The Politics of Essentialzing Otherness

Take 300 ( The Movie)

Younes Abouayoub

Kanaan online

“…The native populations have that instinctive feeling that those with whom they have got to deal have not behind them the might, the authority…those populations lose all that sense of order which is the very basis of their civilization. “

A. J. Balfour (1910).

"…The idea that some races and cultures have a higher aim in life than others; this gives the more powerful, more developed, more civilized the right therefore to colonize others, not in the name of brute force or raw plunder, both of which are standard components of the exercise, but in the name of a noble ideal."

Edward W. Said, (The Clash of Definitions).

We are fighting for liberty against tyranny…against an army that shakes the earth with its march. The army of Persia is poised to crush Greece, an island of reason and freedom in a sea of mysticism and tyranny!  Thus spoke King Leonidas to his men preparing to fight the hordes of Xerxes’ soldiers. 300 white men besieged by dark-skinned menacing aliens. With a highly politicized narrative, Zack Snyder’s movie recounts the famous Thermopylae battle (Hot Gate) that opposed the Greeks to the Persians. The name of the battle comes from a narrow passage on the east coast of central Greece, also called Hot Gate probably because of its hot sulfur springs. In 480 BC, during the second Persian invasion of Greece, Leonidas commanding a rather tiny group of warriors set his mind on resisting Xerxes’ huge army. The director who based his screenplay on Frank Miller’s comic book 300, who in turn drew his inspiration from Herodotus’ writings, adding to it a politically-controversial flavor, did quite a job transposing orientalist stereotypes in a subliminal manner onto the Persians; those same stereotypes that have been used to portray Arabs and Muslims since Hollywood came to exist, i.e. inter alia the so-called sun and sand movies.

Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) in his main writings, On the Spirit of Laws and Persian Letters, coined the term Asian Despotism to refer to authoritarian states such as the Chinese and the Persian empires. More than a century later, addressing the House of Commons in 1910, Arthur James Balfour echoed these same clichés when he contended that ‘Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government…having merits of their own…you may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. All their great centuries…have been passed under despotisms, under absolute government.  History construed in this way has been characteristic of European/Western thought. In other words, an interpretation of history that assigns immutable idiosyncrasies to ‘Otherness’, i.e. the non-white, non-Occidental alien. According to this historical construe, ‘Oriental’ regimes are intrinsically despotic, ferociously anti-institutional and against moderation and political structures of any kind. Such a system is the ultimate desert of servitude; the political evil par excellence. Hence, Zach Snyder tells us that the absolute sovereign, Xerxes, has the right of life and death over his subjects and longs for more conquests and ever-expanding empire. In one of the first scenes of the movie, we see the Spartan King Leonidas meeting with Xerxes’ emissary who informs him that the Persian King expects total submission from Sparta and the Athenians, i.e. Western civilization (the Occident), to his sway: the Oriental despotic civilization. Needless to say, that the proud and intrinsically-free Leonidas, who embodies the ancient virtue, reason and honor of Western civilization, prefers to die rather than kneeling in front of the despot who makes such outrageous demands. Yet, the Achilles’ heel of this rendering of history is that it is myopic or worse benighted.

Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, Achaians

using the people as its mere dupe, as an underworker

a purchaser in trust for some tyrant

dexterous in pulling down, not in maintaining

LXVIII, The Cantos, Ezra Pound

Far from being a beacon of liberty and Democracy, Sparta (circa 550 BC) was a militarist and bellicose state; where women had the ultimate duty to give birth, pass down male chauvinism and surrender the education of their babies to the State, which applied an implacable and callous eugenic regime to all unfit babies. No wonder that the Third Reich chose Sparta, not Athens to model the German youth upon its state culture. Ephialtes, the hunchback who betrays Leonidas in the movie, we are told was survivor of this eugenic regime. Nevertheless the real Ephialtes, who died around 461 BC, was an Athenian democrat, who paved the way for the flourishing democracy in Athens. He was a champion of popular sovereignty and a staunch enemy of the Spartan authoritarian and elitist polity, represented by general Cimon (c.510-451 BC), who played an important role in building the Athenian Empire after the war against Persia and who contested Pericles (c.495-429 BC) and his democratic policies. Being a harbinger of democratic change would cost Ephialtes his life later on. In this regard, Zach Snyder aligns himself with the neoconservative and fascist attitudes held by Frank Miller and ends up contradicting himself. If liberty is the paramount virtue in the eyes of Snyder and Miller and if Sparta is the embodiment of such a noble value, how come that the only real democrat is portrayed in such an unprepossessing way as a hideous hunchback? If Ephialtes is a persona non grata in Sparta, should not Democracy understood as the will of popular assembly and the free choice of the ruler by the ruled be also an outcast concept? Finally, since Ephialtes slipped through the net of eugenics and ended up betraying his people, aren’t we invited to think that the movie applauds such Darwinian wises of selecting the fittest among the members of society?

