Mel Gibson’s drunken verbal abuse of Jews has been rightly
condemned. As is so often the case, however, the commentariat have
seized on a relative triviality and overlooked more substantial
matters.
Gibson has been involved in a series of pseudo-historical films
which may be much more important in terms of actual political
effect and whose content deserves scrutiny.
Let us consider first the film Gallipoli, an Australian
film made in 1981. The screenplay of Gallipoli was not
written by Gibson but by a leftist Australian intellectual, David
Williamson. Gibson was, however, the major star.
The film deals with the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, when French
and British Empire troops failed in a long and costly battle to
advance from the Turkish coast to Constantinople. Winston Churchill
was blamed, perhaps unfairly, and his political career almost
destroyed. It was the first great campaign for Australian and New
Zealand troops, the casualties were shocking. The anniversary of
the Gallipoli landing, April 25, ANZAC Day, is kept in Australia as
the equivalent of U.S. Veterans’ Day and is the greatest national
commemoration day of the year. Associated with it are many
semi-religious ceremonies and rituals in which millions of
Australians — not only veterans — participate, and the number
involved is growing every year.
The film Gallipoli does not show much fighting for most
of its length. However, its climax is a re-creation of the
disastrous Australian attack on a Turkish position called The
Nek.
The troops, mainly dismounted West Australian light horsemen,
innocent boys from the bush whose life in Australia is indicated at
the beginning of the film, attack in three waves in uphill charges
against entrenched Turkish machine-guns. The first wave is wiped
out and the attack is shown to be clearly hopeless and suicidal.
However, an English officer, Colonel Robinson, safe in a dug-out
far from the fighting, orders the attacks to proceed.
The second wave attacks and is also annihilated. The senior West
Australian officer, Major Barton, wants to halt the attacks.
Robinson refuses. Major Barton orders a soldier, Frank Dunne, a
champion runner, played by Gibson, to run to the Australian
General’s headquarters and have Robinson’s suicidal orders
overridden and countermanded.
The wise Australian general gives orders to halt the attack, but
as Frank sprints back with these orders, he is killed and the
message is never delivered. The third wave, led by Major Barton
after he has made a moving speech to the men, goes over the top and
is also destroyed.
So much for the film. Like other “historical” films Gibson has
made, it could easily be taken as fact by people who are not
well-informed historians. However, the reality is that there was no
such person as the bumbling and murderous British Colonel Robinson.
The fatal orders to persist with the attacks were actually given by
another Australian, Colonel J. M. Antill.
Further, the fatal attacks were not delivered to support British
troops — who in the film are said to be “drinking tea on the
beach” as the Aussies die for them — but to support a New Zealand
attack that had also bogged down. In fact a British regiment
incurred heavy casualties trying to support the Australians once it
was realized they were in trouble.
The film is a piece of anti-British propaganda and its plot is
based on a falsehood. There was no discernible reason to create the
fictional character of Robinson except to encourage anti-British
sentiment in Australia — which was certainly on the left political
agenda in the 1980s under the code-name “The New Nationalism.” The
bizarre anti-British and anti-Semitic crank historian (and Lenin
Jubilee Medalist) the late Manning Clark was highly honored in
certain Labor Party and other leftist circles about that time for
promoting anti-British mythology.
The Gallipoli battlefields are visited by many Australian
tourists and this poisonous film is apparently shown every night in
a number of tourist hotels and hostels there.
BRAVEHEART, ALLEGEDLY THE STORY of Scotland’s struggle
against English genocide, was made in 1995 and directed by Gibson.
It is an anti-English diatribe from its opening, in which Robert
the Bruce is shown saying, “I shall tell of William Wallace.
Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is
written by those who have hanged heroes.” The first scene shows the
child Wallace encountering the hanged bodies of Scots noblemen and
boys treacherously murdered after a meeting with representatives of
the English king.
In the film the English king intends to destroy the population
of Scotland by war or breeding. He invokes the doctrine of
primae noctis, which allegedly allows the English lords
the right to sexual intercourse with any common woman on her
wedding night.
Historians question whether primae noctis ever actually
existed in this form in Europe at all. It did not exist in either
England or Scotland. Further, this suggests conceptions of race and
genetics quite foreign to the medieval mind.
Wallace’s wife has her throat slit in public by the English, one
of numberless Anglic atrocities. At one point Wallace is seen
rallying the Scots with the speech: “I see a whole army of my
countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You have come to fight as
free men, and free men you are. What would you do without freedom?
Will you fight?…They may take our lives but they’ll never take
our freedom!”
