Well, I never really thought 300 to be a documentary but an artistic vision of one man, based on a legend over 2000 years old.
Discussing history in the context of the film is ridiculous.
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Well, I never really thought 300 to be a documentary but an artistic vision of one man, based on a legend over 2000 years old.
Discussing history in the context of the film is ridiculous.
Not if it is contextualised by the creator within a paradigm that's basically xenophobic.
Authors should be free to create anything they want. They can portray Hitler and Pol Pot jumping around, holding hands and smelling flowers. It's fiction, it doesn't have to conform to any scientific rules.
Otherwise we might sue the pants of George Lucas for filling our minds with weird, glowing, phallic-shaped objects.
Uh-huh. Pray tell where your getting this interesting notion.Quote:
Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla
Edit: you mean Cromwell and the irish or King Edward and the jews?
No, I mean that the Persians were further up the freedom-ladder than the spartans, who created the most brutal regime the world has ever seen.Quote:
Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy
A persian victory would've meant more freedom for the spartans. A spartan victory ensured the continuation of their brutal oppression.
"Spartans" only refers to the upper class of their society, i.e. the actual opressors. The vast majority of people living in the general area of Sparta (and Messenia) were called helots, slaves who were treated as sub-humans.Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
There isn't all that much known about Sparta really, almost impossible to destinguish fact and myth, it's mostly hearsay from other polisQuote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
I reffered to all the people affected by sparta's political system.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kralizec
Except it was seen as a Greek victory not a Spartan one therefore the allusion to the Allies stands as Persia and Sparta are two side of the same coin to an Athenian are they not.Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
Also as has been pointed out already 300 plays so fast and loose with the truth that I'm wouldnt be surprised if Hercules or Zena are in the directors cut.
No one is saying they should be censored, but instead Frank Miller and the creators of 300 are being criticised for reinforcing existing stereotypes.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sarmatian
You are applying modern conceptualisations of 'freedom' and 'oppression', as well as buying into the trope that the war was only fought for the freedom of the 'Greeks'. None of these things would stand up to historical analysis, because they are based on a logical fallacy. Also because...Quote:
Originally Posted by HoreTore
Of this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
"No one is saying they should be censored, but instead Frank Miller and the creators of 300 are being criticised for reinforcing existing stereotypes."
Which is rediculous. It's just a cool commic and an awesome action-movie. Stupid mindless fun nothing more. Who would it be stereotyping in the first place, it confused Irans's president with a good part of a millenium OK but he's an idiot. Cool story about cool warriors, that's all
Us British invented the concentration camp during the Boer Wars.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
But in many respects, World War 1 was simply "Part 1" and World War 2 was "Part 2", ie: They are effectively the same war with a ceasefire in the middle.
That wasn't very nice admit itQuote:
Originally Posted by Tiaexz
Most conflict from late 19th century to 1989 was for want of a better term about the place of Germany in Europe and the wider world.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tiaexz
Basically in last 150 years all the rows have been about who controls the central bit of Europe where Germany is today. This area and whoever has control of it gives a good launch pad for expansion, but it has no strategic depth and this has meant traditionally Germany has expanded either left or right.
Basically the Germans have being and will forever be trying to remove the geographic impediment to there own safety, lately this has been more political under the EU which has given safety in front and behind them.
There were, so far as I know, no citizens under Persian Law - merely subjects of the King of kings and law was vested in the King. As such, there is no freedom because there are no "rights" except those granted by the King, and what the King grants he may withdraw. This is basically the same legal position as the British Empire adopted, and despite, by and large, treating its subjects very well and yet they all fought bloody insurrections for their freedom.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hax
By contrast, both Athens and Sparta defined their citizen legally, and all citizens were a part of the polity. You may think that Athenian and Spartan definitions of "citizen" were extremely limited, but nonetheless these citizens had actual rights. In the case of Sparta, it pretty much invented legal citizenship when it creates the Spartiates as a class, and both Athens and Sparta operated according to the due process of law, not the whims of the individual ruler. As to Socrates, he accepted his own execution BECAUSE it was legal and to go into exile would be to invalidate Athenian law according to the accounts of both Plato and Xenophon.
