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It was said by a certain congresswoman (and I do mean certain in every sense of the word; few leaders in today’s America have proven themselves as minimally informed yet as unwaveringly convinced of their opinions as is she) that the dilapidated and overcrowded units along the southern border in which a recent deluge of illegal immigrants have been housed were tantamount to “concentration camps”.

Not surprisingly, this utterance of hers raised more than a few eyebrows. Indeed, it did so even upon the faces of her allies most ardent in their support of her and most sympathetic to her unusual form of rhetoric. Yet those brows began to furrow and exasperation crept on the countenance when she concluded this provocative observation by uttering the phrase “Never Again”. These doleful two words are quite unequivocal. They are, of course, those by which the Holocaust is remembered today. Having said them, she made what was a tenuous comparison of the immigrant housing situation on the southern border to concentration camps into an explicit invocation of that grisly extermination of six million Jews.

A remarkable thing to say on its face, the comparison of our immigrant detention centers to concentration camps—situated within this country, a putatively generous bastion of liberty and human rights—rather peremptorily demands our attention. It does so, I should think, at the very least. If civility is a feature by which we fancy ourselves distinguished among all peoples on this historically quite brutal earth, we could never be so insensitive to the claim as not to inspect it further and with haste. Thus, our exertion toward a more thorough examination of the issue will be forgiven by the pundits and the cynics who smile at us, an often-too credulous mass. We must discover if really this is the case: is the American government operating a string of concentration camps along the southern border?

Surely, if it is (as that ever-so certain congresswoman claims), our attachment to so lofty a set of ideas as enumerated above would rightly be questioned, if not fully revoked. And we, a contrite and ashamed nation, certainly wouldn’t find it wise to protest its revocation. Nor should we if her comparison is shown to be a charge of which our government is guilty. And we, the people by whom this now magnanimous, now nefarious government is funded, would be complicit all the same.

First, however, before the drawing of any verdict regarding our government’s depravity, its humanity, or its ambivalence somewhere in between, a word must be said on the subject of history. It seems always to be the case that those least affiliated with it and habituated to its study make the most extraordinary claims in its behalf. Like an analphabetic grammarian or a food critic without a sense of taste, those to whom history is not only a distant time but a foreign tongue have a tendency of perceiving its lessons with complete inaccuracy. Granted, within the simple and incapacious confines of one’s own head, this misperception is no big deal and it arouses my frustration not. Sure, it’s an issue if one’s concerned with the current epidemic of ignorance that’s been terrorizing our mental and national state, but if kept quiet, historical ignorance is not a communicable disease. It’s when one becomes a vocal and public expositor of poorly-formulated thoughts unanchored by the truth of the past that mischief is given a chance to run off of its leash. It’s then that history becomes pathology and we’ve fully lost our grasp.

And nothing is more mischievous nor ultimately more specious than the phrases and images that are used to elicit memories of Nazism, Fascism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Yet for some reason, be it out of ignorance or recalcitrance, our intelligentsia appears intent on using these terms where they don’t apply. Indeed, their legitimate application is mercifully reserved for very few cases in this modern and mostly peaceful age. One can point to Venezuela for National Socialism, perhaps Hungary or Poland for incipient Fascism, but nowhere—so far as we descry—can concentration camps or a burgeoning Holocaust be seen. Nevertheless, all of these terms, be they applicable or not, are used with such regularity, such flippancy (and with such lack of historical fluency) as to diminish their original meanings.

This brings us back to the congresswoman from whose Instagram video the words “concentration camps” and “Never Again” were heard. To refresh the memory, they were strung together in what was a painfully inarticulate description of the situation of which our southern border has long failed to disencumber itself. The problem, though unresolved and intractable through the course of the past few decades, has become in recent weeks distressingly acute. The heat down there is extravagant and the hospitality sorely wanting. The numbers of alien arrivals are simply incommensurate with the government’s humble means. Though not deliberately cruel, our treatment of them hasn’t been the epitome of humane. We haven’t the beds to accommodate them, the nutrition to preserve them, the sanitation to cleanse them, nor the bi-partisan political motivation to alleviate their plight.

Yet they come of their own volition. That’s not to say that they’re not coerced by the wretchedness of the circumstances from which they flee—conditions that doubtless are a sad admixture of immiseration, desperation, poverty, and ill-health—to traverse the middle of this long continent and arrive with wishful anticipation at our gates, but it’s a trial and a travail upon which they embark voluntarily. They are free agents, however unenviably placed, and their emigration is an act of their own accord. It’s for this simple reason that the term “concentration camp” is inappropriately applied when made in reference to the southern border and the units to which these illegal immigrants have been temporarily confined.

In nearly every historical instance to which the term “concentration camp” can be applied, a group of people (typically one of an ill-favored breed) was quite literally “concentrated” in a specific allotment of land over which its “superiors” or captors presided. The idea of the concentration camp was an expedient and a novelty in the late nineteenth century; a well-designed atrocity in the twentieth.

Before the arguably unjustified intervention of the American military on the island of Cuba in the year 1898 (for which the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, the casus belli of the Spanish-American War, was dubiously responsible), the Spaniards forced into concentration camps hundreds of thousands of native Cubans. The purpose of this unprecedented maneuver—it had never been systemically attempted in any previous war—was to separate these locals from the native combatants. The latter had taken to the verdant, tropical mountains and fields—the later playgrounds of a well-concealed Castro—to wage a guerrilla campaign against the powerful and traditional Spaniards. This, of course, was a compulsory concentration—not at all one into which the Cuban people willingly marched.

