I think one of the jobs of a history teacher is to make the "young" aware of the patterns of human behaviour. Obviously this covers a lot of different things, but at the moment we are looking at how, even in a country with an excellent education system and free elections, people who are embodiments of evil can be put in charge.
I'm one of those people who think that most things are really shades of grey, but I'm happy to call Nazi Germany pure evil and I don't expect many people to disagree with me. Americans, for example, would quite rightly pride themselves for the part they played in bringing the Nazi regime to an end in 1945. And yet...
I have always loved Classics, and whenever I have a gap in my Social Studies classes I slot in a bit of film and history concerning the ancient Greeks and the Romans. We watch Hollywood's latest version of Troy and Alexander the Great. The students love it. The movie they loved most last year was 300.
300 is a movie that promotes fascism.
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Here's Andrew Sullivan on 300:
I caught 300 last night and thought I'd pass on my thoughts.
It is a deeply silly and deeply beautiful film. It's most silly when it's trying to be a movie, and it's most beautiful when it's trying to be a graphic novel. Fortunately, it mostly just tries to be a graphic novel. But, ah, the men. All those beautiful, beautiful men dancing around in briefs and capes. It almost brought me to tears. It is perhaps the gayest movie that I've ever seen that wasn't porn.
Those who try to deconstruct the movie into a statement on the current war, or who say that it is racist or (most glaringly wrong) anti-gay are utterly missing the point. Everyone (perhaps excluding the Queen) in the film is gay. You have the butch gym queens of Sparta (I mean can any chisled man run around in speedos and a cape and call himself straight?), and the pierced, shaved, and bejeweled bar queens of Persia. It's gay-on-gay violence, pure and simple.
Whooah!
It's like playing with Oija boards and invoking demons - you have now summoned up the gay militia - be scared.
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