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| 5/31 |
| 2007/3/27-29 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:46108 Activity:high |
3/26 War Nerd reviews 300 and Victor Hansen
http://www.exile.ru/2007-March-23/war_nerd.html
\_ Spot on, thanks for this.
\- one point about this: yeah, athens should be given their
due in the case of the persian wars, but if you are going to
talk about contemporary lessons, the pel war is much more
relevant. and there the lesson is: eventhough the "athenian
way of life" was far more appealing than the spartan, athenian
high handedness and power was a greater threat to many of
their neighbors. nobody is inspired by north korea, but
NK doesnt affect say how their govt wants to spend their tax
dollars [anti-drug measures, ip enforcement etc]. the pel
war ushers in "the fall of the athenian empire". Let's hope
Iraq is not America's "Sicily" ... "the athenians responded
first in anger and then in fear. first they lashed out at th
politcians who had proposed and argued for the Sicilian
expeditions (Thycydides bitterly remarks, "as if they had
not voted for it by themselves"); the were furious with the
seers who had predicted success. Next, they grieved over men
lost in Sicily. Finally, they feared for their own safety
when they calculated their own losses and te enemy's gains ...
Athens' allies ... would not surely rebel ... they exaggerated
the enemy's capacity to take effective action, but they had good
reason for concern over the condition of Athens and its ability
to carry on the war. The most obvious problem was manpower ..."
--Donald Kagan, via psb
\- one point about this: yeah, athens should be given their due in
the case of the persian wars, but if you are going to talk about
contemporary lessons, the pel war is much more relevant. and
there the lesson is: eventhough the "athenian way of life" was
far more appealing than the spartan, athenian high handedness
and power was a greater threat to many of their neighbors.
nobody is inspired by north korea, but NK doesnt affect say how
their govt wants to spend their tax dollars [anti-drug measures,
ip enforcement, susidies etc]. the pel war ushers in "the fall
of the athenian empire". Let's hope Iraq is not America's
"Sicily" ... "the Athenians responded first in anger and then in
fear. first they lashed out at th politcians who had proposed
and argued for the Sicilian expeditions (Thycydides bitterly
remarks, "as if they had not voted for it by themselves"); the
were furious with the seers who had predicted success. Next,
they grieved over men lost in Sicily. Finally, they feared for
their own safety when they calculated their own losses and te
enemy's gains ... Athens' allies ... would now surely rebel
... they exaggerated the enemy's capacity to take effective
action, but they had good reason for concern over the condition
of Athens and its ability to carry on the war. The most obvious
problem was manpower ..."
--Donald Kagan, via psb [see http://www.amazon.com/dp/0801499844]
\_ So you think that if the US decides to pull out from Iraq and
the country falls to chaos, our allies (UK, Israel, Canada,
Germany, etc) are going to turn on us and attack? What?
\_ We have already lost some of our Cheese-Eating Surrender
Monkey allies, but we are likely to lose more.
\_ Which allies? And have they turned on us a la Athens
and are now gearing up to attack us?
\_ France, Turkey, Egypt, to a lesser extent
the EU and Saudi Arabia. No, they are probably not
gearing up to attack us, but they will co-operate
less with us in the future and are already lining
up alliances with our rivals. So we are definitely
in a weaker position geopolitically. I am surprised
that this is news to you.
\_ France: independent at best. The ultimate self-
interested nation. (I've no problem with that,
it is just how they are).
Egypt: An ally? Are you nuts? We pay them a few
billion a year to not attack Israel. They're
a cold war era 'our bastards are better than
their bastards' dictatorship who has a piss
poor record of supporting the US at the UN (for
example).
Turkey: a matter of self-interest. They have
Kurdish terrorists/freedom-fighters who want to
break away and a free Kurdistan in northern
Iraq is the last thing they want to see. Are
they kicking us out of the country? Are they
asking us to do anything in particular? What
exactly is Turkey doing that gives you the
willies?
If these are the 'allies' we're losing due to
American foreign policy (and I disagree they were
allies in the first place or that the
relationships have changed *at all* then we have
***nothing*** to worry about in the "oh n0es~! our
allies are turning on us!!11" sense. I'm
surprised you see these nations as 'allies'. They
are on-again off-again self-interested parties,
like all nations. They semi-rationally determine
what is in the best interests of their leaders,
(not necessarily their nations) and do whatever
that is until such time as some other greater
self-interest emerges.
