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Comment by Two4 | Hacker News Reader

Total war is distinct from civil war or regional conflict - none of the parties you mentioned are completely committed at every level possible to victory (or at least the other side losing). Britain and Germany can both be thought of as being in states of total war at varying times during WW2.

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If you draw this distinction it doesn't apply to Sparta either.

They are not drawing the distinction, this is a specific definition that you decided to take offense to for some reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

It's not some political statement, all that was meant was that their whole society participated in the war effort and their education centered on fighting and survival rather than writing things down.

> their whole society participated in the war effort

Right, and this is untrue of Sparta.

I probably don't know enough about Sparta then. From what I thought I knew before your comments, I learned that they took the "teach kids to be fighters" to the extreme and they had the longest "education" period of any city states around them, mostly focused on skills for battle. Supposedly the old men were involved in this education, the kids were training, the men were fighting, and the women were supporting all of this. So that's what I was basing the thought of this type of society probably making it less likely that you have a bunch of scribes or other types of jobs being done that would be more likely to leave stuff written down.

Congratulations! You are a total victim of this Spartan myth that the article author has often debunked.

Problem is, they taught only citizen kids to be fighters (skipping over what did they actually teach). When 80%+ of your society is not-citizens, then this has little relation to what the society is actually focused on.

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