The mortality rate was unforgivably high. Already a despised people in the Spaniard’s mind, the imprisoned Cubans had little opportunity of withstanding the conditions under which they lived. They faced terrible and unrelenting heat, insalubrious houses, endless and menial work, and the brutal sadistic urges of a frustrated and defeated Spain. Quickly, they moved from despised to decimated in less than a year. The eventual liberation of Cuba (for which an America with annexation on its mind is very rarely thanked) and the success of its revolution freed those prisoners from the camps. None thought that so depraved a regression to barbarism could ever happen again.

The fin de siècle would come and pass before the next concentration camp arose. This time, as it did in the Cuban Revolution, it would arise in a time of war. On this occasion, however, the belligerents weren’t Conquistadores and Cubans but Angles and Afrikaners, and the setting wasn’t an island of the Caribbean in the New World, but a country perhaps eldest of them all. We jump in time and in place to the progenitor to the modern state of South Africa and its Boer War, a surprisingly under-appreciated conflict in the minds of the American west.

I consider our general lack of interest in this war of independence surprising for the quite selfish reason that it so closely resembles our own. The British empire, very nearly at its most puissant height as that ominous twentieth century got underway, was attempting to consolidate the southern-most tip of a continent already colored in the shade of her majesty’s red. While France failed in working itself and its mission civilisatrice horizontally from Senegal to the Red Sea, Great Britain nearly succeeded in dominating that arid continent from top to bottom—cap-a-pie. From Egypt to South Africa, the formidable Cecil Rhodes (to whose eponymous and illustrious scholarship so many of our brightest graduates on this side of the Atlantic aspire) wanted a distinctly British link and bothered himself little with thoughts of just how much blood need be shed to hold the African line.

Naturally, the local Transvaal and Orangemen of South Africa were less than amicable to his ambitious plan. Hegemony, so they thought, was palatable up until a point; the Brits could disseminate their fertile seed in every which way, so long as it didn’t touch the African tip. Though unsuccessful in the end, the Boers fought a far better-equipped British army with a tenacity that was something to behold. This is where our revolutions diverge; ours was successful, theirs ultimately futile. Wanting the likes of a General George Washington and having not the geographic benefit of a vast ocean in between colonizer and tributary state, the Boers were defeated by the superiority of British arms.

Toward the end of the war, in an effort to sequester the civilian population from the guerilla combatants, the British took a page out of the recent Spanish playbook. In imitation of those haughty Iberians working in the Cuban heat, the British colonists erected concentration camps in which the Boer people were forced to live. Sadly, as might be expected in an environment of gratuitous violence, collateral damage, and a years-long war, the conditions to which the prisoners were exposed were horrendous. Thousands of immured Boers perished of malnutrition, pestilence, disease, and exposure. If any consolation in the face of travesty was to be had, it might be that attempts to reform the administration of the camps were in the air. The problem was that they took too long to float so far south. Unfortunately, they were often delayed and painfully unavailing, but it can’t be said that there wasn’t pressure to ease the atrocities exerted by discomfited Londoners back home.

A few years after the Boer experience and a few hundred miles north of the modern South African state (to whom independence was finally granted by the British government in 1961), the Germans had a similarly brutal response to what they considered a misbehaving local tribe. Tribes, really, as there were two: the Herero and the Namaqua. Though deeply entrenched in mutual hostilities for which propinquity and history are largely to thank, the two indigenous tribes found themselves caught in the same net and opposed to the same enemy. Both were now under the subjection of an interloping German elite, one that proved itself as murderous as it was avaricious for land.

Late to the scramble for Africa, and perhaps for that reason desirous of standing shoulder to shoulder with the atrocities of their other European contemporaries, the Germans treated the local inhabitants over whom they now ruled with complete disregard. Here, in this creatively-named country of German South West Africa (today we know it as Namibia; a mellifluous improvement to the guttural German tongue) witnessed the slaughter of thousands of tribesmen, women, girls, and boys.

As did the Spaniards and the British before them, the Germans initially conceived of their concentration camps as a means commensurate to a military end. They wanted to cordon off the guerrilla militarists (the style of fighting to which the Herero and the Namaqua had been made to resort) from the civilians upon whom the former relied for food, clothing, and other essential things. All other innocents would be rather unsparingly cut down by the advent of the Maxim gun—the bloody brainchild of Hiram Maxim, the dual resident and duly-honored American-Brit. If not that, they’d be prevented from accessing drink from local watering holes—the intention being slowly to desiccate them beneath the inescapable glow of the African sun.

Those not starved, dehydrated, nor shot in the head while in the discomfort of their homes were to be gathered up, fettered, and sent to one of five concentration camps along the country’s western coast. The most infamous of the lot was the concentration camp of Shark Island where the above three afflictions (starvation, dehydration, and ballistics through the head) were equally as abundant as they were on the outside in the field.

Aptly named, Shark Island was created from the outset to be a pool of death. In this way, the German version of the concentration camp differed slightly, though very much for the worse, from that of Spaniard or the Brit. Unlike those other two overly heavy-handed European hegemons, the Germans made extermination a chief aim of the island and continued its operation (both of concentrating and of killing) even after the cessation of its short-lived “war”.

Whereas the British soldiers promptly closed the Boer concentration camps after the guerrilla phase of their war had ended, the Germans perpetuated and perhaps even accelerated theirs in a deliberate effort to eradicate the Herero and Namaqua peoples. It can be said, though not without the acidic taste of history regurgitated and repeated, that the Germans were attempting the planned genocide of an entire race. As we know, it was a plan that didn’t find itself resting in latent disuse for long. Three decades hence, they’d replicate this dream on a much more impressive scale. As the first quarter of the twentieth century ended, world Jewry would become the target, but every inspiration to carry forth this type of systematic murder on so massive a scale came from a couple of provincial African tribes.

