I am re-reading Steven Pressfield’s excellent novel Tides of War and this quote at the very beginning of the book hit me like a fast ball between the eyes.
Thousands of years and miles may have separated us, but I know exactly how General Alcibiades felt.
“The worst enemies of Athens are not those who like you have only harmed her in war, but those who have forced her friends to turn against her. The Athens I love is not the one who is wronging me now but that one I used to have secure enjoyment of my rights as a citizen. That country that I am attacking does not seem to be mine any longer, it is rather that I am trying to recover a country that has ceased to be mine. And the man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire for it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again.”
-Alcibiades Addressing the Spartan Assembly in Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War