Mel Gibson is an Anglophobe

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10191
Another Perspective
The Real Case Against Mel Gibson
By Hal G.P. Colebatch
Published 8/8/2006 12:07:12 AM
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 in 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.


Hal G.P. Colebatch is a lawyer and author and lectures part-time in
legal studies at Notre Dame University in Western Australia. His book
Blair's Britain was selected as a Book of the Year in the London
Spectator.

.

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