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The '300' stroke
Hamid Dabashi*
writes on pride, prejudice, Persia and other empires
Al-Ahram Weekly
2 - 8 August 2007
Issue No. 856
FOR THE WORLD AT LARGE, the sign "300" may not
mean much beyond a mere number placed solemnly between a double
quotation marks. But given the prevalent Hollywood hegemony over
the globalised pop culture, that anonymity should not remain the
case for long. Why should the world care about an oversize
American comic book being made into a jumbo- sized videogame
look alike, CGI-virtuoso, cinematic spectacle (released
theatrically in March and then late this July on DVD), has
scarce anything to do with a testosterone-infested infantilised
culture of teenage mutant computer wizards giving wild momentum
to their belated adolescent fantasies and more to do with the
fact that precisely that very orgiastic nucleus of violence is
at the roots of a very real -- though still unreal -- predatory
empire wreaking havoc around the globe.
On the face of it, Zack Snyder's 300
(2007) is just a bodybuilders' wet-dream version of a
foundational myth, of how "the West" began -- albeit the
muscularity of its sculpted takes on military prowess bespeaks a
bit too noisily the moral obesity it seeks to hide and yet
manages to expose even more obscenely. Ever since its original
narration by Greek historian Herodotus, the Battle of
Thermopylae (480 BC) has increasingly assumed a symbolic
significance far beyond its original import. Not just in
Thermopylae, but also in Marathon and Salamis did the Greeks put
up splendid resistances to the predatory expansionism of the
Achamanid Empire. Much later in history, these battles assumed
disproportionate and entirely ahistorical significance -- the
farther the myth of "the West" (as the presumed centre of
universe and the colour-coded sign of white man's civilising
mission around the globe) developed the more these battles
assumed almost metaphysical and supernatural significance. Small
skirmishes at the farthest frontiers of the shapeless,
graceless, and gargantuan Achamanid Empire at the time, battles
such as Thermopylae, Marathon, or Salamis increasingly assumed
ahistorical, prophetic, and even divine significance in the
making of the myth of "the West" as the Christian God's gift to
humanity.
The increasingly ahistorical significance of
these battles between the Ancient Greeks and the Achamanid
Empire corresponds squarely to the expansion of European
colonialism and its concomitant self-conception of "the West" as
the generic rubric under which Europeans launched their global
conquest. The origin of the glorification of the Graeco-Persian
wars in modern history evidently goes back to Michel de
Montaigne (1533-1592) who first identified the "glorious defeat
of King Leonidas and his men at the defile of Thermopylae" as
more glorious than "the fairest sister- victories, which the Sun
has ever seen." Appalled by the Turkish domination of Greece,
Lord Byron (1788-1824) would later join Montaigne in decrying:
"Earth! Render back from out thy breast/a remnant of our Spartan
dead! /Of the three hundred grant but three/To make a new
Thermopylae!" Reporting these earliest records of reading the
Battle of Thermopylae ahistorically, the British popular
historian, Tom Holland says "no wonder, then, that the story of
the Persian Wars should serve as founding-myth of European
civilisation; as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over
slavery, and of rugged civic virtue over enervated despotism."
(Tom Holland, Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the
Battle for the West, 2005: xviii).
What Tom Holland calls "European civilisation"
for the rest of the world spells out as a predatory form of
colonialism. No wonder then that the shared sentiments of
Montaigne and Byron about Thermopylae were soon to be picked up
by grand officers of the British Empire. John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873), for example, spoke on behalf of the entire British
colonial character when he said that "the battle of Marathon,
even as an event in English history, is more important than the
battle of Hastings." Giving philosophical momentum to European
colonialism, Hegel (1770-1831) had already chimed in that "the
interest of the whole world's history hung trembling in the
balance".
The Persian Wars in general and the Battle of
Thermopylae in particular were not to remain outside the purview
of the direct beneficiaries of European colonialism, namely the
rising European bourgeoisie and its preferred cultural outputs.
European Orientalist opera was to have a ball with Xerxes and
the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis. Francesco Cavalli
(1602-1676) in 1654, Giovanni Bononcini (1670-1747) in 1694 and
most famously George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) in 1738 had
much fun putting the Achamanid king to song and dance. Although
in Handel's Serse, the Persian emperor gets to sing one
of the most beautiful arias of the opera, " Ombra mai fu
", one only needs to compare it with Aeschylus's Persians
(472 BC) to note the vast difference in the manner in which the
Greeks themselves saw and empathised with their adversaries and
the way the Europeans of the Baroque period began to stage their
"Orientals".
