printNamby-pamby libertarians and Objectivists are forever waxing silly about the comic book creations of Superman or Batman as the quintessential American heroes. How sad and what philosophically childish twaddle. How can any person with a brain take seriously the symbolism that has been squeezed from these characters?
I don’t give a dried camel’s hump for the above nonsense, but the 300 Spartans who, the Battle of Thermopylae, took on over 200,000 Persians intent on invading and enslaving the free Greek city-states —now that’s an entirely different matter. I seldom visit the cinema anymore, but this is a film I intend to see on the big screen. Even if it disappoints —and with a great deal of animation involved, and having already been immortalized as a comic strip, it has the potential to be cartoonish.
The story is nothing short of inspirational and is, quite plainly, the reason for Western Civilization. For if not for those 300 Spartans and 700 Thespian volunteers who placed themselves in the way of the mighty people the historian Herodotus called the “Barbarians,” Western Civilization as we know it would not have come into being.
Whether this film makes this point (as a similar film made in 1962 did) I do not know. If anyone of our readers has seen it, do tell us too whether Herodotus’ appellation for the Persians was used, or whether the screenplay writers reverted to modern-day political correctness.
Ultimately, the 300 and their Thespian brothers-in-arms are not only Greek heroes; they are ours. A nation’s heroes, even mythical, reveal a lot about that nation. Superman and Batman showcase the frivolity of the American psyche.
Update: Debbie Schlussel reviews “300.” “This is a man’s movie,” she writes, which is fine by me. I hate chick flicks. I’ve never seen “Pretty Woman,” or that other film about two all-night drunks or insomniacs engaged in a pity fest, turned love affair. Or something along those soporific lines. The Indian, immigrant-experience film Schlussel raves about above her “300” run-down would make me snooze. I certainly would not inflict it on Sean. The rest of her comments, however, indicate “300” is short on history and long on porn and other grotesqueries, aimed at “the video-gamer slacker dummies,” as she puts it. I was hoping just this time Hollywood would deliver. What a shame. Perhaps we should just all stay home and rent “The 300 Spartans” (1962).
The Deniers Strike/Update: Historical deniers are everywhere with their brand of deceit. I’m no historian, but I certainly don’t intend to give a platform to the pseudo-historians who’ve tried to post comments propounding their idiosyncratic version of the Battle of Thermopylae, positing, first, that the Spartans were just “jerks,” whose strange faith mandated that they stay and fight until the end. Of course, this slight is a non sequitur. Someone can posses a balmy belief system and still exhibit courage and heroism. Moreover, if the Spartans’ faith obligated them to all die if victory was unobtainable, why did Leonidas dismiss the army and retain a select few to stay and fight?
The other misleading statement —or rather outright lie —was that the Spartan’s “stopped nobody and saved no Western civilization whatsoever. They lost, the Persians forwarded, and that was pretty much that.”
The Greeks won thanks to the brilliant strategy Leonidas and his seafaring Athenian colleagues devised. According to Wikipedia:
The fierce resistance of the Spartan-led army offered Athens the invaluable time to prepare for a decisive naval battle that would come to determine the outcome of the war. The subsequent Greek victory at the Battle of Salamis left much of the Persian navy destroyed and Xerxes was forced to retreat back to Asia, leaving his army in Greece under Mardonius, who was to meet the Greeks in battle one last time. The Spartans assembled at full strength and led a pan-Greek army that defeated the Persians decisively at the Battle of Plataea, ending the Greco-Persian War and with it Persian expansion into Europe.
I have a special detestation for the assaults on truth by assorted historical deniers (scroll down to follow other entries on the topic. My Junk Science Archive is useful too, and in particular this and this). This is not the forum for them.
Update # 3: Not that I didn’t know it, but comments on the blog confirm that honorable men aspire to be heroic. Part of the tragedy of modern, metrosexual manhood is the breakdown of more traditional gender roles —a dissolution championed by feminism, its assorted permutations, and the state. Good men have been denied —and denuded of —their need to be defenders.
Loved it. Heroes that one wishes he could die with.
I was always more fascinated by the Spartans than anything having to deal with Batman. I thought both Batman and Superman were silly.
The thing that makes the 300 so mythical wasn’t just their deeds, it was even the comments they made during and even before battle. When a Persian commented that the arrows would block out the sun itself, a stoic Spartan [King Leonidas] simply stated, ‘then we will fight in the shade.’ The battle, the statements made, and the overal symbolism was so fantastic and outrageous that even the great Greek mythological writers would be hard pressed to come up with a story as grand, and even if they did, it would sound phony if not for us knowing the truth.
