Apocalypto: An Antidote to Multiculturalism
Column by Greg Gerig -
Feb 12, 2007
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Mel Gibson's latest film, Apocalypto, deserves credit for doing what nobody else will: exposing the fact that Mayan "civilization" was far from the utopia it is made out to be by many present-day multiculturalists.
On the strength of rave reviews and word-of-mouth on Mel Gibson's new film Apocalypto, I set aside my disgust with Gibson's apparent festering anti-Semitism and went to see it. I’m glad I did.
The film centers around a villager named Jaguar Paw, whose initially peaceful jungle existence is shattered by invading Maya who take him and his fellow villagers captive and lead them to the ritual human sacrifices that were the common fate of Mayan prisoners.
Apocalypto plays at times like a documentary of a primitive civilization, at other times like horror, and for most of the latter half as a white-knuckle, pedal-to-the-metal adrenaline rush along the lines of the first “Alien” or the more recent blockbuster “MI-III” — but beneath the action is a valuable lesson on historical perspective.
From its beginning Apocalypto takes the audience through always-tense, generally horrific milieus of confrontation between groups alien to one another. Even when such encounters are resolved without incident, in a primitive, tribal world violent death is always a palpable presence only narrowly averted.
Gibson dramatizes in graphic detail the basic fact of pre-Columbian life that the “PC” / multiculturalist left desperately seek to conceal: The “idyllic” existence of the “indigenous” people of the Western Hemisphere was no Eden, rather a life of continuous inter-tribal violence broken only by sporadic and tenuous periods of calm.
Through the scenes in which the captive villagers are paraded to their destination — the Maya’s sacrificial pyramids — the film dramatizes more of the myth-busting facts glossed over by the multiculturalist left:
The pre-Columbians were not magically disease-free;
They were not magically devoid of slavery as common practice;
They were not magically immune to war, to calculated viciousness, to unspeakable cruelty, to horrific injustice, to the bloodlust of mob fanaticism.
Yes, this is cinematic fiction, not a first-hand documentary, but for one to assume that Gibson’s portrayal is unrealistic, that these negatives could somehow be absent from this “idyllic” pre-Columbian world, would be to deny the perennial condition of human existence.
So long as the human mind is capable of volition, there will be those who will choose evil and visit it upon others, and the only defense against such evil is a civilized, individualist society — the very civilization brought to the Western Hemisphere by the Europeans.
By the final scenes of the film, where Jaguar Paw and his vicious pursuers end up on a beach face-to-face with a landing party of European explorers, you, the audience member, have been taken through a harrowing yet long-absent lesson in essential perspective.
The endlessly-vilified “genocidal Europeans” are now correctly seen as yet another unknown and alien culture to confront — no worse than any “indigenous” tribe encountered previously by the protagonist.
Suddenly the prospect of being indoctrinated with yet another bizarre culture and religion, at the hands of (presumably) the Spaniards, seems for the audience a blissful alternative to the rivers of blood and mountains of discarded human corpses produced by the “highly advanced civilization” of the Maya.
Whether it was his explicit intent or not, Gibson deserves credit for exploding, in gritty fashion, the myth of Europeans despoiling a pre-Columbian “Eden.” Apocalypto is not high art, but it is at once heart-pounding entertainment, an engaging historical drama, and a philosophically edifying tale that dramatizes a crucial and long-overdue rebuttal to the haters of Western Civilization. I recommend it highly.
Greg Gerig is an aerospace technician working on contract to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. He has worked as copy editor for Logan Clements’ magazine American Venture and has been an activist for individualism and objectivism since the late ‘70s. He blogs sporadically as The Objective Eye and maintains a horrible first-generation amateur-HTML website selling objectivist-flavored bumperstickers, Poor Richard’s Print Shoppe. (Note: The opinions expressed herein are those of Mr. Gerig alone and are not to be construed as endorsed by NASA, JPL, or any other entity.)
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