300 (The Second Part ?)

[Rasputin]

Iranians outraged by `300' movie

TEHRAN, Iran - The hit American movie "300" has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran.


"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," blared a headline in Tuesday's edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper.

The movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days.

Even some American reviewers noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line — and the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.

In Iran, the movie hasn't opened and probably never will, given the government's restrictions on Western films, though one paper said bootleg DVDs were already available.

Still, it touched a sensitive nerve. Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the United States tries to "humiliate" Iran in order to reverse historical reality and "compensate for its wrongdoings in order to provoke American soldiers and warmongers" against Iran.

The movie comes at a time of increased tensions between the United States and Iran over the Persian nation's nuclear program and the Iraq war.

But aside from politics, the film was seen as an attack on Persian history, a source of pride for Iranians across the political spectrum, including critics of the current Islamic regime.

State-run television has run several commentaries the past two days calling the film insulting and has brought on Iranian film directors to point out its historical inaccuracies.

"The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people," Ayende-No said in its article Tuesday.

"It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilization before world public opinion at a time of increasing American threats against Iran," it said.

Iran's biggest circulation newspaper, Hamshahri, said "300" is "serving the policy of the U.S. leadership" and predicted it will "prompt a wave of protest in the world. ... Iranians living in the U.S. and Europe will not be indifferent about this obvious insult."

[Rasputin]

Iran accuses Hollywood of 'psychological warfare'

Hollywood is already firmly established as a source of cultural decadence in Iran's pantheon of hated western symbols.

But now the country's Islamic leadership has accused it of "psychological warfare" over its depiction of the battle between the Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae in 480BC, regarded as a key event in the birth of western democracy by some historians.


Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government has joined MPs, bloggers and local media in denouncing the newly-released Warner Brothers epic, 300, as a calculated attempt to demonise Iran at a time of intensifying US pressure over the country's nuclear programme.


Ahmadinejad's spokesman branded the film "an insult to Iran" while four MPs have urged the foreign ministry to pressure other Muslim countries to ban it.


The film, directed by Zack Snyder and based on a novel by Frank Miller, grossed nearly £40m in ticket sales in three days after opening in north American cinemas last week. It portrays the heroic endeavours of 300 Spartans, under King Leonidas, who are shown resisting an invading force of 120,000 Persian troops led by Emperor Xerxes.


The plot depicts the tiny Spartan force repeatedly outmanoeuvring the invaders and being defeated after a three-day stand-off only through treachery. Iranians complain that it represents them as savage, murderous and warmongering.


The film's availability in Iran has been limited so far to pirate DVDs, but that has not stopped an outpouring of official condemnation.


The government spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, described the film as "cultural intrusion" and an attack on Iran's ancient civilisation. "Such a fabrication of culture and insult to people is not acceptable by any nation or government," he told reporters. "[Iran] considers it as hostile behaviour which is the result of cultural and psychological warfare."


The reformist newspaper, Ayandehno, accused the makers of trying to set international opinion against Iran to fit President George Bush's description of the country as belonging to an "axis of evil".


"In the film Iranians are considered to be monsters devoid of any culture, humanity and wisdom who know nothing except attacking other lands, threatening peace and killing human beings. There is no option other than to confront, fight and destroy this wicked tribe so that the world can be saved from this axis of evil," the paper's film critic wrote.

It is not the first Hollywood production to cause upset in Iran. There was widespread anger over the favourable portrayal of Alexander the Great in the 2004 film, Alexander. The Macedonian king is reviled in Iranian culture for destroying the seat of Persian imperial greatness at Persepolis after defeating Emperor Darius III in 330BC.

[Rasputin]

First Part

Collectively, we in the Iranian-American and Iranian-Canadian communities [Iranian-North Americans], have once again shown our brothers and sisters in Iran as well as the many other Iranian expatriate communities around the world what we stand for and what really matters to us, or more accurately what doesn't really matter to us. As is far too often the case, we've once again shown that we never miss a chance, to miss a chance to ferociously and forthrightly speak out against the cruel and often barbaric treatment meted out to our friends, family and fellow countrymen by Islamo-faucist thugs employed by the regime in our homeland.

