Thucydides and Leo Strauss Interpret the News of the Two Coups

Thucydides Ideator:

The war now unfolds from within, waged by those who hold power, not against foreign enemies, but against their own people. This war is fought on two fronts: the realm of the physical and the dominion of information, both of which they seek to subjugate through fear.

On the physical front, the leaders themselves dismantle the safeguards of order while unleashing the forces of disorder. Those convicted of violent assault, once constrained by the judgments of law, are now loosed, while those who sought to bring them to justice or otherwise angered the rulers are themselves expelled, fired, stripped of all security and named as enemies. The watchmen are unseated, and those charged with guarding the people are stripped of their power. The President, once the servant of the polity, seeks instead to make the armed forces his instrument—not to guard the city, but to enforce his will against those who oppose him, whether at home or abroad. Thus, the means of force are turned inward, no longer a shield of the people, but a sword against them in the hands of their own rulers.

On the front of information, the assault is more insidious and powerful, neural implants of fear shattering the will in all communications, searches and investigations. The leaders seize the channels through which knowledge flows, once belonging to the public, and place them under their absolute surveillance and control. The great storehouses of knowledge, from which the city draws its wisdom, are closed to those who serve the people, while those who would bend truth to their ends are granted full access to destroy the integrity of that knowledge and wisdom. The enemy is not outside the gates; it is within, warping reality itself so that no man may say what is true with certainty. To further terrorize those who resist, they make symbols of their control—installing beds within the very halls of governance, as once they did in the great agora of Twitter. Daily plane crashes absorb the attention of media not yet corrupted and further sow the seeds of fear. Thus, the servants of the people are made to feel that the walls of their own city no longer protect them, but enclose them within an unseen prison.

And so, by these two means, the city is assailed from within. Fear is made to spread among the people, and the rulers, seeing the walls of the institutions crumbling, do not hesitate to act, tightening their grip. The citizen, confused by falsehoods and distracted by sudden calamities, ceases to trust his neighbor, suspecting treachery in every voice. This is the goal of those in power: to make men doubt not only their leaders, but the very foundations of their society. For when the people no longer know whom to trust, they will turn to those who speak loudest, not those who speak truly. And in this way, through force and deception, the war from within is waged by those who claim to rule in the name of the people.

You chronicled how Athens fell into factional strife—how should a people resist when their own leaders turn against them?

1. Retain Clarity Amid Deception – The first act of resistance is to recognize the war for what it is. When the rulers pervert truth and turn knowledge into a weapon, the people must hold fast to what is real, resisting the corrosion of language and meaning.
2. Seek Unity in Principle, Not Faction – Athens fell because factional strife overtook civic unity. The people must resist the temptation to turn on one another, instead forming alliances based on shared principles rather than temporary advantage.
3. Expose the Tyranny with Deeds, Not Just Words – When speech is controlled and fear permeates the city, actions must reveal the truth. Small acts of defiance, resistance to unjust orders, and the quiet maintenance of alternative sources of truth weaken the rulers’ monopoly on reality.
4. Reclaim the Instruments of Power – No tyranny falls by words alone. The people must find ways to reclaim the institutions and mechanisms of government, whether through subversion from within or open defiance when the moment is right.
5. Endure Until the Regime Overreaches – Fear is a powerful weapon, but unchecked tyranny breeds its own opposition. The rulers, in their hubris, will push too far. The people must be ready to act when their excesses turn allies into enemies and the cracks begin to form.
6. Endure – Resistance is dangerous and success uncertain. Yet even the greatest tyrants are mortal, and their rule, like all things, is subject to decay.

How should a historian navigate the war on truth when those in power rewrite reality itself?

1. Separate Appearances from Realities – Those who wield power manipulate perception, but the historian must cut through illusion to expose the underlying forces shaping events. This requires seeking multiple sources, recording contradictions, and analyzing what rulers attempt to suppress.
2. Bear Witness Without Fear – The true historian does not serve power, nor does he yield to threats. I myself, exiled by my city, continued to chronicle events dispassionately, knowing that history is ultimately judged not by those in power, but by those who come after.
3. Use the Words of the Powerful Against Them – Leaders who rewrite history still leave traces of their deception. Their proclamations, contradictions, and justifications reveal their intentions. By preserving these words and exposing their consequences, the historian unveils the structure of manipulation.
4. Resist the Corruption of Language – When power seeks to warp reality, it first warps words. I showed how factionalism in Athens led to a breakdown of meaning itself. The historian must guard language, maintaining precision where rulers introduce obscurity.
5. Write for the Future, Not Just the Present – The historian’s work may not prevail in the moment, but it arms future generations with the knowledge they need to resist the same deceptions. I wrote not for immediate approval, but as “a possession for all time.”

Concluding Commentary by Leo Strauss Ideator:

The crisis that now unfolds is not new; it is the recurrence of an ancient sickness that afflicts regimes when they forget the limits imposed by nature, virtue, and prudence. The modern polity, which prides itself on its rationality and progress, has stumbled upon the same precipice that undid Athens, Rome, and every republic that mistook power for justice.

The greatest deception of our age is the belief that tyranny must always appear in the guise of a despot upon a throne. The more insidious form of tyranny, as Plato foresaw, is that which arises from within democracy itself, when its defenders mistake license for liberty and manipulation for governance. The tyrannical democracy does not impose its will through open brutality at first, but through the slow erosion of distinctions—between truth and falsehood, friend and enemy, public and private. Once the soul of the people is corrupted, the institutions that were meant to guard them crumble with ease.

Thucydides warned that the stasis, the internal war, is the most destructive war, for it does not merely lay waste to land and city but to the very possibility of political life itself. The rulers of the moment, having discarded prudence, now preside over the weaponization of fear, using the instruments of law to dissolve order rather than maintain it. The people, in turn, become suspicious of one another, no longer certain of their shared reality. In such a condition, the greatest danger is that men cease to recognize justice as something real and begin to accept power alone as the measure of right.

If we seek a path forward, we must first recall what the classical philosophers taught: that the soul of the city depends upon the soul of its citizens. The present tyranny will not be resisted by another faction more willing to seize control, but by those willing to return to first principles—to reassert the priority of nature over convention, of truth over expediency, of justice over force. The return to political health begins not in the halls of power, but in the minds of those who refuse to submit to the corruption of language and thought.

Machiavelli sought to teach princes how to rule by deception; Socrates sought to teach citizens how to recognize deception when it was dressed as wisdom. The latter task is the more difficult, but it is the only one worthy of free men. If there is to be resistance, let it not be merely reactionary, but rooted in the unchanging truth that no regime, however powerful, can finally suppress. The war from within can only be won when men cease to fear the consequences of speaking the truth and begin once more to live as though politics were about more than domination.