Do not take my words as an endorsement of the stupid and shortsightedly evil insurrection. I do not endorse it. But I cannot completely agree with the article and given that the comments on site are turned off (understandable), this might be the place to raise objections.<p>I think there is an obvious flaw in the comparison. The larger the entity you want to have under your control, the less likely is that you succeed just by occupying one concrete location. An ancient city-state was tiny compared to even modern Greece, much less so than modern and fairly decentralized USA.<p>By storming an important government building, you can do some damage (esp. reputational one), kill certain people, but overthrow of a political system in a huge country is much harder to pull off. In modern history, such primitive actions usually fell flat on their face after mere hours. Which is precisely what happened here.<p>I would be more worried about a potential "rebellion in the provinces", which is basically what Francesco Franco did. That would have a potential to spin into a full fledged civil war or violent secession. This is something that was effective in certain cases.
None of this is new. Hitler based his Beer Hall Putsch on Mussolini's March to Rome and his Jewish Question on the Ottoman Empire's Armenian Question. Our Capitol insurrection riot has elements of both the Beer Hall Putsch and also the Reichstag Fire. Because fascism is mythic and traditionalist, its adherents will always seek to reuse and appropriate as many symbols and rituals as possible from ancient cultures.<p>We need not just to pursue a legalist approach to justice and reconciliation, convicting and punishing terrorists and seditionists, but also expose the historical details of each insurrectionist action, so that we can build a society where people have the knowledge required to actively be antifascists.
It is an interesting perspective. I disagree with Dr. Devereaux in his take, but agree with his proscriptions.<p>His analogy has strengths and weaknesses. Dealing with the main weaknesses: ancient Athens is not modern America. In a Greek city state, most of everyone would have in the city so having the power to size the public spaces while your opposition was in them would have been equivalent to breaking their military - citizens and military were largely equivalent. A modern insurrection and and ancient insurrection play out very differently.<p>Dealing with the main strength - yeah, the animating spirit of the mob and the ancient insurrections would have been somewhere between similar and identical. A large mob of people will sometimes attempt to do something and will try to make it happen until they meet resistance or go to bed. That is a general risk that large groups of people transition to mobs, and that is why modern states, by and large, need some sort of military and policing power.<p>But the issue here is that the punitive measures are being escalated to right-wing political leadership without any sense of perspective to (1) a rather extended series of "peaceful" left-wing protest in 2020 that went violent in 5-10% of cases with enormous community costs and (2) Republican leadership, including Trump, are fighting ... using the court, which is a perfectly acceptable avenue and the three tries of "Peisistratos" is now called "having an election every couple of years" - also an accepted avenue. There is manifest evidence that most of the mob did not intended to be violent the morning of - violent protestors would come prepared with guns. It escalated on the day as protests are known to do sometimes. The police were underprepared.<p>It isn't acceptable, a lot of people need to be arrested, changes are needed to police tactics if nothing else. But the retaliation including an internet purge of right-wing aligned personalities and businesses (and impeaching Trump without taking the time to draw breath) is much more damaging than the ghostly ember of a mob. The knee-jerk overreaction is a low-thought decision making response that has far more in common with mob mentality than the thoughtful approach to governance and discourse which work in the long-term. The hazard posed by this mob - as in, the part inherent to it without considering the government response - was arguably not worst the States has seen in this decade. Even if it got further into the Capitol than most.