One could go on about this overwhelmingly forgotten and historically foreboding event. After all, it was the one event before all others that set the stage for the later atrocities attributable to that increasingly fistic, Teutonic state. Encouraged by the results they’d achieved in that forsaken corner of Africa, the Germans would later synonymize death with concentration by opening camps all across Europe and their new, imperial domain. They became masters of mass slaughter after observing the Gulag methods of the Soviets. Zyklon-B, a gas odorless and murderous, was then introduced. The result was six million dead Jews and an exhortation to bear in mind the simple mantra of “Never Again”.

Having waded through the brutal and sanguinary history of the concentration camp, from its origin as a Spanish military expedient to its conclusion as Hitler’s final measure to rid himself of all Jews, we return to the comparison offered by the congresswoman at the start. By any measure of history, by any shifting definition of political semantics, it’s impossible to claim that the facilities in whose overpopulated halls thousands of illegal immigrants are being held are in any way comparable to concentration camps. Immigrants arriving to this country with the hope of attaining a better life are neither Boers, nor Cubans, nor Hereros, nor Namaqua. They certainly have their troubles, but one of them isn’t the compulsory detention in a concentration camp.

Protagoras was a figure, a self-reputed member of a now ill-respected class known to antiquity as the sophistai, or, “the teachers of wisdom”. Yet in spite of all of our current wisdom, of which we’re perhaps mistakenly excessively proud, he persists as a man about whom sadly little is known. Much of his life, much more of his system of thought have been successful in their evasion of history. And neither pedagogy nor psychology, two fields with at least one eye forever turned to the past, have been any luckier in their conjoined pursuit of him. Yet perhaps because of his obscurity, a darkness that forever tempts one to illuminate his depths and to seek into his life, he’s become a man upon whom my attention has turned.

He was, in his time, a thinker whom the classification of thought places before the emergence of the man whose name would come to delineate antiquity and modernity—the thoughts of old and those of new. The latter thinker to whom I make reference is, of course, none other than the venerable Socrates—gadfly of Greece and conversationalist par excellence. As I make reference to him, he serves as the very point of reference for the rest of us and for all of time. As if an earlier Mohammed or Jesus the Nazarene, he was a third messiah around whom philosophic calendars were to be based, and he set himself up as the standard for the proportioning of time. All that existed before the man at whose coattails the precocious Plato scribbled with furious and solicitous haste was to be rendered desperately Pre-Socratic. It was the age of Thales, that of Pythagoras, and that of a couple happy Dao-endowed Asian cogitators sitting cross-legged in the East. At the risk of offending the deceased, all that preceded Socrates was clever but constrained. The study of nature was all that was known and thought was rooted in the earth. His school, informal and controversial though it may have been, marked the flowering of that excited plant. In his succession was an ethical exuberance, a metaphysical foray into the new world of the ripened mind.

Having been ascribed to the school of the Pre-Socratics, one would imagine Protagoras immeasurably old. On the contrary, he was far from an elderly ghost haunting the minds of a juvenescent Greece. His was no hoary philosophy, and he was no specter. Thus, though technically not a misnomer, the title of Pre-Socratic—when applied to him—tends to be somewhat misleading. Certainly, he wasn’t so elderly as to precede by an order of centuries the historical Socrates—the wisest man ever to have trodden the Athenian streets. In fact, he and Socrates must be seen as contemporaries of a sort, not unlike Beethoven and Liszt. Though the one was aged as the other flirted philosophically out of the emergence from his youth, they lived contemporaneous lives, if not equally well-documented ones (not everyone can be so lucky as to avail himself of a Platonic, personal scribe). Odd though it is to conceive of Socrates—bearded, aged, and intoxicated by the hemlock heroically held in his grasp—as a man burgeoning from the delicacies and the follies of youth, he was exactly that, as were we all not so long ago.

In Protagoras’s eponymous dialogue, written by the hand of Plato though spoken through the voice of his putative professor, Socrates is in supreme form. There is no sense of the timorous upstart or the cautious novitiate in the face of the well-worn veteran against whom he stands. Opposing him, the thinker for whom this wonky and wordy tract is named, is described as being the eldest of the gathered bunch—of which Socrates is the implicit intellectual leader. Born in Abdera, a city located in what was the northeast section of the empire of Greece, Protagoras added to his accumulation of years an endless number of steps. He was an itinerant teacher, a sort of proto-peripatetic before Aristotle made popular that philosophical term. Ambulatory as only an ancient could be, Protagoras walked all the way from modern Thrace (the supposed place of his birth) to the mainland of Greece, stopping along the way at every accessible city with a combined sense of cupidity and inquiry with a desire to teach. He was, as Plato makes certain to point out, a quite highly accomplished sophist—a man whose occupation was wisdom, whose commerce was discourse, and whose trade was talk.

Yet the field of sophistry (in which Protagoras labored) and that of philosophy (in which Socrates leisured) were to be differentiated. The former was wisdom, or at least the appearance thereof. But it wasn’t exactly a wholesome nor a salubrious wisdom for the sake of wisdom alone. Rather, it was a highly-studied wisdom for the purposes of remuneration and the payment of a fee. Philosophy, on the other hand, was an activity of love. For better or worse, it was an infatuation from which one couldn’t be cleaved once enticed by its allure.

Etymologically, the word sophistry—derived from the Greek sophos which means “wisdom”—assumed an omission of loving when it came to learning. That distinction could be misleading, and there’s no reason to think that Protagoras wasn’t as commensurately passionate in his endeavors as he was smart. No imprecation could be so baseless, no scurrility so damning as to assume him a thinker concerned only with the coin and not with the thought. He was, after all and as far as history can tell, an advisor in good standing to that greatest of statesman—the inimitable Pericles (the archon one might add, under whom Socrates served as a humble infantryman at the outset of the Peloponnesian War. It appears our beloved gadfly was also a gladiator when his city entangled itself in that bloody, decades-long civil war). Undoubtedly, the appointment spoke well of his genius—a finely-tuned brilliance at whose edge Socrates could sharpen his own.

