I mentioned the film 300 in my last mailing, and it brought to mind something else that I had written about it some ten years ago, and that has a certain current relevance. I submit an extract from it.
". . . One of the unconsciously funniest
moments in it—and there are several—is the final battle scene where the Spartan
contingent of a united Greek army move against the Persians under the
battle-cry of ‘We rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny!’ Leaving aside the historical implausibility
of it, there is also the purely human implausibility. Individuals may sometimes be moved by the
call of reason, but armies, I would suggest, seldom are. What moves armies is a mixture of the more
primitive emotions, for example, hate, fear, greed, or the desire to protect
one’s homeland. One cannot envisage an
army moving forward with any enthusiasm under such a slogan, no more than if
its leader cried ‘Forward for the cube root of nine!’ or ‘Charge in the name of
Darwinism!’
The dilemma of the
modern liberal was most sharply defined by easily the best film of the last
twelve months, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.
The fact that it was nominated for only a minor Oscar (which it failed
to win) reflects perhaps more the reaction to Gibson’s anti-Semitic outburst in
Hollywood than any generalised liberal response. After all, the general liberal consensus now
is one of covert anti-Semitism under the guise of being anti-Israel. Yet all the liberal film-reviewers suffered a
sort of schizophrenia in dealing with this film. Compelled on the one hand to admit that it
was a brilliant cinematic achievement, they sought to compensate by nitpicking
and disparaging the director. Even while
forced to praise it, Sukdhu Sandhu, film critic of the British Daily
Telegraph, felt the need to comment that Mel Gibson was ‘one of the
stupidest of front-line contemporary directors’. The reason for this lies in the underlying
message of Gibson’s film.
The secret of Mel
Gibson’s Apocalypto lies in the quotation from Will Durrant with which
he prefaces it: ‘A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it
has destroyed itself from within!’ There
is also no doubt that Gibson is drawing parallels between the collapse of the
Mayan Empire and the situation of our own civilization in modern times. In plain language what he is saying to the
left-liberals is that their out-of-control agenda of extreme anti-sexism,
anti-racism, anti-homophobia, and anti-whatever-else-you-might-have, is not the
harbinger of some new millennium in human affairs but rather a symptom of the
decay of the existing order. Rather than
being part of the solution, current left-liberalism is part of the
problem. Like the mass of spectators in
the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the ruling social junta of
liberalism, degenerate socialism, militant feminism, and militant homosexuality
cannot see, and cannot allow itself to see, that it is caught in the tailspin
of a declining historical epoch.
Let us imagine a
scene perhaps not too many years down the line.
Despite continuous secular liberal bleating and wishful thinking, Europe nevertheless finds itself confronted by a massive
and hostile challenge from, say, the east or the south. Under what battle-flag might Europe then mobilise its forces? Against mysticism and for reason? For the liberal agenda? In defence of the woman’s right to
choose? For gay marriage? I don’t think so. It would be a very ragged army that would
line up under such slogans—if any army at all.
In the course of
the fall of the Roman Empire and its aftermath, it was Christianity that
provided the mainspring of resistance to the barbarian invasions—not nostalgia
for Roman plumbing or urban planning or Latin culture, no matter how beneficial
in themselves (and equally threatened) these things might have been. The causes that move people best have always
a touch of transcendence about them that raises them to a higher
level—something that the self-indulgent program of modern liberalism is by its
very nature incapable of achieving.
Trotsky wrote of
the Czarist army that it was an ideal weapon for the suppression of internal
dissent, but once it was faced by external challenge then it proved
useless. So be it with the trendy modern
left-liberal conspiracy: it rules through its internal power of destroying
lives and reputations by means of character assassination, mockery and
victimisation. In academia positions are
being lost and careers ruined through a failure to bow deeply enough to the
prevailing orthodoxy. There is a
rational case to be made against the theoretical underpinnings of all the
various –isms. Except that those
who should be making it are either running scared or compromising out of
self-interest. There’s a religious case
that could be made as well. But even the
priests, it seems, are heading for the hills.
The problem is
that in the failure of either religious or rational opinion to take on the
left-liberal ideological junta the way is left open for those who press the
more emotional and visceral human bells.
Failure to stand up to the militant feminists and their dogsbodies leaves
the way open for a renewed Nazism in whatever guise it might take. And this is potentially the most dreadful
scenario, pregnant as it is with the possibility of destruction of what it is
that makes us human, not to mention the possibility of actual world
destruction. Films such as 300
are, I suggest, harbingers of the way things are going."
