In the last years I lived in Israel, it became more and more apparent to me, that Israel was a new Sparta, not a very appealing place for someone who espouses the values of Athens. In this article, Justin Smith makes the same observation about the United States:
“…It seemed to me, on this visit more than ever before, that those virtues that many Romanians continue to ascribe to the United States are rapidly giving way to virtues extolled by the Ceausescu dictatorship itself, virtues that had their most vivid ancient expression in the civilization of the Spartans. This is a troubling change, as it is usually thought that there has been a distinct, continuous line of descent from ancient Athens, the enemy of Sparta, through to the American Revolution, from the freedom of Socrates to pursue truth rather than mere opinion, to the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Sparta has been the eternal opposite, so the narrative goes, of everything we stand for. And this change is particularly disconcerting for those of us who prefer to spend our time hanging around in marketplaces (or their modern analogues), shooting the breeze, pursuing our erotic whims, drinking too much.”