And it’s a good thing he could, for their dialogue moves unhesitatingly from a pointed inquiry to a verbal joust. The question at hand, from which a Platonic digression always is to be expected, was whether or not virtue was capable of being taught. Was that highest of aims educable, or was it ingrained? Ultimately, after countless repartees and argumentative thrusts, the answer to this question remains inconclusive. Pedants and pedagogues will quibble, each claiming a resolution to this ancient question. Alas, we know not if virtue can be taught, but we join Protagoras in hoping that it might. For him, his income was in some way dependent on its being so. If there is no lesson to export, no curriculum to which one ought to adhere, of what use is the teacher by whom these matters are possessed? For us moderns, we like to think ourselves a mere Amazon “Alexa” inquisition or self-help book away from being improved, but we gravely diminish the role of the teacher by being so reliant upon our own devices.

The question, then, on the educability of virtue is frustratingly moot. We impugn these intrepid thinkers not. Their inability to achieve an answer is no cause for our distaste. Rather, we give to them our deepest sympathies, having come up with no better answer to this issue ourselves.

Beneath this most practical of all questions (that is, as earlier stated, whether or not virtue can be taught and, if so, by whom?) lies a philosophical distinction of which we, as devoted members of the thinking world, have been admirably quick to take note. It is the penetrating divergence between feelings and facts. The former is a product of subjectivism—the theory that all a man feels to be true is indubitably just that. “Man”, as the greatest expositor of that belief tersely pointed out, “is the measure of all things”. This is the apothegm of Protagoras by which the genteel sophist (if nothing else is remembered of him) is known. Contrary to the associated Pre-Socratics with whom he ran, Protagoras was more interested in thoughts than in things. He was more psychologist than naturalist, more Durkheim than Darwin. Everything—be it virtue, beauty, justice, goodness, you name it—was subjectively to be discerned and every man in retention of his own understanding of the truth. Objectivity was an apparition. A perhaps radical sense of relativism had found its champion and individualism its voice (a voice, one might add, that’s become increasingly resonant in our Post-Modern age—an age in which the bewildering line “my truth” is commonly bandied about).

But a voice is only championed if it can withstand the raillery an adversary. It mustn’t buckle when the imprecations of an opponent flow its way. And, expectedly, flow they will. There was no more redoubtable an opponent, irrespective of his youth and the gentle curiosity of his mind, than that found in the person of Plato’s Socrates. In opposition to Protagoras’ idea that the capricious self is the only enduring source of truth, Socrates believed in a philosophy of greater solidity. There was, in Socrates’ as well as in Plato’s mind, an ultimate and essential Truth—one in whose image all lesser facsimiles were to be formed. If, as Protagoras had convinced us, we were to accept the premise that man is the measure of all things, by what measure—we curiously ask of the Thracian traveler—would he himself be gauged? Mustn’t there be a universal ideal, a Form of man by which man is ultimately measured? There is an ideal under whose recognition we live—to whose perfection we strive. We form not our own measurements, but that Ideal to which we look up keenly measures us.

Between Protagoras and Plato, relativism and idealism, the battle for the truth of life continues. According to the solipsistic century in which we presently live, the former thinker seems to have gained the advantage. Finding acceptable no truth but our own, each of us has become the bluntest of measuring sticks. Nothing is unknown to us as we appreciate every angle—no matter how acute the lines or obtuse our thought. Nevertheless, the Socratic idea persists and demands that it be heard. It does so every Sunday, that alleged day of respite during whose morning hours we hear it said of us and of our closest friends that we were made in the likeness of a loving God. He is the measure by whose dimensions or dictates we’re crafted.

Ultimately, there’s room both for sophist and philosopher in this quest for the measurement and understanding of man. All hands are needed on his tumultuous deck. And if it be our endeavor to take up the task with the commitment it deserves and the earnestness of which we have no lack, we’ll have to use every available instrument and every man—whether wisdom is for him a labor of income or one of love. We thus seek to know Protagoras so we might better know ourselves. We likewise hope to understand Socrates, though we frankly expect never to understand ourselves.

Along with millions of other fanatics of this decade’s most fantastical show, I felt at the conclusion of Game of Thrones that my HBO subscription had grown, how shall say, superfluous. Indeed, if I’m to be blunt, I’ll be forced to admit that my subscription had outlived its purpose of making accessible to me five rather forgettable episodes of that epochal show.

Yet HBO, doubtless in anticipation of the mass exodus of a group of now devoted, now frustrated Thrones patrons from its network, ensures that each viewer retains his subscription for at least one month more. I think of it as the “cool-down” lap after the conclusion of a race. In actuality, it’s a clever little business model with which I profess to have no qualm; I understand and even momentarily appreciate its purpose—until, of course, I consider the impending double-digit digitized bill. The idea is not only to squeeze from you one final payment, but to attempt to capture your attention with another of its shows.

This is no enviable task. So swollen is the internet with options catered to the diversion of your attention that the simple consumer is besieged by entertainment (offered, in many instances, at cheaper rates) on all sides. He’s in the midst of a torrent of entertainment and he enjoys, or he drowns, in a televisual, internet-driven embarrass de richesses.

And while this embarrassment is not a modern ailment to which I’m personally immune, I feel as though I’m perfectly capable of “cutting the cord”, if you will, as it pertains to my prior attachment to HBO. That said, during the interim between my decision to do just that and the imminent day upon whose arrival my HBO access will have formally expired, I decided to watch the miniseries, Chernobyl.

It was, not only to my surprise but to my great delight, the perfect “chaser” of a series—one intended to be swallowed only after having consumed to the dregs Game of Thrones. Chernobyl was a much-needed gulp of sobriety, flavored by the stresses of history, in opposition to the imaginative intoxicant that was Game of Thrones. But sobriety, above all, is absolutely necessary when one ventures to wean himself off of an eight-season high of dragons, elixirs, white-walkers, and such incredible beasts and plots as these. Chernobyl was precisely the sobering pill for which both mind and body yearned, displaying before us beasts who were far more recognizable to human eyes and plots to political too believe.