Truly, the Spartans were Supermen.
I haven’t seen the film yet but certainly will. When the Persian king sent word to Leonidas tht he would spare Leonidas and his men if they would surrender their weapons and step aside Leonidas simply replied “Molon Labbe”. (Probably misspeled.) Meaning, roughly, come and get them. The Spartans at
Thermopylae, the Texans at the Alamo, the Foreign Legion at Camerone, the Americans at Bastogne. Courage and devotion to duty displayed in the face of overwhelming odds. An inspiration..
Batman, Superman and other super heroes feed the natural appetite that young boys have for heroic men to look up to. That appetite is not well served by the history education that they receive in our politically correct, leftist, multicultural public schools. Perhaps if our schools did a better job of teaching about the many instances of heroism in the story of the rise of Western Civilization young boys would have their nose in history books instead of comic books.
Teachers could do well by teaching the meaning of the last line of the “Declaration of the Independence” which states, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Clearly these were men like Leonides who understood the magnitude of their risk and the righteousness of their case. And, like Leonides and the 300, many of the signers ended up giving their lives for the cause.
Borrowing from Sir Isaac Newton in a different context I believe that truly, “we stand on the shoulders of giants.”
What a nice pun against gamers like myself by Debbie. I guess since we’re stereotyping, you should take people’s guns away because they’ll kill everyone, you shouldn’t let women drive because they’ll crash into each other, blacks only eat chicken, etc.
For G*d’s sake, this gamer hears enough about how gamer culture and gamers are idiots from people who know nothing about games. Some are, some aren’t. This gamer, for example, is probably smarter than the person who wrote that article. At the very least, I’m certainly more polite, and I have enough of an active mind not to enjoy the mindlessly boring drivel that she gushes about. What an uneducated, impolite critic.
I looked forward to seeing it because the author, Frank Miller, cites Ayn Rand’s The Romantic Manifesto as a source for his inspiration for his stories and characters. A theme explored in the movie is a Rand mantra: “logic and reason” against “mysticism and tyrrany.” I saw the film and enjoyed the movie’s imagery and themes despite the sex scenes and high-octane violence. I’m sure many of the 10 million people who saw it this weekend enjoyed it despite the imagery and themes. Either way, I would certainly recommend it.
“300” is art. It depicts King Leonides and his 300 personal guards as men as they ‘could be and should be’. Unfortunately this concept is foreign to too many today. There were two young Marines leaving the theater. They looked at each other and simultaneously said “Semper Fi.” It sent a chill down my spine.
I guess 300 could be seen as ‘art’, but it’s not historically correct..
The thing is, 300 is an excellent piece to make the point that Hollywood has popularize and overdo everything it does in order to make it trendy. The Spartan War was so fantastic, so epic, and so nearly unbelievable in it’s scope, meaning, and deeds and words of those who fought that there is absolutely no need to try to make it exciting. That’s the whole point of the Battle of Thermopylae; it was so epic and unbelievable that if someone created it in fiction, it would come off as being hokey.
In trying to make the unbelievable even more so, Hollywood seems to have again bitten the dirt. What a shame..
Haven’t seen it yet, plan to.
The military historian Hans Delbruck has a different, and equally courageous, explanation of the stand there. He argues the Spartans must have known that every pass can be flanked. There are always small paths around it, and bigger ones at a distance, and this was known of that pass in antiquity. Moreover, when the Spartans suggested Leonidas take more men, it is reported he refused, saying that he did not go to the pass to hold it, but to die there, and no sense taking more men with him.
Delbruck’s explanation is political. Persia had offered Sparta incredible terms. It would rule all of Greece, as a subject empire. No Persian troops would invade Sparta. The Spartan army would become a key part of Persia’s forces and be honored and rewarded accordingly. The rest of Greece trembled … if Persia and Sparta united, they were doomed. And one of Sparta’s two kings had already defected.
Thermopylae had an emotional significance. To Greeks, it was where Greek territory began. So the king of Sparta and 300 Spartan peers died in the pass, in a hopeless stand, to deny the Persians their first inch of Greek soil.
Any question now where Sparta stands?