\_ I haven't even seen this movie, but I'm not sure I believe it was
made by neo-cons. Was it financed by Cheny or something?
\_ Does it say it was made by neocons? I think the author
was saying neo-cons point to the movie and cheer about how
the movie shows the good, fascist, strong, 'democratic?'
disciplined Spartans (american proxies) triumph over
the unwashed ninja move boy-loving hordes. I can easily
\_ There was no Persian boy-loving
going on in the movie.
believe the not so bright will see this movie and think it
represents Greek history accurately, and that you can
derive some sort of parallel between the Greeks then and
the American War On Terror. Victor Hansen has written
many nationally printed columns about how wonderful 300
is, which is pretty amusing since Hansen is a classics
professor and should know this period of history very well.
\_ It's a movie made from a friggin' comic book! It has nothing
to do with anything. It is entertainment. The entire world
is not some sort of allegory for Iraq or US Hegemony or any
such thing. C-O-M-I-C B-O-O-K!!! sheesh.
\_ From the rant "The only reason this thing got made is that it
makes good anti-Iran propaganda..."
makes good anti-Iran propaganda...[big cut]...Now the neocons
have gone so over the deep end of delusional thinking that
they've resorted to fantasizing about Sparta...These diehard
neocons have gone insane because there's no way they can
argue for an invasion of Iran any more."
He seems pretty sure that this is some neocon conspiracy.
I agree with the above guy, it's just a comic book movie, war
nerd should get over it. Besides, there are probably far
more people who believe in Michael Moore's fantasy
documentaries. |
| 5/31 |
|
| www.exile.ru/2007-March-23/war_nerd.html Previous (114) FRESNO, CA -- Well, I did it, took one for the team, jumped on the grenade, offered my belly to the bayonets--in other words, sat through 300, the comic-book movie about Thermopylae. The only reason this thing got made is that it makes good anti-Iran propaganda, because as every war fan knows, at Thermopylae "300 brave Spartans held off the entire Persian army." Every time the Spartan king Leonidas makes a "rousing speech," his warriors yell "Hoo-ah!" Actually the Spartans had a rep for silence, but we're not dealing with great historical minds here. What had me really wanting to puke is that this movie tries to make Sparta into some kind of Land of Hallmark Card-givers. There's about an hour's worth of perfume-ad scenes where Leonidas and his lovey-dovey wife, a feisty lady in one of those bondage-lite Greek dresses, cuddle and make eyes at each other and say patriotic stuff by way of foreplay. Yeah, that's why you see those bumperstickers, "Sparta was for lovers." Give or take a little egalitarianism, Sparta WAS North Korea. Spartan laws did everything they could to break down the family. Sparta was more anti-nuclear family than any Hollywood liberal could ever be. Wanna know what a Spartan wedding night was really like? As soon as a Spartan girl got her first period, they grabbed her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, threw her down on her new husband's bed, and then, well, he had his way with her. Since hubby had been in an all-male dorm since age seven, I'm betting that that night of lovin' was more like a skinny white boy's introduction to San Quentin after lights-out than it was like a chick flick. So when this movie shows the Spartan hero saying to his wife, "Goodbye, my love," I just had to laugh. That would've been like treason, because the Spartan rulers wanted family ties snapped, so the only bond left was to the state. They left room for folks' natural urges by letting the women drink, which they did non-stop, and the men form what you might call close comradely bonds with their fellow soldiers. In the ancient world, gay was a matter of who was on top. Sparta's leather-bar ways were a running joke to the ancient Greeks. The Spartans were stone killers - but they also preened like teenage girls before a battle. They grew their hair long, and before a fight they'd comb it, oil it, try out fetching new styles, put little baubles in their ears, anything to die young and leave a beautiful corpse. The script even has Leonidas taunt the Athenians calling them "boy-lovers." Athens, the true hero of the war against Persia, gets dissed time and again in this movie. You won't hear a word in 300 about Salamis, the real decisive battle of the war - because it was Athens, not Sparta, that destroyed the Persian fleet at Salamis. The Spartans wanted to run away from the Persian fleet and wall themselves off in the Peloponnese (you wouldn't believe how many times I've messed up the spelling on that damn word). They didn't have a clue about combined-arms operations (which the Athenians handled durn well). In fact, the Spartans, who are called "the finest soldiers in history" over and