The show was not only accurate, but evocative and for those who endured it, painfully memorable. From its opening sequence until its very last, it achieved in that regard. Indeed, upon watching it and, with it, contemporaneous footage from that time, it was the show’s verisimilitude that struck me most. The setting was less replica than full facsimile of a Soviet Union on the brink of dissolution. The producers, actors, and the set and costume designers took every pain, however excruciatingly minute, to make the situation on the screen as real as it was nearly three decades ago. The nuclear power plant at which the historic explosion occurred, the manner of dress by which the actors were adorned, the weight of the Communistic regime under which the people were so evidently oppressed—all these visual, and if not visual, palpable factors made the viewer feel as if it were all real.

And real it was. The show’s creators were nothing if not scrupulous in their pursuit of the highest levels of accuracy in the telling of this national tale. In discussing the series, they’ve claimed frankly that historicity, perhaps more so than theatricality, was the greatest end for which they strove. Yet the historical and the histrionic combine as if in a natural alliance with no amount of drama left out. The writers and producers wanted its events captured precisely as they happened in that harrowing year of 1986. In the pursuit of that goal, every available archive was searched, every survivor inspected, and every contemporaneous piece of evidence checked twice. The resulting story was more laden with drama than even the subtlest and most imaginative of Hollywood writers could conceive. Drama, in the case of Chernobyl, was truer than fiction ever could be.

The meticulous nature by which the Chernobyl writers conducted their project leads to the portrayal of something very near the real thing. The historical accuracy of the show, not to mention the erudition of its performance, must be considered beyond dispute. Yet it leaves a rather ugly mark on the face of the Russian government—no easy task when you’re dealing with a countenance already so shamelessly bruised. Finding time between its meddling in foreign elections and annexing neighboring states, the Russian government decided to raise a bunch of predictable protestations in regard to the show. Ever the inventive regime (and never slow to hurl invective our way), the Russians have responded to the show’s success by claiming—contrary to all reason—that the Chernobyl meltdown was in fact an American job. If the propagandists of the Kremlin are to be believed (as decreasingly, one hopes, they are) it was our furtive penetration into the Soviet state, rather than its stark incompetence that led to the disaster we see likened on screen.

As if the Cold War had never fully thawed, top representatives of the Russian government are suggesting that it was the C.I.A’s responsibility for inciting the meltdown in that quaint, inhospitable Ukrainian town. Interloper America, rather than solicitous Mother Russia, is the country to which we ought to turn our attention if we wish to unveil the actual truth. Fortunately, the historical literacy of the world is on the rise and everyone is justifiably suspicious of the Russian state. This is what happens when perfidy becomes so pervasive that a government can’t be believed. Ultimately, in the re-telling of the story of Chernobyl, the Russian government wants not facts, but counterfactuals to prevail.

We smile upon their fantasy. Let them live and think as they may. The Russians can enamor themselves of their lies; we concern ourselves with such distortions of history not. Nevertheless, it is interesting—perhaps even compulsory—to view this merciful mini-series (five succinct episodes of Chernobyl contrast well with eight ponderous seasons of Game of Thrones, the latter of which at times strained the span of the patient viewer’s attention) in the light of our modern political environment.

I admit, the use of that last phrase is gratingly trite, but the second of its two words is deliberate. It’s the environment—presently so tenuous and contentious a thing—upon which our focus now shifts.  

Chernobyl, aside from being captivating from a dramatic point of view, is compelling from an environmental one as well. Nuclear energy, by far the most propitious and powerful of the types of energy available today, has seen scant application over the course of the past forty years. This is a source of bewilderment to me, a problem around which I’ve never been able to wrap my head in our ever-so environmentally-conscious age. In a comparison with all the other feasible types of energy (be they solar, wind-produced, hydroelectric, or, god forbid, coal-fired) nuclear energy is by far the strongest. Its impact on the atmosphere (so long as its contents and emissions are safely contained) is exiguous. It’s nearly the most salutary approach to energy production graspable by the modern mind. Add to that its renewability, and there’s even more to recommend it. Uranium and Plutonium—the materials by which reactors are made fissile and functional—can always be procured, be it by synthesis or some other brilliant means extraction. Potency and sustainability, therefore, aren’t the questions with which nuclear energy is beleaguered. Those of safety and stability, however, are.

It’s on this point that Chernobyl, after having scintillated us on screen with an amazing sequence of events, scares us with what might come to be. It reveals to us our fears of radiation and of an unnatural death.

The dramatis personae become precautionary tales. Chernobyl, the real place and the tragedy of which it’s representative, sits atop those other stories of precaution, of which we number but three: Chernobyl, of course, comes first to mind, but alongside it we count the partial meltdown of the Three-Mile Island plant in the state of Pennsylvania and that earthquake-induced disaster at Fukushima in Japan. Those with a disinclination toward nuclear power, after having watched Chernobyl and considered the fallout of the other two, are sure to feel vindicated of their belief that nuclear energy is simply no good. It would be difficult to be persuaded otherwise. Of course, this is in the absence of a consideration of just how rarely problems with nuclear energy occur; compare these three incidents, each more unfortunate than the last, with the multitudinous oil spills and vaporous pollutions that happen, in the case of the former, every year and in that of the latter every second of every day. By doing so, one’s thinking is bound to change.

However misbegotten the conviction of nuclear energy’s inherent badness may be, it persists as one of which we as a society haven’t yet been disabused. We still shutter at the thought of a power grid driven by nuclear means and this fear has an impact on our politics.