While we like to brag on ourselves as being the most highly educated, privileged and prosperous of the many distinct overseas-Iranians communities, sometimes it seems that we waste our time and talents on relatively meaningless and inconsequential matters, such as all the words which have been wasted on the movie 300 while far too few words were used to condemn those who once again brutalized our sisters in Tehran last week. I don't know why I should be surprised or shocked though. We, in the North American Iranian communities, may be well educated and we may like to slap ourselves on the back for having "made it" in western society, but in my humble estimation, collectively, many of us can't see the forest for the trees.

Surely, Khoda has blessed our people by giving us more than our fair share of fine writers who possess unique powers of perception, persuasion and intellect. Many possess an agility and prowess with the written word that is far sharper than the sharpest and most dangerous of daggers, but instead of putting that talent to work for our homeland and our people we have frequently wasted it. One of God's gifts to us is a wondrous power to wield the pen with lethal precision. Many times, however, instead of writing about the monumental issues which have confronted our people day-after-day, decade-after-long-and-agonizing-decade, what have we done? We have spent countless hours debating, arguing and writing about absurd and silly subjects. Instead of using our power of the pen to do what we can to relieve our people's suffering by shining the brilliant, blinding and unrelenting light of truth on the Islamo-faucists' evil regime, we have far too often written about mind-numbing drivel.

Inherent in the power of the written word is the promise it holds for truthfully informing the world of the trials and tribulations our brave nation and brutalized countrymen. Unfortunately, the only way that the truth can possibly help to set our people free is if we recount to the English speaking world how our countrymen have bravely endured for so long. A well-informed world just might care enough to raise its thunderous voice to demand justice for the Iranian people. If we utilized our talents wisely to inform humanity of the continual crimes and indignities perpetrated against the Iranian people, perhaps our people's days of nightmarish suffering would end sooner. If, however, we fail to continually inform the world as to what our people go through, then only a whisper from the world will be heard, every so often, questioning why Iranians don't share in the rights that all other humans around the globe have been granted by God.

The world needs to know how each and every day, the tyrannical regime of Qomites metes out a non-stop diet of cruelty, humiliation, torture, deprivation and death to our people. The people of the world should never be able to pick up a newspaper or magazine without having to encounter yet another article, editorial, or special report recounting the suffering of our people and the hideousness which circumstances have forced them to call daily life. The people of the world must be told how all our people, but, especially how our women and children, have been made to suffer at the hands of brutal leaders who persecute them only for having the audacity to want the same things which other people in other counties want; to live with freedom, dignity and respect. Names like Saeed Mortazavi and Parvin Hosseini should be seared into the minds of English speaking people beside infamous names like Hitler, Stalin and Sharon.

There is hardly a day that I can open a newspaper without reading about the suffering of the people of Darfur in Sudan. Similarly, the suffering of the people in Palestine is recounted 24 hours-a-day on radio and television in hundreds of different languages around the world. The plight of our people, however, is hardly ever mentioned. Whose fault is this you may wonder? Is it possible that there's some international conspiracy of silence when it comes to reporting the indignities our people face? Is it possible that all of the media outlets around the world are agents of the Islamo-faucist regime or at the least working in close cahoots with it? It would be easy for us to conclude this because we, after all, are a nation of conspiracy theorists, but that would be just a little too easy, don't you think?

The sad and shocking truth is that we have no one to blame, but ourselves for the world failing to notice the plight of our people. Some of us, in fact, fail to notice the plight of our people anymore. We get caught up in the hustle and bustle of our own personal lives and somehow the troubles facing our friends and family in Iran seem so very far away. Instead of telling the horror filled stories of the Iranian people, many of us write about things which are of little or no consequence to anyone or we write nothing at all. More than a few Iranian-North American writers seem to enjoy frittering their time away writing about one little manufactured tempest in a teapot after another. Perhaps, that's what having a comfortable expatriate life is all about; having all the free time one needs to create and write about the latest "crisis" in the Iranian-North American community. I doubt that there are many writers in Iran who have the luxury of manufacturing crises to write about when so many of them are targets of the regime.

While our lives in North America are immeasurably better than tens of millions of our countrymen in Iran, I hope that I never see the day where we get so comfortable that we are unable to hear the cries of our nation, or to feel the pain of our people. With Nowruz just around the corner, I pray that the West's seductive lifestyle never renders us unable to recognize that the heart of the Iranian nation is that thumping sound we hear in our own chests? Though distance and time have separated us from our homeland and people, we must never forget who we are. The day must never be allowed to come that our tongues and pens fall silent as long as our people continue to suffer. We must be their voice to the English speaking world and we must make their thirst for freedom and hunger for dignity known to the world.