over in this movie, were a mediocre, one-dimensional, inflexible military force. Sparta understood only one kind of fighting: land battle, the hoplite shield-wall - a Big Ten offense from the old school, "three yards and a cloud of dust." shield wall battle, the bigger offensive line will break the opposing team's wall, leaving them open to massed spear thrusts. Once the opposition's wall was broken, the citizen-soldiers would scatter to fight another day - a totally sensible reaction, since the alternative was annihilation. In battles like that, psycho varsity offensive-line types like the ones Sparta bred did just fine. But vary the conditions of battle in any way, and they were as helpless as Woody Hayes' Ohio State teams were against a team that could stop the run. So it was actually fairly easy to stymie the Spartans: just put them in a situation where they had to think for themselves. Imagine a Spartan army up against a Mongol scouting force. Even if the Spartans outnumbered the Mongols by, say, 4-1, I'd have no hesitation betting on the Mongols. They were truly tough, not artificially hardened by sick PE games but by life in the saddle, on the steppes. And they were smart enough to realize that smarts count on the battlefield, that negotiation and alliance-building, scouting and propaganda are all important aspects of war. Only amateurs are dumb enough to think that being dumb, mean and inflexible like the Spartans is the route to military success. The Thebans under a really brilliant general, Epaminondas, crushed the Spartans in the battle of Leuctra (371 BC) because Epaminondas just plain out-thought those lummoxes. He knew exactly how the Spartans would stack their forces in battle order, because they always did it the same way. So he tinkered with the conventional phalanx-stacking set-up and those Thebans, most of them ordinary Greek citizen-soldiers, mere amateurs by Spartan standards, kicked Spartan ass right down the line. The Helots, the locals the Spartans had enslaved and terrorized for generations, finally got a chance for payback and Sparta withered away to nothing. they're still pissed off because people like me dared to warn them the Iraq war was going to be a disaster. Now the neocons have gone so over the deep end of delusional thinking that they've resorted to fantasizing about Sparta, where nobody ever argued, where everyone yelled and stabbed and otherwise kept their mouths shut. It's downright hilarious the way this movie punishes every smart character. Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he's evil. Snyder shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq. These diehard neocons have gone insane because there's no way they can argue for an invasion of Iran any more. So they've taken a crash course in fascism, jumping all the way to cheering for Sparta and booing for Athens - because Athens stands for brains and flexibility and talking things out. They can't win the argument, so they want to kill anybody who tries to argue. That's why Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy down a well. The film only approves of two things: 1 Yelling 2 Bashing. I say "bashing" because you can't call his view of military operations "strategy" or even "tactics." It's just close-ups of Leonidas's teeth while he yells about "freedom." Leonidas actually says, and this is a quote, "Freedom isn't free"! " And since the ham playing Leonidas has this thick Scottish accent, and teeth like an old horse, it was like some Clydesdale doing an impression of Mel Gibson in Braveheart at the same time. But here's what's really interesting about Leonidas's "freedom" speeches: every one happens just after he's thrown some envoy down a well or stabbed somebody who advocates talking strategy. That's the real fantasy here: wouldn't it be great if we could just yell "Hoo-ah!" You can almost see the pitiful dweebs behind this movie jacking off every time his musclebound Spartan hero kills another envoy or politician. If there's one thing we shoulda learned from Iraq, it's that in asymmetrical war, the following items are totally useless, in fact worse than useless, because they get in the way: 1 muscles 2 "Hoo-ah!" Contrary to what amateur fascists think, the really successful military elites encourage discussion, train mid-rank officers to react independently, and discourage yelling, steroid use and macho bullshit in general. Hell, even the Wehrmacht was filled with calm, polite and cultured men. Petraeus seems kind of like that, but by this time the situation's so awful I'm not sure how much he can do. jocks, make them realize they're not fit for theater command, and get them back to their true calling: coaching high-school football. Russia Goes Ballistic by Alexander Zaitchik Tactical nukes may soon be returning to Eruope, thanks to plans for missile defense bases in East... |
| www.amazon.com/dp/0801499844] We're sorry. |