War! Huh! What is it good for?--Turns out quite a lot...

How is that not a contradiction?

You reek of ignorance.

Sparta was one of the countries that stood as free men against a Persian army that wanted to enslave all the Greek nations.

What the Spartans did at the Hot Gates, and later on at the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Plateau along with the rest of the Greeks led to the preservation of democracy....allowing for a free Greece to exist and spread those ideals onto us.

300 was not a documentary.

Perhaps you should brush up on your Greek history then.

I never implied that it was a documentary.....and I'm not even referring to it.

Unless of course you want to continue to look like a fool.

Rant could be shorter. Two sentences, to be precise:

1. I don't have to offer much, I need my country to be powerful and show it so I can have some self esteem.
2. I have never worked for anything but the American war machine so I need war on a very personal level.

Oh, so you resort to trolling now.

:lookatme:

It's not. Well, I certainly don't think it is. Unless you are coming from it with the thinking that diplomacy has failed if war has started, then I don't see how you could say the threat of war is not, in and of itself, a diplomatic tool.

resort? You really haven't been around much

If you hold that war should be a last resort only, I don't see how the threat of war can be a viable diplmatic tool. Unless these are empty threats.

In order of appearance:

(1) Sparta was not a country of free men.
(2) Specifically, the majority of those facing the Persians at the Thermopylae were not free men, but hoplites, slaves-at-arms.
(3) Sparta was never a democracy, and when Athens became a democracy, that democracy was ended by Sparta (or arguably by the hybris with which the Athenian democracy provoked war with Sparta).
(4) War was the downfall of the only democracy Greece saw in ancient times: It was created in peace and destroyed in war.
(5) Greek democracy didn't spread to America; French democracy did.
(6) Neither the general ideological Greek inheritance nor the contemporary French philosophy of democracy spread to America while it was protected elsewhere, whether by war or otherwise.
(7) Greece, as a whole, was never one free country in known history until the 19th, arguably the 20th century.

A while ago -- I'm not sure whether you were already here -- we had a thread where I argued vehemently that 300 should not be mistaken as a documentary. Some said it was a documentary; others said my concerns were unjustified because no-one would mistake it as such. Your post is a prime example of what I was worried about.

At Trinity?

I was wondering about your original statement, hh. That still doesn't make sense to me.

It seems you want to make a hard distinction between what counts as a diplomatic tool and what doesn't. That's fine, I guess, if you believe that diplomacy can solve everything and war is ultimately a failure for everyone. But its splitting hairs in this discussion. No one here really wants war but most realize that it's a part of life and most likely always will be. There are always going to be times when talking isn't going to stop the Hitlers of the world and force is ultimately required to either put him back in his cage or put him in the ground.

French democracy? I don't think so.

Then pick up a book. If democracy came to America from anywhere outside itself -- a claim presupposed by Azure, not me -- it came from French philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It did not come from Greek philosophy, or from Greece's historical example.

Its not a documentary.....there are a lot of historical inaccuracies in it. Sure, some of the quotes very correct, but mentioned by the wrong person. Some of the actual people who fought at the Battle of Thermopylae, such as Dienekes weren't even included.

Most of my reference points, especially about the preservation of democracy comes from the book Gates of Fire. While also not completely accurate in regards to some characters being made up to actually create a story, the Spartan culture that Pressfield revealed IS accurate.

And I still stand by my original point.

War played an inaugural part in the preservation of democracy.

I'm unsure how "inaugural" and "preservation" work together, but war has certainly preserved democracies in the past. That's why I said the conclusion was correct. But that wasn't the case in ancient Greece, and most definitely not at the Thermopylae.

French philosophers, undoubtedly, had some influence but "French democracy" did not exist until 1789 and then only in name.

I understand and agree with that. But I'm not getting how you can threaten someone with war as part of diplomacy and simultaneously say that it's only a last resort. Maybe one of us is misreading the other...

Yeah. That's what I said in my #5. Not only did the influence on American democracy come from France rather than Greece, it didn't coem from any country that had ever defended democracy in a war, because it did not come from any democratic country at all. (Interestingly, it also seems to have not been in any relevant way influenced by the two arguably democratic nations that existed at the time in Switzerland and Iceland.)

Perhaps, I'd argue it came from English traditions.

It certainly is closer institutionally to the French system than the British one.

Well, yes. But anything from Locke onwards is influenced by French philosophy, and not really distinct from the traditions that were immediately identical to the democratic tradition in America. As I said, you might add a #8 to that list by pointing out that American democracy did not really come from anywhere outside of its English tradition, but from within.

Greek democracy had an influence as well. England, while not a democracy, was on the path at the time and its philosophers also contributed to the thinking that founded this country. America's founding fathers were extremely well read and pulled influences and good ideas from many sources.

Again, I think there's some hair-splitting going on here. Full-blown democracy didn't exist but there were many countries that had at least some of the ideas in place and had fought wars for their existence. The Spartans at Thermopylae were part of the Greek tradition and possibly the first defenders of the more liberal forms of government.

Maybe you should pick up a book and find out where the actual ideas that Montesquieu only supplemented came from.

Both Aristotle and Machiavelli suggested the whole 'natural law' concept before Montesquieu.

In fact, many of the references that Montesquieu made came from the original ideas by Plato and Aristotle.

And later on at the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Plateau.

Which is the point I was trying to make.

Look at it the other way, say Xerxes would have conquered the Greeks.....do we still see the same ideals of democracy, while not perfect, exist any further?

By all accounts, Xerxes was a tyrant, and certainly didn't believe in any sort of democratic rule.

Not really. The legislative systems are different, but as a whole we retained the system of common law and the traditions of government as a whole.

But you still ultimately derive your source from Locke himself, who was the greatest influence of the Continental Congress.

It would be more accurate, I believe, to label it all as products of Locke, and that the people and institutions that followed were merely feeding off of each other.

Neither Plato nor Aristoteles had any truck with democracy whatsoever.

I completely agree, but French liberalism precedes and informs Locke.

And the point that we're trying to make is that modern democracy arrived from an understanding of the fundamental rights of men, not merely a historical tradition of direct democracy.

The concept of voting wasn't revolutionary, it was that all men are entitled to it, regardless of size or stature.

In what way were the feudalistic oligarchists that drove their slaves to death at the Thermoplyae part of a "more liberal form of government"?