How have we gotten to the point where the general North American public knows that some of us don't like the movie 300, but they don't know that women are frequently stoned to death and minors are routinely hanged in Iran? Why is it that they know that we'll loudly scream "police brutality" and "racial/ethnic discrimination" when one of our pampered young men refuses to obey a policeman's lawful order to leave the UCLA library and as a result gets tazed, but they don't know how our women are beaten in broad daylight on crowded Tehran streets by club-wielding Islamo-faucist trash? How is it that they know we'll collectively raise holy hell if National Geographic has the nerve to call the Persian Gulf, the Khaleej al-Arabi, but they don't know of all the newspapers which have been closed in Tehran and of all the reporters, and bloggers who've been arrested, brutalized, raped, imprisoned and, even, murdered by the regime? Some among like to insult Americans and Canadians with hurtful comments about how little they know of our country. Why, may I ask, would the average Joe or Josie in North America want or need to know about Iran? The answer is they wouldn't. If they don't know the plight of our people, it isn't their fault, but ours. Some of us pompously expect our non-Iranian neighbors in America and Canada to know about and care what happens to Iranians halfway around the world without us having to do anything to enlighten them. People, I ask in all humility, what's wrong with this picture?

[Rasputin]

Second Part

We are not powerless. The only way we can rightly consider ourselves powerless is if we think of ourselves as victims. While all of us have met fellow Iranians who've lived their lives in North America as if they had a big scarlet letter "V" tattooed on their forehead, none of us are victims. We may have a few self-absorbed sissies in our ranks, but no victims. Our brothers and sisters who have suffered for so long under the boot and lash of the un-reformable monstrosity call the Islamic Republic of Iran are victims! Much to their credit though, they have never faltered in courageously facing the cruel indignities heaped upon them by their tormentors while we have lived our fat and happy lives abroad, far from their suffering and even further from their anguished cries for help. While they most certainly deserve our love, our honor and our respect, they, most of all, deserve our help. We are the lucky ones if one can think of life in a Diaspora as being lucky. Our community lives in freedom; our community members are highly educated, and; collectively, our ethnic group is filthy rich compared with other ethnic communities across North America.

While we all share a love for our homeland, we are not all alike. Each and every one of us is an individual with a distinct personality. Likewise our community is comprised of different kinds of Iranian-Americans and Iranian-Canadians. Many amongst us are North American immigrants who were born, raised and educated in Iran. Then there are others among us- those in the second-generation who were born and raised outside Iran to Iranian-immigrant parents and then there are those like my sister and I, who are of mixed parentage. One thing that the "born-abroaders" and the "mixis" have in common is that we were neither born in Iran nor have we ever lived there. The tie that binds us and our elders who emigrated, before we were born, to our homeland is not merely one based on blood, but one of love; love for our homeland, its culture, its language, but most of all, its people. All North American Iranians... not just Persians, but the entire tapestry of ethnic groups who look east in the night sky when they think of our Iranian homeland...must use their talents to make the world see, understand and feel the suffering of our nation. The way we do this is by making our voices heard. We ought to make it our mission in life to inform our non-Iranian friends and neighbors of what is and has been happening in Iran for three decades.

Those among us who are more comfortable writing in Farsi about the injustices our people endure should be writing everyday. If you more comfortable writing in Farsi, get a friend or younger family member to help you translate the passion of your heart's words into English, so you can share those important words with non-Iranians. Those of us who are members of the second-generation have a part to play as well. We can't shrink from our responsibility to communicate the horrors facing our cousins in Iran just because we weren't born there. Those of us who were born and raised in English speaking countries are far more comfortable than many of our elders in putting English onto paper. We must do our part in communicating the situation in Iran to the wider English-speaking public, especially to those who are young, successful and highly educated, like us. Many of our upwardly mobile non-Iranian friends will one day be in positions of power and authority throughout Canada and the United States. If we can make such people want to befriend our nation and our people, then someday they just might be in positions of power to do just than.

I hope that the suffering of the people in places like Darfur and Palestine ends soon. However, I feel that our paramount responsibility is to collectively do what we can for our people before we think of trying to help others. How can we possibly hope to make a positive difference in the lives of others if we don't first make a positive difference in the lives of our own countrymen?

Iran, first, last and forever!

