I wrote this at presenceofmind.net, but I'm posting it here, also.

Greg Swann

How the West is lost...

Citing a dumb MSNBC article (Drudge had it, too), David Deutsch of Setting the World to Rights offers this:

This year's Academy Award for Best Motion Picture is thought to be likely to be awarded either to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ or to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. It will be an agonising choice for the Academy, involving a rare conflict between the two great principles -- antisemitism and idiotarianism -- that currently trump every other consideration in the minds of the fashionable.

The two movies are somewhat similar symptoms of the same serious malaise in Western society: the widespread loss of confidence in its secular moral values. Both are personal statements made by charming rogues who have a sense of humour, are very good at their jobs, and are driven by a core of gibbering hatred. Both peddle incendiary falsehoods that have caused murder and destruction beyond measure, been a blight on every kind of progress and will undoubtedly do a great deal more harm before they are extirpated.

Privately, by email to Sarah Fitz-Claridge, whom I had thought had written the piece, I wrote: Both [....] are driven by a core of gibbering hatred.

This is beneath you. You have no evidence of gibbering hatred in Gibson and no shortage from Moore. This is moral relativism at its worst. Whatever Gibson's faults may be, he is motivated by nothing but benevolent ends. And whatever Moore's virtues, if any, his objectives are openly malevolent. Even taking account that neither film will attract any Oscar votes--why would that matter? are you misled or just counting coup?--this is a completely invalid comparison.

[snipped]

It is not necessary to insist that Gibson is right about anything to understand that, by grouping him with Moore, you are crediting an unearned merit to Moore.

It was Sarah who told me that the author was David Deutsch. In the mean time, I had these further thoughts:

The best-light form of the equation is:

life-loving small-l libertarian film-maker carried away by his religious faith, who may have been influenced by an antique anti-semitist, produces a film that consists of a particularly gory Stations of the Cross with a particularly saccharine Pieta as coda, which film, contrary to hysterical predictions, has had zero negative consequences and may have had some salutary positive consequences, and has no movement-oriented or anti-civilization objectives whatever

equals

life-loathing Socialist propagandist desperate to deprive honest but ignorant voters of their right to an informed consent by deliberately promoting vicious mis- and disinformation, thereby intentionally undermining American and allied troops in war and openly making common cause with the worst enemies Western civilization has ever known

This is an obviously invalid equation. When we despoil thought we despoil the very thing we have that our enemies lack. We surrender that which cannot ever be conquered.

I don't like the non-concepts "idiotarian" and "anti-idiotarian", a pair of junk drawers of the mind, but whatever the poster thinks--or doesn't think--about The Passion, Mel Gibson is beyond all doubt an important voice in the ancient and continuing war against tyranny. Not only does the poster elevate his undoubted enemies, he denigrates a true friend of liberty far more important than any of us. This would be nothing more than detestable snobbery if it did not effect by erosion the enemy's objectives.

The West will fall, if it does, not because it was knocked down from the outside, but because it was not held up from the inside. That little post, of less, even, than passing moment, is how that will be done.

I have defended The Passion of the Christ at length, not just because it is a great movie, but also because it is not an evil movie. It is a good deal less important to the cause of human liberty than Braveheart or The Patriot, but it is a good and valuable and important film. Moreover, Gibson's entire corpus is entirely benevolent, where Moore's is entirely malevolent. To compare these two men in any way at all is the kind of obscenity, that, if indulged, will contribute to the fall of the West.