Three Hundred Instances of Nonsense

By Farish A. Noor

A small country, whose citizens are virtuous men all, is pitted against the might of an overwhelming foe whose customs and traditions are barbaric, licentious, violent, decadent and immoral. The ruler of the opposing empire is a hedonistic and corrupt megalomaniac and his followers blind fanatics devoid of free will, agency and identity. They march at the instigation of the whip and the point of a sword, and they lay down their lives not for the sake of their beliefs but out of deference to their God-King whose will is absolute and whose tyrannical ambitions are all-consuming. The lumbering army of the foreign invaders is even equipped with weapons of mass destruction:  War elephants, rampaging rhinos, war galleys, incendiary fire-bombs, catapults, arrows, spears, the lot.

The outnumbered citizens of the virtuous state however are upright men of honor, who fight and die for their beliefs. Their values sound curiously modern:  Liberty, freedom, justice, defense of their country and the pursuit of their own destiny.  They are armed only with their spears and shields, and do not even have the luxury of armor.  As they face their enemies they know that they will all die, but only to be taken up into the fold of posterity and remembered forever as brave heroes and free men who died for freedom.

Sounds familiar? One would think that such a scenario would befit the collective imaginings of any tiny state surrounded by potentially hostile enemies, such as Israel, for instance.  One would also be forgiven if one made the mistake to think that this was the plot to some modern political thriller, designed to send chills up the spines of the beleaguered citizens of the civilized Western world, faced with the threat of invasion by the hordes of Asia.  For “Asia” is indeed the enemy here, and Asians appear as a tide of non-distinct, mindless drones who simply walk into the trap and are slaughtered by the hundreds.

But no, this calculated attempt at historical revisionism comes from the film ‘300′, which chronicles (or rather mis-chronicles) the tale of the three hundred Spartans led by their king Leonidas who fought at the battle of Thermopylae against the invading armies of Xerxes the Persian king.  Little wonder if the government of Iran is less than pleased by this latest blockbuster which looks and sounds like some hammy muscle-flick set to rock music and animated to look like a video game.  There is enough blood in the film to ensure that kids would not be able to watch it.  But perhaps that too is a good thing, for the last thing any child needs now is to be fed a skewered account of history that throws facts out of the window and makes propaganda look respectable instead.

Critics of this sorry excuse for blood-letting have already pointed out the historical inaccuracies that litter the movie: King Leonidas extols the virtues of nationalism and calls on his men to defend their country, at a time when nation-states did not exist and there was no such thing as the Spartan nation-state in the first place.  The Persians in turn are presented as less than human, stunted and misshapen barbarians, looking more like the Orcs and Gremlins of “Lord of the Rings” than Central Asians.  For some reason known only to the directors and producers of the film, the few Persians we see (save for Xerxes, their King), tend to be darker too, with decidedly African features.  Xerxes looks like a malevolent Boy George dressed in golden panties with ear, nose and nipple piercing to boot.

In a world already divided neatly between the forces of Good and Evil as framed in the dichotomous logic of Bush and his Neo-Con allies, this contrast of light and darkness was a tad too crude to digest.

So why the sudden interest in history, and why this remake of the tale of the Spartans today? It is interesting to note that as the governments of the Western world look upon the impending rise of China and India as the next economic superpowers of the world, the gigantesque image of Asia looms ever larger.  Was this little more than yet another pathetic attempt to draw the cultural and political frontiers between the West and Asia, yet again? And if so, is the Occidental conscience still troubled by the thought of an Asia on the rise?

Certainly the film “300” is replete with stereotypes of every type and cast of Asians and their inscrutable ways:  The Asians of the Persian empire in the movie look, sound and behave every bit as foreign as can be imagined.  To add insult to injury, the famous “immortals” of the Persian army are dressed almost to look like ninjas (and armed with short swords that look like Japanese Katanas and Wakizashis), and are all masked uniformly.  All Asians look alike?  Perhaps in the minds of Occidental film producers and game designers that may be the case.

Coming at a time when the political vocabulary of international relations discourse has been hijacked to suit the interests of Washington, and when the War on Terror is, so we have been told, fundamentally a battle between the free world and the forces of religious fanaticism (despite the fact that there are more than enough religious fanatics in the USA as it is), the film “300” is a case of political propaganda dressed up as pop historical entertainment at its worst.

But one should never doubt the efficacy of such propaganda in the immediate present.  Today we all know that the real history of the American Wild West was not as simple as it was made out to be, but did we not as children root for John Wayne and accept the false premise that the American Indians were the bad guys?  In accepting the premises of 300 at face value, are we not in danger of falling into the same trap, and passively buying the line that civilization has to be defended at all costs, even violence; and that all that is foreign has to be alien too, and therefore dangerous and to be rejected as well?  Forget the Spartans who are dead and gone, and remember instead Guantanamo Bay where some real injustice is being meted out in the here and now.

Dr. Farish A. Noor is a Malaysian political scientist based at the Zentrum Moderner Orient, and one of the founders of the www.othermalaysia.org research site.

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