 Furthermore, the esthetics and the cinematographic attitude^[1] of the movie make a clear-cut distinction between the two races. Conversely to Frank Miller’s comic book, where the Athenians are also sun-tanned, Zach Snyder chooses to depict his positive heroes, the Spartans, as white against black and dark-skinned anti-heroes, the Persians. Xerxes’ army is made of brown ‘towel-headed’ malicious soldiers, which makes us think of Arabs or Muslims, and Ninja-looking elite military troops venting spite who resemble matter-of-factly the Chinese; both groups making up the fictive category of the ‘Orientals’ according to an imposed narrative of history that ascribes centrality to the ‘Occident’. An esthetic cold war turned hot between two civilizational foes is depicted in Snyder’s cinematographic narrative. Besides, the scene where epicene Xerxes, sissified in most of his appearances as opposed to the manly Leonidas, tries to bribe Ephialtes, we are invited as voyeurs of an orgiastic scene depicting a free-for-all of lust and lechery, which brings in the immemorial stereotype held against Orientals, Muslims, Arabs and the like as being lascivious and hedonist. Raphael Patai, in his ‘study’ on The Arab Mind, writes: ‘Sexual hospitality and other manifestation of sexual laxity were reported in the late nineteen century from various tribes in Southern Arabia…This license must have been a residual fertility ritual, whose purpose was to ensure fruitfulness for mankind, animals and vegetation”^[2]. Raphael Patai argues that a study carried out in U.S. college campus found out that ‘…sexual activity is more intensive among Arab students than among Americans’. According to a testimony by Edward William Lane reported in Patai’s book, sexual luxuriousness is so banal among Arabs that ‘…things (of sexual nature) are named and subjects talked of, by the most genteel women, without any idea of their being indecorous, in the hearing of men, that many prostitutes in our country (i.e. England) would probably abstain from mentioning’^[3].  He further brings the testimony of ‘one observer’ who contends that ‘…even girls playing with dolls enact (sexual) scenes of complete realism. But this calm animal shamelessness is not alarming and has nothing to do with obscenity’^[4].

The Italian thinker Benedetto Croce once said that all history is contemporary, and the historical narrative of ‘300’ is without doubt contemporary to the marrow. Set against the background of the not-so-new bellicose trend in U.S. foreign policy, the audience is invited to think of the recent crusades launched against the ‘Islamo-fascists’ by the neo-conservatives and their British henchman , with whom Frank Miller admits a kinship. Iran is the target this time. Nevertheless, Miller and Snyder make a peculiar reading of contemporary politics; one in which victims are blamed and aggressors are left off the hook or worse portrayed as bottom dogs. It takes a cheeky posture to imply that the Iranians, or the ‘East’ in general, are picking up a quarrel with the ‘West’ while it is the latter that is ganging up on the former using such subterfuges such as building democracy, protecting Human rights or preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons. The recent ‘war on terror’ launched by the American administration gave free rein to a series of publications, press articles, TV and radio shows that try through a textual attitude to justify and vindicate the American policies by essentializing  the ‘Orientals’ as ‘Terror-driven zealots’. To give this narrative a semblance of truth, centers of power resort inter alia to spurious scholarly works in the same way that whilom imperial powers did before to justify occupation and assuage ‘the white man’s burden’ by carrying out his civilizing mission of ‘the savage’. This tendency to put a new spin to history is typified by some writers such as Joseph Wheelan in his book Jefferson’s War. According to him, “It was widely known among educated Americans that Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco were Moslem states and exhorted tribute from Europe through terror…The Barbary States…presented a solid, menacing front to Christian Europe and America^[5]”. Suffice it to say that the writer uses geographical names when referring to political and geographical entities such as Europe and America but deliberately bestows a pejorative linguistic qualifier to allude to the ‘other’ non-Westerner, in this case Muslims. Thus, the quaint term ‘Barbary’ is revamped to become the essential vocable for the geographical region extending from Egypt to Morocco that used to be known for Europeans as ‘the Barbary coast’. ‘Separated by 200 years, the two conflicts might at first seem to have little in common other than Moslem adversaries who targeted American civilians. The Barbary States wielded terror in the name of Islam for mercenary purposes, not to advance a political agenda, the goal of Al-Qaeda and its allies. Their depredations did not occur in New York or Washington but in the Mediterranean and the Eastern Atlantic, against ‘infidel’ civilian contractors transporting goods on sailing ships. Yet, it was terror nonetheless prosecuted cynically in the name of Islamic ‘Jihad’, Al-Qaeda’s pretext for hijacking jetliners and crushing them into highly visible symbols of U.S. power. America’s response in 1801 was the same as today: ‘to repel force by force’ as Jefferson puts it succinctly^[6]’. In this instance, Essence precedes Existence; terror then and now is the essential trait of the ‘Oriental’. What has changed is not the essence but merely the objectives. Previously, the urge behind the use of ‘terror’ was a mercenary benefit while today it is the attainment of political goals. Besieged, the righteous and unsullied ‘Occidental’ had no other choice but to defend himself by hook or by crook. In the same vein, Zack Snyder portrays the Persians as fanatics, violent and merciless conquerors. This attitude posits an ‘Orient’ as a stabile and unfluctuating totality intrinsically and eternally sundered from the ‘Occident’. If the rationale changes from era to era, the stereotypes are nevertheless recycled ad-nauseam. Thus, sensuality and bellicosity previously used for other Oriental peoples can be proven today as ineradicable traits of the Muslims by referring to some verses of the Coranic text for instance. This essence, as perceived through the Orientalist’s prism and construed sometimes in metaphysical terms is both historical because it goes back to time immemorial and a-historical since it impales its object in a ‘non-evolutive specificity^[7]’ instead of historicizing it as in the case of other nations and cultures. It follows that essential categories of peoples are created pseudo-scientifically and we end up with putative typological tiers such as homo Africanus, homo Arabicus and homo Persianus…etc. These categories of peoples perceived as the non-Western others are incapable of performing what the ‘Westerner’ can achieve. They are prepolitical and prehistorical in Hegel’s view since human evolution takes place from the lower Oriental stage towards the higher German one, while Immanuel Kant believes the Orientals unfit to produce or enjoy the beautiful and the sublime^[8]. ‘An Oriental lives in the Orient, he lives a life of Oriental ease, in a state of Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism’^[9].

