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Could it be that the film 300 -- plus the grassroots sensation of my friend Evan Sayet's YouTube video (160,000 views and counting) -- signal the beginning of the end of moral ambiguity?
Here's Victor Davis Hanson on 300:
The phrase "300 Spartans" evokes not only the ancient battle of Thermopylae, but also the larger idea of fighting for freedom against all odds - a notion subsequently to be enshrined through some 2500 years of Western civilization.
...almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy - freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.
And here's Glenn Reynolds on 300:
... the movie industry -- or at least the critic section thereof -- is stuck in the 1970s, when moral ambiguity and angst used to be groundbreaking and novel. Now they're overdone, predictable and boring.
Is it a coincidence that at this moment, Sayet's YouTube video is attracting such attention, that Victor Davis Hanson and Dennis Miller were talking about Evan, enthusiastically, on the radio last night? Sayet makes powerful points illuminating the absurdist logic of moral ambiguity.
An end of moral ambiguity could have a massive impact on global geopolitics. To take one example, it's time for Israel to thrill the world by saying, loud and clear, that Israel stands for freedom, democracy, achievement, science, and equality of the sexes, and that those who do not recognize its right to exist, have neither freedom, nor democracy, nor achievements, nor science, nor equality of the sexes. That alone would electrify - and change - the world.
