300 review - a Conservative View

OPENS 5th April in Australia.

So we've seen the socialist/left review on this movie, now is the conservative, freedom lover, red neck, U.S.A. version from the jawa report. A great site.

And the dialogue? Puh-lease! It's absolutely thick with the notion that the Spartans are fighting for freedom and liberty defined exactly in the Western Enlightenment sense of those terms. The dialogue consists of only three themes: liberty, sacrifice, and gay jokes.

And the monologues are strictly about the first two.

Any Leftist, Islamist, or other hater of Western values who saw this as a "metaphor" for oppressed people around the world fighting against the vastly superior power of the U.S. is simply deluded.

Sometimes a rose is just a rose. And sometimes the rose is a metaphor for something else. But I got news for you: a picture of a giant penis isn't a metaphor for something phallic. It is phallic.

I'm not even going to explain the larger point of this great piece of propaganda. It is simple and straight forward: Western civilization is worth fighting for.
There are some more subtle messages in their, too. Like: Professional warriors fight and die so that people like you and me can become philosophers, artists, and politicians.

Oh, there's more. Much more.

The propaganda, it is oh-so-beautiful. It rivals anything put out by Republic Pictures or Warner Brother's animation during WWII. Heroic Americans fight the Hunnish/Asiatic hordes (many seem to forget that it wasn't until after WWII that our movies redeemed the "Germans" by separating them from the "Nazis"---part of the Cold War propaganda effort).

In fact, I'll go out on a limb and compare this to Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part I--that classic piece of Soviet propaganda which artfully legitimized the Stalinistic purges as an effort to consolidate state power in the face of a foreign menace (Ivan as Stalin, the boyars as anti-revolutionary forces, and the Turks as the Germans). And who would argue that Eisenstein's masterpiece wasn't needed to help the war effort? Or Bugs Bunny? Or John Wayne?

No, "300" brings us back to the good-old days of propaganda. When propaganda was produced in support of our country. When propaganda was produced to remind us that we are the good guys and that our ideals are better than the ideals of our enemies.

Go see "300".

If you don't like it you probably hate America. That, or you're gay.