verging_on_random

Grasping at historical straws

March 16, 2007 on 10:43 pm | In Uncategorized |

I don’t take much interest in movies any more. There are exceptions, of course, but most of them are so obsessed with faux violence and special effects that they’re just boring.

So anyone reading probably knows more than I do about a movie called 300 that was released not long ago in the USA (and here for all I know). It sounds like another ridiculous distortion of history: an opportunity to dress up in period costumes and use stilted dialogue.

However, in the USA something decidely weird has happened. The remaining neo-cons have seized on 300 as a parable of US intervention in the Middle East and in a hilariously crazy way, used it to justify what passes for foreign policy in George W Bush’s America.

Here are some gems from one of the USA’s foremost neo-con blogs:

The problem isn’t that 300 offers too few theories of Spartan greatness, it is that, behind all the stylized blood spatter, it offers so many. Not the least of which is that that a people that honors its artists and scholars above its warriors eventually becomes a weak, effeminate people.

Who could she mean? (Yes it’s a woman, Megan somebody … Ann Coulter’s inspired a whole generation of American Madame Defarges whose knickers are permanently wet at the thought of Men Fighting and Dying for Freedom.) Anyway you whistle and I’ll point, I reckon she’s having a go at those Olde European countries like France and Germany. The ones who honour their artists and scholars above their warriors. Or maybe she means the Chinese, who knows? Certainly not Australia, anyway, we only honour our sporting gods.

Megan’s an old-fashioned militarist. I’m sure she would just love to be a North Korean, where you can hardly move without tripping over a parade full of grimly efficient soldiers. For instance:

The grim efficiency of the Spartan career soldiers stands in stark contrast to the brave but incompetent Athenians who hack away at the enemy like, well, like a bunch of actors and craftsmen.

Just to allow a tiny bit of historical perspective into Megan’s fantasies, the Sparta she so admires was a totalitarian oligarchy and Athens, which she clearly despises, was the original democracy. I remember when Americans prided themselves on being citizens of a democracy but obviously people like Megan no longer feel that way. They just want to kill people.

Is it also relevant that the Battle of Thermopylae was what we historians call a ‘defeat’? It’s the ancient equivalent of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava: c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. Oops, my Olde European bias is showing. Anyway the ‘grim efficient’ Spartans were comprehensively beaten. The war against Persia was actually won by those effete Athenians who won a naval battle a few months afterwards, which threatened the Persian lines of supply and sent it scurrying for home.

BTW did you pick up on the key word in that last paragraph? Yes it was ‘Persia‘, aka Iran. Now you can see where Megan’s coming from. In her fevered imagination the Battle of Thermopylae is a splendid example of how Teh West should stand up to the Beast from the East.

[The Spartans’] unwillingness to become slaves to an ideology from the East helped preserve the tenets of Western Civilization for generations.

Which of course is the purest horseshit, revealing the depths of Megan’s ignorance, or maybe her dishonesty. The Peloponnesian Wars were about ideology? Come off it Megan, next thing you’ll be telling us the Persians were Islamo-Fascists.

Someone should explain to Megs that at the time of the Greco-Persian wars Persia was immeasurably more civilised than the Greek city-states, which were little more than fortified tribal encampments. Megan would have run screaming if she’d encountered a Spartan in a dark alley. She would have found the Persians much more her kind of people. In fact if anyone wants to play one of those silly parallel history games on a wet afternoon, they could easily run a persuasive argument that Europe would have turned out a whole lot better if the Persians had won.

But Megan’s not going to be deterred by a few inconvenient historical realities. She’s going to use this film to glorify the Bush Administration no matter what anyone says:

The filmmakers didn’t have to impose parallels with today’s geo-political reality; history had already done it for them.

Cue helpless mirth.

If you can be bothered going and reading the whole childish ‘film review’ you’ll see how Good Brave Spartan King Leonidas is George W Bush, the gutless Council is the Democrat Congress, the priests are the liberal traitors of their day and so on. Megan frames the whole film as a moral fable in which the Brave and the Good go forth to fight the enemy because it’s the Right Thing To Do.

I don’t know, however, if Dubya will altogether appreciate Megan’s historical analogy. You see every Spartan soldier at Thermopylae was slaughtered and George W Leonidas was decapitated by the Persians. So if Megan’s suggesting that 300 is a fable for our times and Thermopylae was the Iraq War of its day, then the portents for the occupation ain’t looking good.

After all her blather, Megan closes with this ringing peroration:

Their very discomfort reveals the most significant key to the greatness of the men who died at Thermopylae. Those with the will to win carry the day.

Except Megs that’s totally illogical. They didn’t carry the day at all. They lost. They all got killed. ‘Those with the will to win’ … got beaten.

Therefore on Megan’s reading of the historical tea leaves Iraq’s looking like a bit of a disaster. Maybe the ‘anemic intellectual types [who] tend to feel a bit defensive (and perhaps inadequate?) in the face of such traditionally masculine sentiments as honor and country’ might have to save the day after all.

I wonder what the effeminate French Navy’s doing next month?