JR commented on Two Blokes in Bristol Oct-29-2019 5:47 PM UTC

James, you've mentioned Herodotus and the Spartans a few times.

I don't remember much of reading Herodotus but something stuck and I was wondering your opinion.

There were two Spartans who were excused from combat at Thermopylae because of eye infection. One chose to die, the other returned back to Sparta where he was ostracized—shunned as a coward for not dying when his comrade had chosen the harder choice.

The survivor fought at Platea, the final battle against the Persians, valiantly ahead of the hoplites, inviting death, but this wouldn't redeem him to the Spartans...tough SOB's the Spartans.

That shunning seems to be a female thing? Maybe the Spartan warriors would have not been so harsh.

I wonder what you think of this. Can a man redeem himself and was this man a coward? Or do you think bravery/cowardice is more of a situational thing?

JR, thanks for reminding me of this signal tale of antiquity, for it strikes to the heart of Western Society, that is what remains of the Arуan "warband" tradition.

It is quite clear why pro-government, soy-infused capitalists and parasites so hate European identity and have degraded it to an empty shade of the rainbow. Because men of Arуan extraction have toppled most of the governments that have stood upon the necks of the Slave Man, and true slaves always resent the demise of their masters.

The core of the Dread Grace project is delving into the feminine influence on Western Martial culture from antiquity. These Spartan matrons are the preeminent archetype of the women who projects her will onto the battlefield, into the most masculine arena, via her appeal to a warrior's ego and sense of hierarchal status and ethnic purity.

The name of the Man-of-the-silent-land [they didn't call themselves, Rope-makers, others called them that] escapes me. However, upon reaching age 21 he had his 20-pound aspis [shield] handed to him, a shield too big to run away with and big enough to serve as a stretcher, by his mother, who said, "Come back with it or on it." These women were stingy with their approval from the outset.

As I understand the fate of this fellow, he was not just dismissed by Leonidas, but detailed to take the message of the suicide battalion's fate back to Sparta. His shunning seems to have driven him to violate the rigid Spartan discipline by fighting like a crazed Argive and endangering some delicate feinting maneuver, and earned the scorn of the men even as he apparently sought to dispel the scorn of the women. Individually, such shaming practices generate unjust and extreme occurrences, but in the main provide a consistently stubborn body of fighting men, which ripples through life internationally and chronologically.

Do we really want to fight these maniacs?

Just having ethnobitch influence on warrior culture guarantees a stubborn warrior breed.

When the Iroquois women, circa 1780, weighted the vote in the Six Fire Council Confederacy towards fighting the Americans, it spelled disaster for their men, who were outnumbered a hundred to one and deserted by their English allies. But, that same attitude assured that we would always respect the name "Mohawk" and that in 1812, the mere existence of 300 Mohawks under Joseph Brant in Canada was enough to panic New England and New York, one third of a multi-million-person polity.

Likewise, the Spartan women's insistence that the small, elite male population defend an unfortified nation, led to almost every man of Laconia being slaughtered in two battles in the next century, circa 370 B.C. To a large degree, the shunning of men who failed to face the enemy made Spartan a household name, 2,500 years later, in a nation perhaps a hundred-thousand times its size. There is much evidence that Germanic and Celtic tribesmen were similarly encouraged by their women to battle ferociously against cultural enemies.

In terms of bravery and cowardice, I agree with Gene Wolfe, a Korean combat veteran, who stated that the difference is often situation, by declaring that whether or not a man is regarded a coward depends on whether he is smitten by fear before or after contact with the enemy. I've entered a fight terrified of humiliation often and emerged fine, even after being beaten badly, accounted brave to the point of idiocy. But on a number of occasions, when I was surprised by criminal aggressors, and responded by rote, like a robot, experiencing no fear and thus not having committed bravery by overcoming it, I then nearly collapses from post-situational fear, with shaking legs and extreme weakness. Whether a man is seen as a coward is sometimes a thing of chance. Intimate social pressures, such as being threatened in front of my woman or son, have guaranteed that I would be brave for no other reason that appearing a coward before my dependents is, for me, a fate far worse and more permanent than death.

For the Spartan, every woman of his nation was judging him, and his mother was not some suburban woman crying about her baby being dragged away by their masters to fight a rich man's war, but a rural ethnobitch determined to demand that her men waged Race War on her behalf.