[Michellica]

bah..maro ba araba engar eshtebah gereftan..oona vahshian!

[Rasputin]

The hit American movie "300" has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran.





"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," blared a headline in Tuesday's edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper, an AP report said.

The movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days.

Even some American reviewers noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line-and the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.

In Iran, the movie hasn't opened, though one paper said bootleg DVDs were already available.

Still, it touched a sensitive nerve. Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the United States tries to "humiliate" Iran in order to reverse historical reality and "compensate for its wrongdoings in order to provoke American soldiers and warmongers" against Iran.

The movie comes at a time of increased tensions between the United States and Iran over the Persian nation's nuclear program and the Iraq war.

But aside from politics, the film was seen as an attack on Persian history, a source of pride for Iranians across the political spectrum, including critics of the current Islamic government.

State-run television has run several commentaries in the past two days calling the film insulting and has brought on Iranian film directors to point out its historical inaccuracies.

"The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people," Ayende-No said in its article Tuesday.

"It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilization before world public opinion at a time of increasing American threats against Iran," it said.

Iran's biggest circulation newspaper, Hamshahri, said "300" is "serving the policy of the US leadership" and predicted it will "prompt a wave of protest in the world. ... Iranians living in the US and Europe will not be indifferent about this obvious insult."

[Rasputin]

300' vs. History: Graphic on how the movie stacks up to history

Sure, it's fun to watch 300 nearly naked Spartans - abandoned by the rest of Greece - ignoring their own battle tactics to fight off a million invaders.
But don't mistake this for history.

Click on the link below to see a detailed illustration about how Zack Snyder's new movie "300" (based on Frank Miller's graphic novel) stacks up against the textbooks on what really happened 2,500 years ago at Thermopylae. (OK, 2,487 years.)

[Rasputin]

300: Grisly but good, movie won’t disappoint

Frank Miller’s 300 put the ‘graphic’ in graphic novel and the film adaptation followed that lead to the ‘T.’

The movie, which opened last week, shouldn’t be considered as the latest screen adaptation to come from the comic book genre, though; it is a solid film with amazing special effects. It’s well-acted with a solid storyline and should appeal to mass audiences—those old enough to get in, that is.

The movie is an epic, plain and simple, crammed into a scant 117 minutes. It is based in ancient Greece, before one of the greatest battles of recorded history, the Battle of Thermopylae—where 300 Spartan warriors faced off against the assembled might of the Persian empire.

Here King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) concocts a bold plan to defeat the army and save his beloved Sparta from the overwhelming forces of the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro). There’s just one problem: the king needs the permission from the oracle to march his army to war and the oracle refuses to give it.

That’s no obstacle for the crafty Leonidas. He merely summons 300 of his best warriors to go instead.

When Theron (Dominic West), a slimy councilman who plots against Leonidas, questions him about this seeming break in Spartan law, Leonidas merely tells him that he’s just going out for a walk with his personal bodyguard.

Questioned on the road to the battled field by the commander of another armed host, Leonidas himself questions members of the other band and finds most of them are sculptors, farmers and blacksmiths.

“See?” he says, “I’ve brought more soldiers than you have.”

Once the battle is joined, the pace is breathtaking. Leonidas and his 300 face off against fantastic creatures and overwhelming odds. Back at home, Leonidas’ wife, Queen Gorgo (Lena Headley) has her hands full dealing with court intrigue as she tries to summon the army to come to her husband’s aid.

The battle scenes are visceral and grisly. Leonidas is always on the front line and his men prove, time and again, why they are the best of Spartan’s army.

Butler is surprising in his portrayal of Leonidas. You expect the growling inspiring speeches, the cold commitment to holding the line. He shows another side, too, though, in caring for his wife, his camaraderie among his men and witty banter with Xerxes as the god-king attempts to get him to surrender.

“Before this day is done,” he tells the giant, “I’ll show the world that even a god can bleed.”

He lives up to his word. The film lives up to the Miller’s vision, too—and so much more.

[Rasputin]

Iranians outraged over hit movie ‘300’

TEHRAN, Iran - The hit American movie “300” has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran.

“Hollywood declares war on Iranians,” blared a headline in Tuesday’s edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper.

The movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days.

