Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 28:351–359

Copyright 
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN 1040-2659 print; 1469-9982 online

DOI: 10.1080/10402659.2016.1201953

Helots, Spartans, and Contemporary

Wars Within
MARC WOONS

The Helots were invited by a proclamation to pick out those of their number who
claimed to have most distinguished themselves against the enemy [Athenians], in
order that they might receive their freedom; the object being to test them, as it was
thought that the first to claim their freedom would be the most high-spirited and
the most apt to rebel. As many as two thousand were selected accordingly, who
crowned themselves and went round the temples, rejoicing in their new freedom.
The Spartans, however, soon afterwards did away with them, and no one ever knew
how each of them perished.

—Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War,

Book IV, c. 400 B.C.E.

After the invading Spartans overran the Helots’ homelands and en-
slaved them as early as the eighth century B.C.E., the Helots held an am-
bivalent place in their new society for roughly the next five centuries. They
were, on the one hand, the bedrock of Spartan society, state-owned slaves
who worked their traditional lands not in their own name, but in that of
their new masters to whom they paid tribute in perpetual servitude. On the
other hand, the considerable numerical superiority of the Helots gave the
Spartans serious cause for concern and reason to treat them as the enemy
within.

R uthless tactics were employed to prevent, and when necessary, suppress

rebellion. Spartan magistrates (Ephors) would episodically declare war
on the Helots in what was usually an annual affair, allowing Spartan citizens to
kill them with impunity. Secret state police (Krypteia) would also terrorize and
slaughter any Helot that threatened the tenuous stability of Spartan life. The
primary means of escape from a life of servitude was through military service,
and even that offered little guarantee as Thucydides reminds us. The state’s
tyranny, coercion, and use of violence only strengthened the bonds between
Helots, whose great revolts sometimes lasted years when fate intervened
through natural catastrophes or the Spartans’ costly external wars. The Helots

351
352 MARC WOONS

were, according to Aristotle, “an enemy constantly sitting in wait for the
disasters of the Spartiates.”
Helotry is not only to be found within history books devoted to Ancient
Greece, but is also present within many states today. The analogy of resistance
among ancient Helots against the Spartans with that of their contemporary
brethren is both fitting and necessary because they are conflicts of a sort
that sit uneasily within any current language on the subject. It is my hope
that imagining certain relationships as forms of Helotry might help bring
specific injustices of violence, oppression, and alienation to the fore in ways
that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to imagine and therefore act
upon.
The tyranny experienced by the ancient Helots through the occupation of
their lands and routine exploitation of their labor at the hands of the Spartans
bears a striking resemblance to the euphemized wars between many Indige-
nous peoples and so-called (and self-proclaimed) enlightened modern citizens
who impose themselves on Indigenous lands as occupiers—as colonizers, as
immigrants, as settlers, or simply as state citizens—around the world. The
following sketch unveils the broader nature of these concealed and ongoing
contemporary “wars within” in the hopes that modern Spartans, who remain
largely ignorant of the tyranny that they complicity (or explicitly) impose on
modern Helots, might realize the full implications of their actions and beliefs.
Even more than this, it is a plea for peace and nothing short of emancipation
for the Helots of today.

T his analogy’s strength depends on some fundamental comparisons ring-

ing true. The first is that Indigenous peoples, and more specifically, the
lands they have relied on since time immemorial, provide the social and eco-
nomic bedrock of modern states in places as diverse as Fennoscandia, Canada,
Ecuador, South Africa, and New Zealand. In these places and elsewhere,
(usually European) “explorers” and their followers have come to occupy—or
colonize, or settle upon, or extract from—Indigenous lands using force and
fraud, all the while convincing themselves and others that the lands they have
stumbled on are empty and/or unused.
The result has been that Indigenous peoples have become subjugated
and displaced, in some cases the victims of genocidal policies, and in others,
forced to make the difficult decision of either serving within the new order
or living on small parcels of land where Spartans hope they will languish.
Speaking to the North American context, Sioux activist and scholar Vine
Deloria, Jr. called the profound relationship that modern Spartans disrupt—or
destroy—“the fundamental conception of life as a continuing unity involving
land and people.” In the Soviet Union, collectivization supplanted traditional
Indigenous economies, forcing many “small numbered peoples of the north”
(малочисленные народы Севера) to work for the greater (read: Soviet) good.
HELOTS, SPARTANS, AND CONTEMPORARY WARS WITHIN 353

