Posted on 01/23/2005 2:26:53 PM PST by wagglebee
According to Prescott, via the Spanish, 20,000 were served up when Monty was crowned. The Minotaur only demanded 7 from Athens, kinda matches the discoveries from "The Room Of The Children's Bones." (Knossos).
That stinks! We wont even have Christmas that year!
When I was a little girl,I was very interested in American Indians,which was spurred by a children's book my mother had been given about the Navajo,written by a white man,who had lived almost all of his life with them. Though this book was written for children,it was a sociological look at Navajo life and their myths on an extremely high level.
Thanks! I love good movies.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I'll be a little more specific in the scenes that really bothered me. The officer that pretended to be Napolian(sp), peed his pants then shot himself. I generally despise the way that hollywood portrays the military anyway and this was no exception. They spent so much time showing our hero documenting his thoughts and art and then they showed 2 thugs who were practically cavemen using his diary as toilet paper. The looser who drove him out there and was later shot by the token evil indians. The perfect peace and harmony and love of nature and mutual respect that the Sioux were represented as having. They belabored the shooting of the wolf for fun and the killing of buffalo for their hides. There was never one single tiny token of truth about Christianity among whitemen. We were just all disgusting thugs. Hated it.
The Mayans often selected future sacrifice victims as infants, strapping boards to the back of the heads in order to deform them as they grew. They also sharpened their teeth into something resembling fangs and kept them in pits until it was time to murder them.
It's true that the Mayans had some religious reverance for the poor kids, but I don't think you or I would consider that to be "treated well."
Yes, I though the fact that he was pretending to be Napoleon made it quite clear that the man was seriously mentally ill, and not representative of the military in general. He was probably suffering from what they would now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
But the sad fact is that the way the US military got rid of the crazies was to send them off someplace where they would have minimum impact on other soldiers, without causing them dishonor by discharging them.
By making the officer so clearly crazy, I thought the movie was emphasizing the point: This was not your typical "military" behavior. It also demonstrated that Lt. John Duncan (or was in Dunbar? You know: Kevin Costner's character) was also sent out there because he, too, was thought to be insane. The sad truth is that the real story is perhaps even graver: The U.S. comitted grave atrocities against the Sioux as a matter of policy. Portraying them as a simple result of insanity is, in fact, close to being a whitewash.
Most Hollywood movies gratuitously add military men acting evil. In this instance, there was a necessary reason for the inclusion.
The fact is that we did do great evil to the Sioux. Out of 100,000 times Hollywood lies about the military, it is strange to attack one of the few instances where the lies are, on the whole, true.
I also credit the movie for putting the conquest by the White Men in perspective. Ted Turner's fiction is that we wiped out tens and tens of millions of Indians. The truth, as the chief did in the movie say, is that white men were so many times more numerous than the Indians, the Indians could not conceive of their number.
The conquest was inevitable, and was not, in itself evil. The gross atrocities committed during the conquest because Washington was so careless as to allow derelicts and crazies to set policy was not inevitable, and should not be forgotten. The crime of Hollywood is to define us only by our failures, not in recording one of those failures.
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