The Orientalist opera became integral to the
artistic and ideological make-up of the European bourgeoisie.
The more European bourgeois historiography became self-conscious
of its colonial globalisation the more the minor skirmishes
between the Achamanid Empire, the very first globalised empire
the world had ever seen, and its tiny Greek borders assumed
extravagant, ahistorical, and entirely mythic significance. The
more European imperialism, it seems, was modelling itself on
what it called the Persian Empire, the more it claimed the
embattled heritage of a tiny archipelago it misappropriated as
its point of civilisational origin.
John Stuart Mill's glorification of the
Persian Wars was premonitory of its further celebration by other
British colonial officers. It is not accidental at all that Lord
Curzon (1859-1925), just before he became the viceroy of India,
visited the ruins of Xerxes Palace with a certain sense of dual
identity. "It might have flattered the British Empire," as Tom
Holland puts it, "to imagine itself the heir of Athens; but it
owed a certain debt of obligation to the mortal enemy of Athens,
too." (Ibid: xxi).
Following the footsteps of European
ahistorical historians, Orientalist storytellers, and British
colonial officers alike, Adolph Hitler positively adored the
Battle of Thermopylae. "To the Nazis", Tom Holland has pointed
out, "as it had been to Montaigne, Thermopylae was easily the
most glorious episode in Greek History." This is not all. It
gets even better: "The three hundred who defended the pass," Tom
Holland reports, "were regarded by Hitler as representative of a
true master-race, one bred and raised for war, and so
authentically Nordic that even the Spartans' broth, according to
one of the Fèhrer's more speculative pronouncements, derived
from Schleswig-Holstein."
Thermopylae has indeed made very strange
bedfellows of European historians, poets, philosophers, colonial
officers, world conquerors and mass murderers. Such is the fate
of European self- delusional reading of history. Soon after
Montaigne, Lord Byron, Hegel, British colonial officers, and
Hitler, it was the turn of the British novelist William Golding
(1911-1993) who in the early 1960s wrote his famous essay on the
event, "The Hot Gates" (1965), where he declared, gleefully, "a
Little of Leonidas lies in the fact that I can go where I like
and write what I like. He contributed to set us free."
Reporting all these creative adoptions of the
Battle of Thermopylae with a sense of historical duty, Tom
Holland himself is not immune to bizarrest forms of ahistorical
fancy footwork. "Had the Athenians lost the Battle of Marathon,"
the British historian firmly believes, "and suffered the
obliteration of their city, for instance, then there would have
been no Plato -- and without Plato, and the colossal shadow he
cast on all subsequent theologies, it is unlikely that there
would have been an Islam to inspire bin Laden" (Ibid: xxii). I
am not making this sentence up. This splendid show of analytical
logic and historical perspicacity is by an otherwise very
respectable and popular British historian.
As the decade of Thatcher-and-Reagan dawned on
the world, a new lease on life was given to the Battle of
Thermopylae. Throughout the 1980s and then 1990s and beyond
there was a resurgence of books on the Battle of Thermopylae.
The British historian Ernle Bradford wrote his Thermopylae:
The Battle for the West (1980), as did Steven Pressfield did
his Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae
(1998); and so did Paul Cartledge his Thermopylae: The Battle
that Changed the World (2006) -- and it is right here that
we need to place Frank Miller's pre-9/11 comic book 300
(1998), with colours by Lynn Varley, on the basis of which
Snyder made his post-9/11, CGI virtuoso, adaptation 300
(2007).
At the centre of all these narrations and
re-narrations of the Battle of Thermopylae is the constitution
of a Homo Militaris, a militant mutation of the political and
the civic into the Spartan site of a malignantly militarised
humanity. What we see in Frank Miller and Snyder's 300 is
nothing but the latest edition of a long and arduous
degeneration of factual memory into fanciful nightmare, where
history keeps repeating itself in ever more violent and vicious
ways.
THE NARRATIVE FUSION at the creative core of
300 -- in which Snyder deliberately seeks to recreate the
visual mood and the mimetic Verfremdung of Miller's comic
book -- is fully at the service of the fact and fantasy that
here come together to make 300 work on an excessive
dosage of testosterone-infested adolescent hype.