There are no signs that things are changing since the fall of communism a
quarter of a century ago.
The initial issue of Peace Review in 1989 included an article about
modern Helotry, even if not expressed using such terms. In “Violence in
Paradise,” Bruno Barillot wrote about the Kanak people of Melanesia, who
came to live under French colonial rule in the mid-nineteenth century. In
discussing the origins of what the French colonizers renamed New Cale-
donia (and the locals now call Kanaky), he writes, “punitive expeditions
against the Kanaks multiplied. Finally on September 24, 1853 France of-
ficially took possession of this territory. French colonists began to install
themselves on lands confiscated from Melanesian tribes. Little by little they
pushed the Kanak people into reserves to make room for cattle farms, which
soon prospered.” Predictably, resistance ensued as, “the Kanak people, for
their part, rebelled periodically against the colonization that was pushing
them back into the mountainous parts of the island. Each time, their demon-
strations of independence were repressed in blood by the French army. The
great revolt of 1878 left 1,600 natives dead, a veritable hecatomb on the
local scale, and was accompanied by further confiscations of land.” The
parallels are so striking that in writing these words it is easy to imagine
Barillot had the story of ancient Sparta and its relationships with the Helots in
mind.
Barillot’s prognosis almost a century and a half later was more cautious
than optimistic: colonial masters in France using negotiations to buy time
in what is a typical response to separatist unrest, doing little about the fun-
damentally structural nature of ongoing political and economic disparities.
Indeed, to suppress rebellious acts in 1988 the French government inhu-
manely used violence against Kanaks to obtain information about separatist
rebels who were in some cases “summarily executed” upon being discovered.
Although a referendum on independence is slated to be held between now
and 2018, “Spartans” today make up almost half the total population making
it even more unclear how weakening ties with France will reverse the broader
marginalization of the islands’ original inhabitants and the fact that they re-
main largely alienated from their lands. In this light, New Caledonia’s new
motto and anthem, both recently adopted in 2010, would seem ironic if they
were not intentionally designed to be paradoxical in the sense of only creating
the illusion of progress and peace by respectively calling Kanaky the land of
sharing (terre de partage) and singing of unity and brotherhood (soyons unis,
devenons frères).

W hile many, if not most, modern Helots have not been enslaved in the
narrower sense of being exploited for their labor, in the broader sense
Indigenous peoples have generally had little choice but to obey their Spartan
masters no matter how benevolent they might have become. Unlike in ancient
354 MARC WOONS

times, modern Spartans would eventually have the numbers and the tech-
nology to do the work themselves, which goes some distance in explaining
why the contemporary focus is less on forced labor and more on accessing
and exploiting Indigenous lands. All of these relationships—both ancient and
modern—center on the continued exploitation of Helot lands and resources
in the name of the state. As Stephen Hodkinson, a leading expert on slavery
in Sparta, writes, “the essential function of the vast majority of the Helot
population was to cultivate the Spartans’ landholdings and to deliver suffi-
cient produce to enable them to sustain their position as a citizen elite with
a near full-time devotion to civic and military affairs.” Although the means
differ slightly, modern states, like the ancient Spartan state, owe much of their
existence and subsequent flourishing to Helot lands—now considered to be
“their landholdings”—even if the element of slave labor is not always clearly
evident.
Dene political philosopher Glen Coulthard has recently reinforced this
point nicely, writing that “the history and experience of dispossession, not
proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the
character of the historical background relationship between Indigenous peo-
ples and the Canadian state [ . . . ] that dispossession continues to inform the
dominant modes of Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship
has provoked.” Modern economies, now as much as ever, depend on such dis-
possession and the continued extraction of resources from Indigenous lands
so that Spartans can maintain their lavish living standards, compete in global
markets, solve their presumed security dilemmas, and more. To the extent
that they assert their view of the good life, or “progress,” at the expense of
Indigenous peoples who can no longer pursue theirs, modern Spartans bear
much more than just a striking resemblance to the Spartans of old. They are
Spartans through and through.