[Rasputin]

300 Sparks an Outcry in Iran

All of Tehran was outraged. Everywhere I went yesterday, the talk vibrated with indignation over the film 300 — a movie no one in Iran has seen but everyone seems to know about since it became a major box office surprise in the U.S. As I stood in line for a full hour to buy ajeel, a mixture of dried fruits and nuts traditional to the start of Persian new year festivities, I felt the entire queue, composed of housewives with pet dogs, teenagers, and clerks from a nearby ministry, shake with fury. I hadn't even heard of the film until that morning when a screed about it came on the radio, so I was able to nod darkly with the rest of the shoppers, savoring a moment of public accord so rare in Tehran. Everywhere else I went, from the dentist to the flower shop, Iranians buzzed with resentment at the film's depictions of Persians, adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran. "Otherwise why now, if not to turn their people against us?" demanded an elderly lady buying tuberoses. "Yes, truly it is a grave offense," I said, shaking my own bunch of irises.

I returned home to discover my family in a similar state of pique. My sister-in-law sat behind her laptop, sending off an e-mail petition against the film to half of Tehran, while my husband leafed through a book on the Achaemenid Empire, noting that Herodotus had estimated the Persian army at 120,000 men, not one million as the film claimed. The morning newspaper lay on the table with the headline "300 AGAINST 70 MILLION!" (the population of the country). It was echoed by the evening news: "Hollywood has opened a new front in the war against Iran."

The timing of the computer-generated film, which depicts the ancient confrontation of Sparta and the Persian empire at the Battle of Thermopylae, is certainly inauspicious. It falls on the eve of Norouz, Persian new year, a time when Iranians typically gather in proud celebration, observing rites that date back over 3,000 years, way before Islam, to the age of Zoroastrianism, when their ancient land produced the world's first monotheistic religion. It is not a particularly welcome season to be portrayed as pillaging, deranged savages. Since the entire country will be on two weeks of official holiday, there will be no shortage of time to sit about discussing the slight and what it portends for Iran's current confrontation with the United States. For a people prone to conspiracy logic, the box office success of 300, compared with the relative flop of Alexander (another spurious period epic dealing with Persians) is cause for considerable alarm, signaling ominous U.S. intentions.

While the hullabaloo over 300 may dampen Iranians' holiday spirits, it offers common cause between people and their estranged government. Top officials and parliament have scorned the film as though it were a matter of state, and for the first time in a long while, taxi drivers are shaking their fists in agreement when the state news comes on. Agreeing that 300 is egregious drivel is fairly easy. I'm relatively mellow as Iranian nationalists go, and even I found myself applauding when the government spokesman described the film as fabrication and insult. Iranians view the Achaemenid empire as a particularly noble page in their history and cannot understand why it has been singled out for such shoddy cinematic treatment, as the populace here perceives it, with the Persians in rags and its Great King practically naked. The Achaemenid kings, who built their majestic capital at Persepolis, were exceptionally munificent for their time. They wrote the world's earliest recorded human rights declaration, and were opposed to slavery. Cuneiform plates show that Persepolis was built by paid staff rather than slaves And any Iranian child who has visited Persepolis can tell you that its preserved reliefs depict court dress of velvet robes, and that if anyone was wearing rags around 500 B.C., it wasn't the Persians.

It is going to take an act of foolhardy courage to distribute that film in Iran. It will truly be 70 million against 300.

[Rasputin]

How "300" misrepresents Persians in history

First Part

What do you get when you take all the “misfits” that inhabit the collective psyche of the white American establishment and put them together in the form of a cartoonish invading army from the East coming to take your freedom away? Then add a horde of Black people, deformed humans who are the quintessential opposite of the fashion journal images, a bunch of veiled towel-heads who remind us of Iraqi insurgents, a group of black cloaked Ninja-esque warriors who look like Taliban trainees, and men and women with body and facial piercings who are either angry, irrational, or sexually deviant. All this headed by a homosexual king (Xerxes) who leads this motley but vast group of “slaves” known as the Persian army against the 300 handsomely sculpted men of Sparta who appear to have been going to LA (or Montreal) gyms devotedly, who fight for freedom and their way of life, and who at times look like the Marine Corps advertisements on TV? You get the movie “300.”

