Feel free to add common myths about the East that you’d like cleared up. Or how you’ve already cleared it up. It might help me or another reader.
Feel free to add common myths about the East that you’d like cleared up. Or how you’ve already cleared it up. It might help me or another reader.
It’s basically a bunch of bullshit the amcient Greeks thought about others, especially Persia, that has been transmitted with little changes through thousands of years through “western” culture, though who exactly the “west” and what the “orient” is has changed.
The west is full of free individuals, the east are unthinking slaves to despots. Western men are properly masculine, eastern men are either effeminate or have a savage, animal masculinity. Eastern women are titillating and “exotic”. Westerners are brave and noble warriors, easterners are a disorganized “horde”, if they ever win its just cuz they have superior numbers and no regard for human life. Only the west has real civilization, others are either savages or overly civilized or “decadent” Etc. Etc.
Once you know about it, you see it fucking everywhere, throughout contemporary society and going back literally thousands of years in history, literature, philosophy, etc. It’s sickening. The “west” needs to be destroyed, materially, morally, ideologically.
Like think about the myth of Thermopylae: 300 brave Greeks sacrificed themselves holding off the countless Persian hordes, keeping the Greeks free of the despotic Persian empire.
(Just ignore the thousands of Greeks that were there who weren’t the 300 Spartans, the fact that Sparya wasn’t exactly a free society, that Persia was a better society in basically every way, that the reason they didn’t conquer the rest of Greece was more that their supply lines were stretched that far away from thier power base, etc)
We tell ourselves the same sorta myths now
Thats more Athens. Sparta wasnt even a village, it was three hamlets and was almost run neoliberal and build on a perpetual enslaved class. Sparta became a myth and a tourist trap for romans and were defeated by an army of consensual similarly aged gay lovers.
The reason Sparta could only send 300 was because they needed to keep most of their army in Sparta to keep the helots, their slaves, from rebelling.
It’s almost like slavery is inherently unsustainable.
They also had a shrinking class of Spartiates, because spartan citizens had to pay for their own training & equipment.
Between that, the slavery, and certain sexual proclivities I’d need to CW, I’m starting to think Sparta was the ancaps’ dream.
They would call it DEI woke though since Sparta Women were OG Girlbosses (because they became big landladies due to the high death rate of Spartiates).
A really absurd thing is how the same lazy narratives are deployed across such a giant range of different societies. Like Morroco, Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, Malaysia, and so many other places. All those are basically the same, yeah?