‘300′: Orientalism (and Fascist Aesthetics) for Beginners

28Mar07

By Mustafa Akyol

This week I went to see the new chic movie, “300,” which tells the story of the ancient Spartans’ last stand against an invading Persian army. Yet what I have found in the film was, besides all the spectacular photography, a crude Orientalism and a thinly veiled fascism.

The person who made “Orientalism” a household term was, of course, the late Edward Said, the most prominent Palestinian intellectual ever. According to Said, the whole Western scholarship about the East, i.e., the Orient, was dominated by a discourse intentionally created to depict this “other” civilization as inherently backward. The Eastern peoples, and especially the Islamic world, was portrayed as irrational, absurd and stagnant — an image which only served the imperialism of the West.

Said has both his fans and adversaries in the intelligentsia, and I think I would stand somewhere in the middle. I think he grasped and unveiled a very important defect in the Western understanding of the East, but extrapolated its influence. In other words, Orientalism in the sense that Said used does really exist, but it does not define the whole picture. Robert Irwin, in his new book, “Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents,” explores this other side of the story and argues that Said did injustice to some of the leading Orientalist scholars, who, far from demonizing the Arab world or Islam, were sympathetic to it. (It might be worth mentioning that Irwin himself is no Zionist or pro-imperialist; he indeed says he sympathizes with the Palestinian cause.)

So, Orientalism should not be the only tool we should be using while explaining how the West sees the East. But as for the movie “300,” it seems to be a perfect fit.

Persians Versus ‘Freedom’?

The movie tells how the 300 brave and strong soldiers of Sparta stood against the evil and corrupt army of the Persians. The Spartans, with their heavy muscled bodies and blue eyes, look as if they are protein-rich surfers from southern California. Moreover, they routinely speak about “freedom” and “reason.” The Persians, on the other hand, are utterly ugly, mystical, and evil. Some of their soldiers, with their turbaned heads, look quite like the Islamist warriors of today. One figure, the guy who asks the Spartan King Leonidas to kneel down, even looks like Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

The message that the film is designed to give is all too obvious: Western civilization (which is free, rational and beautiful) has always defended itself against the barbaric East (which is tyrannical, irrational and ugly). And the saga just continues today.

However, one needs to be an extremely naïve Westerner to be inspired by all that. First of all, if the idea of a weak and outnumbered group of dedicated warriors standing against the world’s superpower is to be seen as a prelude for today’s “clash of civilizations,” if there is any, then the out coming message has to be quite the opposite of what the makers of “300” wish to give. In case you haven’t noticed, the United States is the world’s superpower today, and terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda see themselves as the few who will conquer the many.

Second, the film is full of unrealistic images. As military historian Victor Davis Hanson notes, “Indeed, at the real battle, there weren’t rhinoceroses or elephants in the Persian army.” Nor were there the Orientalist clichés of the movie: “[Persian] King Xerxes wasn’t, as in the movie, bald and sexually ambiguous and he didn’t prance around the killing field. And neither the traitor Ephialtes nor the Spartan overseers, the Ephors, were grotesquely deformed.”

The third and I think most important point is that Sparta was not the beacon of liberty, as the moviemakers would have you believe. It was, in fact, a citadel of fascism.

Sparta the Fascist

Yes, actually Sparta is the place where the roots of fascism flourished. The Greek city-state, unlike Athens, was totally devoted to militarism and the life of the individual was worthy only it served the totalitarian ideal. As the movie “300” shows in passing, the newborn were subject to the survival of the fittest: Spartans would immediately kill defected babies. Moreover, they would leave all babies outside for a length of time, and the survivors were considered stronger, while many “weaker” perished.

The idea of designing the human race, which was the norm in Sparta, became popular in Europe again in the 19th century with the rise of the Social Darwinistic theory called eugenics, which advocated the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. The term was derived from the Greek word “eus” (good) and the suffix – genes (born), and was coined by Francis Galton, the half-cousin and the full admirer of Charles Darwin.

The state that would embrace and implement eugenics would be quite different than the Victorian Galton and his followers, tough. It was Nazi Germany! Under Adolf Hitler, the Nazis attempted to maintain a “pure” German race through a series of programs called “racial hygiene.” During the 1930s and 1940s, they forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally and physically “unfit.” They even killed tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled through compulsory “euthanasia” programs.

It was no accident that Hitler was an admirer of Spartan militarism. The statues of the naked and heavily muscled “Aryan men” that Nazis raised all around were inspired from Ancient Greece. They were, just like the Spartans of “300,” praise to masculinism, and “fascist aesthetics.”

A Land of Homosexual Pedophilia

In their highly interesting book, “The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party,” Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams argue that even the “masochistic homosexuality” that was so widespread among the Nazis was linked to their masculinist spirit — which comes, again, from Sparta. The makers of “300” give you no hint, but actually the gallant soldiers of the Spartan army were mostly gays who were trying to show off to each other with their military skills. And it was not just among mature men: Sparta was a land of homosexual pedophilia. As Professor Lowell Lindemann of Princeton notes, “Spartan men would often take a young boy under their wing in a close-knit, mentor-type relationship which included sexual relations.”

In short, if Sparta really represents the Western civilization, it certainly does its worst.

What’s troubling to me in the movie “300” is the combination of bloodthirsty fascism with the crudest Orientalism. If some Westerners really take the idea that the Easterners deserve the Spartan way seriously, then we have a serious problem.

source here

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