It is these insinuations in the film that are more troublesome to me as a Persian immigrant to the U.S., than as a historian of antiquity. After all, Hollywood tries to sell movies and does not care if they are historically accurate, but movies also carry a subtle message which has very effective and current consequences. Some passages from the Classical authors Aeschylus, Diodorus, Herodotus and Plutarch are spilt over the movie to give it an authentic flavor. Aeschylus becomes a major source when the battle with the “monstrous human herd” of the Persians is narrated in the film. Diodorus’ statement about Greek valor to preserve their liberty is inserted in the film, but his mention of Persian valor is omitted. Herodotus’ fanciful numbers are used to populate the Persian army, and Plutarch’s discussion of Greek women, specifically Spartan women, is inserted wrongly in the dialogue between the “misogynist” Persian ambassador and the Spartan king. Classical sources are certainly used, but exactly in all the wrong places, or quite naively. However, my response is not so much to the inaccuracies of the film, but rather to its ultimate motive and its possible use in the current issue of war on terrorism.

The movie begins by showing an idyllic Sparta, where women go about freely, children play in safety, and become real men by going through the agoge system, as our movie hero King Leonidas does. From the distance an African-looking man with piercings all over his body appears with the head of the king who had the audacity of resisting Xerxes, the Persian ruler. There are some haphazard exchanges between King Leonidas and the Persian ambassador, who looks like a science fiction freak monster with his Al-Qaida entourage behind him. The king’s wife dares to talk and invokes the passage from Plutarch on women in Sparta “We are the mothers of men…” to the freakish, body-pierced bully who is the Persian ambassador, and a number of slogans about freedom, faith, etc. which sound like they came from Fox News or the Bush Administration, are spouted through King Leonidas. The sentence “We are the mothers of men” was actually never said to the Persians in history, but rather was part of a completely Greek debate on the position of women, regarding the fact that Athenian women were forced to stay in the andron (inner sanctum of the house) so that their reputations would not be tarnished. Spartan women were different than the Athenian women, but Persian women of this period had more freedoms than either the Spartans or Athenians and interceded not only in political matters, but also joined with the army, owned property, and ran businesses. The only time Persian women are shown in the film is as the usual fanciful Odaliskic Oriental women who do nothing but crawl on the ground, perform sexual acrobatics to fool the Western man, or just swarm around the water-pipe, high and happy.

So King Leonidas represents the fearless king who wants to keep Sparta “free” and to preserve “their way of life” and “democracy.” These mantras are repeated throughout the film. Even though the Spartan Gerousia (Congress) does not want to declare war, only King Leonidas knows what is needed and he makes the unilateral decision that he and his 300 Spartan men must go to battle for truth, justice and the Spartan way. I don’t think I was the only one who by the end of the film had a sense that Leonidas was a bit like President Bush and that the Gerousia was a bit like our U.S. Congress. But I am sure this is a coincidence since President Bush has himself never fought a war and since he will retire soon to have an airport or library named after him. But, on the other hand, King Leonidas lays down his life for the mantras that slavishly emanate from Bush’s official pulpit (Fox News) and other media outlets since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. So perhaps it is correct to equate the Persians of “300” with some of our enemies today, the Iranians, and King Leonidas with our war hero, i.e., President Bush.

Another side note to this battle is the clear identification of the Eastern Oriental Persian army with the Muslims, almost taken from Medieval imagery of the Moors who attacked Europe. They are dark, have head covers, and are very angry and disorganized. On the other hand the great general of Leonidas who receives continual praise from his king bears an uncanny resemblance to the Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli’s landmark “Jesus of Nazareth” and even experiences Christ-like suffering. Thus Bush, with Jesus at his side, defends Western Civilization against the Eastern Islamic-esque army who are coming to invade the West and take away our freedoms.

The Persian ambassador/Al-Qaida agent is killed in Sparta and so war begins and the Persians make plans to take away Spartan women, children, and freedoms. King Leonidas is not going to let this happen so he takes his elite fighting force to the pass of Thermopylae to stand against the million man slave-army of the kingdom of Persia. The Spartan fighting men very much act and sound like the U.S. Marine Corps with their slogans and their growls. Of course, this is only a coincidence. Then appears the powerful and homoerotic King Xerxes who first tries to deal with the Spartans by sending a conveniently stereotypical angry, fat Black man to brandish his whip at them. Then comes the almost baboonish Persian army, composed of monsters who cannot speak (another way of identifying the Persians as barbarians, i.e., the Greek name for those whose language is unintelligible). Although they resemble Iraqi insurgents, cinematic events unfold differently than they have in President Bush’s Iraq: the 300 Spartans kill thousands of the enemies of freedom without receiving so much as a scratch.

