If anyone would like to read a thorough take down of Sparta as a state not worth emulating, then ive got just the series of articles for you!
Reblogging because pissing on Sparta is one of my hobbies. And yes, totally check out the link above. Brett has a lot of great discussion and scholarship on why Sparta was proto-fascist garbage, and he presents it with both snark and accessibility.
Holy shit. That’s… that’s worse than I thought it would be. Yikes.
Reblogging because more people should read the ACOUP Sparta takedown and fewer people should get their concept of history from fucking 300.
No one should get their concept of history from 300, and I say that as someone who enjoyed 300. 300 is a comicbookification of a legend, and legends are already exaggerations.
A Great Divorce has also done an audio version of the ACOUP Spart takedown if audio is easier for you!
The tweets (Fuck Elon it's still tweeting) fail to notice that the fucking marble is what endures. Sparta may have had men, but it's Athens that still stands as the seat of power. So who won after the dust settled? Athens. Be so fucking for real.
A paragraph from the second article in the series that feels especially relevant to the original post:
"Put in more blunt language: armies that abuse and beat recruits or junior soldiers in training and in peacetime will tend to abuse and murder civilians in occupied territory and in wartime. Violence also rolls downhill, it turns out. Soldiers who are abused by their superiors tend in turn to abuse their subordinates, both as a learned behavior, but also as a transference mechanism (they repair the humiliation of receiving violence by inflicting it on someone even more powerless than them). This relationship is best documented in the Imperial Japanese military (e.g. S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978), 46-54); but also observed in the German Imperial Army (I. Hull, Absolute Destruction (2006), 93-103 – though I should note that Hull focuses largely on the failure of command and political structures to apply the brakes to this tendency; see also for the Wehrmacht in WW2, O. Bartov, “The Conduct of War: Soldiers and the Barbarization of Warfare” (1992)) – and hey, what do you know, two other armies that somehow gained a reputation for ‘badass’ military effectiveness despite a comprehensive inability to achieve strategic objectives resulting in the complete annihilation of the state they were supposed to defend. It’s almost like we have a pattern."
