sound overly optimistic to those who claim we’ve already passed the tipping point beyond which the overheating and overpolluting of the planet can only accelerate.

Their argument: instead of trying to save our way of life, policy makers need to prepare now for a world with higher sea levels, more extreme temperatures, fewer resources and fewer species. A world where politicians can no longer promise better jobs, higher wages, more stuff.

Then there are those who discard doomsday prophets, who insist you can go green and continue to grow. Their argument: it will be technology to the rescue. Already, we’re exceeding expectations when it comes to harnessing renewable energy. Save our way of life? Or prepare for the new normal? At least both sides agree that drastic action is needed, fast.

But how drastic? Will the surge of Green parties in Europe herald a new kind of bottom-up democratic resurgence? Or can only a top-down China-like authoritarian state impose the drastic measures needed for drastic times?

Produced by Alessandro Xenos, Juliette Laurain and Ariana Mozafari.

Lennon in Havana

DECEMBER 26, 2019

by SUSAN BABBITT (counterpunch.org)

Photograph Source: Joost Evers / Anefo – CC0

The anniversary of John Lennon’s death (December 8) was marked in Cuba. Criticism followed on social media: Cuba repressed Beatles music forcing kids under the covers. Abel Prieto and Guille Vilar, youth in Cuba at the time, say it’s not true. [1] But that’s not the point.

More useful, Prieto argues, is what happened to Lennon’s message in the US. One result, celebrated this past August, was the “existential explosion” of Woodstock. Prieto wonders why such a powerful experience did not end in effective resistance to hatred.

Cuba had no “existential explosion”, although Eusebio Leal uses such language. Leal has been city historian for Havana since 1967. When appointed, he had grade five education. He’s directed the restoration of Old Havana, world heritage site since 1982, celebrated at Havana’s 500th birthday.

Asked how he did it, Leal says the revolution “exploded” into his impoverished life. He and his single mom were Christians and he still practises. He is philosopher, although never trained, formally. He’s received awards and recognition from around the world.

The Cuban Revolution didn’t exactly “explode”. Leal was awarded his PhD in History for work on Carlos Manuel de Cespedes.[2] Cespedes freed his slaves in 1868, initiating a war. The 1959 revolution started there, even before. Cespedes was a philosopher, a fascinating one, as Leal explains.

Many such revolutionaries were philosophers. They discovered ideas explaining actions that couldn’t be explained within existing theory. If you act, and can’t explain, at least to yourself, you feel crazy. You can’t sustain direction.

At a Party Congress in 1997, Fidel Castro said direction was everything. He didn’t say getting it right was everything, although it matters. Charles Darwin didn’t get it all right, but he defined direction. He raised questions that led to explanation of what previously had not been explained, and that needed to be explained, to understand what needs to be understood to move forward: in a direction.

“Existential explosion” needed explanation, to define direction. Martha Ackman’s wonderful new book on Emily Dickinson shows a way.[3] We meet an engaged, active Dickinson whose home was the “wild terrain of the mind”. She wanted her poems to be true, so that a poem does indeed convey the sense of the bird. That her poems were called true was praise she valued most.

Early on, as a student, “Emily wanted to stare [the unknown} down and walk straight into the abyss”: truth. She never shied away from “looking anguish in the eye“. It was her “dominion over misery“. She saw in the dark, that is, she saw things in the dark: life.

Today the only “dominion over misery” is “light at the end of the tunnel”. In an early poem, Dickinson writes, “We grow accustomed to the Dark – Either the darkness alters – Or something in the sight adjusts itself to Midnight.” And so, we see life.

It links her to Cespedes. He saw in the dark. Dickinson thought there could be truth, not just about birds, but about the sense of a bird. Thus, she applies a criterion connected to the world. Some feelings are true as regards what is lived and can be lived. Some are not so true.

It’s mind/body connection. Feelings, sometimes, are from the world, indicative of how it is, or might be. But many want “light at the end of the tunnel” and only that.

I was reminded of this by Javier Cercas’ Lord of all the Dead. [4] Cercas writes about his great uncle who died for Franco. His death was “seared into my mother’s imagination in childhood as what the Greeks called kalos thanatos: a beautiful death.” Like Achilles, he lives on.

By the end of Cercas’ compassionate story, the great uncle is no longer a symbol of shame but rather a “self-respecting muchacho“ lost in someone else’s war. But Cercas tells the story for the sake of telling the story. That’s what he says. The story must be told because it’s better than to “leave it rotting”.

It can’t, for instance, be a story explaining what needs to be explained , such as the “silent wake of hatred, resentment and violence”, left behind by the war. Cercas can’t make this claim. “Silent wake” is a metaphor. It can’t be fact. Cercas sets these in opposition, repeating it, four times: Legend is unreliable, dependent on people, “volatile.” Facts are something different: “safe” and “brutal”.

Mercifully Dickinson didn’t have this view. Otherwise, her poems couldn’t be true. Cercas is in the sordid grasp of an old story, separating the personal from the objective, as if the latter is achievable only if freed of the former. “Beautiful death” is the same story: human beings apart from nature.

It makes freedom from decrepitude worth speculation. And speculate Cercas does. He ends with immortality. Nobody dies, we learn; we’re just transformed, physically, living in an “eternal present”.

It’s better to see in the dark, not with silly views about “hope” but by finding stories that explain direction. To say science and art are connected is not to say they are the same thing. Unless you imagine how the world might be, even if it can’t be that way, you don’t ask why it is the way it really is.

John Lennon sang about this. Europeans pulled apart art and science, in a false view of truth and knowledge, linked to a false view of human beings in nature.

Cuba tells a different story. So does Dickinson.

Cuba didn’t repress Lennon’s message. It explains it, in art and philosophy. Eusebio Leal is part. The beauty of Old Havana is the beauty of the ideas that explain its stunning restoration. Ideas explaining what needs to be known, for a direction that can be lived, with dignity, have claim to truth.

They’re not stories for the sake of stories: European liberalism’s hidden recipe for despair.

Notes.

1) http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2019/09/27/la-cebra-que-le-hemos-hecho-a-lennon/#.Xf4JnUdKiM8 

2) Carlos Manuel de Céspedes : el diario perdido (Havana: Ediciones Boloña, 1998). 

3) These Fevered Days W.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Review forthcoming https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ 

4) Translated by Anne McLean, Alfred A Knopf, 2020. Review forthcoming https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ Join the debate on FacebookMore articles by:SUSAN BABBITT

Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014).