TexasDan on August 8, 2007 at 9:37 PM

Upon further consideration, you may be right. My Greek is more than a little rusty, unfortunately…

Militant Bibliophile on August 8, 2007 at 4:41 PM

Tino on August 8, 2007 at 9:19 PM

Damn, I jumped into this late and most of my points have already been made. I’ll just add that the most successful armies of the ancient world, the Spartans and the Romans, took a dim view of the kind of man-on-man love liberals are obsessed with.

The Romans in particular would severely punish sexual relationships between leigionaires, even killing them, as it tended to screw with unit cohesion and morale.

Grim determination, not flashy theatrics, wins wars. Thebans died at the Hot Gates as well, but it’s the Spartan lambda on our tanks. (That’s the upside down V for you uneducated morons;)) Uniform equipment was another Spartan innovation. Remeber, the United States was founded as a republic, based far more on Spartan values than Athenian ones.

- The Cat

Militant Bibliophile on August 8, 2007 at 4:41 PM

I think it’s philios, not agape. Otherwise agreed.

Xenophon writes about this. Lycurgus, the legendary law-giver of Sparta, had very conservative views about sexuality and homosexual activity. People should understand the Greeks had a mixed feeling towards this, the love-education between men and young boys was considered good, any sexual relationship generally bad.

Nepotism was a big problem for the Spartans, with their ideals of merit based armed forces. If I remember correctly it was a major political issue with one of the kings and his favoritism towards his lover during the Peloponnesian war. I even read somewhere they didn’t put lovers in the same place in the Phalanx.

The Thebans come later than the Spartans with their gay fanatical sacred band.

A few more points:

1. The Spartans did lose the Persian wars, in the sense that the Athenians emerged as the victors and dominant power in Greece. This later led to the Peloponnesian war (that Sparta ultimately won, but that wore down both cities). Morally Spartas reputation was helped by the last stand of the 300.

2. Greeks did not practice homosexuality, men who only were with other men. They like other cultures had wide-spread bi-sexuality, where men occasionally have sex with other men, but also (and often preferably) with women.

Anyone who tells you homosexuality was the norm in Greece/Ottoman empire/Mamluks is demonstrating a shallow knowledge of history.

3. What annoys me most with Democrats is the combination of ignorance and arrogance. “Anyone who doesn’t know Spartans were gay is ignorant about ancient history”. Yeah, except anyone who actually read through a couple of books about Greek history would know it was much more complicated. A little knowledge is worse than no knowledge, if it makes you overestimate yourself.

4. The core of the issue: Regardless if the Thebans made it work, it was in a completely different culture. Democrat politicians should care about how things work given your American culture today. All fighting armies need the macho mentality of young men, especially an elite volunteer force such as the US Military. In America 2007 gay=not macho. End of story. People that risk their life for the rest of society are not toys for leftist social experiments, their wishes should be respected.

There could be some things to be learned about warfighting by studying the Spartans

Resolute on August 8, 2007 at 7:14 PM

Yep, like: show no mercy, take no prisoners, never retreat or submit.

Spc Steve on August 8, 2007 at 3:02 PM

Definitely agreed.

Gravel scares me in many ways. I was about to say, “Stop talking. I preferred it when you were staring me down and throwing rocks in a lake,” but then I figured that no…no, I didn’t.

This nit wit is the guy generally credited with getting the campaign rolling that withdrew funding for the Vietnam thereby causing our withdrawal. “…and for having put into the public record the Pentagon Papers in 1971…” wiki

LakeRuins on August 8, 2007 at 2:55 PM

All righty then.

Laughing academy graduate. Top O’ his class. Gravel has Ron Paul poster above his bed. Gravel thinks Ron Paul invented Almond Joy.

If we take the same understanding of gender issues between hetero men and women, and apply that to gender issues between hetero and homo of either gender, we end up with the same type of unsolvable problems.

My response to this is, well, this is partly right. However, the statement above is itself 100% gender biased against men, and the kind of subjective standard feminists are arguing against.

The point is that this statement is exactly the opposite of the current gender bias against women, in which we foolishly expect women in military uniform to act like men.

Is it men only that need conditioning? Or is it both men and women? Or, is the point that it isn’t wise to mix men and women in combat situations? How much conditioning does it take to drive the sex-drive out of the average human being, man or woman?

A woman fighter pilot flying in combat is one thing. A woman infantry soldier stuck with a man in a lonely, dirty, stinky fox-hole is something quite different.

If we place women in the same military job as men, it stands to reason that they should both be measure by the same objective standards. But it does not stand to reason to place men and women in a situation which seriously temps and hampers their ability to succeed.

If we can’t trust men to control their emotions around women, then we shouldn’t be putting women in a situation with them that sets both the men and the women up for failure.

Not to mention the fact that women are also human and to try to condition the human emotion (eg: sex-drive) out of women is just as silly as trying to condition it out of men. But this is exactly what we are trying to do. And it doesn’t work. Unless we turn all our soldiers into eunuchs, or if we implant some kind of robocop control chip in their heads, we will never resolve the personal interaction problems associated with place men and women together in combat.

I can’t imagine a Spartan version of Scott Thomas Beauchamp would have been spared after slandering his fellow warriors. I can’t imagine his death being very pretty, either.

“We got caught with our pants down”

One, it was the Thebans, not the Spartans who encouraged homosexuality (The Sacred Band. Google it) as a means to promote unit cohesion. In a unit that fought en bloc and organized so that lovers stayed together, it was a passing good idea. Phillip was said to have wept after, ahem, wiping them out to a man.

Secondly, this unit only worked because it was organized with this structure in mind from the beginning. Don’t ask me to prove it ’cause frankly I don’t have the time, but it would make sense to me that any really bad breakups would result in immediate transfers. In a modern army with the required fluidity of staffing (average time at a unit: 3 years), this kind of “closeness” is a recipe for disaster along the lines that Spc Steve pointed out.

The kind of love you see in a military unit is agape, the love of choice, not only to one’s fellow soldiers but to the unit as a whole. Eros (erotic love) would (and does, hence the prohibition on marrying or even dating someone from the same unit) screw up this dynamic in ways that would severely affect a unit’s fighting ability, and not in a good way. At the very least, lovers’ quarrels in the barracks can lead to decreased morale and all that goes with it. At the worst, you end up with sloppy decision making in the field that gets men killed all because, let’s face it, men think with the lower of their heads almost as often as the upper.

The whole hetero male army thing is supposed to minimize that particular genetic quirk.

Does he also point out that the Spartans were pedophiles? Somehow I doubt it.
And if we are going to follow the Spartans’ examples we must also trade in our democracy for a race-based slavery system. I loved the movie, but the historic Spartans were not fighting for democracy or freedom for anyone else, only their own freedom and ability to dominate their own slaves. Which does not diminish their courage or audicity in the slightest.

Maybe Gravel is confused.

Maybe?

And no, that’s not a Barry Bonds asterisk.

…go see the movies on war…

Because if you’ve seen it in a movie, it must be true!

Well, at least he’s willing to admit where he gets his views from…

Spc Steve on August 8, 2007 at 3:02 PM

Nicely said.