small wars journal

small dick, small soul, Papa Johns

Author’s note: there are of course differences between Sparta/Athens and Ukraine/Russia comparison. Ukraine is a democracy and Sparta was ruled by two kings. Athens was a democracy and Russia has become a totalitarian regime. And no, there were no Nazis in Sparta for the Russian strategic communications team.

(Narrator) "Sparta's political economy was in fact defined by their invention of a system of nazi eugenics which was designed to create the exact same hierarchy which this satanic PMC fascist is soyfacing over" https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/eugenics-program-in-ancient-sparta-and-the-unexpected-results

Sparta was a warrior nation, every man served, and the entire nation was on a wartime footing. Whereas Athens was not. I recalled his words from many years ago as I observed the Ukrainian people, going about their lives, ignoring air raid sirens while sipping coffee at outdoor cafes.

"Wow! Being deadeyed due to 24/7 psychological trauma is fricken epic!!!" :matt:

Every member of the 38-million-person country has been touched by this war directly and deeply. At least 5.5 million refugees, mostly women and children, fled the country ahead of the on-coming Russian horde of rapists, looters and murderers.

the IMF's coup doesn't count as rape or looting or murder...what happened with Ukraine's farmers by the way? Did they suicide like India's victims of finance imperialism?

In hindsight, the global community should have put these sanctions in place in 2014, or even earlier when Putin’s aggression started in 2008 in Georgia, or in 1999 in Chechnya.

lmao so funny "we should have destroyed the USSR in 1989 while we had the chance" :agony:

The Russian culture is not a warrior culture like Ukraine. In fact, it is a dysfunctional and dying culture with a declining population, high alcoholism, and declining life expectancy.

"high alcoholism" Literally neoliberal praxis which this guy is cheering, consider Britain getting China addicted to opium, or McKinsey's FBI collaborating role in getting (minorities/teens/etc) addicted to tobacco products and later opiates, again. Why would finance imperialist demons want to keep people controlled like this?...Anyway, they haven't yet looted Ukraine like the USSR so just wait a few years for the kulaks to hollow it out.

Over the course of eight years the Ukrainian military was deliberately converted from the old Soviet Style “command and control” model to a much more western model which pushes down authority and decision making to the lowest levels. U.S. special forces and NATO soldiers helped lead this transition, creating a learning Army, where soldiers are taught “how to think” not “what to think.”

anarcho-lib synthetic leftists say this exact CIA NPC dialog, but about homeschooling teaching "critical thinking, not indoctrination" like at public schools. Apparently literacy is problematic so we have no choice but to "smash the Stalinist state" as every woke Liz Warren Reagan neoliberal insists.

Militaries often lead their societies through great social changes. The returning Ukrainian soldiers will bring with them western style thinking and help continue to transform Ukrainian society to be part of the West and reject all aspects of the old Soviet Union once and for all.

Western style thinking: soulless NPCs who believe they are human beings despite having no meaning in their life except 'making individual rational-self-interest choices of consumer product in the free market'

The Spartan soldiers who won this war will return and lead Ukraine to a bright and prosperous future, integrated into the EU and NATO, and the First Army of Peace will have helped degrade and destroy Europe’s #1 threat,

"helped degrade"

Working class: "GLOBALIST DEMONS WANT TO DEGRADE YOUR FAMILY"

woke radlibs: (scoffs) "globalism isn't real, idiot...(five minutes later) "Biden is racist to ban menthols, actually 40000 black cancer deaths a year is a good start to achieve our internationalist free market utopia. We need small consumer joys, we need free markets, not Stalinist authoritarianism. Google Bookchin McKinsey and help us smash the state to do more neoliberal deregulation to help more workers get addicted to opiates, Black Consumer Freedom Matters!" https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inclusion/a-300-billion-dollar-opportunity-serving-the-emerging-black-american-consumer

  • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sparta was a warrior nation, every man served, and the entire nation was on a wartime footing.

