Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
India could have stretched from Yemen to Burma. Some of the divisions led to mass refugees and massacres. Some of these nationalisms and national identities were relatively new. The actual history of much of this, is underplayed in all countries involved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLxYD9Rs5k4
A more accurate translation of the Old Testament is not that ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, but that ‘when he began to create the heavens and the earth’…meaning, this is just when he began to create them, and…it is not the beginning of time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pbZaVV2hdw
Nolan’s central trick: “Nolan has smuggled the core of Judeo-Christian ethics into the center of The Odyssey.” Zeus’s Law in Nolan’s Odyssey is more similar to the Christian and Jewish golden rule than ancient Greece’s Xenia. The problem with the modern right isn’t that they haven’t obeyed the golden rule, it’s that they detest it. Cruelty toward the weak, the poor, the stranger, the immigrant…is glorified. Trump’s policies are built on the logic of tribute, not compassion, love, or reciprocity.
To Homer, Odysseus’s trick, using their common religious beliefs to fool the Trojans and to destroy Troy and slaughter its people…to Homer, Odysseus was a hero, but to Nolan, it was a great crime and that Odysseus needed redemption.
In Homer’s time, slaughtering innocent people wasn’t bad as long as they were the other. After Jesus and eventually the enlightenment and eventually applying these principles to societies…we don’t believe slaughtering people is okay just because they aren’t us. Using our common moral principles to trick each other is not heroic. We believe that from a long chain of history, but that chain’s strongest seed was Jesus.
Nolan made the Odyssey about the values of Jesus. Not the values of the ancient Greeks. Not the values of Homer. Not the values of Trump.
The modern right cares about power and the need for cruelty. Jesus cared about love.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=livIbni7x7o
Too much of the Russian psyche is the belief that Russia is uniquely great and this greatness is defined by empire. Russia is the light of culture and should benevelonly spread its culture to its neighbors and to its already subordinated ethnicities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_w9qsi6efo
Greece foreign policy history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClDAMnloqXE
Much of the historical context of The Odyssey was wrong, but some of it was fairly right.
Even the ancient Greeks would create their own spins on their own classic works and add different themes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7h-0GUgDzk
Nice bit of Israeli history, although…Zionism ended in 1948. Once Zionism was achieved and the state of Israel was formed, we just have the policies of Israel and the ideologies of its citizens, not something special called Zionism. It doesn’t make sense to have a word that means the ideology to form a particular state for a particular people when that state has already been formed. Other countries don’t have a special term that means people think that that country should continue to exist, neither should Israel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKELq9Jdc0k
The Greeks created their myths, and works of art based on those myths, over hundreds of years. They’d make new versions of old myths and change some of it, and other Greeks would complain that they weren’t true to the original.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOy1gZP7SDA
How do they get BATTLEFIELD ARCHERY so WRONG in MOVIES?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roncJuXR9bA