The battle between the outnumbered Spartans and their Persian enemies took place at the pass of Thermopylae in the year 480 BCE. In the movie version, the Spartan warriors kill the Persian soldiers without any losses until one wave of the Persian forces begin throwing fanciful explosives that shoot shrapnel into the chiseled physiques of our Greek “heroes.” Are we to believe that the Improvised Explosive Devices which are killing our soldiers in Iraq, and which the Bush/Leonidas administration claims to be manufactured by the Iranians/Persians (Iran was called Persia until an official name change in 1935), can suddenly appear on a fifth century BCE battle field?

Along with the IEDs, the doom of our Hellenic heroes is encompassed by a deformed half-Spartan who turns traitor and shows the Persians the backdoor route which results in the entrapment of the Greeks. Although King Xerxes comes one last time to convince the freedom-loving Leonidas to surrender, and even tempts him with the whole of Greece just for giving his obedience to the Persians, our hero does not give in. In an almost sexual gesture Xerxes holds Leonidas from the back and asks him to submit, to bend before the Persian ruler. The king goes into a dream (lifted from the Russell Crow film Gladiator) about his wife, child, and city, raises the battle cry, and then dies along with his entire regiment while the Spartan Congress, crippled by bribery and backstabbing, debates whether or not to send aid.

[Rasputin]

Second Part

One Spartan survivor is sent back to tell the story and so the heroism of the 300 Spartans who fought a hopeless battle against the overwhelming Persian slave army is remembered for posterity. This event galvanizes Greece into a unified force that can withstand the Persians (although unity soon dissolved into the Greek civil conflict known as the Peloponnesian Wars), and defeat them at the battle of Salamis (although Athens was sacked and burnt). The moral of the story is that 300 men sacrificed their lives for freedom, their way of life, and Democracy, something echoes in today’s broadcast updates on the war against so-called Islamic terrorism. Again, another coincidence.

But let us address the historicity of the film and the way in which the film uses history to mount a defense of “Western Civilization” against the invading “Other.” The reasoning for King Xerxes’ invasion of the continent of Europe is never discussed in the movie, and is rarely mentioned in the West. This is because accuracy is sacrificed in order to manipulate ancient history to buttress the Western view of the world. The borders of the Persian empire stretched from the Indus and Oxus Rivers in the East, to the Mediterranean Sea in the West, extending through Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and Egypt. This way the rivers and the seas were to provide a natural defense. But one of the cities along the cost of Anatolia, Miletus, ruled by a Greek tyrant named Aristagoras in 499 BCE staged a revolt and turned to the Athenians for aid. Until then the Persians had no plan or desire to go into Europe. The tiny Greek archipelago was probably almost beneath the notice of the Persian king. But then an Athenian attack on a major Persian province, which culminated in the sacking and burning of the city of Sardis, naturally alarmed the Persians. It is this destructive event that started what is known as the Greco-Persian Wars. It was not an unprovoked Persian invasion of Greece. Nor did Aristagoras start this trouble for “freedom” or “democracy,” but rather as step in his intrigue to take control of another Greek city (Naxos) on the Anatolian coast. The Athenians did not bring freedom or democracy to Sardis either. It was burnt and looted. So much so for the cause. In 494 BCE the Persians soundly defeated the Greek forces at the battle of Lade, and the coast of Anatolia was once again peaceful. Of course most of these preliminary events are of no significance today in the West and the subsequent battle between Xerxes and the Greeks is taken out of context, manipulated, and the freedom-loving, democratic Greeks are set against the slave empire of Achaemenid Persia. Is this is a fair and balanced view of history?

The result of these events was that the revolt started by Aristagoras was stopped by the Persians, the Athenian forces retreated, and then the Spartans and others were the defeated at Thermopylae. Luck was with the Greeks since in the subsequent battle of Salamis they gained the upper hand. However, Athens was sacked and burnt for its indiscretion at Sardis in 480 BCE. But if you read any history book in the West, none of these events really are highlighted, and only the Persian defeats are emphasized and such modern mantras as “freedom” and “democracy” are projected into the past onto ancient warfare.