Within the contents of the much-ballyhooed Green New Deal, there’s no mention, much less an express affinity, for the idea that coal might be supplanted by nuclear power. Ostensibly, the authors of this verdant proposition (which was, somewhat anticlimactically, unanimously vetoed upon its arrival in the Senate) want to achieve net-carbon emissions equivalent to zero. Lofty an aspiration though this may be, and sympathetic to its ambition though I may be, to do so would be completely unthinkable without the help of nuclear power. And it seems not to have been an accidental act of omission on the authors’ part; in subsequent statements, they’ve voiced their open distaste for what’s admittedly the riskiest, but also the cleanest and most puissant of all sources of energy known to man.

Theatrical, political, historical—the mini-series Chernobyl was all of these things. It aroused a latent but excitable animosity between the Russia and the West. Admittedly, very little is required for the provocation of so inveterate a response. It captured, if only for a month, the attention of people fleeing HBO en masse. It was the necessary chaser subsequent Game of Thrones. It detained our attention if only for a fleeting moment in time. Finally, it provided a reflection on the current politics of climate change, as well as the climactic effects of political change.

Our vaunted generative organs, those parts of our bodies to which our minds are so powerless and subservient, have a tendency to dominate our lives. Indeed, at times, they prove themselves to be complete monopolists on our morals or tyrants over our thoughts. We can’t help but to be led to sin when dragged by their leash. And, as one so led, I ask: by whom could we be blamed? Aside from coition, no higher cogitation finds itself as having any mental space when it’s the loins that steer the wheel. Their focus is always singular—always sexual. Alas, we are but slaves to that which suspends itself between our legs—be it clitoral or testicular, feminine or male or something newly medically or socially conceived. And, lest you think this indecent infatuation unique to our own age, it’s a quite ancient phenomenon with a history that’s as lascivious as it is long. 

Aristophanes, unrivaled producer of comedies of the old and, in my humble opinion, of the superior type, and prosecutor of the great gadfly Socrates for the crime of being brilliant, knew this more than any other artist when he wrote in the year 411 BC his famous play, Lysistrata. It is, among a few of his other beloved productions, a work at whose core the theme of peace is to be found. Starkly different from the gratuitous violence that dripped from the pages of every tragedian in sight, Aristophanes’ work was a refreshment if only for its lack of bloodshed. Not only novel for novelty’s sake, he had every reason for wanting to craft a uniquely irenic play. This is because he labored on this work in the midst of a seemingly endless civil war—a conflict that subsumed the better part of his adult life.

Having recently thwarted the Persians’ attempt to conquer their country, first by land and then by sea, the Greeks must’ve found the protracted state peace in which they lived unstimulating. Certainly, they failed to deem it conducive to the development of their bustlingly martial worldview. They were jealous of glory and ultimately desirous to drain their populations both of coin and of men. To accomplish this, a great battle emerged between the forces of Athens and those of the Peloponnese. We today know this nearly three-decade-long battle as the Peloponnesian War—a conflict that consumed the entire civilized part of the Mediterranean Sea. Being that the Athenians proved themselves better authors than soldiers, they ascribed to the war the name by which we know it today. As did the British in the eighteenth century and the Americans in the twentieth, the Athenians in fifth before Christ labeled the war by the name of the party against whom they were fighting. Hence, all of Greece (and much of Greek-owned Italy) fought in the Peloponnesian War.

Aristophanes, delicate artist as he was, understandably found himself disillusioned by the war. By this point in time, the Athenians’ efforts toward a quick victory were completely unavailing. Already, in fact much earlier, the great statesman and orator Pericles had died. If the war were to be conducted in an expeditious manner, it would’ve been done so under his administration. One can only assume as much, as the duration of his tenure over the city marked Greece’s only Golden Age of which we have any lasting knowledge. None like it had been encountered in Greece, nor was any like it soon to follow. He was as much a patron of the arts as he was a political savant. Like a latter-day Leo X or some other aesthetically-inclined sixteenth-century pope, Pericles was a staunch supporter of the arts. And the most eminent of the artists of his day was, of course, the unforgettable Phidias—the Grecian sculptor par excellence. Though none of the distinctly chryselephantine works wrought by his hand have been preserved, Phidias earns even to this day the distinction of having been the classical age’s best craftsman. Pericles promoted and commissioned him until the very end.

The timing of this immortal archon’s death was premature; the cause, painful but inscrutable. At the outset of the war, indeed not long after the hostilities first leapt from embers into flames, the city of Athens was struck by a plague. It was, by all accounts, an epidemic to which the native population had no resistance. Thus, it became one to which the people succumbed en masse. This still-nameless plague became an ailment to which nearly the entire population of Athens quickly and devastatingly fell. Akin to the deadly Ebola of today, or the hemorrhagic fever or typhus of a recent yesteryear, this frightful plague of the ancient world with which the Athenian people were beleaguered escapes even the savviest of modern diagnosticians. Thucydides, the formidable historian of the war, describes in excruciating detail the symptoms and the moribund effects of the disease in his masterful work whose name, to avoid redundancy, need not be said here. As it hadn’t Pericles, nor a vast swath of the Athenian population, the contagion spared the great historian not. Yet unlike that ancient archon, by some miracle of fate Thucydides was able to survive the infection to which—for having done so—he was now made immune. Thus, the survivor became the chronicler of this virulent plague (not to mention the larger war at whose outset it played so injurious a part). Pericles, along with a vast swath of the urbanized and cramped Athenian people, weren’t so lucky.

