Re:Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
by goatlover on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:10PM
(#43105283)
What is the equivalent of Spartans in the modern world? The Soviet Union also produced nukes and bombers.
Re:Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
by bee_rider on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:26PM
(#43105494)
What does it mean to be “equivalent” anyway? I mean, the fact that we’d have to do some funky normalization to the standards of the era is itself an indictment of Spartan values, right? Every major power of even somewhat recent history is very decadent by their standards, including the Soviet Union. If somebody thinks Soviet feats were impressive, they should just adopt Soviet values instead I guess.
Re:Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
by goatlover on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:35PM
(#43105623)
The claim was that liberal democracy not Sparta created nukes and stealth bombers, when Sparta didn't exist in the modern age, and couldn't have created such things no matter how they organized their society. This isn't a promotion of Spartan ideals, rather it's just pointing out that the comparison doesn't work for obvious reasons.
Maybe it's us? The USA has a reputation as a military superpower and yet in most of the conflicts after WWII we have actually lost (or at best tied).
Re:Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
by yellowapple on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @01:50PM
(#43105817)
It's a bit more complicated than that. Militarily, we rather consistently win (or at least not lose). The trouble is that the new regimes we establish end up reliant on us for defense, and unless we're willing to be said regimes' military for decades on end (like we were with Japan) or at the very least maintain permanent military presences (like we did with West Germany until its reunification with East Germany, and like we're still doing with South Korea and Japan), those regimes prove incapable of defending themselves from the adversaries we defeated to establish said regimes in the first place.
That's exactly what happened with South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: as soon as we pulled out "victorious", the newly-established allied regime was unable to defend itself against North Vietnam / ISIS / the Taliban (respectively).
Re:Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
by FredPret on Wednesday February 19, 2025 @06:33PM
(#43109181)
Things are different now.
The US can destroy anyone by one guy pressing a button.
On the other hand, to win a non-nuclear war in the modern age, you need clever political positioning and a realistic end goal as well as battlefield results. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 were all unwinnable no matter how well you fought.
But, we should keep in mind the stakes, right? He provides a compelling argument that, actually, Sparta was not even that great at marshaling up a bunch of guys with big spears. That’s a nice beachhead in the conversation as to whether Spartan values are valuable, if you think they aren’t.
But even if he is wrong, what does it mean? Big groups of guys with spears don’t win wars nowadays anyway so even if we think a value system’s ability to win wars is very important (pretty questionable!) spartan-ism is obviously much worse than something like liberal democracy, which produced nukes and stealth bombers which could kill, like, endless numbers of spear guys (however good they are at lining up).