“But Angry Staff Officer, Spartans were great soldiers who were very successful, and fought together, and lived by a strict and honorable code, and upheld traditions of brotherhood. Why shouldn’t we adopt them as a model?”
Because Spartans were an entire totalitarian society based around a warrior class whose sole purpose was violence. Yes, I know, they kept some trappings of democracy – just like the democracy of the pre-Civil War South, where slaves couldn’t vote or own property. The entire Spartan system was based on the primacy of the pure Spartan warrior who had to be supported by the helots, who were slaves owned by the state (Spartans weren’t alone in the whole “let’s own other people” thing; slavery was common in the Mediterranean world, in varying states of brutality). The helots did all the “dishonorable” jobs – like farm, fish, make tools, make clothes, make weapons and armor; basically, all the things that the Spartan warriors needed to survive. Oh, and then were was the rampant sexual abuse of young Spartan boys as part of their training, as well as the sexual abuse of helots at the hands of the Spartan warriors.
In other words, the Spartan lifestyle was essentially the opposite of everything espoused in the U.S. Armed Forces. And the Spartan state – built around a war machine – is antithetical to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet we condone this type of imagery and symbolism – even as we wonder why sexual assaults and domestic violence incidents still take place within our ranks.
There’s something twisted in the way that the special operations support community – looking at you, SOFREP – glorifies anything Spartan. It’s almost as if they know exactly what Sparta stood for and have no problems with making the civilian population into a subservient class of peoples (ahem, “sheep”) that only exist to adulate and support the warrior class (“sheepdogs”). There is a cult – yeah, I said it, and I can already hear the personal attacks on me for hating freedom and patriots furiously being typed – around our special operations community, fed by book-writing retirees (who SOCOM told to STFU), civilians who want to feel like they are supporting the military, airsoft military wannabes, and seemingly every other dude out there on social media who has “MOLON LABE” superimposed over an American flag somewhere in their profile. Feeling uncomfortable yet? Well, you should, because this type of rhetoric is not only subversive to democracy but is positively antithetical to the ideals of the Founding Fathers who saw a standing professional army as one of the greatest threats to our republic.
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