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Movie Review: 'Alexander'
by T.C. Lynch
12 December 2004
Oliver Stone's "Alexander" is great. It isn't perfect, but neither was Alexander. It is definitely worth seeing. But there is a subtle and sinister thread of anti-White propaganda running through the movie, and I would not recommend it to anyone without warning him first.
There are many reasons why I enjoyed "Alexander." Chief among them is Alexander himself. Alexander the Great was surely one of the most gifted men in history. His father, Philip II, was the king of Macedon and the conqueror of Greece. Alexander was handsome and athletic. He was highly intelligent and received a remarkable education (Aristotle was one of his tutors). As a genius of military and political strategy, he was almost without rival. He was also an eloquent speaker and a charismatic leader of men. He was courageous, sharing the hardships of his soldiers and leading them into battle. He was capable of great acts of magnanimity to his enemies and generosity to his friends. He became the richest man the world had ever seen -- and gave most of it away. He was a patron of art, science, and exploration, a city founder and an empire builder, a political visionary. He changed the course of history, for good and ill, in countless ways. His principal effect was to shift the dynamic center of our civilization from the Near East to Europe proper, namely to Greece. Alexander westernized "Western" civilization.
But Alexander was also a tyrant, a sacker and destroyer of cities and empires; he killed, mutilated, and enslaved countless people; he was capable of astonishing acts of cruelty and folly; he was corrupted by his power, and by his lust for more power, which grew as his power grew. He began his career as a Greek-style constitutional monarch who made decisions with the counsel of his peers, and he ended his life an oriental despot surrounded by flatterers and sneaks, a despot who brooked no disagreement and executed men on suspicions and whims. He began life as a devotee of the Greek philosophy of moderation -- the Greeks always mixed water with their wine, even during drinking parties. He ended his life as a debilitated alcoholic who fell mortally ill after downing a krater of unmixed wine at the end of a long drinking party. He was also grossly irresponsible. Even when it was apparent he was dying, he refused to name a successor. This led to forty years of civil war that destroyed his empire. His mother, his wife Roxane, and his only son were among the slain. He was only thirty-two when he died. Few men mourned his passing. Many celebrated it. Most were simply relieved.
He wasn't Alexander the Good. But he was Great, because in both good and evil he was larger than life. As the passage of time put a safe distance between Alexander and the rest of us, the moralistic denunciation of his crimes began to look small-minded. Alexander seemed less a failed human being and more a demigod or a force of nature, both terrifying and thrilling. His life was a Greek tragedy every bit as compelling as the stories of Hercules and Jason and Oedipus. With this kind of material, it would be hard to make a bad movie about Alexander.
The script was also well-written, well-researched, and surprisingly scrupulous in its concern for historical accuracy. Yes, countless small liberties were taken in bringing Alexander's life to the screen, but the movie is faithful to the spirit of what happened, and that is what counts. For instance, a line spoken by the Indian king Porus is given to a daughter of Darius III, but it provides an occasion to illustrate Alexander's magnanimity just the same. (Other historical liberties were taken for propaganda purposes, which I will detail below.)
There were a few historical inaccuracies: the lighthouse of Alexandria was shown in the background as Ptolemy I dictated his memoirs, even though it was not built until the reign of his successor Ptolemy II. When Alexander enters Babylon, we see the great Ziggurat of the temple of Marduk, although it had been demolished in 482 BC to punish the Babylonians for a rebellion. When Alexander enters India, we see stone Buddhist stupas, even though the Indians did not build and sculpt in stone until after they came in contact with Hellenistic civilization as a result of Alexander's invasion. In the bedroom of Alexander's mother, there is a statue of a goat standing on its hind legs. This is a reproduction of an artifact found in the last century by Sir Leonard Woolley in a royal tomb at Ur, dated circa 2600-2400 BC. It is completely out of place in fourth century BC Macedonia.
I do have a quarrel with the narration. It seemed to meander and contain irrelevancies, and it could have done more to frame and link the scenes of the movie and make them more intelligible.
The acting is excellent, particularly Colin Farrell as Alexander and Angelina Jolie as his mother Olympias. Farrell is a handsome and virile Irishman who has been groomed for stardom in a number of movies in recent years, but he has never really achieved leading-man status until now. I had never taken Angelina Jolie seriously as an actress before, but she was really quite believable as Alexander's ruthless and cunning and slightly mad mother. (Perhaps the poor woman can now afford to undo the botched plastic surgery that disfigured her lovely face with grotesquely large Negroid lips.)
