Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2017 8:26 amSeleucus wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2017 6:58 am
Belinda wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2017 11:59 am
Seleucus wrote, besides his juvenile idea about what constitutes a hero :
Hitler and Stalin were 'saviours' (saviors) of the common productive working man.
I'm not sure which your point is, are you saying saying something is wrong about my understanding of heroic ethics,
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/beowulf/themes.html
https://www.classicsnetwork.com/essays/ ... of-the/369
or, are you trying to compare Donald Trump to Hitler or Stalin?
Hopefully the first as that will be an interesting discussion, while the latter is an already tired and ridiculous trope.
I am saying both of the above.
I took a few days to do some reading and double check. Yes, "help your friends and hurt your enemies" is a classic expression of heroic ethics. It appears all over the place in old sources, on Sulla's tomb for example, but it is probably most well known to us as it went under and the new world emerged, Plato had his Socrates dispute it, and of course Jesus flatly contradicts the line by saying to love your enemies. Heroic values mean respect for tradition hence is one of the main themes of both the
Ramayana and also the
Mahabharata. Loyalty is filial, tribal, and to one's race: note the last lines of Sophocles's
Ajax, "and his whole race",
link. Considered a statement on the hero,
Ajax is important too since it shows the hero demanding of himself to be the best, and if he cannot be, then he prefers death. In Hesiod's
Works and days the poet expresses the Buddhist sentiment that all is dukkha, to live is to labor. These are in many ways the values of the hero Donald Trump: war like, he puts his own people first: "America first", that also means a belief in superiority, and he is true to the traditions and to the value of hard work. If we can believe Franz Fanon in
Wretched of the Earth, the universalist (slave/Christian/politically correct/liberal/modern/communist) ethic is always really a fraud. As soon as the Algerians had thrown off the French, their own new elite occupied the very same properties and offices that had been abandoned, and the prisons were soon filled with their own new enemies and underclass.