[thegaulofthem]

I was always under the impression that the glorification of Sparta started and ended at the battle of Thermopylae, the willingness to fight and die alongside your brothers in arms is venerated just as we Remember the Alamo.

All in all, this FP just reeks of a leftist hit-piece, Sparta is so associated with right-wing toxic masculinity and so must be pilloried. After all, they’ve already torn down beautiful statues venerating heroes, now own to the intangible idols.

[FormerBandmate]

Traitors who fought their country for slavery weren't heroes. The Founding Fathers were

[OfSanguineFire]

When the American Revolution erupted, society in the Colonies was split pretty evenly between those who rebelled and those who wanted to remain under England. The American Founding Fathers are representative of a side that ultimately won by doing things like burning down many loyalists’ homes, or tar-and-feathering them, and then exiling them to Canada or the West Indies, in order to cow the other loyalists into keeping quiet. Sure, that is a bit less heinous than fighting to perpetuate race-based chattel slavery. But there is no reason to view the American Founding Fathers as heroes unless you are of that small portion of the world’s population that has been through American schools and still has an attachment to the mythology presented in civics classes there.

[WalterBright]

There certainly is reason. Did you know that after Washington defeated the British, his officers offered him a military dictatorship?

And he turned it down? Who does that? Who else in history did that?

When he became President, he turned down titles like "your Excellency" and other trappings of power. He voluntarily left after two terms, establishing a precedent that lasted until FDR.

How do you get more heroic than that?

As for the signers of the Declaration of Independence, terrible fates awaited nearly all of them.

https://michaelwsmith.com/the-sacrifices-made-by-the-declara...

[chrchang523]

Rare virtue, but I wouldn’t say it was unprecedented: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus

[WalterBright]

I didn't know about him, thanks. But it illustrates my point - you had to reach back two thousand five hundred years to find an example.

[andrepd]

France-Albert René, Jerry Rawlings. Couple of 20th century examples of autocrats who yielded their power to democratic rule.

[8note]

Theres not a big sample size to pick from.

How many people have led armies fighting British, let alone beat them?

[sifar]

For the record, there is also Scipio. But yes, very few people in all of history who voluntarily stepped back when offered absolute power.

[OfSanguineFire]

It’s easy to turn honours down when you are among the wealthiest people in a country and therefore retain a great deal of power and influence even without formal trappings.

[WalterBright]

Easy? Who else has done it? FDR was very wealthy, but he clung on until he died. People like power, wealthy or not. It's the ultimate seduction.

[OfSanguineFire]

Loads of revolutions have ended with one or more of the warlords involved relinquishing any formal role in the subsequent elected government, in exchange for simply keeping their massive wealth and networks of influence. After all, formal roles bring duties and obligations, so why bother if you don’t have to? The idea of Washington as some kind of saintly Cincinnatus is itself a literal textbook example of early American mythology.

[andrepd]

Your portrayal of FDR is extremely unfair, and shows your biases clearly as day. The man was re-elected for his 3rd and 4th terms in 1940 and 1944, think of any extenuating circumstance that might have caused that?

[norir]

> How do you get more heroic than that?

Do the same things without owning people.

[WalterBright]

He turned down owning the entire country. Do you know of anyone that meets your standard?

The French Revolutionaries, Washington's contemporaries, didn't own anybody. How'd that work out? I'll help. Millions dead, and they arrived right back where they started with Napoleon declaring himself hereditary monarch of France.

How about all the other revolutions in the Americas?

[Apocryphon]

What your ascribe to nobility might simply be prudence. The American republic was founded on the ideals and rhetoric of anti-tyranny. Washington may have simply chosen the course of wisdom of not getting overthrown, himself. Or assassinated by any of his various rivals, such as Horatio Gates and the officers of the Newburgh Conspiracy, which sought to remove him as leader of the Continental Army during the war itself.