Val Kilmer played Alexander's father, Philip II. The dreamy, androgynous Jared Leto was cast as Alexander's lover Hephaestion. Anthony Hopkins played an aged Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, who, after Alexander's death, became ruler of Egypt. He is the narrator of the film.
Racially, the cast is remarkably Nordic. This, of course, is historically accurate, although mere historical accuracy has never counted for much in the eyes of Hollywood. The Greek ruling class of the classical age was Nordic, even though the aboriginal population of Greece whom they ruled was a darker, Mediterranean race, among them the descendants of the remarkably cultured and beautiful Minoans. The Macedonians to the North were, if anything, even more Nordic than the Greeks because they had fewer opportunities to mix with Mediterranean stock. Alexander was a blonde, and was portrayed as such. (Mainstream reviewers have been harping on Farrell's "bad dye-job," but there was nothing bad about it, unless they were simply objecting to the fact that it was blonde.) There were also many luminous blue eyes among the cast. Interestingly, blue eyes were highlighted in the hand-tinted black and white photos used in print ads. Clearly it was a priority for Nordics to be able to identify with Alexander and his countrymen.
There is, however, one major problem with the casting. Alexander's first wife Roxane was the daughter of a nobleman named Oxyartes in what is now Afghanistan. She was said to have been one of the most beautiful women in the Persian Empire, second only to the wife of Darius III, the Emperor whom Alexander defeated. She was undoubtedly an Aryan like Alexander himself. But Oliver Stone had her portrayed by Rosario Dawson, an obvious mulatto. Later in the movie, when Alexander shares his vision of the empire he is creating, and he explicitly says that it is a place where "the races will mix," meaning miscegenation, not trade and tourism.
Alexander did marry Roxane and two Persian princesses. This was an unpopular decision because the Macedonians understandably wished him to take a Macedonian bride. Alexander also ordered his Macedonian officers to marry the daughters of Persian noblemen, a move that was intensely resented. (Most of these marriages were repudiated after Alexander's death.) Alexander also offered dowries to the Persian concubines of his soldiers and Greek educations to their illegitimate children to encourage the men to marry them. This was a humane and popular gesture.
Alexander realized that he could not rule the Persian Empire without the recognition and cooperation of the Persian aristocracy that had conquered it and ruled it for two hundred years. Thus he hoped to cement his conquests through marriage.
But this was not a policy of racial miscegenation, for the simple reason that the Persians were Aryans too. The name Iran, like Ireland, is derived from Aryan. Today's Persians, like today's Greeks and Macedonians, are heavily mixed with Semitic stocks, but one still finds people with genuinely Aryan, even Nordic, features among them. (See Savitri Devi's remarks on "Alexander the Great and the Mixing of Races." http://library.flawlesslogic.com/alexander.htm)
Oliver Stone's directing is stunning throughout. This is a hard thing for me to admit. I had hated Stone since walking out of "Platoon" in 1986. I had never seen a Stone movie before "Platoon," and I boycotted every one after it. I disliked him because he was a manipulative sixties Leftist spouting the predictable nonsense about corporations, Wall Street, the Vietnam War, the Military-Industrial Complex, J.F.K., M.L.K., Negroes, etc., not because he was a Jew pushing an anti-White agenda.
Since then, my views have mellowed about the sixties counter-culture, and I can go a long way with Leftist analyses of economics and US foreign policy until I part ways with them on the issues of race and the Jews. I have also become more objective in my reactions to filmmakers, meaning that I can enjoy a well-made film even though it has disagreeable elements.
Thus, around two years ago, I let a friend persuade me to watch the DVD of Stone's "The Doors." I thought it was excellent and went on to watch other Stone films. I was most impressed with "J.F.K." and "Any Given Sunday." I had to admit that Stone is a highly talented director, even though all of his films contain anti-White propaganda to one degree or another. "Alexander" is one of Stone's best films. ("The Doors" remains my favorite.)