One has to look at Miller's original
double-page format -- imitated in the film version mostly
through bluescreen shots -- to understand why it is that
coast-to-coast in theatres around the United States the enthused
(mostly teenage) audiences were offered the chance to look at
Snyder's spectacle at mega-sized IMAX formats and partake in the
spectacular extravaganza. The point here -- in Miller and Lynn
Varley's palettes, in Snyder's testosterone- infested vision, in
Larry Fong's meticulous angular execution, in William Hoy's
spellbinding cuts, in Snyder and Kurt Johnstad's muscular
dialogues, and in Tyler Bates heavy metal score -- is to
overwhelm and dwarf all human measures, all historical
proportions, all boundaries of the ordinary, and thus to place
the experience in the daunting spectrum of some frivolous,
violent and deadly juvenile culture.
The questions of why now and why this are far
less important than what precisely this furious phantasm of
playful power, this imperial self-projection of mythological
might, entails. It is of course ludicrous to imagine, as does
the Islamic Republic and much of a spectrum of so-called
"Persian diaspora" in the United States, a conspiracy behind a
comic book turned into a Hollywood production. There is no
conspiracy. That is how things work in the imaginal making of an
empire. Instead of degenerating into such conspiracy theories,
it is far more important to excavate the archeology of an
evidence that in its varied layers embraces not just Miller and
Snyder and the millions of their teenage mutant audience
participating in a collective orgy of violence, but that extends
to embrace their elected president, vice-president, and above
all the American warlord Donald Rumsfeld. What Miller and Snyder
have joined forces to do for a whole world to see is the
juvenile criminality at the bottom roots of the US Empire. There
has always been something juvenile about the American
imperialism. If it is vile and violent it is not despite the
innocence at the heart of in this case what after all is just a
comic book but precisely because it is rooted in nothing but the
phantasmagoric labyrinth of that innocence. This is how an
illusory empire operates. Those soldiers trained as killing
machines and sent off half way around the globe to maim and
murder people in Iraq or Afghanistan do so not out of any
ideological conviction, political stand, moral principle, or
civilisational sense of superiority -- but by virtue of having
all been fed on this dosage of violently playful comic books,
videogames, and films -- to the point that what they see in
front of them in Afghanistan and Iraq and shoot to kill are not
human beings but in fact comic strips, videogame images, Sunday
matinee double features -- the delusional fantasy of an
otherwise deadly real world. When US soldiers are inside their
tanks, when US pilots are flying their fighter jets, when US
marines look through their night vision goggles -- they do not
see human beings when they pull the trigger. All they see are
videogame figurines, of the sort they have been shooting at in
videogame arcades, reading about in comic books, cheering at in
films such as Snyder's 300. It is the same testosterone
-- in different buckets.
The peculiar manner in which the visual
Imperium of 300 operates in the post-9/11 George Bush led
imperialism is by an act of emotive reversal, projecting the
American imperial practice back in time and space to something
called "the Persians" and instead assuming the identity of a
band of Spartan soldiers that now speak and act on behalf of
"the West" -- the imperial provenance of American identity. In
this emotive swap, the US as "the West" wants to have its cake
and eat it too -- act as the Achamanid (what they call
"Persian") Empire did but assume it is a small band of Spartans
defending freedom and democracy against a horde of foreign
invaders. Flaunting and flexing the most deadly military
machinery in human history, the US can now partake in the
delusional feat that Miller and Snyder have cooked up for it to
see itself as a small band of guerrilla fighters resisting a
predatory empire. Here "the Persians" mutate and stand for
(among other things) what the terrorising propaganda machinery
of the US empire calls "Islamofascism".
Cinema is a miraculous (for those who abuse it
treacherously) medium. It reverses angle on you (the filmmaker)
without your even noticing it. Snyder has gone through all this
trouble and these expenses to demonise an ancient and forgotten
empire only to give a perfect picture of the empire in which he
lives and which he, however inadvertently, serves -- just lower
the loud volume of 300 and watch it and ask yourself
between Bush and an anonymous leader of Iraqi resistance who has
more claim to Xerxes and who to Leonidas?
