I’ve now seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I cannot hold my silence any longer: I am appalled by the racial casting of the movie. It is woke nonsense parading in the costume of an ancient epic.
It is sacrilege.
In his mighty work Politics, Aristotle laid out a perfectly clear paradigm of ethnicity which educated Greeks would have known and whole-heartedly supported.
Greece and her peoples were at the centre of the world, naturally. They knew that far to the north and west were other lands, cold lands, with other peoples. The same was true to the south and east, except those lands were hot.
But Greece and the waters and lands that surrounded her were far removed from those distant places and peoples. Which was fine. Most were backward and irrelevant. Greeks had made in Greece the world’s highest civilization.
This was no accident, Aristotle insisted.
According to Aristotle, Asians were shaped by their warm climates to be intelligent, inventive, and skilled in the practical arts, which we would call technology. But they were wholly lacking in “spirit,” unwilling to fight for freedom, and thus forever living in a state of subjugation and slavery.
The people of Northern Europe were the opposite: Their cold climates made them full of spirit and thus fiercely free and impossible to conquer and enslave. But they were numbskulls. And lacking in practical arts. In a word, they were barbarians.
But in the middle were the Greeks.
In their temperate climate, the Greeks developed high intelligence and became skilled in the arts. But they were also full of spirit, loved freedom, and could never be enslaved. Blessed with the perfect balance of temperaments, Greeks were the finest peoples. Naturally, they had built the finest civilization.
I’m sure you now understand the outrage of what Christopher Nolan has done.
Christopher Nolan — one of those stupid-but-free northern Europeans — cast his kind in all of the lead roles. Tom Holland as Telemachus. Anne Hathaway as Penelope. And Matt Damon as Odysseus.
Madness.
Matt Damon’s ancestry is English and Scottish. When Odysseus was sacking great cities, his ancestors were shivering naked in caves.
And spare me the politically correct they’re-all-Europeans line. The word “Europe” didn’t exist in Homer’s time. It did in Aristotle’s day, but it was merely a geographic expression for one of the three big lumps of land known to the Greeks — Europe, Asia, and “Libya.” Greece was on the edge of Europe but that had nothing to do with Greek identity. At best, Greeks would have laughed at the suggestion they were “Europeans” who shared kinship with barbarians shivering in Scottish caves. More likely they would have been insulted and killed the speaker.
And I swear by Zeus that if anyone even mentions the “white” race — a concept developed a mere handful of centuries ago by Atlantic slavers for reasons too obvious to enumerate — I will draw my xiphos.
While I’m getting things off my chest, I really wish someone would tell that pale-skinned barbarian Elon Musk — such low intelligence, such deficiency of practical arts — to knock off his woke bullshit.
And Christopher Nolan? Cast all the gibbering barbarians you like but I will never accept the ridiculous proposition that they are in away the kin of, much less interchangeable with, the noble lineage of Greece.
Stuff your politically correct propaganda.
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