SAISgeist

The movie “300” narrates the Battle of Thermopylae (480 BC), an epic tale where multitudes of Persians fought a handful of Greeks. The Greeks ultimately lost – after all, they were vastly outnumbered – though they inflicted great casualties on the enemy. Freedom flickered at the moment the Spartans fell, though the Greek armies were later able to defeat the barbarian hordes. Even with a slight delay, freedom and reason triumphed over slavery and darkness. Or at least, that’s what I learned from the movie.

A Greek should tread carefully on the subject – as should any “winner” of a war whose writers got to write the only history. Greeks are particularly fortunate on this matter, by the way. Our ancient victories are praised in Homer, Herodotus, Xenophon and others. Our ancient tragedies, such the Peloponnesian War, were captured so eloquently by Thucydides that his history is a masterpiece of literature and history. Even our defeats were praised – when Greece fell to Rome, historians noted that the victors were being influenced more by the conquered than the other way around. Even in our later-day tragedies, such as the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, we found sympathetic voices, ready to mourn the fall of a millennial empire.

Needless to day that the movie “300” was not well received in Iran. Iranians thought the portrait of their ancestors, and particularly of King Xerxes, was unfair (according to TIME, 300 is “a movie no one in Iran has seen but everyone seems to know about,” but that’s another story). TIME reports that Tehran buzzed with the contention that, “the movie was secretly funded by the U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to war against Iran.” It is harsh to be on the receiving end of unfavorable history, even if it’s just a Hollywood movie.

Put aside whether the movie slurred the Persians (which it probably did), or whether that was indeed the aim (it could, through hyperbole, seek to mock the Manichaeism which pervades war and its historical narratives). I want to focus, instead, on the reaction in Iran, which I found somewhat natural, though exaggerated – I would have left out the talk about secret funding and the pretext for invasion.

What came to mind is how I appreciate Westerners writing self-critical and revisionist history. Granted, this is neither a uniquely Western tendency nor a universal one in the West. But I find that it is stronger here than elsewhere (In quite a few countries self-criticism is okay as long as it is contained within borders). Note how often, for example, a Turkish writer is being charged with insulting “Turkishness” – I pick on the Turks not out of nationalism, but because they are an easy and recurring target. This would be an aberration in the West (denying the Holocaust would be the only comparable offense that comes to mind).

It helps, as I noted earlier, if the history books are somewhat favorable to you. But the effort to rewrite history in a critical manner is an admirable tendency of Western historiography – at times it goes too far, at others not far enough. But it is at once remarkable and bizarre, allowing a people to think a little more freely and less dogmatically about their history. It is rather healthy for a society to be able to come out from a movie like “300,” where is has been painted in a negative light, and just say “Good movie. Bad history. Dinner anyone?”

Healthy. But not easy.