Lessons from Salamis

As I looked out over the U.S. Naval Base on approach to San Diego International Airport this past weekend, I pondered the great naval battles that marked turning points in history.

Of course there are many: the great battle at Midway that turned the tide in favor of the Allied Forces against the empire of Japan; the iconic Battle of Hampton Roads between the Monitor and the Merrimac that preceded modern submarine warfare; and the Battle of Gravelines in which Sir Francis Drake’s navy decimated the Spanish Armada saving England from conquest.

I count myself among those youngish men who love a great war flick, and among them 300 didn’t disappoint.  As classical scholar Victor Davis Hanson lauded, the movie “preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees.”

The movie closes with the momentous charge by the Greeks upon the plains of Plataea to ultimately rout the remaining Persians and seal the victory for freedom in Greece.

You’ll recall from the history books that these two battles culminated the long war between Persia and the Greek city-states that began with the surprise victory by Athens at Marathon in 490 BC.  But the greatest naval battle, untold in 300, is the Battle of Salamis.

As American Majority President Ned Ryun detailed in a recent post, the greatest armada is not always the victor in great naval battles.  He explained in these David versus Goliath scenarios, “The Goliaths, the ones ten-times stronger in the fight, won the encounters over 70% of the time. But in instances when the Davids broke the rules and stuck to a strategy that played to their strengths, the Davids’ win percentage rose to almost 64%.” Five hundred years after David slew Goliath, the Battle of Salamis was one such occasion.

The Persian armada of some 1200 ships under Xerxes’ command sailed to the Straits of Salamis with the intent of finishing off the remaining Greek forces after their defeat at Thermopylae.  The Persians quickly formed a tight blockage of the Greek navy inside the straits.  But taking a Davidian tactic, the Greek’s repositioned their smaller but quicker triremes and charged the much larger and bulky Persian ships.  Slow and tightly packed in blockade, the Persians could not move to counter the attack.  Greek triremes rammed the sides of the Persian ships piercing their hulls, ultimately sinking or capturing more than 200 ships.

It was this defeat that prompted Xerxes to take the bulk of his army and retreat to Turkey…leaving his remaining army to slaughter at Plataea.

This was the “cradle of democracy” where freedom overcame tyranny by greater numbers.  And it should be a lesson to us all that the Davidian forces of conservative America can overcome the Goliath progressive left.

American Majority has and continues to make great strides in identifying and training hundreds of conservative local candidates nationwide.  These Davids, well-equipped and prepared for battle, are defeating the forces of the left on their own local battlefields.  To retake America, we need more Davids to step up and be counted.