Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- 1 Deception and the rhetoric of Athenian identity
- 2 Deceiving the enemy: negotiation and anxiety
- 3 Athens and the ‘noble lie’
- 4 The rhetoric of anti-rhetoric: Athenian oratory
- 5 Thinking with the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
Prologue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- 1 Deception and the rhetoric of Athenian identity
- 2 Deceiving the enemy: negotiation and anxiety
- 3 Athens and the ‘noble lie’
- 4 The rhetoric of anti-rhetoric: Athenian oratory
- 5 Thinking with the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index locorum
- General index
Summary
Liman seemed sympathetic to North for having taken an unanticipated fall. But while presumably disarming North with this tactic, he was also drawing from the witness repeated acknowledgements that his behaviour in lying and deceiving was in violation of the Naval Academy's values of honour and trust-worthiness that he had sworn to uphold as a midshipman.
Now Nields would try to lecture North: In certain communist countries the government's activities are kept secret from the people. But that's not the way we do things in America, is it?
A man can do you no greater injustice than tell lies. For in a political system based on speeches, how can it be safely administered if the speeches are not true?
Two congressional committee members attempt to make Oliver North realise that he was wrong to have deceived Congress, the American people and the Iranian government. Liman appeals to an oath he took when he became an American serviceman. Nields makes an explicit link between openness, honesty and normative political behaviour in America. He implicitly grounds that link in America's democratic constitution. He contrasts such ideal behaviour with the practices of countries which are not democratic. The contrast reproduces Karl Popper's influential distinction between ‘the open society and its enemies’ – even more so when we read Senator Lee Hamilton's verdict on North's testimony.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Deception and Democracy in Classical Athens , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000