Comment on A 'US-Made iPhone' Is Pure Fantasy
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week agoI really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.
Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.
When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.
I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.
Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.
The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.
I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 week ago
USSR was the same except it made trash aristocracy. There was one difference, the CC CPSU really was a college, Brezhnev couldn’t make decisions all alone, for example. But, well, Sparta was sort of a college on top too, if I remember correctly.
See those movies and stories of USSR’s public culture of the 30s-50s - that pompous imperial pretense, those main heroes with steel scornful faces looking down at subservient or immoral or not to be trusted helpers. Not everything, but there is a feel.
Like “Fourth height” - unironically a movie of a girl who flew airplanes in her teens, in USSR, as sport, then became an actress, and then a medic on a frontline and killed there. That’s even less normal social level in the USSR than, say, in England. But such things were given as a something normal, there are those people rightfully better in our just socialist society.
Again, that’s Stalin’s time.
You do realize all the official parts of Soviet art were about ideology and what didn’t impede it? And heavy industries were built around military goals. Most of Soviet industries existed in peacetime just so it would be easier to convert them in case of war, and what they were producing in peacetime was secondary.
They were actually subsidized (or one can say paid as mercenaries) by other cities\rulers often. They were apparently not too shit at war for that, but certainly not qualitatively better than everyone else.
Nah, it even officially was world revolution first, military for that, industries for that, communism later. Stalin retconned it into socialism in one country, but industries still for war, because it fit him better. After him Soviet ideology was retconned into socialist friendship of peoples, unification of humanity and industries to achieve that and communism.
Usually hateful parts are done “because we can” and are not the main reason.
For a couple of years, until that was made illegal and a mental illness, together with banning abortions and other progressive socialist future-aimed policies.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?
Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 6 days ago
I’m not bashing it, just kinda full of some things of its legacy.
Too bad.
No, in the way Soviet propaganda presented Soviet citizens its place in the civilized part of history. Which ideas we follow, which we don’t, what is civilization and what is barbarism. Community and ascetism were kinda there, and it was thoroughly militarized and in theory prepared for a supposed full mobilization all the time, except nothing would really work. Not much more than that.
Soviet propaganda was actually very keen on that idea of civilization, antique references all over the place when you read anything touching philosophy from approved things. And the descent to barbarism would be what the “imperialist” or “capitalist” world was doing.
At the same time, due to Soviet economy’s limitations, there was also promotion of ascetism as something morally superior, say, they have all those nice things and rock-n-roll, while we have well-read people and value the spiritual above the material. That part is not new, of course, it can be found in German and Austrian stuff before WWI and in every totalitarian regime around.
I think some of the people creating that aesthetic were actually sincere, which is hard to imagine now, but touching it you feel that. It’s a bittersweet feeling, a painful one.
What does this have to do with Spartans specifically? I don’t know, but the structure of the Soviet society for me looks like something deliberately imagined after a romanticized version of Lycurgus’ Sparta, except done by crooked mind and crooked hands. Which would match the demographic of “old Bolsheviks” and other revolutionaries of early XX century, who were mostly students (mostly dropouts too) of social sciences.