    I just want to point out that that isn't even a true claim. The Spartan education system barely had anything to do with military training beyond the same sort of weapons training the failchildren of landowners got everywhere in Greece, and the Spartan citizen-warrior class were basically just idle aristocrats hanging out in the contemporary equivalent of country clubs all day drinking and eating, and their literal only requirement for membership was being rich enough that you could afford to do that instead of working. Literally all of their warrior mythos shit is just contemporary propaganda that got uncritically repeated by credulous later scholars. In actual battles they had more or less identical methods and results as every other city-state, because their land-owning rich boy soldier class was living the exact same lifestyle and had the exact same training as every other city-state's land-owning rich boy soldier class.

    • MerryChristmas [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Actually Sparta had a population of 300 and they were all beefy dudes with spears.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I"l always bring it up - there were three other contingents there, and I think at least two of them were bigger than the Spartan contingent. One fought to the death. One fought until all their spears broke and no one was combat effective. The Spartans also had like 2,000 helots with spears and no armor that they forced to fight the Persians as cannon fodder. And the real battle was fought by the Athenian Navy just off the shore.

    • notceps [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I mean you could also point out the fate of Sparta, they literally had one major defeat and would see other city-states and nations take fertile land from them until it became nothing more than a single small fishing village filled with insane nazis, a fall so drastic that the Romans wouldn't believe the locals when asking where Sparta was.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    "First Army of Peace" sounds like it got rejected from 1984 for managing to be too dumb and on the nose even for Orwells level of respect for his readers.

    Its fucking stupid too even if you buy into this shit because what the fuck are all these "peacekeeping" forces all over the global south if not armies of peace? Absolutely moronic dogshit, every time a new primary global target is chosen for elimination, Libs have their minds memory wiped of all events between the end of WW2 to now.

  • Alaskaball [comrade/them]M
    ·
    2 years ago

    Ukraine is the Modern-Day Sparta

    Concidering the worryingly large numbers of Ukrainians that have been posting online they want to murder Russian children, this may be more accurate than they think.

    Also if you draw parallels to the nationalists and the fascists being a higher class than normal Ukrainians and can and have murdered normal Ukrainians with impunity to the spartan aristocratic class and their Helot slaves whom the Spartans routinely killed for fun.

  • SaniFlush [any, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Sparta? I’d love to visit Messina one day, stand in the spot where an evil empire was defeated…

  • TheGamingLuddite [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    anarcho-lib synthetic leftists say this exact CIA NPC dialog, but about homeschooling teaching “critical thinking, not indoctrination” like at public schools. Apparently literacy is problematic so we have no choice but to “smash the Stalinist state” as every woke Liz Warren Reagan neoliberal insists.

    Unrelated diatribe, but I was just thinking about how if Russia had invaded Ukraine under a republican president, our involvement could have been justified by bush-era machismo rather than liberal internationalism. The will of capital is more war, dissent is impossible, you get to choose Coke or Pepsi, which brand do you like more?

    The public school system is being dismantled, you get to choose why you think it's good. Is it good because your precious child won't be exposed to LGBT people and CRT, or is it good because the school system is actually racist and teaches totalitarian conformity and can't be reformed. What's that? You don't want the children of the poorest and most vulnerable to be illiterate and working in an amazon warehouse at the age of 12? Fuck you, this is empowering, you get to choose between two reasons why.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Do the Democrats even try to justify defunding schools? I thought they just did it and then most of their base was either ignorant or in denial?

      • TheGamingLuddite [none/use name]
        ·
        2 years ago

        A lot of middle and upper class liberals are super big on charter schools, but it's not out of the question for PMC former campus radicals to produce takes like that.

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Militaries often lead their societies through great social changes. The returning Ukrainian soldiers will bring with them western style thinking and help continue to transform Ukrainian society to be part of the West and reject all aspects of the old Soviet Union once and for all.

    Where is the lie tho?

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Ukrainian soldiers keep stables of little boys for sexual exploitation?

  • GusanoHater69 [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Zelensky couldn't write wiretap scars but Jim Ward could be a western puppet