The other night I watched the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven”, all 3-plus hours’ worth. Since I’m retired, I have more time to devote to culture, or anti-culture depending on your point of view. The whole thing struck me as a polished, elaborate reflection of Howard Zinn’s indictment of western civilization. I can’t think of a more biased portrayal of the Crusades and Crusaders.
I know that I’m not unique in this portrayal of the movie, absent the connection to Howard Zinn. It was observed when it first premiered in 2005.
Who is Howard Zinn? Some of you may know of him. He is no minor figure in our current edition of the Democratic Party. When you think of our current “woke moment” – sometimes referred to as the “Great Awokening” – think of Howard Zinn. Remember 2020 and its wave of memorial defacements (statue-toppling, etc.) and Antifa and BLM riots? Howard Zinn’s characterization of our country and civilization animated the hyper-activity of the radicalized perpetrators. The Fortune 500 c-suite’s campaign against Georgia’s 2021 voting law, and their current threats against Elon Musk’s Twitter, were based on at least an intuitive acceptance of Howard Zinn’s opinion of American history. When I’ve said that a good chunk of the “beautiful people” have turned left, I meant that they have Howard Zinn’s definition of America roiling between their ears.
So, what is Howard Zinn’s grand thesis about America and western civilization? To put it bluntly, he believes that ours is a history of hate, racism, sexism, and general hostility to any of the “other” or so-called “out” groups in the world. In other words, overt and systemic oppression explains it all. Zinn is the historian’s version of Marcuse.
Of course, the Church (the latinate or Roman Catholic) comes in for particular abuse in the script. Priests, bishops, archbishops, the hierarchy are portrayed almost universally as venal, vicious, self-serving, and hypocrites. From the very beginning to the last scenes, Church figures are yuck!
The actual history of the Church’s involvement in the Crusades is more complicated, which is likely to be true regarding almost any accurate portrayal of many large-scale human endeavors in history. The Middle East of the Middle Ages was a diverse religious and cultural tapestry, much more so than it is today. The Crusades were triggered by Muslim depredations of Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land. The cruelty was evident in an age of cruelty, when war and crime was conducted at the length of a man’s arm, up close and personal. Believe me, there was enough inhumanity to go around from all sides. This movie’s rendition of the siege of Jerusalem simplistically kept the focus for evil on the Christian side.
Another interesting aspect of the film’s story is the movie’s admiration for religious skepticism, bordering on secularism and atheism, in some of the characters. The film’s good guys fit that mold. But how true is that in actual history? The bloodiest century in history, the 20th, was made a bloodbath by atheists (110 million killings by Marxists) or people who rejected Christianity as a “slave” religion with a “slave” morality (the National Socialists, drawn from Nietzsche).
Murderous secularists have far bloodier hands than any of the laity and clergy of the Church. In fact, Christianity and its “slave” morality has generally been a moderating influence on human conduct. And further, the reality is that war and battlefield miseries does not generally turn people away from faith but will probably intensify those yearnings for the deeper and more profound meaning of life that is found in faith. The movie’s depiction of the wise and grizzled veterans as skeptics is a self-serving lefty trope.
If you’re wondering why surveys have registered a decline in the numbers who identify Christian (see below), part of the reason may lie in the fact that we are more of a visual people. The audio-visual arts surround and consume us. Howard Zinn’s ideology dominates Hollywood, so the story gets out and is repeated ad infinitum. Almost uniformly, Hollywood is an America self-hate enterprise.
Think of it, Disney, the company of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, and Bambi, can’t bring itself to defend children from sexual mutilation. A company devoted to making children’s movies is so under the sway of Zinn’s dogmas that it kowtows to Zinn-influenced employees in opposing a Florida law to protect children from this grotesquery. Thank you, Howard Zinn and Hollywood.
Please, watch the movie . . . particularly if you’re a Howard Zinn groupie.
RogerG