T he second similarity pertains to the way Indigenous peoples are treated as

a constant threat to the stability of the existing order—as enemies within.
This conflict has only been exacerbated in modern times by state-building
projects that seek to exclude or assimilate culturally different groups using
Westphalian notions of exclusive sovereignty. For instance, in 1798, a century
and a half after the Peace of Westphalia, Irish Helots under the banner of the
Society of United Irishmen rebelled against what sociologist Michael Hechter
would later call the internal colonization of the Celtic fringe at the hands of
the British. Describing this oppression in 1785, William Drennan, a Society
co-founder, wrote that:

[E]very nation under the sun must be placed in one of two conditions. It must be free
or enslaved. I make no scruple in affirming that there is no medium between those
two situations; and if we are deceived into the belief that there is such an intermediate
HELOTS, SPARTANS, AND CONTEMPORARY WARS WITHIN 355

state, it is by mistaking the prudent moderation of tyrants, the mildness of modern

managers, or the gentle but powerful influence of religion for public liberty.

The British quelled the rebellion in 1800 and maintained their oppressive ways
for more than a century more until (approximately five-sixths of) Ireland was
freed following its War of Independence from 1919 to 1921.
A similar struggle with perhaps a less positive outcome persists between
Canadian (and, earlier, British) Spartans and the Tsilhqot’in. When British
settlers began unilaterally exploring and eventually developing Tsilhqot’in
lands as part of a late-nineteenth-century gold rush in what most now call
British Columbia, the Tsilhqot’in saw it as an invasion tantamount to an act of
war. When they retaliated by killing fourteen settler workers in 1864, the then
Colony of British Columbia lured the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs to a meeting on a
promise of talking peace. They were instead arrested. During the subsequent
trial, the Colony’s Judge, Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, dismissed the chiefs’
arguments. He called their actions murder in a time of peace, not an act of
international war, but part of an unlawful and domestic uprising. True to his
nickname as “The Hanging Judge,” all six were sentenced and hanged. Luring
them to town with promises of peace, and deceitfully feeding the narrative
of negotiation after a period of war once again reveals striking parallels
with the Spartan trickery in Thucydides’ story, and their false promises of
freedom.
After more than a century and a half of colonization the Tsilhqot’in
continue to fight for their freedom, now primarily in Spartan courts. They do
so against a state that, echoing Drennan, claims “prudence,” “moderation,”
“mildness,” and “gentleness,” and uses newer words like pluralism and multi-
culturalism, even though all these ideas and associated political practices deny
much of the freedom they enjoyed before being invaded, overwhelmed, and
oppressed. The similarity of these political patterns is evident even if modern
Spartans perceive themselves as being kind, generous, or even just.

I n Canada, Indigenous peoples face higher incarceration rates than average,

and many within their communities experience abuse, go missing, or are
murdered at rates many times higher than general averages. State attempts
to tempt, co-opt, marginalize, and ultimately silence Indigenous peoples are
all too often successful. In some extreme cases, supposed Indigenous leaders
start acting like Spartans themselves by mistreating their own people—a more
tragic aspect of neo-colonialism. In places as different as the Philippines and
Peru, Indigenous leaders fighting to protect and regain control of traditional
lands against extractive industries are regularly being killed or simply disap-
pear. Even though the means sometimes differ, it is as in ancient Sparta where
more powerful Helots who showed military promise were simply done away
with “and no one ever knew how each of them perished.”
356 MARC WOONS

In response, modern Helots also eagerly await opportunities to strike

back in the name of restoring their lost freedom. We should therefore not be
surprised that much like the Helots of old, unique and pan-Indigenous iden-
tities are indeed strengthened by this oppression. In an article appropriately
entitled “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism,”
Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred and his Cherokee colleague Jeff Corntassel
tie the strength of Indigenous bonds to an “oppositional, place-based existence,
along with the consciousness of being in struggle against the dispossessing
and demeaning fact of colonization by foreign peoples.” Sadly, independence
is not on the immediate horizon for most Indigenous peoples despite century-
long struggles with European colonizers and their settler offspring. Unless
Spartans wake up to these “wars within” and pursue peace in good faith,
Indigenous peoples will similarly continue to lie in wait for any opportunity
to secure victories both large and small at the expense of Spartans, who have
so far done too little to foster peace and trust in the spirit of co-operation and
mutual respect.