Maybe choosing not to be a dictator was simply the safest course of action. Least path of resistance.

[FormerBandmate]

They also fought for freedom and democracy. Without their heroic example the French Revolution would never have happened and the world would still be ruled by hereditary monarchies. Also, the military in the great nation they founded has consistently protected the democracies of today from falling into dictatorship (like Ukraine)

[OfSanguineFire]

> They also fought for freedom and democracy.

They claimed to do so. Most revolutions have some kind of noble ideology that is proclaimed over what is actually a complex mixture of self-interest and enmities.

> Without their heroic example the French Revolution would never have happened and the world would still be ruled by hereditary monarchies

The French Revolution is widely regarded as a disaster of sorts: any noble aims were downed in the blood of innocent people during the Terror that immediately ensued. Moreover, even the French reversed its achievements multiple times over the 19th century.

That the world would still be ruled by hereditary monarchies is a stretch considering that even the state that the American Colonies rebelled against had reduced the power of the monarch in favour of Parliament many decades before.

[andrepd]

Oof, bold claims (the world would not have liberal democracies without the American revolution) and bald-faced lies (muh USA military protecting democracy, Guatemala, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, etc, would all like to have a word with you).

[readthenotes1]

" Traitors who fought their country for slavery weren't heroes. The Founding Fathers were"

Someone said a few years ago:

"On the one hand, we had people who fought with gun and sword to murder, rape, and otherwise exploit my people. On the other hand we had people who fought with pen and parchment to murder, rape, and otherwise exploit my people."

[vcg3rd]

The first right enumerated in the Declaration of Independence (not declaration of liberty or equality or rights) is the first sentence: the right to dissolve political bonds. And the US actually did it again after the Revolution when the Articles of Confederate were replaced by the Constitution.

Please explain to me how the states which dissolved their bonds with the United States and declared their independence from it (many of which had done so during the Revolution and had ratified both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution while slavery was legal, and several of which did not secede until after the U.S. fired on Ft. Sumpter) were different in exercising the right to dissolve political bonds?

Bonus points if you can do it without saying but but muh racist. If you don't accept the first sentence of the Declaration the rest of it is null and void.

(While you're at the explain how the three-fifths compromise actually strengthened slave states (who wanted to count each slave as 1 person) because it actually weakened them and also, most importantly, enshrined slaves as persons and not property in the Constitution with the consentand ratification of those states where slavery was still legal.)

[int_19h]

That right belongs to the people, not the states. Which in slave states included the slaves. In two Confederate states, slaves were an outright majority, and in most of the rest, they were a large plurality. Do you seriously believe that Confederate politicians could be meaningfully described as representing "the people" dissolving political bonds, given that those politicians did not in any way represent all the slaves by design? It's about as meaningful as claiming that Spartan aristocracy represented helots or Messenians.

Not that it matters much. Even if it is democratic, there's no moral right to self-determination if that self-determination is explicitly for the purposes of brutal oppression of some minority.

[CBarkleyU]

>Please explain to me how the states which dissolved their bonds with the United States and declared their independence from it were different in exercising the right to dissolve political bonds?

Non American here. Honestly, I'm perplexed by the question? Are you being genuine?

The difference is that they're the traitors from your perspective. You're American. They seceded from America. Thus they're traitors.

The same way that Americans are traitors from the perspective of an Englishman.

How is this even a question? There is no absolute right or wrong. There's not even an absolute right. Nothing says you can or cannot secede. It all depends on your perspective. If you're American than the South were the traitors.

[JPws_Prntr_Fngr]

> You're American. They seceded from America. Thus they're traitors. ... Nothing says you can or cannot secede. ...

GP's entire point was that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence establishes the basic right to secede. Here it is:

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."

His point is that Americans are broadly wrong when we condemn secessionists as traitors. According to our own founding document.

[FrustratedMonky]

It becomes turtles all the way down.

