“300″ Movie an Insult to Iran?
An article in the People’s Daily Online (note: Chinese news) ran the headline: Iranian official lashes out at Hollywood movie “300″ for insulting Persian civilization. I get a mental image of the scene in 300 where the Iranian Persian emissary with the big whip gets his hand lopped off (and then talks about arrows blotting out the sun, about one minute into the trailer). The article goes on to talk about the new movie as being “part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture.” That makes me smirk for many reasons, namely:
1) Said Iranian official gives Hollywood waaaay too much credit if he thinks there is some conspiracy with the U.S. government to defame the Iranian culture. One would not exactly describe Hollywood’s relationship with our government leaders as a love affair. Besides, Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is doing a way better job of defaming Iran than Hollywood ever possibly could.
2) Nearly the entire film is the story of the Battle of Thermopylae being told as a rallying speech (after the fact) by Dilios, and thus is a legendary representation of the battle. It’s fair to say the Spartans would have had a biased view of the Persians, and thus the film is accurate to how a military captain would tell the tale to invigorate his troops. Evidently it worked well enough to invigorate some Iranians too.
3) It might have been wise for said Iranian official to choose his own battles more wisely, seeing as how 98% of the population would otherwise have never even known that modern day Iran is descended from the Persian Empire, and thus the “comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Persian Iranian culture” would have been a dismal failure. Fool! Traitor! Ephialtes!