M ainstream contemporary language on war struggles to describe the situ-

ations facing Indigenous peoples today as clearly as Helotry does. This
is because ongoing wars between modern Spartans and Indigenous peoples
exhibit two features that, particularly when combined, shroud such wars so
profoundly that those who need to dig deep for any signs of their existence
and have the power to change the situation for the better, also have the least
incentive to do so. First, the wars are drastically asymmetrical to the extent
that Spartans believe they live in a time of profound peace while Helots, whose
voices are suppressed by the very violence and oppression being questioned
here, know the truth is otherwise. And, second, the international and predomi-
nantly one-sided violent conflicts are euphemized, concealed, and transmuted
into “domestic” and “minor” forms of unrest, individual challenges, or—when
absolutely necessary—labeled as exceptional acts of terrorism against the
“well-ordered” state. With respect to this last point, states are increasingly
passing legislation labeling Indigenous peoples (and environmentalist allies)
eco-extremists or eco-terrorists for getting in the way of state-supported re-
source extraction and development projects taking place on traditional Helot
lands.
The combined effect of these two factors is powerful. It creates the
appearance, at least to the masses and to the world, that there is no war,
at the same time as Indigenous peoples continue to experience tremendous
daily suffering as they try to escape tyranny using any of the limited means
available to them. In an attempt to make this more explicit, I show how typical
definitions of war, both general and specific, can highlight various dimensions
of these contemporary wars within even as they miss the mark in one way or
another.
HELOTS, SPARTANS, AND CONTEMPORARY WARS WITHIN 357

Consider the broad definition found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Phi-

losophy: “war should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread
armed conflict between political communities.” Spartans all too often claim
that peace reigns, and that any conflict is sporadic (not actual) and local
(not widespread). Prominent Hungarian peace researcher István Kende would
likely concur that Helotry typically falls short given that skirmishes are occa-
sional and spontaneous rather than sustained. Yet, for Indigenous Helots, these
criteria are easily met given the conflict that comes from always living under
the yoke of another, and the associated struggle to break free from oppressive
structures. The infrequency in which the wider community experiences even
a modicum of their pain while forcibly sustaining their idea of “peace” should
instead be seen as reflecting just how asymmetrical the war is, and entrenched
and widespread Spartan domination and obfuscation has become. Simply put,
in such situations the absence of violent conflict should not deceive us into
believing there is an absence of war or an abundance of peace.

S ome more specific and commonly accepted ideas of war apply to sit-
uations facing Indigenous people, even if only partially or imperfectly,
reinforcing my belief that the term “war” suits such situations, albeit in ways
that can be difficult to capture. Two immediately come to mind: occupation
and wars of liberation/decolonization. Defining occupation under interna-
tional law, according to Eyal Benvenisti, involves a twofold criteria: “[1] the
effective control of power [ . . . ] over a territory to which [2] that power has
no sovereign title, without the volition of the sovereign of that territory.” The
definition certainly comes close, especially on the first point that Spartans
effectively control Helot territory. A problem arises, however, on the second
point given that Spartans tend to resist any and all legitimate Helot counter-
claims to sovereignty over the territories in question, claiming them as their
own in acts of collective amnesia.
Spartans in many cases even mistakenly believe sovereignty has vol-
untarily been handed over to them. One might respond that these are better
understood as permanent annexations to another state, yet in most cases the
previous colonial masters have already left settler Spartans and native Helots to
their shared fate. Although it is true that such colonies become free from the di-
rect influence of the former imperial center, settler Spartans generally change
very little, all the while still receiving international support for their claim
to sovereignty over that of the original inhabitants. One of the most tragic
consequences stemming from the powers that be denying Helot claims to
sovereignty within their traditional territories is that the democratic option to
secede is denied to them, as are meaningful forms of shared sovereignty that
might better reflect contemporary circumstances when separation is neither
possible nor desirable.
358 MARC WOONS

