[ianbicking]

Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor.

Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.

[rsynnott]

> Yet something about Sparta seemed worse.

Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that.

Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio.

> That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien?

Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.

[naravara]

> Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor.

I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work.

The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races.

Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.