We may not find Athens or Sparta to be particularly appealing as societies, but they established important legal and philosophical principles, and the conflicts and interactions between the Polies in Greece fomred the basis for the society you and I live in, not Persian benevolent autocracy.
Consider the difference between Peria under Darius and under Xerxes, vs the continuity within Athens and Sparta over the same period.
Well, this is basically true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hax
No, I was thinking more of the Boer War concentration camps and Churchill wanting to gas the Kurds (stopped only by a lack of technology). You might also want to look up the affect of the 19th century Schools Acts on Welsh Speakers within Wales.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
If the stated intent of the author is to equate the foundations of Western society with the current Western-Eastern conflict then that changes things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fragony
There's a difference between concentration camps and death camps. The only similarities between boer camps and Nazi camps are the poor conditions for the inmates and even then the British didnt intentionally make thier prisoners starve to death in droves, let alone they didn't use gas chambers.Quote:
Originally Posted by Philipvs Vallindervs Calicvla
...Tear gas, he wanted to use tear gas on tribes that fought against the british. Even ignoring that, wanting to use poison gas on enemy combatants isn't all that heinous for the time.Quote:
and Churchill wanting to gas the Kurds (stopped only by a lack of technology).
Ok I cant really find anything on this but I'm assuming they decided to not teach welsh in publuc schools in wales and peanalized those who used it.Quote:
You might also want to look up the affect of the 19th century Schools Acts on Welsh Speakers within Wales.
Come on, we weren't saints, but the leap between what we did and what the Nazi's did wasn't small.
My nationalism couldn't take it so much as an implication (!)
Frank Millers comments are irrelevant. A movie can't become racist after the fact based on whether you read something the author of the original source material said.
Strictly speaking, the Greek states were fighting for their sovereignty, if not their "freedom".Quote:
Originally Posted by CountArach
Also, from what I've read of it, Sparta's treatment of the helots was exceptional even by the standards of the day. Allthough individuals could conceivably be set free, the helots were basically a nation (in the sense of a cultural/ethnic group) that was kept in perpetual slavery. I imagine that they felt oppressed. About what we really "know" of Sparta, I imagine that quite a lot of what we know derives from the Athenians, but it should be kept in mind that there were also Athenians who admired Sparta and its institutions.
Depending on how much you want to believe Thucydides, many fellow Greeks were disturbed by the Spartan subjugation of the Helots. Or as a classics professor friend of mine put it, "It was fine to enslave other people, but Greeks? That was in bad taste."
Debatable why they disapproved, whether the reasons were economic, cultural or aesthetic.
Exactly. He chose to tell story that he liked. He mentioned numerous times that he was impressed by the movie 300 Spartans and that inspired him to write a comic. He basically took the idea of people fighting against all odds for something they believe in and put it in a historical background.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro
In that regard, 300 is exactly the same as Braveheart or The Last Samurai. Kingdom of Heaven stands as the opposite example - in that east vs. west conflict Christians are portrayed as evil, scheming, unsophisticated and bloodthirsty while Muslims are brave, benevolent and honourable, which also has little to do with reality.
Nationalism can be blinding. The British committed numerous large and small genocides throughout the history of the Empire, before the war, during the war, and even after the war.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
Nationalism is blinding by definition, PJ ~;)
No offense, but sources I can confirm or nothing. I'm not buying those books and even then I've seen books that deny the holocaust so books by people I've never heard of aren't exactly convincing.Quote:
Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger
You've read these books?? They seem like standard reflexively anti-colonial sensationalism...there's a lot of bad research on this stuff because enough academics like the message.Quote:
Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger
Yes, there's a big difference between concentration camps and death camps. One that PVC specifically established in his initial post, when he argued that the death camps were the one big distinction between Germany and everyone else. So what were you taking issue with there?Quote:
PVC: "As far as Sympathising with the Third Reich, if you take away the Death Camps it is not really much worse than any other state at the time."
Greyblades: "Uh-huh. Pray tell where your getting this interesting notion. Edit: you mean Cromwell and the irish or King Edward and the jews?"
PVC: "No, I was thinking more of the Boer War concentration camps and Churchill wanting to gas the Kurds (stopped only by a lack of technology)."
Greyblades: "There's a difference between concentration camps and death camps."