Such jargon relating to “freedom” and “democracy” as used in the movie “300” is utterly untrue and exactly the opposite of what is revealed in the historical sources. It was not the Persians who were the slave nation. In fact the Persians allowed the different peoples of their empire to carry on their lives and traditions as they liked. Thus, the ancient city of Babylonia and the Greek-speaking settlements on the coast of Anatolia continued to use slaves, but in general the Persians hired people and paid them regardless of sex or ethnicity. This is made amply clear by the cuneiform documents from Persepolis, the capital of Achaemenid Persia. There were Persian women supervisors who controlled various economic activities in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Such women were granted a stipend for the support of their children and even given maternity leave. We find none of this in Greece. But in “300” we hear the “we are the mothers of men” quote, out of context, as if it applies to Persian ideas about the low status of women.

In the “freedom”-loving and “democratic” Sparta, slaves called helots were owned communally and there was an annual festival during which young Spartan men were allowed to terrorize the slave population and even kill a few of them to remind the rest of their place. And Sparta was not a democracy. It was a militaristic monarchy with a council of elders which decided political matters, but it was not a democracy. It was constantly on the warpath and constantly attempting to control and enslave its neighboring Greek city-states. Likewise, “democratic” Athens did not behave any better after it became the Hegemon in the fifth century BCE and began enslaving its neighbors, taking their lands, and destroying their way of life. Democracy (literally, rule by the people, Greek demos) was but a brief experiment in Greek history. Some estimates suggest that even when Greek democracy was at its height in 431 BC, less than 14% of the members of this society were allowed to participate in this “government by the people.” Not only was the vast majority of the population, including women, excluded from policy making, but nearly 37% lived in actual slavery [See: " Decolonizing Persian history"]. In contrast those who joined the Persian army, which included many non-hunchbacked Greeks, were paid for their service!

In the film “300” there is a constant reiteration that only 300 fought against two million, of which probably one million died in the course of the film. In reality the “freedom”-loving Spartans used slaves along with free “citizen-soldiers,” while the Persians employed paid forces and no slaves. The battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) has been recorded as the last stand of 300 Spartans who died to the very last man to protect free Greece, which is a myth happily held up by the modern West as a symbol of resistance against the East. In fact, each of the Spartans had seven slaves (the same helots mentioned above, who also fought to the death) with him in battle, bringing the total to 2400, plus another 2,000 non-Spartan Greeks (Thespians and Lacedaemonians) who also died. Some estimates put the Greek forces at Thermopylae as high as 7,000. The Persian force was not in the millions. An ancient army could never have mustered so many people, even if the Persians had resorted to slavery. But of course 300 against millions sounds much better than thousands of Spartans against thousands of Persians.

In the end, what is most troubling is the timing of the film’s premier. The fight between the Greeks and Persians, two civilizations representing the West and East, is screened in many movie theaters just when the U.S. and Iran are facing off in a bitter battle of words and ideologies. The two countries claiming descent from these two ancient peoples. On the one hand the movie Persians are shown as the representation of all that is alien and distasteful to the white Western life. Then there is the added ingredient of Black people, homosexuals, pierced and tattooed people, who in many way represent the archetypal outcasts in the collective imagination of middle America. And on the other hand there are the beautifully sculpted men who are moral, righteous, and willing to die together for freedom and Democracy. They obviously represent Western values.

In a time when we hear the sirens of war over Iran (Persia), it is ominous that such a film as “300” is released for mass consumption. To depict Persians / Iranians as inarticulate monsters, raging towards the West, trying to rob its people of their basic values demeans the population of Iran and anesthetizes the American population to war in the Middle East. This way Bush, Cheney, and other “compassionate” conservatives can more easily rain their precision guided missiles down on the heads of my parents, family members and other Iranians, establish Abu Ghraib detention centers, and perhaps take revenge for the death of the 300 Spartans in antiquity and finally bring democracy, peace and a better way of life to the East. Iraq was such a success, now the Spartan Marines need to head out to Iran and destroy it in order to protect our American freedoms. The fantasy movie “300” is just another of the propagandistic tools to reiterate this preposterous belief and to get the American people, children and adults, ready to endorse another Shock and Awe operation. I am saddened that we never seem to learn from history!

[IQ]

Hey Mr. Sia long time no talk.
how is it going.



listen I just check the petitiononline.com and I saw that they close down the petition to new signatures at author's request. What happened ? do you have any idea why. saving the whales get over 650,000 signatures and no one closes that petition. Have we become less than whales?

[IQ]

samething with the boycotting the movie's petition.

[Parinaz_M]

here is the link

http://www.petitiononline.com/wpci96c/petition.html