Correction: it has never faced an external threat to its territory. Its armed forces have however extraordinarily violently and destructively fought a homegrown independence movement.
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
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Posting fantasy Spartan art is funny because hey, guess what would happen to those Spartans if you sent them to Ukraine?
They'd form a cool little phalanx and then get wiped out by an artillery shell fired from a precision engineered gun kilometers away, using a trajectory calculated by a computer based on data fed to it by a drone. Basically, the most disappointing and one sided game of Civilization ever.
We don't live in a world where manly men with big muscles can do anything with the power of positive thinking. To do anything really well in the modern world you need machines, and that means you need people to design and create those machines, and because those machines are complicated the people creating them need to be educated. If you lose all the educated people, your society loses the capacity for innovation, and innovation is very, very important.
You may not think nerds are very valuable, but the Russian government does, and losing them is a huge problem.
Fascists so thoroughly identifying with the Spartans is kind of a self own. Because the system they glorify was unsustainable and at the height of its power only enjoyed a hegemony for about a decade or so before it all collapsed and Sparta became an irrelevant non factor forever after, without its time in the sun having left the world anything of value. Sparta's cultural footprint was non existent and since it was so inherently finite their military footprint wasn't replicated by any Empire that knew what it was doing."High quality people"?
What is with the spartan fetish?
Oh right, fascists.
The Sparta Fetish Is a Cultural Cancer
The myth of the mighty warrior-state has enchanted societies for thousands of years. Now it fuels a global fascist movement.newrepublic.com
Sparta falling so quickly and leaving no real legacy wasn't an accident either. It was always doomed to end that way due to how Sparta constructed its state. Therefore emulating or glorifying it is foolish.
Somewhat disagree there. Sparta for most of its history wasn't that powerful, yes (though the rest of Greece knew their reputation as being great warriors), but that was at least in part a conscious decision to be not go to the bother of getting an empire. They kept being at war with Athens because Athens kept trying to conquer them, if Athens hadn't bothered the Spartans would have stayed home oppressing their slaves. Worries about slave revolts while the army was off enslaving someone else was another reason they didn't do much beyond their borders.
(Also the Romans of course someone glorified the Spartans, and the Romans also were into fascines, so it kinda makes sense)
Sparta couldn't be an empire - or not for long.
Sparta evolved the way it did because the Spartans needed to control their underlings. Every other city state in Greece, the masses were citizens (or their women). Spartans were a minority of their city state, and they were professional warriors because it was the only way they could guarantee they could keep the more numerous freemen and slaves under them from rebelling.
Spartans, as per my previous post, may have had harshness to keep their fitness and skills up, but they otherwise had pretty cushy lives. A bunch of underlings to do the drudgery whilst they went off and spent most of their time having fun hunting, writing poetry, debating, and occasionally murdering their slaves. Of course they didn't want an empire. Why go through all the privations of campaigning abroad when they could sit at home with loads of wealth and leisure, amusing themselves?
And secondly, if the very limited number of warrior citizens are out garrisoning distant lands, who is going to keep the underlings in line? They needed their warriors at home, preventing rebellions. Sparta's population declines throughout the 5th century BC: it couldn't take the sort of casualties that wars inflicted, and their system consequently degraded. Towards the end, their armies were very heavily composed of allied city states and mercenaries, and revolts grew ever more common and more serious.
True, though they did send large forces away for times during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars.
(As an aside, one wonders how many of the people currently lionising Sparta would themselves go through training as rigourous as theirs...or any at all, really)
(As an aside, one wonders how many of the people currently lionising Sparta would themselves go through training as rigourous as theirs...or any at all, really)
Actually, I dare say quite a few of them might be. Lots of fascists are militaristic, macho bully-boys into discipline, fitness (especially possibly martial arts related). I'm also sure a load are wannabes who find the military terribly exciting for the associated machismo and fantasies of glory, but would find actual service thoroughly awful.
I have recently read that the Spartans only became so martially focused after Thermopylae, being kind of cought in their own legend that became part of their idendity that they felt like having to live up to. And that earlier Sparta was not recognized as particularly remarkable in this matter by peers.
The Spartans were highly regarded by the greek allied forces before Thermopylae, though. They ended up in leadership positions for the alliance.
I was thinking more of the second type. Probably lots of them like dressing up in knock off camo and carrying AR15s, and maybe go to firing ranges to practice whatever cool thing they saw John Wick doing, but serious training regimens, not so sure.
Those are called Gravy Seals
That description sounds disturbingly like what the extreme right think of the current US government.
They fantasize that they would ace it, because their opinions of their abilities are typically well above the reality. It's the same reason they fetishize the downfall of civilization, because they think they'd be the warlords rather than the victims.
I've always known that if the zombie apocalypse ever hit, I would NOT be one of the plucky survivors fighting/hiding from the horde. I would be comic-relief zombie #7 wandering around bumping into things because my undead self had lost my glasses.
Oh sure, but for some reason they don't actually get round to the training.
Eh, a lot of us would be sitting round posting about how bad things are. Not because I'm comparing internet culture to zombies, but because you need an enormous failure of everything for a zombie apocalypse. Hard luck everyone living in London, and half of Texas would kill the other half before the zombies actually got there, though.
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in particular an enormous failure of physics and biology. (Look at that zombie. Then look at your science book. Then look back at that zombie.)
Depends on the zombie, some people include people with rabies like viruses. Or who've ingested home made drugs and tried eating their neighbour's face.
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Yeah, depends on how you stretch the metaphor (I sometimes classify Night of a Hunter as a zombie movie). But even the "virus makes them very angry" versions makes them weirdly imprevious to harm (in fact, quite often, the more damaged they look the stronger and faster they are). Amongst other oddities (ignoring each others, etc).
In practice, it's always magical. Or more like that, metaphysical. Dream logic. With the occasional "our vampires are different" rationalization.
Personally I like that better, because then you can have evil wizards and the like organising them and providing options, instead of zombies shambling at the machine guns which somehow always works for them.
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Well, I like shambling zombies. I really appreciate the creeping horror of a zombie you can truly contemplate (along with its implications) as it advances towards you. I like the dichotomy of threat between stumbling isolated walking corpse and inescapable crowd, the infuriating tragedy of underestimating them (the cocky clumsiness that one bite doesn't forgive, the overlooked zombie that takes you by surprise, the number that reached the problem threshold), and the sence of injustice when you get destroyed by something that basic, ineffectual and passive. It's a bit like realising that stupidity, funny in isolation, is absolutely devastating past a critical mass. Just like the worst of this forum is being kept as the harmless isolated fascist specimen in a test tube, but if like-minded people arrived en masse, the ban reaction should be swift before the forum gets culturally redefined (a phenomenon I've seen elsewhere). Or, in society, how the extreme-right is often seen as a harmless, impossibly stupid clownery (Trump and Hitler having both been described as ridiculous outliers with no chance in politics) before the realization that woah, there's actually enough support to put them and maintain them in power.
But I also like the fact that it's magical. Precisely because zombies function on symbolism. They get scary because they resonate with fears and uneases that are largely abstract, they make sense in the realm of concepts more than in the realm of physics. It's a "what if" concerning pure ideas. Nightmares.
And it's actually being lost to some degree when they become blurry fast frantic killers, because they lose their specific dread (death figure, relationship betrayal, crowd condition, etc) to become... Aliens, or Velociraptors, or anything that'd go fast and get bitey.
(To some degree only because it retains some aspects, such as the exponential development, and it probably echoes other abstract fears and uneases, such as the increasingly frantic agressivity of modern society.)