Again, PVC's point was that the German activities (apart from the death camps) were not abnormally heinous for their time, however atrocious they may appear through a modern lens. You seem confused on whether you agree or disagree with him.Quote:
PVC: "Churchill wanting to gas the Kurds (stopped only by a lack of technology)."
Greyblades: "Even ignoring that, wanting to use poison gas on enemy combatants isn't all that heinous for the time."
Ajax
Mike Davis is a commie, PJ is a fascist.
I have my doubts PJ has named him as a source because of a shared ideology.....
I see, My mistake.Quote:
Yes, there's a big difference between concentration camps and death camps. One that PVC specifically established in his initial post, when he argued that the death camps were the one big distinction between Germany and everyone else. So what were you taking issue with there?
It would seem so. I suspect my nationalism produced a knee jerk reaction at the idea of something I see as of high importance being compared to such a heinous counterpart. even though the comparison wasnt particually damaging nor was it incorrect. I was in the wrong, though I'm not sure if my recognising it makes it any better.Quote:
Again, PVC's point was that the German activities (apart from the death camps) were not abnormally heinous for their time, however atrocious they may appear through a modern lens. You seem confused on whether you agree or disagree with him.
All you Europeans are biased with your privilege anyway. The only people that can truly comment on who was more evil are the oppressed people's in Africa, Asia and South America!
Heh, actual sources are usually preferable to internet content. If all you want is someone on the internet bloviating about something they have read somewhere else, then I can find some summaries of the above. :grin:Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
Source 1:
"In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of the famines which killed between 12 and 29 million Indians(1). These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy.
When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4 million hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, government officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way”(2). The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within the labour camps, the workers were given less food than the inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarized campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places which had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, like Stalin’s in the Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the North-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m died."
Source 2:
"I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," Winston Churchill famously declared in 1942. That passion for empire did not, however, entail the duty of protecting the lives of the King's distant subjects, especially Indians, "a beastly people with a beastly religion." In 1943, as millions were dying of starvation in 1943 in Bengal, the birthplace of the Raj, Churchill not only refused to help but prevented others from doing so, commenting that Indians "bred like rabbits." The Churchill industry, more interested in the great man's dentures than in his war crimes, has managed to keep this appalling story fairly quiet.
Much has been written on the Bengal famine in India and America, but mostly concentrating on local factors. Madhusree Mukerjee's Churchill's Secret War, however, sets the disaster in its imperial context, showing how the story of the famine was interwoven with the history of Gandhi's "Quit India" movement and the attitudes and priorities of Churchill and his war cabinet. It establishes how Churchill and his associates could easily have stopped the famine with a few shipments of foodgrains but refused, in spite of repeated appeals from two successive Viceroys, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the United States.
Famines, never unknown in India, became increasingly lethal during the Raj because of the export of foodgrains and the replacement of food crops with indigo or jute. The Second World War made things worse, especially after Japanese forces occupied Burma in 1942, cutting off Indian rice imports. Then a destructive cyclone hit the Bengal coast just when the crucial winter crop was maturing and the surviving rice was damaged by disease. Officials of the Raj, fearing a Japanese invasion, confiscated everything that might help the invading force – boats, carts, motor vehicles, elephants and, crucially, all the rice available. The Japanese never came but a panicking public – and many crafty businessmen – immediately began to hoard rice and the staple food of the people quickly disappeared from the marketplace.
Government stocks were released but only to feed the people of Calcutta, especially British businesspeople and their employees, railway and port workers and government staff. Controlled shops were opened for less important Calcuttans and the urban population never suffered too greatly. The rural masses, however, were left to the wolves. This was when Churchill could have made a difference by sending wheat or rice to Bengal, and not enormous quantities. The point was to make hoarding unprofitable and as the Viceroy Lord Linlithgow pointed out, "the mere knowledge of impending imports" would have done so by lowering the price of rice.
Churchill and his war cabinet, however, decided to reserve available shipping to take food to Italy in case it fell to the Allies. Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose, then fighting with Axis forces, offered to send rice from Burma but British censors did not even allow his offer to be reported. Australia and Canada were eager to send wheat but virtually all merchant ships plying in the Indian Ocean area had been moved to the Atlantic in order to bring food to Britain, which already had a comfortable stockpile.
