[Thomashuet]

If it just means "don't take my guns", that's what they would write on their merch instead of some greek letters most people can't read. By using this Spartan phrase they're trying to evoke the mythical greatness of Sparta, and that is what this article is about.

[bluGill]

"Come and take them" has long been a refrain of the gun crowd. This greek is a new version of the same thing.

[jerf]

Yeah, and everybody in Alabama always says "Go Team, Win Win Win" instead of "Roll Tide" because nobody can understand what "Roll Tide" means.

Nobody is actually invoking anything beyond the absolutely most superficial "Spartanness" and going deep into "Well, actually, the Spartans were not nice people if you dig deeply into the truth" is not relevant when nobody else is digging that deeply. To a first approximation nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess".

Despite all the sensitivity in the university system in the past 5-10 years, I've never even heard a whiff of a suggestion that Michigan State University needs to change its mascot... because nobody, not even the educated and politically sensitive, thinks anything about Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess". If anyone had any sort of real knowledge about the situation it would have been considered extremely extremely insensitive... but nobody thinks about these things. Hard to get much more proof than that.

[sixo]

It sounds like this kind of essay isn't for you!

> "nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond.."

"Sparta" is a "symbol" in our culture's "language of symbols" which stands roughly for "brutal and effective masculine warrior ethic, worthy of respect and fear". It is probably the single most unambiguous symbol available for this kind of thing, and is therefore used constantly—when somebody wants to make an argument like "might makes right", or "what if we didn't care about other people", or "men must be strong, austere, and violent to be worthy of respect", a reference to Sparta is never far away. Even when they don't make explicit reference to Sparta, it lends credibility to these sorts of ethics. It acquires its power from the fact that it actually existed in history and was seemingly successful, that it lives on with a generally admiring connotation, that it stands for the pinnacle of achievement in a certain sense.

The point of an attack on the historical accuracy of the symbolic Sparta is to weaken the power of the symbol to be used for evil. It did not exist as remembered, nor for all that long, it was not particularly effective, the admiration of Sparta has been concocted after-the-fact by commentators trying to fit it into their agendas, it was not as brutal as it is imagined to be, nor was it particularly important in history. It was just a weird and particularly unpleasant culture that existed at one point.

These are attacks on the structural integrity of a whole set of ideas which are regularly used to justify cruelty, abuse, and violence, and which mislead people—young men especially—as to the nature of virtue.

That it is sometimes used harmlessly doesn't have much to do with this at all.

[mola]

Well written!

[sixo]

Thank you!