This is historical codswallop. The wars of Edward of England and
the Scots under Bruce were wars between Norman-descended feudal
nobles. The very idea of freedom for the peasants would have been
beyond the conception of any of them (these were the days when two
dogs were said to have been hanged for attacking a lion in a Royal
menagerie — since the lion was the King of Beasts, the dogs were
guilty of treason).
It is claimed by some that Braveheart contributed to a
significant increase in Scottish Nationalist sentiment before the
general election of 1997 when the Scottish Nationalist Party
doubled its representation in Westminster and a Scottish Parliament
was set up. The results of this have been generally negative and
divisive, and anti-English rhetoric, attitudes and even physical
attacks on English people in Scotland have led to a growing
anti-Scots backlash in England, to the point where serious
commentators believe the English will not again accept a Scots-born
Prime Minister. I have commented previously
on this completely unnecessary souring of relations between the two
countries.
In 1997 in an act of almost unbelievable crassness and bad
taste, a statue of Gibson as William Wallace was placed outside the
Wallace Monument near Stirling, Scotland, with the word
“Braveheart” on Wallace’s shield, thus trivializing and
kitschifying the memory of Wallace. (I was fortunate enough to be
taken by my Scottish brother-in-law to see the monument before this
happened. It was simple and majestic.) One local resident stated it
was desecrating the main memorial to Wallace with a “lump of crap.”
In 1998 the Gibson statue was attacked with a hammer, and now, with
the word “Freedom” in its plinth, it is protected by a cage at
night.
Braveheart has vanishingly little discernible
relationship to history. This is true even of the details that the
Scots are depicted wearing kilts and playing Highland bagpipes,
neither of which in fact appeared until several hundred years
later. Though the story is set in the early 14th Century, Gibson is
shown carrying a 16th-Century claymore. In the film it is suggested
Edward III of England was Wallace’s son. In fact he was born seven
years after Wallace’s death. Irish soldiers on the English side are
shown changing sides and joining the Scots at the Battle of
Falkirk. They didn’t. There is no evidence for the mass hanging of
Scottish nobles which Wallace is meant to have witnessed as a boy.
Most of the dynastic “history” presented is complete fantasy. While
it is claimed in the film that England had oppressed and attacked
Scotland for the previous hundred years, relations between the two
kingdoms had actually been comparatively peaceful. And so on, and
so on. It would take too long to detail all the historical
falsehoods here, but there is a Wikipedia entry which gives many of
them.
GIBSON’S NEXT EXERCISE IN ANTI-ENGLISH propaganda masquerading as
historical fact was The Patriot, made in 2000 and set in
the American Revolution. Again, historians savaged its
inaccuracies, particularly its exaggeration or invention of British
atrocities. These included a scene in which the British burn a
town’s inhabitants alive in a church, actually probably inspired by
a Nazi atrocity in World War II. In fact, history is not merely
falsified but inverted: American-owned slaves are shown being freed
to serve in the Revolutionary Army and it is implied the American
forces intended to free all slaves, when in fact it was the British
who first offered slaves who joined them freedom with the Dunmore
Proclamation.
I have not seen Gibson’s 2004 Magnum Opus, which he directed,
produced and co-scripted, The Passion of the Christ, and
to which he personally committed many millions of dollars of his
own money. I have read the book and know how the story ends, and
prolonged flogging and torture scenes (apparently Christ’s rib-cage
is shown eventually becoming bared by the whipping) fail to appeal
to me. People whose judgment and ethics I respect have praised it
and claimed it is an aid to Christian faith, though they have also
said the violence and torture is excessive. Whether the many
accusations that the film is anti-Semitic are true or not, I do not
know, but at a time when Israel is fighting for its life against
enemies sworn to its annihilation, it would seem to be both the
responsible and Christian thing to make such a film in a way that
these accusations would not be possible, for example by making the
point that Christ was crucified as a result of the machinations of
a small “political” group rather than by the Jews as a whole. As we
have seen in rather too much detail recently, anti-Semitism often
does not need much to ignite it.
Gibson’s drunken ravings about Jews were truly disgusting. But
it is also true that they are not very important in themselves and
it is wrong to scapegoat him for them. If we were all to be held to
account for words of drunken stupidity few would escape whipping, I
think. He has confessed to a long-standing problem with alcohol and
one should wish him well in overcoming it.
The more serious matter is that he has taken part in a series of
probably highly influential films that tend to portray falsehood as
fact, and which, at a time when it seems “Anglosphere” cultural and
political unity is of some importance, even setting aside the
possible anti-Semitism of The Passion of the Christ, seem
aimed at setting Australians against British, Scots against English
and Americans against British.