Given that there is little chance that occupation will be internally rec-
ognized, external support for wars of national liberation or decolonization
predominantly experienced in places like Africa and Asia might seem like a
better fit, if not a last resort. The prominent legal definition, found in Article
1(4) of Protocol I of the Geneva Convention (1949), includes: “armed conflicts
in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation
and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination,
as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration on
Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-
operation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”
Yet, if Yoram Dinstein’s analysis of international opinion on the sub-
ject is correct, Indigenous claims also gain little traction in this area. He
writes, “Over the years—with the process of decolonization of European pos-
sessions overseas largely accomplished, and following the collapse of the
Soviet Union—the pressure to support ‘wars of national liberation’ has sub-
sided.” This is most evident in the United Nations’ support for the Blue Water
Thesis (also know as the Salt Water Thesis), enshrined under General Assem-
bly Resolution 637 (VII) in 1952. The Resolution establishes an international
norm whereby only Helots clearly geographically separated from Spartans
can be freed, thereby leaving “domestic” Indigenous Helots to their fate; that
is, under Spartan thumbs.
Unfortunately for them, the alternative Belgium Thesis lost out, which
according to Michla Pomerance would have also included “disenfranchised
indigenous peoples living within the borders of independent states, especially
if the race, language, and culture of these peoples differed from those of
the dominant population.” Even the recently celebrated 2007 United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which enshrines the Indige-
nous right to self-determination under article 3, and many other powerful and
important rights in other articles, gives modern Spartans an out. Article 46
basically stipulates that nothing in the Declaration can be taken as challeng-
ing the sovereignty of existing states, even partially. The hierarchy therefore
remains firmly in place.

A s a concluding thought on the nature of Helotry as wars within, I believe it

is useful to consider the distinction between direct and structural violence
made by prominent peace researcher Johan Galtung. War and violence need
not involve soldiers nor police armed with guns. Nor must it involve the use of
destructive war machines. It can result from structures—which he describes as
unintended and indirect—equally capable of inflicting suffering, repression,
and even death on those unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end.
In invoking the idea of Helotry, I have argued that this mistaken per-
ception of unintended and indirect violence must be made fully explicit so
that it—and the violence it perpetuates on Indigenous bodies and minds—can
HELOTS, SPARTANS, AND CONTEMPORARY WARS WITHIN 359

be challenged and overcome. Unless the lines are drastically blurred between
intended and unintended and between direct and indirect warfare, modern
Spartans might never realize their own complicity in such structures of vi-
olence and the role they must inevitably play in replacing exploitation and
oppression with peace and, perhaps one day, even friendship.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
Alfred, Taiaiake and Jeff Corntassel. 2005. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contem-
porary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40(4): 597–614.
Coulthard, Glen. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Drennan, William. 1785. Letters of Orellana, an Irish helot, To The Seven Northern Counties
Not Represented In The National Assembly of Delegates, Held at Dublin, October, 1784,
For Obtaining A more Equal Representation of the People in the Parliament of Ireland.
Originally Published in the Belfast News-Letter. Dublin, Ireland: J. Chambers and T. Heery.
Hechter, Michael. 1975. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Develop-
ment, 1536–1966. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Luraghi, Nino and Susan Alcock (eds.). 2004. Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and
Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Swanky, Tom. 2013. The True Story of Canada’s “War” of Extermination on the Pacific—Plus
the Tsilhqot’in and other First Nations Resistance. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada:
Dragon Heart.

Marc Woons is an FWO Doctoral Fellow with the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven. He
is the author of numerous articles on Indigenous–state relations and the editor of Restoring Indigenous
Self-Determination (E-IR Publishing, 2015). E-mail: marc.woons@hiw.kuleuven.be
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