Leonidas' mission in Snyder's 300 is an
act of suicidal violence -- a suicidal violence that if
performed by white people in remote corners of history is heroic
but if by Palestinians or Iraqis then it becomes sign of
barbarism. So what Miller/Snyder effectively want is yet another
example of having their cake and eating it too -- stealing the
strategy of suicidal violence from those desperate measures of
resisting imperialism of one sort (US) or another (Israel) and
cast the enemy as imperial. It is a complete reversal of fact to
make spectacular fantasy -- stealing resistance of the poor
coloured folks and white--identifying it, while projecting your
own imperial barbarity to some remote point in history and
calling it The Enemy, "The Persians". This is a remarkable act
of reversal, a projection backward. You become the enemy you
abhor and you catapult the abhorrence you are to your enemy.
300 thus amounts to a CGI-engineered sense of tragedy and
valour for an otherwise carnivorous empire that has just
inflicted unfathomable pain and suffering on millions of Afghans
and Iraqis.
What Snyder actually portrays (for the whole
world to see) is the best picture of the US army in action. That
monstrosity that Snyder pictures marching towards Thermopylae is
the American empire -- and that band of brothers that stood up
to that monstrosity are those resisting this empire: they are
the Iraqi resistance, the Palestinians, Hizbullah. Thermopylae,
in 300, becomes a floating signifier. "The West", Miller
and Snyder, have no control over it. 300 is thus too
smart a thievery for its own good. It is a robbery completely --
from beginning to end -- caught on closed caption camera. Today
the Palestinian, Lebanese, and Iraqi resistance to US/Israel
imperial warmongering have a far more legitimate claim on being
the Spartans of their time than Americans, British, or Italians
do.
The reversed projection of Miller-Snyder, now
seeking to provide the Bush-Cheney project with an ideological
hegemony they otherwise lack, ipso facto casts a claim on
the absolutist militarist culture anachronistically attributed
to the Spartans -- all narrated around their presumed
infanticide practices, where children deemed useless to the
military culture were killed at birth. This is Fukuyama's "end
of history" thesis in a nutshell -- where the only citizens
worth living are citizen soldiers. There is a scene in Snyder's
300 where King Leonidas makes fun of a regiment of Greek
soldiers that has come to help him in the battle. He asks the
Greek soldiers what their professions are. They respond by
stating their ordinary professions before they became soldiers.
He then turns to his soldiers and asks them the same questions,
and they respond in unison that they are all nothing but
soldiers. This is not just the end of history. This is the end
of humanity. This is the US military projected back into history
-- a professional and heavily privatised army entirely divorced
from the will and wishes of a polity and a democracy that does
not have to invest its own sons and daughters in its military
adventurism.
THE REACTION OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC to 300
was at once banal, hypocritical, and entirely irrelevant to the
psychodynamic synergy that 300 had generated in the
imperial denomination of its origin, the United States. The
officials of the Islamic Republic, including President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, opted for the usual conspiracy theories. That
"Americans" are launching a psychological warfare against them
as part of "their" opposition to the Iranian nuclear programme.
Meanwhile, they sought to abuse the situation and posit
themselves as the defenders of Iranian national pride when their
heritage and identity was under attack. Never mind the fact that
over the last three decades, the Islamic Republic has done
everything to eradicate the non-Islamic aspects of Iranian
culture (whether nationalist or socialist) and most recently
started viciously cracking down on a nascent civil society and
women's rights activists.
It is imperative to keep in mind that the
reaction of Iranians to 300 in the United States was
mainly by the computer and Internet savvy young generation. The
youthful disposition of this demography is crucial in our
understanding of its visceral disposition. The reaction of young
Iranian-Americans to 300 was swift, bitter, and
traumatic. They immediately launched an online petition and led
a Google-bombing campaign against 300. "It is a proven
scholarly fact," the young Iranian-Americans declared solemnly
in their online petition, "that the Persian Empire in 480 BC was
the most magnificent and civilised empire. Established by Cyrus
the great, the writer of the first human right declaration,
Persians ruled over significant portions of Greater Iran, the
east modern Afghanistan and beyond into Central Asia; in the
north and west all of Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the upper
Balkans peninsula (Thrace), and most of the Black Sea coastal
regions; in the west and southwest the territories of modern
Iraq, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, all
significant population centres of ancient Egypt and as far west
as portions of Libya..."
