[antimedia] antimedia: After too long an absence, David Paulin is back....

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Posted by antimedia:
After too long an absence, David Paulin is back....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1167461050.shtml


   ....with an eye-pleasing update to his blog's appearance and [1]an
   interesting article about the reaction to Mel Gibson's new file,
   Apocalypto, by a leftist professor and her media critic companion, who
   attended an advance viewing of the film. The professor was so upset by
   the film that she actually had heart palpations, a concept that had me
   chuckling as a read David's description.
   Their objection to the film? To realistic. We really should be
   romanticizing these ancient cultures rather than highlighting their
   brutality. (Of course, no such equality is offered for American
   culture. Only our warts can be be discussed.)

     Curiously, Guernsey admitted that âApocalyptoâsâ scenes of bloody
     sacrifices got more things right than wrong. âWe have evidence to
     suggest that there were group sacrifices. But it would probably
     have been done as a pious act with solemnity,â she said. (Emphasis
     added.)
     Got that? The butchery was done with much piety and solemnity. I
     wonder what the sacrificial victims had to say. Would Guernsey also
     evoke the mantra of âcultural sensitivityâ to excuse cultural
     practices unique to the Muslim world â âhonor killingsâ and âfemale
     circumcisionsâ?
     If morally neutral professors can excuse bloody human sacrifices,
     where might such thinking take future academics? A few hundred
     years from now, will professors like Guernsey look back on
     Germanyâs Third Reich and be so awed by its engineering marvels,
     martial expertise, and social unity that theyâll overlook the evil
     zeal with which its leaders sent six million Jews to the gas
     chambers?
     This is not to say, to be sure, that the Mayans were Nazis, but
     consider some parallels. The Mayans carried out human sacrifices to
     appease their Gods â a perfectly logical reason for their
     bloodlust, when viewed from a morally neutral perspective. As for
     the Nazis, they undertook the Final Solution for logical reasons of
     their own â namely, to protect the Fatherland and its heroic values
     from the pernicious influence of Jewish intellectual and genetic
     degradation. Who are we to judge them? Obviously, cultural and
     moral relativism can lead to some pretty absurd extremes.
     Garcia, for his part, also favors looking at the Mayans from a
     morally neutral perspective. The important thing for him is to
     understand the Mayan's point of view. To make this point, his
     review criticized one scene in which Gibson contemptuously âsums up
     all of Maya evil.â This was where âterrified sacrificial victims
     are lined up to have their hearts cut from their chests by a
     distinctly satanic priest garbed in feathers and paint and human
     bones, with claw-like fingernails and wild eyes,â he wrote.
     Incredibly, Garcia then attempted to legitimize such conduct with a
     paragraph that provides an astounding example of moral confusion:
     âIt would be nice to get some context for the violence, but Gibson
     refuses to illuminate the cultural and religious forces behind the
     ritualized murder, the better to paint these people as barbaric
     monsters.â (Emphasis added.)

   Apparently, when you make a lot of money, hobnob with the
   intelligentsia and go to all the right parties, it's easy to lose
   sight of reality, not to mention morality.
   Is it any wonder college graduates are so confused?

References

   1. http://bigcarnival.blogspot.com/2006/12/apocalypto-enrages-leftist-elites-mel.html