The Sparta certainly practiced infanticide (as did many ancient societies), but out of eugenics not out of race. The Greeks could be extraordinarily ethnocentric, but there's almost no evidence of racism in Sparta or anywhere else in Greece, even though they were certainly aware of somatic differences.

The Spartans were not "completely undemocratic": they had a citizen assembly with a limited right of veto, a council of elders, ephors (public guardians) with strong executive powers who could control the kings' conduct, settle disputes between them, and prosecute them before the Spartan supreme court (made up of the gerousia -- the elders council -- and the ephors). Note the plural kings -- Sparta was ruled by two kings, a poor translation of the Greek basileus and not at all what we in English think of the word kings.

The Spartans did not keep "an entire sub-culture of slaves." They ruled over in a complex relationship peoples called the helots. The Spartans did and so did others. The name helots designates not an ethnicity or race or culture, but derives from the Greek for captured, through battle. They were undoubtedly a subjugated class and the Spartan did engage in some horrible, brutal practices against them, no doubt. But the helots weren't outright slaves. Some Greek states, including Sparta, had these servile populations but they were not privately owned-chattel and had a superior status to slaves in many important respects. The ancients regarded them as being somewhere between free men and slaves. The Messenian helots had a much worse relationship with their overlords than the helots of Laconia (Sparta), some of whom established close working relationships with them and were employed on a large scale in the Spartan army and eventually liberated in substantial numbers. Helots probably outnumbered the total free populations of Laconia and Messenia, something unknown in chattel-owning communities. Also, helots controlled their own family dynamics, not being threatened with being sold off as slaves -- they reproduced as they wished and kept their families together. Although the helots were collectively the property of the Spartan state, they were not individually owned, and they did possess some of their own property rigths. The helots provided the Spartans (and others) with military manpower and with a fixed quota of natural produce. So, they possessed an ambivalent position of being the bedrock of the entire Spartan polity and also the enemy within. In any event, the Messenians freed them in 369 and the Spartans in the early 2nd century.

"Well... They didn't keep slaves domestically, and I haven't heard that they killed their own infants. So they didn't do some of that."

The slaves were in something you might otherwise know as concentration camps (or ghettos). Hitler specifically in Mein Kampf speaks of the enslavement and gradual annihiliation of "non-aryans".  They were being farmed out as slave labor to all the major factories in German controlled territories during the war.

As for killing their own infants? It was a specific part of the Nazi eugenics program to put to death infants with birth defects, children, adolescents and even adults with severe mental problems or mental retardation. This wasn't just a proposed policy, they'd actually started carrying it out.  Which is not to say that all doctors or all parents co-operated with this policy, but implementation had started and it was their full intent to carry it out consistently.

••

Most of Germany's military hardware was build by slave labor. (An
interesting statistic from WW2: American weapons almost never jammed
or misfired, while the Germans had an ongoing problem with this.
Coincidence?)

As to the killing of infants, once again it is necessary to remember that
many of the people -- men, women and children -- killed in the "final
solution" were Germans. The Nazis had no qualms about killing
their own people.

They didn't keep slaves domestically

----------------------------------------------------

Oh, well then its okay.

Pardon my usual sarcasm, but some of the comments I have read on this thread have furthered my belief that we have allowed freedom of speech to become freedom of ignorance.

Who said it was okay? Are you calling me ignorant because I said that Spartans weren't Nazis?

IMP.

Keeping slaves is keeping slaves whether domestically or not.

You point was that Spartans kept slaves whereas Nazis did not.

JB responded that the Nazis did infact keep slaves.

You responded "not domestically."

Don't twist it now... keeping a slave is what it is. But in those times it was acceptable. Which makes it more forgivable than when slaves are kept in the 20th century after centuries of progress.

Keeping slaves in the US is bad whenever it happens, but it would be MORE bad to keep a slave in 2009 as opposed to 1765 (when it was legal and common practice).

••

I'd be more inclined to say making it legal would actually make it worse.
When you have an irredeemably horrible concept like slavery, you really,
really, really don't want the government endorsing it!

(Ultimately the whole concept of better/worse falls apart in a scenario
like this, tho. It's like the difference between being poked in the eye with
a dull stick as opposed to a sharp one.}

good points all around.

My thought, maybe not expertly stated, was that comparing to decades is difficult let alone over thousands of years.