The south secedes. Then a few states don't dig the confederacy and secede from that, to form "The States of Northern Florida". Then some counties secede, then some cities secede, then a few individuals secede.

This actually happened, (not the Florida part). Once seceding was an option on the table, individual states started considering it and individual counties. And the whole thing was going to break apart.

Once you start down the path of anybody can 'dissolve the political bands' then the whole enterprise dissolves into anarchy.

You can interpret the Declaration of Independence literally all you want. But I'm pretty sure it was just a big middle finger to England. Once the US consolidated, those in power did what all people in power did, and it was more 'Can't have anymore of that'.

[nobody9999]

>His point is that Americans are broadly wrong when we condemn secessionists as traitors. According to our own founding document.

And he'd be wrong. They betrayed their nation, the United States of America. What's more, the Declaration of Independence didn't found anything.

It was a declaration of rebellion with broad, well understood at the time, political arguments designed to rile folks up against George III.

The U.S.'s first "founding document" was the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union[0], approved by the Second Continental Congress in 1777 and ratified by all 13 colonies (cum states) by 1781, followed by its replacement in 1789 by the US Constitution.

While the Declaration does lay out political arguments for secession, it has no legal force. Rather, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land[1]. What clause in that document grants the several states the right to secede? I'll save you the effort. It ain't there.

You can absolutely make the philosophical argument that a society can, and in some cases, should, create a separate political entity. As was elucidated in Robert Heinlein's lunar retelling of the American Revolution in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress[2].

But that's a philosophical argument, not a legal one. That said, there's nothing stopping you or anyone else from advocating/organizing secession from the Unites States (or the relevant political entity wherever you might be), but governments tend to frown on that sort of thing.

As such, no matter the malicious motives and/or provocations of said government, if you attempt to overthrow its authority, you are a traitor (or a 'freedom fighter', I'm not picky about labels). But you are perfectly able to do so. But things might not end so well. Governments tend to be less pleasant to those who take up arms against them than they might be.

As the Confederacy[3] found out, during the American Civil War.

Relatedly, Kermit Roosevelt[4] persuasively argues[5] that the members of the Confederacy were the true inheritors of the political arguments embodied by the Declaration of Independence, not the Union. His point being that our nation as it exists is the product of the evolution of our constitutional order, and not simply the natural rights arguments laid out in the Declaration.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_Confederation

[1] https://constitutionus.com/constitution/the-supreme-law-of-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_a_Harsh_Mistress

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_of_America

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt_III

[5] https://www.c-span.org/video/?469938-1/rethinking-americas-f...

[EA-3167]

I think a lot of it comes down to the usual ignorance of what the Spartans actually did and how they lived. A lot of focus is placed on their extreme lifestyles while a lot less is placed on their massive community of slaves (helots) and their secret police to manage them. It's funny, since the existence of a slave population which greatly outnumbered them shaped their society and led directly to their downfall.

They've also always been a very useful shibboleth for people trying to make the "Effete Athenians vs Manly Spartans" comparison.

[brazzy]

> All in all, this FP just reeks of a leftist hit-piece, Sparta is so associated with right-wing toxic masculinity and so must be pilloried.

Can you point out any factual errors in it?

>After all, they’ve already torn down beautiful statues venerating heroes, now own to the intangible idols.

Which statues specifically are you talking about?

[amanaplanacanal]

I suspect they are talking about the statues glorifying the confederate slave owning society.

[FrustratedMonky]

As stated elsewhere I think. Right-Wing glorification of Sparta is really based mostly on the movie 300, and not on much 'historical fact'.

Not that this bad. Most of our romanticized notions are incorrect. I also loved the movie 300 and if that is the romantic ideal for manly fighting, then so be it. That is fine. Call this some kind of 'Spartan Fighting Spirit'. Just don't take it as fact. Kind of like the Arthurian Ideal of Knighthood and Chivalry. It is a very powerful symbol, even if not very 'accurate'.