Some favorite scenes: Philip showing Alexander crude depictions of the sufferings of Hercules, Jason, Oedipus, and Prometheus -- tragic representations of the downfall of heroes and the jealousy of the gods; the battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC where Alexander crushed a vastly larger Persian force and drove Darius III from the field, leaving Alexander the master of Mesopotamia; Alexander's dazzling triumphal entry into Babylon; Alexander's battle with the Indian king Porus near the river Jhelum in 326 BC (the best scene of the film, intense and emotionally shattering; the war elephants were terrifying); Alexander's last fateful drinking party: when he looks into the krater, he sees his mother's face with snakes in her hair, like Medusa -- a brilliant allusion to the tradition that Alexander was poisoned, perhaps by strychnine, delivered in unmixed wine; when Alexander downs the wine, his face disappears behind the krater and it looks as if the head of the lion's skin he wore is drinking in his place -- brilliantly depicting how Alexander was consumed by his own superhuman appetites.
Oliver Stone's handling of war in "Alexander" is worth pondering. Stone made three films about the Vietnam War and its aftermath -- "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July," and "Heaven and Earth" -- and Vietnam also hangs in the background of "J.F.K." and "Nixon." Stone was very much opposed to the Vietnam War. He masterfully depicted its brutality, horror, and injustice, and he juxtaposed the ideological rationale for the war with the realities that belied it. It would be natural to conclude that Stone is against war as such. But in "Alexander," Stone seems to have found a war he likes. He certainly does not dwell on the horrors of Alexander's wars as he did on Vietnam.
Nor does Stone probe behind Alexander's rationale for war. Alexander makes speeches about defending Greek "freedom." The Persians had conquered the Greek city states in what is now Turkey, and they tried but failed to add Greece proper to their empire. But Alexander was not one to talk. His own father Philip had conquered Greece, accomplishing what Alexander had blamed the Persians for attempting, and Alexander himself savagely quashed the Greek rebellions that followed his father's assassination.
As for the Greek city states conquered by the Persians: they had grown far richer and more cultured than the "free" states of Greece proper, for the Persians did not permit the ceaseless, destructive, and dysgenic wars that the Greeks fought amongst themselves.
In any case, Alexander "freed" the Greeks under Persian rule rather quickly (by adding them to his empire), thus his campaigns into Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and beyond were all about winning an empire, not spreading freedom.
Alexander also accused the Persians of assassinating his father. He almost certainly did not believe it, but the lie served a dual purpose: to justify war and to deflect suspicion from the most likely culprit, his own mother.
Stone offers another rationale for war: it is a civilizing mission. The "Asiatics" (meaning the Caucasian peoples of the Middle East, not the Mongoloid peoples of the Far East) are said to be "barbarous" and "cruel," which apparently means that the more-civilized Greeks and Macedonians need not respect their sovereignty, so long as they promise to bring the blessings of Hellenic civilization at the point of as sword. Of course the Greeks and Macedonians really thought this way, but given Stone's views of the Vietnam War -- for which the same rationales could be given -- it is surprising that he includes these sentiments without comment, critique, or the least hint of irony.
Later, when the Persians have been conquered and his troops want to go home, Alexander castigates them for their xenophobia and seeks to merge them with the conquered Persians. Instead of making the Persians more Hellenic, Alexander's armies must now become more Persian. But the result is the same: whether packaged as spreading civilization or appreciating "diversity," the distinct identities of peoples are erased.
The wars in "Alexander" invite, of course, comparisons with the United States' recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stone chose to represent only the part of Alexander's campaigns that took place in what is now present-day countries of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, even though Alexander also fought battles in present-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. Stone even dresses Persian soldiers in Arab headscarves, although in reality their costumes were quite different, and the actor playing Darius III was cast and costumed to remind us of Osama Bin Laden.
This is explains why Stone took pains that the Aryan majority in the US should be able to identify with Alexander and his Macedonians. The purpose of the movie is to manipulate Aryans to be more willing to kill Iraqis, Iranians, and Afghans. What is Stone's motive? He is a Jew, and Jewish policy is to dupe Americans into squandering their blood and treasure to increase the wealth, power, and security of Israel. This is how Oliver Stone has finally found a war that he likes.
Stone promotes miscegenation because, although it may be in the short term interest of Jews to manipulate White racial consciousness to dupe us into killing their enemies in the Middle East, it is in the long term interests of Jews that Aryans cease to exist, that we be dumbed down by breeding with inferior races. And what better way to encourage this than to portray a handsome White alpha male marrying a mulatto?
