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FREE PREVIEW: Radio War Nerd #162 — The Rise & Fall of Sparta (Patreon)

Published:
2019-01-01 00:04:16
Imported:
2026-06
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Guest: Philip Matyszak, author & historian 

Recorded: December 17, 2018

For non-subscribers, here is a 25+ minute preview of Radio War Nerd episode #162 about ancient Sparta—the ultimate warrior tribe, romanticized by everyone from Plato to Bush-era neocons, and waffendweebs in between. We talk to historian Philip Mayszak, who appeared on the popular RWN EP #151 about Athens' disastrous Sicily campaign, discusses with us his two recent and highly recommended (by us) books on Sparta: "Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation" and "Sparta: Fall of a Warrior Nation". Lot of surprises and myths debunked. Sparta was essentially a proto-fascist slave state that ruled through terror and cult indoctrination, and eventually decayed into collapse due to the oldest reason of all: Inequality, the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. 

Would you like to know more? Subscribe to Radio War Nerd here on our patreon page, to listen to the entire episode 162 and all previous locked episodes. Depending on your pledge, you can also get our downloadable RSS feed for your podcast app, the Radio War Nerd Newsletter, Show Notes and more...  

Buy Philip Matyszak's books on Sparta: "Sparta: Rise of a Warrior Nation" and "Sparta: Fall of a Warrior Nation". Read Matyszak's blog.

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Comments

Samuel Roberts

This is the episode you accidentally dropped in our feeds this morning, right? (I got 20m in and when I came back in the afternoon, it was gone! It had also been titled “&”, hence why I’m asking)

Paul Vd

Man if Assad, the Kurds and Turkey can make a deal, then the Russian diplomatic effort is going to come out looking as spiffy as it's military effort in this war. The US won't like that. Scary times ahead. The CIA or someone is going to dirty this up a bit. Just to make it look worse. Bc it's looking too good now.

Jason Thompson

Amazing episode. The fact that women had more rights in Sparta than elsewhere in Greece, chiefly to keep the helots at bay, reminds me weirdly -- and I don't mean this as some kind of anti-feminist nonsense -- of some of the openly white-supremacist suffragette arguments of the 1900s-1920s. I once read a 1920s white feminist book which openly singled out and complained about every instance, in different U.S. states, in which nonwhite men got the vote before white women.

eh

Part of the utopian vision in Herland is a strict commitment to eugenics, which I was slightly shocked by even knowing about the views of Sanger etc

Jason Thompson

The amount of pro-eugenics stuff in that time period was astounding/horrifying. And, to go off-topic, it was interesting that some of the biggest opposition to it came from conservative Christians like G.K. Chesterton. Actually, even today you can find fairly mainstream Christians saying they can't morally believe in evolution (!) because it leads to eugenics.... the 2004 graphic novel "Loyola Chin and the San Peligran Order" by Gene Yang, a very respected comic artist who I know from my comic-drawing days, makes this its main theme

wendy johnson

Off topic, but have you considered covering the war in Balochistan? The latest insurgency has been going on since 2005. This is a brief introduction by Selig Harrison (<a href="https://mondediplo.com/2006/10/05baluchistan)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://mondediplo.com/2006/10/05baluchistan)</a> who covered their history in his terrific book "In Afghanistan's Shadow: Baluch nationalism and Soviet temptations" <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistans-shadow-Baluch-nationalism-temptations/dp/0870030299" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistans-shadow-Baluch-nationalism-temptations/dp/0870030299</a>

Cade Jameson

Sanger was for eugenics but she wasn't racist (at least not what you'd consider racist back then). That's hard for people to understand in this day and age, but it's a historical quirk. Not all eugenicists believed in racist eugenics. A good example is Trotsky who attacked Nazi eugenics on the grounds that racial hybridism was superior to racial purity. Eugenics is creepy, so I'm not defending it. But it was broadly accepted "science" for a time so it attracted a lot of people who were interested in public health like Sanger.