Silencing the poets

A major question in Plato's Republic is whether or not it is at all possible to found the ideal state in the real world. Well, it's happening, or at least some aspects of it. Just see this and this from Arts and Letters Daily (heads up: link 2 is from Daniel Pipes, a notorious Orientalist, but there's interesting stuff there). Our old pal Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is at it again, it seems. He wasn't the first, though. Check out this quote from the Ayatollah Khomeini:

"If their music does not dull the mind, they will not be prohibited. Some of your music is permitted. For example, marches and hymns for marching. . . . Yes, but your marches are permitted."

Socrates similarly allows for certain odes and choral marches in Books 2 and 3, but tragedy, Homer, Hesiod, comedy, and even representative artwork are verboten. In Platonic studies, one sometimes loses sight of just how prohibitive and totalitarian the guy can be. But when we see just what extreme Platonism "looks like" in the real world, as certain college professors would have it, it's pretty fucking freaky.