by Jeff Davis

“The 300″ has garnered 70 million dollars in its opening weekend, which is unprecedented for an epic historical movie that heavily uses blue screen technology. Apparently it’s a well done action movie, but is there anything subliminal or fishy about it? What would make it acceptable to the Hollywood elite who determine which movies appear in theaters and which don’t? Hollywood usually doesn’t glorify great moments in European history so something funny is going on.

According to the Toronto Star, Hellenic scholar Ephraim Lytle sees a lot of disturbing inaccuracies that may go beyond the usual Hollywood “dramatic license” of the kind that had the courtiers of Louis XV disco-dancing at Versailles in the atrocious film Marie Antoinette. In an interview with the Star, Lytle says that “History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs.” Uh, wait a minute. That is the first problem I would have with the flick, assuming that what I saw in the trailers is confirmed. In the first place, Greece gets pretty damned cold in the winter. Spandex thongs may be a slight exaggeration, the garments looked more like Ghandi-style “diapers” for lack of a better word. The movie trailers show the Spartans wearing helmets, shields, “diapers” and capes —that leaves a lot of vulnerable skin for arrows to strike.

Lytle goes on to make some comments that, to me, hang out a few warning flags. In speaking of the Spartan government, he says, “Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta’s highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas’ campaign, despite 300’s subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good.” Whoa! Hold it right there! Is this starting to ring a bell, people?

Someone is distorting history to try to make Bush look good. King Leonidas did absolutely nothing illegal by Spartan law. An army of hundreds of thousands of Persian soldiers was invading Greece to enslave them. The Persian tyrant had already started a war against the Greeks. The Spartans were facing a very real threat with only a few days to react. The Spartan government however was unable to make a decision because of a religious celebration. King Leonidas had the authority to take his personal elite guard of 300 Spartans to guard a key mountain pass at Thermopylae. Leonidas wanted to buy time for the Greeks to raise an army and to cost the invaders heavy casualties. Leonidas chose to respect the law since he saw it as more important than his own life. (Contrast that to Bush who calls the US Constitution “just a G-d damned piece of paper.”)

Fast forward 2,483 years to Bush Junior. America was faced by no real threat from Iraq. The neocons wanted a war for the sake of Israel so they invented lie after lie to trick the American public. Bush Junior helped them spread their lies. This attempt to portray a chickenhawk liar as a brave king who fought beside his troops, should have King Leonidas spinning in his grave. If anything, Bush bears a resemblance to the Persian tyrant invading another land in an unjustified war of aggression.

The other obvious analogy, the neocons would like us to get from this movie, is a war between Persia and the West. This time however the West has the overwhelming power. Our technology makes the courage of 300 soldiers standing in a mountain pass defending their homeland completely obsolete. Sure the Persians were a serious military threat to the West thousands of years ago. But why were the Greeks fighting? They wanted their culture and their race preserved. Today, politicians like George W. Bush leave the immigration door wide open for Muslims to invade the West without a fight. They will wipe out our society and culture just as surely as if the Persian tyrant won his war against the Greeks. Bush’s upcoming war against Persia won’t protect our society from swarthy Persian invaders. In fact we already absorbed hundreds of thousands of these people when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and we’ll probably absorb millions of Iraqis when Bush’s occupation of Iraq finally falls completely apart.

The 300 Spartans were heroes fighting a war to defend their homeland. Bush and the neocons are criminals pushing a war against Iran that does nothing to protect our people or our heritage.