Although ancient Sparta was not without its virtues — among them courage, loyalty, and discipline — it wasn’t a free society in any sense. It was said that Sparta was always either at war or preparing for war, and those preparations began at the earliest possible age.

The Spartan state made a proprietary claim on each child shortly after he was born. The infant would be given a physical examination for defects that would impair his ability to serve as a soldier. If such imperfections were found, Plutarch informs us, the child would be cast off a cliff to his death. If the child passed that inspection he would soon be bonded to an older warrior who would raise him as the state’s child and prepare him to fight the state’s wars.

While Sparta’s virtues are difficult to find in contemporary America, some of its vices are well-represented. For instance, our ruling elite has arranged things in such a way that they are always sending Americans to war, or searching for new enemies to justify the permanent warfare state.

This requires a steady and growing supply of trigger-pullers and coffin-stuffers, and the people who preside over the bipartisan warfare state are worried that American kids simply aren’t fit for slaughter.

Mission: Readiness — Military Leaders for Kids, a new Pentagon-aligned pressure group, recently published a report entitled Ready, Willing, and Unable to Serve. That document invites us to be horrified by the Pentagon’s claim that “75 percent of Americans 17 to 24-years-old are ineligible to serve in our military,” generally because of “inadequate education, a criminal background, or excess weight.”

That is to say: Our kids are supposedly too fat and stupid to serve as IED-bait on some distant battlefield.

Speaking on behalf of the warfare state, Mission: Readiness demands a dramatic enhancement of the welfare state in the form of expanded federal funding for “quality early childhood education” programs.

“We must invest now in the next generation to preserve our nation’s security, freedom, and opportunity,” the group insists in the boilerplate language of Beltway lobbyists. “We call on all policymakers to ensure America’s national security by supporting interventions that will prepare young people for a life of military service and productive citizenship” —

Wait a minute. The objective here is to create a uniform national effort intended to “prepare young people for a life of military service”?

To these nostrils that phrase smells like an oblique warning that the Regime is preparing to re-impose military slavery (more commonly called the draft). That impression is buttressed by the Starship Troopers-style rhetoric equating government-mandated “service” with “citizenship.”

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It is toward the end of raising an improved quality of cannon fodder that Mission:Readiness is demanding a wraparound welfare state — call it “Sparta Lite” — in which the preparation for military service would begin in the cradle. And the retired military officials who compose the organization’s membership — a veritable stockyard of War Pigs — are already drawing up plans for children not yet old enough to crawl.

“Our national security in the year 2030 is absolutely dependent upon what is going on in pre-kindergarten today,” declares Rear Admiral James Barnett, U.S. Navy (Ret.). That remark contains a veiled by unmistakable proprietary claim on all American children, including mine.

Those of us who have children look on each of them as a unique blessing from God to be loved, taught, and protected. People like Barnett look on them as fungible “national security” assets to be squandered in whatever idiotic wars our rulers arrange. They also see parents as a potential obstacle to achievement of their “national security” objectives; this was demonstrated by a recent Pentagon recruiting campaign intended to overcome parental opposition to enlistment.

If we could see things as they really are, this is how we would perceive the results of successful military recruitment.

“If members of Congress, governors, and state legislators act now to ramp up both the quantity and quality of early education programs, they can count on strong support from the retired generals of Mission: Readiness,” promises the group’s report.

This most likely foreshadows a pressure campaign in which retired flag and star officers will be deployed nation-wide to act as lobbyists for the welfare bureaucracy and government education racket.

Aristotle famously warned that children raised by “society” are equally neglected by everybody. By collectivizing responsibility for the upbringing of children, the welfare state abets that kind of neglect.

It took trillions of dollars spent on the welfare system and government school establishment to bring about the dismal social conditions lamented by Mission: Readiness. Rather than recommending a radically different approach, the group demands that the government spend additional sums to expand the same policies that produced the disaster.

I’m cynical enough to believe that the people behind that campaign are very much aware that their policy prescriptions would exacerbate many of the problems they describe, and that they intend to capitalize on the resulting social damage. Where the needs of the military-industrial complex are concerned, that approach has worked very well.

Of the fighting men sent into Iraq in 2003, Evan Wright writes the following in his recent book Generation Kill:

“These young men represent what is more or less America’s first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon [the second platoon of the Bravo Company of the Marine Corps’ First Recon Battalion, with which Wright was embedded] come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.”

“We’re like America’s little pit bull,” commented one Marine to Wright. “They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody.” Perhaps this is why the crop of warfighters harvested from our current culture displays far fewer compunctions about killing, even in a war most of them admit was begun for palpably false reasons.

“In World War II, when Marines hit the beaches, a surprisingly high percentage of them didn’t fire their weapons, even when faced with direct enemy contact,” one lieutenant informed Wright. “Not these guys. Did you see what they did to that town? They f*****g destroyed it. These guys have no problem with killing.”

The military is the state’s apparatus of murder and property destruction. The welfare state is an instrument of social demolition. They really are complimentary sides of the same debased coin.

Obiter Dicta

I’ve been traveling of late, which helps explain the week-long delay in publishing a new post. I appreciate your patience.

Yesterday (November 11), my family played host to a film crew from CNN International, which was conducting interviews and shooting footage for a story about the Christian Exodus movement, with which I’m peripherally involved. The piece should air sometime in January or February; I promise that I’ll provide details as they become available.

On the subject of Sparta’s despotic regime: One of the very first things done by Lycurgus, the founder of the proto-fascist Spartan state, was to criminalize the use of gold and silver and to issue worthless, brittle iron slugs for use as legal tender. Tyrants really are a predictable lot, aren’t they?

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Dum spiro, pugno!