Why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans

[JHB]

Many of you will recall Frank Miller's recent screed against OWS:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2300077

Science fiction author David Brin takes him to town on citizenship and freedom by dissecting Miller's generally best-known work: the graphic novel and movie 300, starring everybody's favorite Spartans.

Roll over, Frank Miller: or why the Occupy Wall Street kids are better than #$%! Spartans

Well, well. I’ve been fuming silently at Frank Miller for a years. The time’s come, so get ready for steam! Because the screech that you just read – Miller’s attack on young citizens, clumsily feeling their way ahead toward saving their country – is only the latest example of Frank’s astonishing agenda. One that really needs exposure to light. I’ll do it by dissecting – calmly and devastatingly – his most famous and lucrative piece of modern propaganda. The comic book and movie tale about Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. A tale called – “300.”

***
Miller’s Spartan warriors honestly and openly conveyed the contempt for civilians that was felt across the ages by all feudal warrior castes. An attitude in sharp contrast to American sympathies, which always used to be about Minuteman farmers and shopkeepers – citizen soldiers – the kind who bravely pick up arms to aid their country, adapting and training under fire. Alas, Frank Miller’s book and movie “300″ ridiculed that kind of soldier…even though the first invasion by Persia, ten years earlier – under Xerxes’s father – had been defeated by just such a militia army… from Athens… made up of farmers, clerks, tradesmen, artists and mathematicians. A rabble of ill-disciplined “brawlers” who, after waiting in vain for promised help from Sparta, finally decided to handle the problem alone. On that fateful day that citizen militia leveled their spears and their thin blue line attacked a professional Persian force many times their number, slaughtering them to the last man on the legendary beach of Marathon.

== The inconvenient truth of Marathon ==
Frank Miller rails against effete, pansy-boy militias of amateur, citizen soldiers. But funny thing, none of his Spartan characters ever mentions those events, just a decade earlier! How bakers, potters and poets from Athens – after vanquishing one giant invading army, then ran 26 miles in full armor to face down a second Persian horde and sent it packing, a feat of endurance that gave its name to the modern marathon race. A feat that goes unmatched today. Especially by Spartans. That Athenian triumph deserves a movie! And believe me, it weighed heavily on the real life Leonidas, ten years later. “300″ author Frank Miller portrays the Spartans’ preening arrogance in the best possible light, as a kind of endearing tribal machismo. Miller never hints at the underlying reason for Leonidas’s rant, a deep current of smoldering shame over how Sparta sat out Marathon, leaving it to Athenian amateurs, like the playwright Aeschelus, to save all of Greece. The “shopkeepers” whom Leonidas outrageously and ungratefully despises in the film.

***

But there comes a point when artistic emphasis turns into deliberate, malicious omission. And then omission becomes blatant, outright-evil lying propaganda. “300″ not only crosses that line, it forges into territory that we haven’t seen since the propaganda machine of 1930s Germany. White is black. Black is white. Good is defined by the triumph of will.

***

No, this is not just artistic license. Expressed repeatedly – with the relentlessness of deliberate, moralizing indoctrination – “300″ idolizes the same arrogant contempt for citizenship that eventually ruined classical Greece and Republican Rome, and that might bring the same fate to America.

http://davidbrin.wordpress.com/2011/11/13/move-over-frank-miller-or-why-the-occupy-wall-street-kids-are-better-than-spartans/

[The Magistrate]

1. Mr. Brin Puts It Pretty Well, Sir

The '300' thing is swill on too many levels and in too many ways to readily summarize. Its author is an ignorant fool in love with violence.

[Eddie Haskell]

2. We've been remiss ... Letting others stand in our place.

These kids need us in the street, shoulder to shoulder. Their cause is just, but they've been dismissed because we do not show our support. We need to make it a million man march and it needs to move to DC.

[blogslut]

3. Happy to give this a fifth rec

Frank Miller is a greedy asshole.

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. I just took a Yale lecture course on the Ancient Greeks

The contemporary society Sparta most closely resembled was Nazi Germany. The actual 300 were more like the Waffen SS than the Minutemen.

That being said it was still was good story telling and art.
I even found Triumph of the Will interesting and mesmerizing, iwhich I think he drew a lot from.

The article nailed it pretty good.

[JHB]

6. If it weren't interesting and mesmerizing it wouldn't have been good propaganda...

...the whole point of Triumph of the Will was to stir up feelings and get the audience to associate those feelings with the Nazi Party.

300's biggest fault isn't the erasing of the serious faults of Spartan society (it is possible to admire admirable traits even in bad people), it's the active sneering at everyone else, treating them like so much fluff and bumble while the uebermench Spartans claim to do all the hard work.

[bonzotex]

5. thanks, K/r

300 was ridiculous as history. It could have still been good if he had just told the real story as is commonly known.