I understand the Iranians are enraged about the film because it casts Persians in a bad light. Of course, when aren’t they enraged about something. If that scruffy looking rodent, The president with the unpronounceable name, doesn’t like the film I will see it twice and buy the video. (There I go again. Disrespecting rodents.)
What the Spartans accomplished was miraculous. They held up the mighty Persian army with King Xerxes at its head. The psychological impact the Spartan defense of the Gates had on both sides must have been enormous. If we look at the correlation of forces one doesn’t have to be a historian to understand that.
As for deniers; the need of many writers and historians to destroy the honor of the brave always amazes. They stand behind their keyboards and judge men who faced certain death and it can be supposed that they attempt to keep from coming up short in comparison.
I opened up the comments by saying “Heroes that one wishes he could die with.” Let me change that to read, These were heroes that men wish they could die with.
“the need of many writers and historians to destroy the honor of the brave always amazes.”
Not so amazing when you think about it. To some, the courage of others is a reproach to them – for only too obvious reasons.
I see two reactions to heroic deeds and individuals: the deifiers and the deniers. The first would make demigods out of heroes, the latter would deny their heroism altogether. But both have the same effect, they put heroism beyond our reach.
When you accept that heroes are men and women not too different from yourself, you also face the realization that when circumstances demand like behavior from you – you have no excuse not to rise to the occasion.
I’m baffled at the way the Spartans have recently been raised up as paragons of Western virtues. Beside their physical bravery, there is little admirable about their society.
They were able to devote themselves wholly to military practice only because they sat at the top of a economic structure built on one of the most brutal slave regimes the world has seen. The Spartans lived in contant terror of an uprising of the subjugated helots, and the initiation of young Spartan men involved creeping into helot villages and slitting the throats of any helots who demonstrated intelligence or leadership qualities.
The institutionalized pederasty of the Spartan system also seems at odds with traditional Judeo-Christian culture.
But what’s most perplexing is how a society in which nobody was allowed to own private money could be praised as some sort of model of liberty. There’s a reason many early 20th-century communists adopted the Spartans as symbols of strength through self-denial.
As for the Spartans standing with their Greek neighbours against the dastardly Persian barbarians, that was a very shortlived alliance. The Spartans quickly turned on their fellow Greeks, and enjoyed Persian support and sponsorship for the duration of the 27-year Peloponnesian War.
So we’re left with physical courage in the face of enormous odds. Which is admirable in itself, but surely no less admirable when practiced by Zulus, Ghurkas, or Sioux, than by Spartans.
Rob,
You make some excellent comments that I felt too. I don’t think that the Spartans were exactly the ideal of liberty – what interests me about them is their physical courage and ability to fight such odds.
I should also mention that boys who were not found to be fit to lead and fight were thrown off a cliff.
Not exactly a good basis for Western society. :=\
Haha. Ilana, your comments? [You’ll have to wait to read my WND column.]
Regarding the comments on feminism, I might agree. But I’m curious about one thing; why are you one of the only females to say these things, Ilana? Do other women agree or disagree with you? I don’t talk to women about feminism – it’s far too touchy a subject – and I’m curious about what they think.
Then again, you might be as out of touch with women’s ideas as I am; I remember reading somewhere in here that you try to avoid women as much as possible. Still, I’m curious as to whether or not other women think the same way. Judging from what I hear – at work and around – it seems as thought they want defenders – but female defenders.
Why they want this I’m not sure.
Hey Alex:
I’m a woman and I certainly want to be defended when my physical security is at issue. I’ll do that myself, if necessary, but I would prefer the intervention of a male defender, if at all possible. Reason: most men are stronger than I, due to the obvious differences between men and women. Even a 16-year old male can fight off an attacker better than I. One of feminism’s most glaring problems is that the philosophy negates physical differences between the sexes, and casts aspersions on the natural ability and desire of men to protect and defend women and children. If you’re hearing anything else, it’s most likely the result of mind-mush directed at normal people by abnormal academics and social “scientists.”
Do other women agree or disagree with you?
I absolutely loathe feminism. It is an intellectually bankrupt ideology and its ideas, when enacted practically, are damaging to society, both at the individual level and as a whole. Feminism is tyrannical at its core and is not about seeking “equality”, it is about double standards for its adherents. The quicker it dies, the better off we will all be.
As for 300, I definitely plan to see it. Hope it lives up to my expectations!
Alex, my husband plays the occasional video game. He tells me it is far better entertainment than wasting his time on the vapid “I am woman, hear me roar” type of sitcoms and dramas that fill evening TV.