So hundreds of thousands perished in the villages of Bengal and, by the middle of 1943, hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying on the streets, often in front of well-stocked shops or restaurants serving lavish meals. The very air of the metropolis, a journalist noted, was pervaded by that "distinctive sourish odour which the victims give off a few hours before the end."
In London, Churchill's beloved advisor, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), was unmoved. A firm believer in Malthusian population theory, he blamed Indian philoprogenitiveness for the famine – sending more food would worsen the situation by encouraging Indians to breed more. The prime minister was of the same opinion and expressed himself so colourfully that Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, exploded at him, comparing his attitudes to Hitler's.
The Churchill industry has always denied that their idol could have done anything to relieve the Bengal famine. Shipping, they claim, was scarce and it just wasn't possible to send food to Bengal. Mukerjee nails those "terminological inexactitudes" with precision. There was a shipping glut in summer and autumn 1943, thanks to the US transferring cargo ships to British control. Churchill, Lindemann and their close associates simply did not consider Indian lives worth saving.
Mukerjee has researched this forgotten holocaust with great care and forensic rigour. Mining an extensive range of sources, she not only sheds light on the imperial shenanigans around the famine, but on a host of related issues, such as the flowering of nationalism in famine-hit districts, Churchill's fury about the sterling credit that India was piling up in London, or the dreadful situation in the villages even after the famine was technically over. Her calmly phrased but searing account of imperial brutality will shame admirers of the Greatest Briton and horrify just about everybody else."
Source 3:
"Synopsis
A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya
As part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu-some one and a half million people.
The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold-the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence.
Caroline Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of Kikuyu men and women who survived the British camps, as well as the British and African loyalists who detained them.
The result is an unforgettable account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya-a pivotal moment in twentieth- century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project.
Imperial Reckoning is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction."
I have read the books. There is certainly an anti-colonialist, and indeed anti-British sentiment in the latter two. (Davis has his own leanings that go beyond colonialism.) Of course, most works on the British Empire are written from a British or at least Western perspective. With histories, you have to learn to glean the research-supported facts from the editorial bias. There are plenty of those facts in each book that paint a British Empire with the same racist views towards subhumans that the Nazis held, views that led to the same kind of state sponsored mass deaths that occurred under the Nazis. India alone was essentially to Britain what Hitler wanted Russia to be to Germany - starved and dehumanized into a slave state good for nothing but resource harvesting. Indian and other scholars are just coming to terms with British excesses in that region.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sasaki
You should look carefully into the collapse of the Empire in the 50's and 60's, ugly, ugly, ugly. We did, after all, deliberately commit multiple acts of cultural genocide, toppled democratic governments (including Iran's) and did various other pretty shocking things.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greyblades
While I don't know Mike Davies I do know that, for example, India was exporting rice during famines in the 19th Century.
As to the Boers, well you may want to ask my Boer Aunt about that - or perhaps not. I read a book which indicated that reports at the time concluded that certain camp commanders were deliberately running down food and medicine in order to make the problem (the women and children) "go away", it wasn't a modern left-leaning one, either.
Then there are all the Germans and Italians we shot in cold blood, and more recently the phospherus grenades we used to burn Argentinain conscripts alive in their trenches.
The Papers recovered after the war indicate that the "Final Solution" was the result of a confluence of factors that essentially consisted of the German High Command considering the presence of Jews in occupied Europe to be intollerable and them being unable to remove them because of the war. So they killed them.
The NAZI's were pretty horrific but the Allieswere hardly saints, they included: a constitutionally racist aparteid state (the US) a medieval theocratic monarchy (the British Empire) a pseudo-democratic oligarchy (Free French) and a brutal totalitarian autocracy (USSR).
I have to be honest, I'm not sure Europe would have been that much worse off in the long run if the Germans had won. The Generals had already decided to kill Hitler, so it was only a matter of time and once you removed him and his NAZI cronies, really, who could be bothered with all that ethnic cleansing rubbish? It was all very expensive for no measurable benefit. Pretty un-German, really.
Calling PJ a facist, well he's not Italian for starters. Beyond that, I don't recall him ever expressing support for Mel Gibson.