The traumatic response of young
Iranian-Americans was perfectly understandable. Born either in
Iran before their parents left their revolution- and
war-stricken homeland, or else immediately upon their arrival in
the United States, these young Iranians were told to identify
themselves scarcely as "Iranian" but principally as "Persians".
"Persia" was a safe and sound fantasyland; Iran a war torn abode
of terror and fanaticism. No one knew where exactly this
"Persia" was. Too many Americans knew where Iran is and had an
allergic reaction to it. Soon after the Islamic Revolution of
1979 and the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980, the
expatriate Iranian communities in the United States began to
identify themselves as "Persians" and termed the language they
spoke as "Farsi". The mutation of "Iranian" into "Persian" and
"Persian" language into "Farsi" was the most immediate response
of the traumatised Iranians living in the United States while
their compatriots were holding Americans hostage in their own
embassy. For almost three decades, these young Iranian-Americans
painted themselves into the Persian corner of their parents
captured imagination. Persia and Persian were now cool; Iran and
Iranian were too barbaric, rugged, ugly. Ayatollah Khomeini was
Iranian, so was the Islamic Revolution, bearded men, veiled
women, hostage taking, airplane hijacking, transnational
terrorism. "Persia" was a whole different story. Persians had
fluffy and cool cats, delicious and expensive caviar, and
colourful and precious carpets. Along with cats, carpets, and
caviar, these young Persians were led by their parents to
exoticise themselves and stage their identity on the exotic
angle of American Orientalism, rather than the rugged realities
of their homeland. This young generation went to school in the
United States and then to college, and thus its emotive and
imaginative universe were by an large American in culture and
disposition, with a little bit of "Farsi" to their fantasies, a
pinch of saffron or a bite of Qormeh Sabzi under the palate of
their McDonald's taste buds. Their annual Noruz get together,
the Anglicised spellings and vocalisation of their names, and
even their embarrassment that their parents came from an Islamic
Republic notwithstanding, for all intents and purposes this
young generation was American, yet another variation on the
theme of other hyphenated-Americans, and it thus spoke its
English with a decidedly American accent, and was fully at home
in American culture. Three decades into this story, suddenly
comes a Miller and a Snyder and smack from the very heart of the
pop culture with which the young Iranian-Americans deeply
identified blasted them out of their ghettoised slumber with a
visceral demonology of unsurpassed racism -- portraying them and
their "Persian" ancestors as beasts, as subterranean creatures,
as monstrous apparitions, as the very definition of evil. Young
Iranian-Americans were stripped of their hyphenated hypothesis
of who and where they were. They could no longer partake in the
youthful fantasies of their generation. They were denied emotive
catharsis with who and what they thought they were. In Snyder's
300, they were, they had become, the other of themselves,
the denial of themselves.
Thus the origin of the outlandish fact of
young Iranian- Americans, at the prime of their idealist hopes
for a better world, unabashedly identifying with a predatory
empire called the Achamenids. The sad pathology of boasting
about how civilised the Persian Empire was (it was no such thing
-- no empire is) -- or how expansive its domains were --
reflects the even more troubling fact of these Iranians in
effect identifying with the imperial adventurism of their host
country, the United States of America. What has been
categorically absent in Iranian-Americans reaction to 300
is even the slightest sign of a critical angle on the Achamanid
Empire itself, the very first global empire that set the
standard for carnivorous warmongering, military expansionism,
colonial domination of other peoples and lands. The fact that
the arrested intelligence of adolescent fraternity brothers like
Miller and Snyder has given free range to their
testosterone-infested fantasies does not mean that the
Achamenids were God's gift to humanity. All empires are
terrorising propositions.
"Persians" are fond of saying that Cyrus the
Great set the Jews free from Babylon and wrote the very first
human right declaration. What nonsensical pieces of absolute
gibberish! Cyrus did no such thing. He set the Jews free from
Babylon very much the same way that the US army set the Iraqis
free in Iraq, and the declaration of human rights he presumably
wrote (predated by Codex Hammurabi by more than 1,000 years) is
the precursor of the constitution that Paul Bremer wrote for the
Iraqis. The "respect" that the Achamenids had for other people
and cultures was limited to permitting them to obey their
imperial rule any way they wished and in terms domestic to their
political cultures. The biblical narratives of Jewish freedom
from Babylon are the signs of a grateful people left alone to
practise their faith within the boundaries of a global empire,
and as such is no indication of the magnanimity of Persian
Kings. No human being must be left to the magnanimity of any
king. Freedom is the inalienable rights of all humans, ancient
or modern, and should never be contingent on an emperor's
goodwill. Where ever the Achamenids went they coroneted
themselves in the manner of local customs, by way of seeking to
legitimise their otherwise predatory conquest of other people's
lands. And any people who resisted them -- as the Greeks
rightfully did -- were murdered and their houses set on fire.