Stone's message to a young White man is: go to the far ends of the Earth to kill the enemies of the Jews, then marry a non-White and return home to sire a litter of mongrels and provide a base for a chain immigration scheme. (The Arab world is crawling with mulattos, by the way, because Arabs have been importing African slaves for more than a thousand years.)
The US military is already responsible for encouraging a huge amount of miscegenation, and what is worse, the miscegenators tend in other ways to be conservative-minded, honorable, and masculine men. But the most important thing to conserve is our race, and through miscegenation their loyalties and their genes are lost to us forever. This is a trend that Jews would like to encourage.
"Alexander" is, however, bombing at the box office. It has gotten a lot of bad reviews, most of which I think are unjust. But it is "word of mouth," not the reviews, that is causing the film to fail. And by far the biggest complaint is about Stone's frank portrayal of Alexander's bisexuality. This does not sit well with a lot of viewers. I saw "Alexander" in San Francisco, which culturally speaking is surely the "gayest" city in the world, and I was surprised at the audible and visible discomfort in the audience. Even there.
I also found the audience's discomfort surprising because Stone's portrayal of Alexander's relationships with men is really rather tame. He puts his arm around the shoulders of Hephaestion and says that he loves him, and be plants a kiss on Bagoas, a Persian eunuch from the harem of Darius. (Alexander also kept Dariusâs harem of 365 beautiful women, one for each day÷or night÷of the year. Maybe Bagoas was for leap years.) Personally, I was more disturbed by the explicit heterosexual intercourse simulated by Farrell and the mulatto Dawson. At least homosexual intercourse does not produce mongrels.
Depicting Alexander's bisexuality was clearly a blunder. Why did Stone do it? Historical accuracy is no explanation, because, as we have seen, Stone was willing to cast a mulatto as Roxane to promote miscegenation.
Stone's aim was clearly to promote the contemporary homosexual lifestyle and agenda. Homosexual organizations and advocates also hoped their cause would benefit from "Alexander." What better way to promote homosexuality than to portray one of the manliest men in history making eyes at handsome guys?
But Alexander was not a homosexual in the contemporary sense. He had homosexual desires, yes. He had homosexual relationships, yes. But he did not adopt an exclusively homosexual "lifestyle." Instead, Alexander practiced the sort of bisexuality that was common among the warrior aristocracies of most ancient Aryan peoples. Alexander married three women, sired an heir, enjoyed the pleasures of the harem -- and also carried on affairs with men on the side. The ancients frowned upon men who adopted exclusively homosexual lifestyles, and there is every reason to think Alexander shared that attitude.
Alexander's same-sex relationships were unusual in only one respect. The standard practice was for a young man of seventeen or eighteen to take up with an older man, who was supposed to be a teacher and authority figure. Hephaestion, however, was Alexander's age. But as the heir-apparent to the Macedonian throne and then as a young king, Alexander could not have submitted to the authority of an older man.
By all accounts, Stone is no homosexual. So why does he promote homosexuality? Because he is a Jew. Judaism, of course, is the most anti-homosexual religion in existence, and these attitudes survive among secular Jews. And, in spite of the fact that the Christian clergy has always been filled with homosexuals, Christian teachings have followed the Jewish lead. Deep in his heart, Oliver Stone probably finds homosexuality revolting.
But Jews do not promote homosexuality in White societies because they think it is good. They promote it because they think it is bad. Jews promote homosexuality for the same reason they promote miscegenation, abortion, feminism, and materialism: to break down White families and communities, to decrease the White population, to drive us further and further towards extinction.
If Stone had contented himself with making two propaganda points -- promoting miscegenation and war against Israel's enemies in the Middle East -- "Alexander" might have been a hit and Stone might have succeeded. But Stone just had to push the homosexual agenda as well and was thus undone by another typically Jewish trait: always grasping for more, he ends up with nothing in the end. It is ironic that Stone was stopped by the grip of his own tribe's sexual taboos on the Aryan mind.
I suppose that we Whites should be thankful any time Jewish efforts to poison our minds and culture self-destruct. But personally I am tired of counting on the Jews to defeat themselves.
T.C. LYNCH
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