300 and Spartan Virtues
Last edited Fri Feb 14, 2014, 08:24 PM - Edit history (2)
A sequel to the popular cartoon (or film, if you must) 300 is currently being advertised.
Now, I get that movies are not big on history. For instance, the people at the Alamo were fighting to retain slavery, not to make all men free. I know, right? Hard to believe John Wayne would have gotten that wrong.
And history was seldom guided by modern standards. Just about everybody sucks in some way if you go back a few centuries.
But c'mon man... the Spartans are a special case.
The Spartan virtues are the problem. Sparta was the embodiment of everything we (are supposed to) consider dystopian. Everything we are always supposed to be fighting to defeat. As inhuman as the Borg.
Ancient Athens was a chattel slavery economy, it sucked being a woman, wealth was concentrated... a bad place for 99% of its inhabitants. But despite being a primitive-ass place, as was typical of the ancient world, Athens had some virtues—notions, cultural ideals and such—of value even to contemporary minds.
Sparta was, on the other hand, an intentional, willful denial of everything we think of as healthy or normal for the sole purpose of promoting a concept of de-individualized state-owned brute masculinity as conqueror of other humans.
But this cultural nightmare of subsuming all of civilization to producing unflinching killers did produce some extraordinary soldiers. Sparta had some military virtues. Sparta had no non-military virtues. None. The Spartan military was not an aberrational but necessary institution protecting a larger worthwhile culture. It was the culture.
The Sparta that produced 300 warriors who held off the Persians at Thermopylae (a truly impressive story, and taking nothing away from it for what it was) was not any better than the invading Persians... like, at all.
Their value is, or was, seen as the hard choice, the necessary evil, the breaking a few eggs to make an omelet, because if those Spartans had not been the most disgusting people on the planet then Athens would have been speaking Persian and we wouldn't have had all that cool stuff Athens led to.
Sparta is the conservative dream of how all the effete simps will come to appreciate the tough-guys when the chips are down. See, you liberal weaklings need these Spartans.
So here we are... with Sparta being presented to Americans as a virtuous Western power holding off the decedent and probably gay Asians because their core values were better, and beloved of God.
Sparta around the time of the Persian War existed on the toil of a slave class (helots) and all of Sparta's energies went to subduing the (numerous) helots and capturing more helots in the usual paranoid slavery death-spiral.
There was no family as we understand it. This is the really sick part... Spartan men and women lived separately. For practical purposes, in separate towns. The sexes were segregated. Separate worlds. Husbands dropped in for impregnation sessions only. Spartan men primarily had sex with slaves and little Spartan boys. Toughened 'em up.
Again, all societies have aspects of this notion but in Sparta it was rigid. Men and women were like separate species because the men had contempt for all things feminine and shielded themselves from all female influence.
When the wife produced a son she would raise him until about 5, at which time Dad would show up to take him off to man-town to become a sex toy and military terror. And he would spend his life in mostly empty world (spartan, if you will) free from all that fruity art and poetry and political science and such.
The end. That was Sparta. Tough slave-holders whose sexual expression was pretty much entirely rape and whose worth was expressed by holding their hand in a fire or some other G. Gordon Liddy bullshit.
Now, there are elements of that Spartan civilization (sic) in all ancient cultures. But those cultures are not revered specifically and ONLY for those things.
The Spartans... the USSR to America's Athens. The Confederacy to our Union. The Klingons to our Federation.
The model of the society existing only for its military expression... the end state of the pathological militarist state.
These are our heroes?
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