Aristophanes would’ve been discouraged by the situation in which his city found itself for another reason. Aside from the domestic pestilence for which there seemed to be no cure, the war effort “abroad” was going horribly wrong. The Athenian government, assumedly bored with the tenuous peace that was achieved by and named for the great statesman Nicias, decided to sally forth on an expedition to invade the island of Sicily. This venture, ultimately the death knell in the Athenian war effort, proved wrong-headed and ill-fated in the extreme. Ostensibly, this attack on Sicily (an island, it might be added, that’s today considered the inviolable property of the Italians, but through much of history, was a playground and a passing possession of just about every European or Islamic regime) was meant to liberate a democratic people—not unlike their own—who’d been burdened with the yoke of oligarchic rule for far too long a time. It was, so the leading Athenians claimed, an effort at liberation—not of colonization done furtively as many historians probably rightly suspect it to have been.

Yet even back then, this “liberation” rationale was cogent, but only superficially so. The inhabitants of Sicily, of whom most called Syracuse—the largest and most prosperous of Sicilian cities located on the eastern coast near the Straits of Messina—their home, were ethnically Doric. The term meant more in the classical era than it does today, denoting merely, as it were, a certain styling of music that we now call the Dorian mode. But there was nothing gentle nor harmonious in that time as it pertained to the Dorian way of life. It was a rather rugged and austere existence, punctuated with hard-fought battles and laconic turns of phrase.

Standing athwart that peculiar culture was that of the Ionian or, as we might call it, the Attic. This was the ethnicity that permeated not only Athens, but the Cycladic islands (at whose center the famous island of Delos sat—whence arose the Delian League from which the Athenian Empire was born) and the western coast of present-day Turkey.

Indeed, it’s the Attic way of life with which we moderns are more familiar when we contemplate the personality and the antiquity of Greece. The Attic or Ionian culture was the soil from which such philosophical giants as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle grew. So too was it the cultivated earth from use bedrock sprung such dramatists as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—not to mention the very Aristophanes to whom we’ll soon return. The geniuses begotten of the virile Dorians, certain though they are to have existed, largely evade the scrutiny of history. That said, it’s natural to see how these two ethnicities—the Ionian epicureanism of the east and the Spartan stoicism of the west—failed to mix. Perhaps when threatened by a common Persian foe they might find it expedient to stifle their differences and join as countrymen in arms, but amicability was not to be found in the absence of so grand an external and existential a threat.

What then, do we make of the ethnicity of the city of Syracuse? It was, to the Athenian people’s great frustration, stubbornly of Dorian stock. Rather athletic than aesthetic, militant than indulgent, Athenian culture had very little sway in that chief city of that fertile Sicilian land.

Ultimately, this proved an impediment over which the Athenian forces couldn’t leap. Though initially costive in its response to the arrival of the Athenian fleet and, for having been so slow, quite overwhelmed by the armada now swirling in its harbor, Syracuse eventually prevailed. But it wouldn’t do so before first having to reach out for support. Such a helping hand was to be found across the aptly-named Ionian Sea, where the Spartans—with unusual celerity—were quick to respond to the desperate cry. Both cities were peopled by citizens whose Doric blood ran deep and they combined to muster a redoubtable force. The Athenians, led by the man for whom the erstwhile peace was named, were defeated as no navy had been before. But before this final defeat, the Athenians would bleed themselves dry. Throwing good drachmas after bad, they persisted in their ill-conceived effort to take the island—be the costs (in lives or in coins) what they may. Even as the possibility of their success became increasingly bleak, they fought on. It was a two-year-long war of attrition that they lost.

And their loss was spectacular. And as for their morale, it appeared at this point unsalvageable. This was the moment at which Aristophanes produced his play. This zenith of comedy came as the military reached its nadir. A pacific fantasy set in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was a brilliant and timely work at whose base such themes as femininity, sexuality, universal peace, strenuous concordance, lechery, and amity mingle as one.

The delicious bawdiness of this bard can’t be understated, and he was able to anticipate the sexual revolution of our age by imagining his own. In the Aristophanic version, Lysistrata—promulgator of peace and latent revolutionary in the midst of an endless civil war—went about developing a plan to end the hostilities that had ravaged her home. Commandeering the Acropolis, a lofty citadel once pregnant and now distressingly drained of its funds, she implored her countrywomen to refrain from intercourse with their mates. And by “intercourse” I mean the sexual rather than the verbal type (though the latter is often penetrating, it’s rarely ever as satisfying). Men were to be tempted only. Always were they to be left tumescent. With their amours unrequited, so Lysistrata thought, the men from whom even the smallest of sexual gratifications were revoked would surely be made to yield. Sex, as noted above and as Lysistrata doubtless agreed, never has known itself to be subservient to any force—be it human or divine. This it’ll never do, even when the issue at hand is death and war, Doric and Attic, civilization and state.

Continence, Lysistrata believed, was the only remaining answer. Indeed, it was the last and best hope for the continent as a whole. After three arduous decades of war, this was the only possible salvation for that seminal nation that is Greece. As authoress of this clever plan, she was expected to be abstemious. By this, we’re not in the least surprised; she was the sedulous rock, never the promiscuous sieve of the movement, but the intemperate women by whom she was surrounded found chastity an unhappy chore. More than that, they were beginning to consider it a sexual strain by which they’d rather not be burdened. They hoped soon to be liberated to become again libertine. The defection of a few (back to the all-knowing world of carnal knowledge) risked the unravelling of the entire plan.

But, as is so often the case, the men yielded first. Endowed with so many other fine and virile qualities, their endurance is wont to fail. And who among us could blame them? Biology doesn’t endow venery in equal proportion; men tend to receive the lion’s share of this insatiable gift. Indeed, one can’t help but smile at the thought of the man’s desire outlasting that of the object to whom his affections attend.

Laying down their arms, once and hopefully for all, the Spartan and Athenian men agreed to an armistice and a trade. They’d trade hostilities for revelries, the latter of which they’d hardly known. They’d renounce conquest in favor of coitus and assassinations for assignations. The martial spirit was to be let go and the sexual splendor retrieved again. Yet our final word must go to the woman by whom this success was conceived. The only person in all of Greece capable of grasping the potency of those vaunted generative parts, it was Lysistrata—the purest of sexual revolutionaries the world’s yet known—who ended so gruesome a war. We smile and thank dear Aristophanes for so peaceful, so sexual a thought.

