The metastasis of Sparta worship in the “fake news” age offers an object lesson in how to rewrite the history of a people and a culture, pressing them into the service of hard-line political movements marked by racism, nationalism, and tyranny. “The message of Leonidas- molon labe (come and get it)-is as timely today as ever for everything tormenting Greece,” Golden Dawn higher-up Eleftherios Synadinos, a former special forces general and a member of the European Parliament, told the assembled partisans there in 2015, just before the crowd broke out into chants of “People! Army! Nationalism!” In Italy, Alleanza Nazionale, a rebranding of the fascist party Movimento Sociale Italiano after its 1995 dissolution, has used Spartan imagery reminiscent of 300 in propaganda posters captioned “Defend your values, your civilization, your district.” The Greek neo-fascist party Golden Dawn gathers each year at Thermopylae, lighting torches and chanting anti-immigrant nationalist slogans. This paranoid vision of a government coming to take your guns, or an alien invader coming to take your culture, has led to more troubling invocations of the Spartan myth, and not just in Anglophone countries.
“Defend your values, your civilization, your district”: A neofascist message from Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale party. The very word spartan transcends the historical city-state to which it once referred it can now refer to anyone or anything marked by strict self-denial, frugality, or the avoidance of comfort-reflecting the legend of the Spartans, rather than who they actually were. There are at least 39 municipalities named after Sparta in America alone, and I gave up counting the number of American and Canadian high school sports teams named “the Spartans” once I hit 100 (Michigan State and San Jose State, both NCAA Division I teams, are also named after them). Most of us have never heard of laconophilia, even as we live in a world so dramatically shaped by it, but it has a hand in everything from the French Revolution to the British educational system to the Ivy League to the Israeli Kibbutz movement. There’s a word for this mania in Western cultures: laconophilia, taken from Laconia, the region the Spartans hailed from. Last August, Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the right-wing anti-government and anti-immigration American militia group Oath Keepers, appeared on conspiracy media outlet Infowars to announce the launch of “Spartan training groups” that would prepare armed Americans to defend the country from the “violent left.” The Oath Keepers’ website also invokes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance,” which exhorts readers to “hear the whistle of a Spartan fife”-a nod to references in both Thucydides and Plutarch that the Spartans used the double-reeded, oboe-like aulos to keep in step while marching to battle.Īncient Sparta’s influence is all around us, providing a litany of patron saints for spectacular last stands. British news outlets ran with the moniker the Daily Mail praised the group’s efforts to sink its own government as “The last stand of the Spartans.” The group of hardcore Euroskeptics dubbed themselves “Spartans” for their singleminded willingness to hold the line, to sacrifice anything in obedience to their convictions. It created this world today.Last spring, 28 Tory hardliners unleashed another round of havoc on British politics, refusing to vote for Prime Minister Theresa May’s compromise Brexit plan and paving the way for her replacement by Britain’s Trump variant, Boris Johnson. You’re from a place, just like in 300, with such incredible history. In 2016, the Hollywood star was spotted holidaying in Mykonos where he stated to media at that time: “Greece is just so unbelievably beautiful, there’s so many islands, you’re spoiled for choice. I love you”, “Law abiding citizen” and “The ugly truth” just to name a few, but he revealed that he considers his “300” role to be his favourite. The 2006 movie “300” was one of the highest-earning films bringing in $400 million.īutler has appeared in numerous movies ranging from “Olympus has fallen”, “P.S. It was reported that Butler would also run as a torchbearer for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. The news of his arrival was announced by the mayor of Sparta, Mr Petros Doukas on Wednesday evening. Hollywood action star Gerard Butler who portrayed King Leonidas in the blockbuster “300”, will be visiting Greece to take part in the 2,500 year anniversary of the Battle of Thermopylae.