On a somewhat related tangent, our friend the Brooding Persian has another bone to pick with Ledeen. This time it's Ledeen's celebration that the assassination of the Dutch artist is forcing Europe to its inevitable reckoning with the decadence of post-modern secularism. The Persian responds to Ledeen (whom he long ago embraced as a true Iranian of the best sort -- or ought to be) with a fable of fickleness of friend and foe, and a recommendation to revisit the political theory of Carl Schmitt. But the intriguing puzzle was an aside he left in passing, where he observed that Ledeen's much derided thesis of "creative destruction" is essentially correct, but that "his conclusions... leave a lot to be desired." Ah, then, our dear friend, what conclusions would you draw instead? Perhaps I'm too eager for a too tidy and too quick response. But today the Persian offers us two more readings. The first is Thucydides, recalling the convulsions of revolution and civil war, and the second, a reminder to the Prince of the danger of being feared without love. With Thucydides' scenes of "the butchery of the wounded supplicants in temples," there is a simple reading of this Persian puzzle from today's headlines. It is a double warning to those who lead armies in a civil war: that war produces a coarsening of the "better sentiments" that states and individuals display during peace and prosperity; and that this leveling of character in war presents the most dangerous of situations for the Prince. Machievelli explains that when men's property and honor are injured is when the Prince loses their esteem, and fear becomes hatred.

[W]hen neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content, and [the Prince] has only to contend with the ambition of a few, whom he can curb with ease in many ways.[…] [B]ut when [the people are] hostile to him, and bear hatred towards him, he ought to fear everything and everybody.

Might the Persian have set us a larger puzzle, with more pieces than a simple roman a clef from today's newscasts? Should we not read Thucydides' cautionary tale as of greater relevance to a Prince who contemplates a new war, or to leaders of a people who have already come to hate their current Princes?