Life, on balance and in accordance with the ancient Buddhist precept, is nothing more than suffering. Agreeably terse and axiomatic, as is the Buddhist’s wont to be, suffering is all, and that’s all there is to know. It’s everywhere around us, and thus impossible to avoid. What’s more, one can’t hope to escape what one can’t help to see. Yet we feel it all the same. It’s everything within us, and thus completely natural. It’s the original disposition of the disquieted man.

Indeed, through the duration of our fleeting seven-decades of life—each one shorter-lived than the last—suffering is the one permanence of which we can be assured. The faculty of reflection, should the mind be sound, will always bear this out. Practitioners of Buddhism, of that allegedly pacific faith, have found it appropriate to call this universal sentiment from which there’s no ready escape dukkha. As is the case with most words of esoteric origin brought forward to modernity through a long passage of time, dukkha doesn’t exactly translate well into our Anglican tongue. It’s unconducive to a modern English diction that appears to shrink year after year. Perhaps more accurately, from a philological if not a practical sense, the word dukkha means an absence, usually of an acutely painful type, of satisfaction in one’s life. It’s the feeling of being frustrated, saddened, and generally and lamentably unfulfilled.

The fact that life is suffering (and most verily, it is a fact with which we must, in all humility, resign ourselves to agree) was the cheerless insight of the now princely, now beggarly Indian sage. The idea was spawned in the mind of the historic figure Siddatha Gotama, whose later sobriquet of Buddha meant the “enlightened one”. Such illumination he was to find beneath the shade of a peculiar Asiatic tree, but that would come later in life. Before then, he was a royal born of noble pedigree and reared in epicurean delights. After having indulged in every passion of antiquity and sixth-century vice, he was encumbered by three observations made outside of his family’s palatial walls. In sequence, he witnessed an elderly man, a sickly man, and a man to whom death had come.

For all he knew, Gotama was to live as an untarnished and ageless ephebe. He was happily and insouciantly to live forever beautiful and young. However, this triune of revelation (of ailment, age, and death), discoverable just beyond his own isolation, stirred him to move. Actually, it stirred him to the most productive instance of inactivity known to man, hence his cross-legged posture beneath the Bodhi Tree. There he sat a full seven weeks until, in a state of physical repose but mental exuberance, he encountered the enlightenment for which he’d set his course.

Though the historicity of the Buddha’s life is in many ways dubious, the potency of his teaching strikes us as being quite real. What better measure of reality is there than that which impacts and sustains us through the ages? We know that suffering is the one human experience of which we’re bound to have no shortage throughout our nonage and dotage—throughout our briefly-lived life. It will persist and, as the equally-enlightened George Orwell made note, “only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise”.

Often, these two groups tend to overlap, as being without years is akin to being without sense. Being myself not very young, but at times exceedingly foolish, I feel as though I can comment with some authority on that idea. But in the case of the seventeen-year-old Dutch girl who recently took her own life, neither juvenescence nor foolishness availed her. More than anyone of whom I’ve lately taken note, she was made to suffer in the most unremitting of ways. She was abused sexually on multiple occasions. The first happened before the age of twelve. Adding redundancy to tragedy, this same thing happened again when she was more firmly entrenched in her early teens. Incapable of coping with the trauma visited upon her as a consequence of these heinous attacks, she became depressed and anorexic. Denying herself sustenance, it was by refusing to eat that she ultimately died. So insatiable was her hunger to depart of this world that she sought professional medical assistance. She did so with the hope that it would aid her in her end. However, finding the authorities moribundly unavailing, she took matters and morals into her own hands. Perhaps as a measure of palliation, a hospital bed was given her in which she might slowly succumb to the absence of food.

Succumb she did. At the under-ripe age of seventeen, her life was no more. Unsurprisingly, within a day, this private tragedy was made into a public controversy by which the world was outraged and intrigued. It was alleged that the state had aided the girl in the fulfillment of her premature death.  A society with the deepest sympathies for those of its citizens who profess themselves mired in anguish, the Dutch have a reputation for their approach to the dying process. Euphemistically, they defend their approach as the gentle application of euthanasia. The employment of a dysphemism, however, will lead you to calling theirs a culture of death.

Viewed through this lens, unavoidably moribund though it may be, we impose upon the Dutch no clear verdict. It would be difficult, indeed peremptory for us to say. In that state, in whose liberal bosom both Erasmus and Spinoza lived, the combined voices of biology, theology, and philosophy continue their endless quarrel. They fight in the labs, in the pews, and in the streets over the right to die or the requirement to live.

That answer is not so clear. Personally, my inclination bends toward the German thinker Immanuel Kant (who argued for the sanctity of the self and his preservation as an end and not a means) but my deep-held philosophy might not conduce with public policy at large. What’s certain is that this young woman suffered with a severity incommensurate with her years. She wasn’t so fortunate to be sprung from her troubles as was the Buddha beneath his tree. She wasn’t able to put the requisite distance between herself and her insuperable dukkha. Lamentably, it seems to be the case that there was no further resource to which she could’ve turned in helping her to do just that. Ultimately, she’s made the escape in which she invested all of her desire. What should’ve been a long future and what doubtless was a troubled past have at present become an unblinking darkness.

In the concluding words of Montaigne, life is but a slavery if the freedom to die is present not. This girl was not only fettered by her suffering, but because of her pain, truly unfree. Upon her epitaph, we inscribe the famous Frenchman’s words (however much we might debate their consequence). For everyone else, we prescribe a more salutary way. Heed Kant and Gotama and will yourself free.