The fact that the history of Thermopylae, Marathon, or Salamis
has been appropriated and abused by European colonial
historiography, or that it is now the subject of a visual orgy
of violence, does not mean that the Achamenids were bringing
peace and prosperity to the ungrateful Greeks. Whatever their
own problems were (such as not just practising but in fact
theorising slavery), the Greeks had every right to defend
themselves against a carnivorous empire seeking to gobble them
up.
"Persians" are fond of saying that "our
enemies wrote our history," meaning the Greek did. And if so,
whose fault was that? At the same time that the Achamenids were
giving the world Cyrus and Darius and Xerxes, delusional
monarchs and warmonger emperors, the Greeks were giving the
world Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Aeschylus, and forming
the very first republics. What sane person would leave the
company of Greek philosophers, dramatists, historians,
scientists, for the frightful company of Cyrus the Great, or
Darius the First or Xerxes the Last? Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes
were the George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld of
their time. The real Spartans, the real Greeks, people who
resisted the Persian Empire, do not belong to the barbaric
tradition of modern European colonialism, Fascism, or
imperialism. They ought to be rescued from such abuses and
recognised as the real forefathers of Third World revolutionary
resistances to European colonialism and now American
imperialism.
Too much in a hurry to defend the gargantuan
Achamanid Empire, too much enamored by the might of the US
Empire, the expatriate Iranians have categorically failed to
watch carefully and see who precisely are these "Persians" that
Miller and Snyder have exorcised out of their nightmares. The
term "Persian" in both Miller's comic book and Snyder's gory
tale is much in need of decoding. Iranians of "the Persian
Diaspora" persuasion are presuming too much thinking that it
refers just to them. Having opted to call themselves "Persian"
ever since the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980, Iranians
have failed to watch carefully and read Snyder's "Persians".
They are not just Iranians. Look at them carefully. They are
also Arabs, Indians, Turks, Afghans, South and East Asians and
Latinos. They are also gays, lesbians, and transvestites.
Snyder's "Persians" are the nightmares of the White Christian
America, the semiotic summations of all their undesirable
elements -- all the racialised minorities, all the vilified
foreigners, all demonised in the interest of a white gang of
patriarchal warriors who do not hesitate even to kill their own
children if they fail the military standard of thuggish
buffoonery. Look also carefully at the graphics of Miller and
the cinematography of Snyder. The Spartans are not just that.
There is a blatant Christian Christological disposition about
King Leonidas and his soldiers. In one final frame where King
Leonidas and his Spartan soldiers are lying dead after the
battle is over there is a powerful portrayal of a crucifix that
unmistakably invokes the European tradition from Michelangelo to
Titian, Tintoretto and El Greco. Miller and Snyder's King
Leonidas is the alter ego of Christ running amuck. There is a
Dantean demonology about the manner in which Miller and Snyder
depict the entirety of the world they hate for being other than
white, male, Christian, and heterosexual (the only woman in
300, Queen Gorgo, is a cut in her warmongering between
Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Maryam Rajavi and Condoleezza
Rice -- all coming together to provide the German Gestapo ideal
of womanhood).
But we, the demonised minorities that Snyder
sees like monsters swarming around him, can look back through
his own camera and reverse his angle. To this "Persian", that
weird looking giant coming down from his throne to meet with the
leader of the resistance looks amazingly like Bush going to Iraq
for a quick visit -- and those obsequious "immortals" bending to
accommodate his feet on their backs remind me of the members of
the US congress abrogating their constitutional responsibilities
and consenting to an immoral and illegal war against Afghanistan
and Iraq. Fearful of all the racialised minorities in and out of
the United States -- Jews, Muslims, Asians, Africans, Latinos --
gathering storm around his white-washed racism, Snyder has quite
unbeknownst to himself given a perfect picture of the way the
world sees Bush's army. He could not possibly have been more
accurate.
* The writer is a professor of Iranian
studies and comparative literature at Columbia University in New
York.
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