Cinema and Society

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Kingdom of Heaven and 300 as post 9 /11 war films

Enemies are enemies . All great kingdoms , principalities and nations have been founded on war , whether ancient or modern . Candidly speaking everything exists today because someone believed it was worthy enough to fight and lose lives for and the greatest of these things is undoubtedly - freedom . Much of the controversy surrounding the moral judgment of war-mongering is based on a misunderstanding not only of other people but of ourselves . It is easy to judge those whom we call

`upstarts ' or `bloodthirsty ' in light of the fact that they are willing to take lives but we do not feel indebted to them for what we have . In other words and taking a simple example of the recent rioting regarding fuel prices in Europe , for some this behavior appeared uncivilized and archaic However , these people are saying what they feel and getting results as opposed to those grumbling on their couches but never putting one foot in front of the other to change it . September the 11th 2001 shocked the world in that it never occurred to the global population that the `peaceful ' and `democratic ' United States had any enemies . Sadly this was not the case because wherever there is power , there are enemies . The lessons we learn from historical battles such as that of Thermopylae Plataea and Salamis is that there are always enemies and that greatness is never achieved through complacency . The irony is that part of advancement of humanity relied on finding peaceful solutions to confrontations , but that that does not always solve the problem because it requires both sides to want it . There are in fact three essential bodies playing a part not only in physical battle but in the media battlefield : sociology , psychology and spirituality . We look at these bodies f knowledge in to explain the phenomenon of 9 /11 in terms of modern media warfare

300

This day , we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny ' - Dilios 300

The above quote is the essence of the Western worlds continuing battle between `good ' and `evil . There are may parallels between ancient Greece and the new United States , not least of all their legal system and there fight for freedom and democracy . Greece was never a united country as we know country 's to be today , rather they were a set of independently governed city states (300 , 2007 Commentary . The United States also has the same governing system where each state is governed by their own Senator . Yet together they stand for the freedom from dominance of world powers . Xerxes , son of Darius became an enigma which struck the same chord of fear in all Mediterranean nations that Saddam Hussein did in this very century . Rather than being an entire nation set on destroying and controlling the whole world , Xerxes like Hussein possibly had severe psychological issues . In 552 BC , Darius had created a mega-army with the Asia Minor and adjacent armies...