Is Thucydides Relevant in Today's World?

The post-modernist claims that there can be no independent view from nowhere of history because of the beliefs and attitudes readers and writers bring to a text. When I contrast Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States against the sanitized obfuscating 'great white man' versions of American history, I consider the proposition all but proven. I oversimplify, but that is not relevant to my purpose.

Does Thucydides speak to us today from his The Peloponnesian War? To the extent that he documents folly, hubris, vanity, pride, the consequences of unrealistic imperial dreams, morals justifying immoral means and ignoble ends, and the brutal consequences of man made and natural disasters, he does.

Thomas Hobbes puts it this way in his translation of The Peloponnesian War in the To the Reader section:

It hath been noted by divers, that Homer in poesy, Aristotle in philosophy, Demosthenes in eloquence, and others of the ancients in other knowledge, do still maintain their primacy: none of them exceeded, some not approached, by any in these later ages. And in the number of these is justly ranked also our Thucydides; a workman no less perfect in his work, than any of the former; and in whom (I believe with many others) the faculty of writing history is at the highest. For the principal and proper work of history being to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future: there is not extant any other (merely human) that doth more naturally and fully perform it, than this of my author.

I know I can be censured for quoting a passage that begins by listing names in the 'white man canon'. I defend myself thus.

My thinking has turned toward my own peculiar brand of post-modernism during the past several years. That has not prevented me from turning to Thucydides and posting some passages particularly relevant to the Iraq War and the hurricane Katrina disaster. Histories must be written. Scrupulous readers will approach them prudently and skeptically, or waste their time. The truth sucks because it is so hard to find, but one shouldn't curse being born because of that.