Another theme the film makes free with is the dialectic between reason and mysticism.  While the Spartans are depicted as rational individuals, the Persians are denied such attributes as reason and rationality. The homo Persianus ‘is poised to crush Greece, an island of reason and freedom in a sea of mysticism and tyranny’ as Frank Miller puts it. Regarding a sub-category of Orientals i.e. Arabs, H.A.R. Gibb opines that Arabs and Muslims have had great philosophers only as an exception; due to a historical accident of some sort since ‘the Arab mind, whether in relation to the outer world or in relation to the processes of thought, cannot throw off its intense feeling for the separateness and the individuality of the concrete events…It is this…which explains the aversion of Muslims from the thought-processes of rationalism…The rejection of rationalist modes of thought and the utilitarian ethic which is inseparable from them has its roots, therefore, not in the so-called “obscurantism” of the Muslim theologians but in the atomism and discreteness of the Arab imagination’^[10]. Decades after H.A.R. Gibb, Pope Benedict XVI echoed similar clichés during a lecture he gave at the University of Regensburg in Germany in September 2006. Cloaked behind a quote from a dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and an erudite Persian, the Pontiff asserted the connate rationality of Christianity, and consequently the Occident, since according to him ‘not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature’. Conversely, he sees that the Islamic doctrine perceives God as transcending such worldly concepts as rationality and his will is not bridled by any principle be it even rationality. In other word, the ‘Muslim God’ (and hence his followers) does not act rationally and contradicts his own words since by his own transcendence he is not constrained by anything.  Rubbing it further, Pope Benedict XVI ends his lecture by inviting the Muslims to the realm of ‘the great logos’: “…It is to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures’.

More often than not, these tautologous and imbecilic statements have been tooled and retooled to provide pseudo-rational explanations and ad hominem exegeses to why the Orientals have missed the train of Modernity. Through a spurious use of historiography, self-proclaimed ‘experts’ quibble on the inherent deficiencies of the Oriental mind and engage in a anthropocentrism mixed with an Occidocentrism to justify their supremacist beliefs. By doing so, they willingly ignore the fact that Modernity, brought about by the so-called Enlightenment ideas and values, has been visited upon the non-white others through the barrel of a gun. These ‘blank spaces on the map’^[11] called Africa or the Orient, had become ‘a place of darkness’ that the white apostle has had the supreme duty to bring to realm of daylight. The truth of the matter is that colonial modernity not only does it not protect us from atrocities but make use of them out of greed and cupidity. In the face of these Orientalist attitudes that submerge the media and popular culture and become even more acute during times of crises, it is up to us as individuals to open ours eyes and minds to the multiplicity of reality. War is not only the opposite of peace since it is embryonic in our daily lives. Wars are won most of all during times of peace when each human being can refuse to be reduced to a soldier and resist being carried out by nationalistic sentiments. History, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said, taught us that war memorials are impious because they transform victims into heroes and relaunch thus the vicious circle of conflicts. There are no nations but only human beings everywhere aspiring to the same goals and values such as liberty and happiness. Civilization should not be taken for granted because during the times of crises humanity can revert to the worst sides of its nature and fascism can overtake from within, not from without as ‘300’ claims, the most entrenched democracies. By dint of using an essentialized otherness as a bogey, warmongers and profiteers try to sow dissension among human beings to assuage their venal drives. “…Empires are always about extraction of wealth from the provinces for the benefit of the center, without regard to the rights of the subject peoples. They may not benefit all social strata in the imperial nation—in fact, some of the lower classes have to fight and die to maintain the empire—but they always do benefit an elite”^[12]. Following a long tradition of supremacist attitudes, stereotypes and dividing practices developed and used by Orientalists, Franck Miller and Zack Snyder have recycled old clichés to affix them on the enemy of the day. From this perspective, ‘300’ with its cinematographic attitude is yet another non-event.