"Balance" by Chicana Muralist Judy Baca (used by permission)

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide


Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide

by Juan Santos

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”

Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.

The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.

Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.

Here’s a taste of the standards Gibson used in conjuring his image of the Maya. The LA Times quotes production designer Tom Sanders:

"We had an archeologist, Dr. Richard Hansen, onboard," said Sanders. "It was really fun to say, 'Is there any proof they didn't do this?' When he said, 'There is no proof they didn't do that,' that gives you some license to play.” And “play” they did. Rex Reed calls the racist portrayal of the Maya Gibson’s “huge cast of spear-carriers from the Oom-Gawah-Bwana School of Dramatic Art.”

In a stunning interview with Chris Garcia of the Austin American Statesman, Julia Guernsey, an expert on Mayan culture at the University of Texas says of Gibson’s agenda, "’We got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the Maya.’ And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture… I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity…”

The other hint you might need to remember is this. No matter what happens in this film, the Spanish don’t show up at the end, at the collapse of the Mayan civilization, to “save” anything at all.

Hundreds of years would pass between the collapse of the Mayan city states and the American Holocaust. For the sake of empire the Spanish would sacrifice 95% of the population in Mexico, a horror they would achieve in a mere 100 years. Hitler’s holocaust, with its 20 million dead, pales: the Conquest of the Americas by Europe would claim 100 million lives. There is no more savage genocide in the history of civilization.

But if you’re looking for savagery, the holocaust against the Mayan people doesn’t stop there. The most recent wave ended a mere decade ago. A quarter of a million innocent Maya were slaughtered in Guatemala by a death squad regime backed by the Gibson’s cohorts on the Christian Right, including Ronald Reagan and apocalyptic fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It’s called “The Silent Holocaust” by those who know of it.

The Maya have suffered a modern apocalypse more brutal than anything in Gibson’s sadistic imagination, more brutal than even he would dare bring to the screen. It’s a tale he would refuse: its demons aren’t “savage” Mayans in horror movie drag, they’re Christian death squads backed by fundamentalist leaders using old school Spanish methods. A British anti-war organization writes:


”Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.

”Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disemboweled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: The presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame.”

Gibson hasn’t told the story of the hunted refugees fleeing Christian death squads a decade ago. His ancient hunters are nothing more than figments of his imagination, racist stereotypes of ancient Mayans who existed nowhere but in his own delirium tremens. They are his own demons chasing his imaginary hero / victim / alter ego, Jaguar Paw, through a “savage” jungle.

The framework of the story is deeply embedded in Gibson’s extreme right wing religious and political views. He casts Mayan priests and leaders as demonically malevolent at a time when interest is growing world wide in Mayan politics – the Zapatistas – and in Mayan spirituality and prophecy. The subtext of the film and its social context involve the Mayan prophecies of the end of an age of destruction, and the beginning of another around 2012 C.E., an age that can lead to harmony between humanity and the Earth.

The biblical counter-vision is of a righteous world destruction carried out by a vengeful god who destroys all living creatures, a vision embedded in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the Book of Revelations, which was the inspiration for the film’s title.

The Maya who survived the killing in Guatemala and elsewhere kept their spiritual traditions alive - including their prophecies of the end of this age - despite 500 years of intensive efforts to eradicate them. Right wing Christians see hell-driven New Age plots at every turn, and understand attacking other culture’s spiritual traditions not as cultural genocide but as legitimate “spiritual warfare” at a time of approaching apocalypse.

Gibson brought Apocalypto to life on the propaganda front of a spiritual war, a deadly serious culture war between those who would protect and defend the Earth’s ability to live and those on the Christian Right who want to “bring on” Armageddon.

The stakes are the future of life on planet Earth in a time when the industrial civilization of the West is seen by many as on the brink of collapse and when the world’s most respected scientists see Earth as on the verge of ecological destruction, a sentiment that is deeply shared by the living Mayan wisdom keepers whose indigenous spiritual tradition Gibson has chosen to paint as evil.

The survivors of the most recent wave of genocide haven’t seen Apocalypto yet – no Maya has, not even those who had the bit parts Gibson reserved for them, or who worked as extras and maids.

One can’t help but wonder how Apocalypto will play to Guatemalan audiences, but one thing is a sure bet: Mayans will be deeply disturbed to see their culture portrayed as a madhouse of killing, while those who supported the death squad regime of the Christian fascist Efraín Ríos Montt will take solace: their view of the Maya as subhuman will be “justified” by the film, and so will their genocidal reign of terror.

Racist stereotypes, after all, serve one function and one function only – they serve as a story, a script that justifies the use of violence against a targeted group, whether the weapons of the oppressor are the sword and cannon, the gas chamber, the M16, a lynch mob’s rope, or a camera.

One viewer understood and embraced Gibson’s intent in its entirety, saying Apocalypto:

“Pretty much precisely describes the whole point of the civilizations of such “noble savages” as the Mayans, if you ask us. There isn’t one, there wasn’t one, and there never will be one. Those bloodthirsty mongrels and many others before and after them were brutal, savage, cruel and entirely without redeeming qualities, and the best thing that ever happened to this planet was when they were wiped out, never to be heard of again.

In fact, we owe the Spanish Conquistadores an eternal debt of gratitude for having wiped that blood-curdlingly bestial, brutal blight upon humanity off the face of the planet because, had they not done it, we would have had to do so ourselves.”

The son of a Holocaust denier, Gibson defended his father in a 2004 interview, and, in the wake of his recent drunken tirades against Jews, Gibson can ill afford charges of propagating racism against Indians. The film’s PR campaign has carefully skirted potential opposition and negative exposure. Despite that effort Mayan activists who’ve seen nothing more than the film’s trailer denounced the film the day before it opened.

Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said "Gibson replays, in glorious, big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact needed, rescue."

The Indians who’ve seen the film itself have been a carefully chosen crew; Apocalypto, for all its epic pretensions, premiered in an Oklahoma casino, and certainly not for an audience of American Indian Movement activists. The initial Latino audience was chosen just as carefully. A Beverly Hills-based PR man arranged screenings of the film for the Los Angeles Latin Business Association – not for Mexican and Central American migrants who know the Maya, not for indigenous minded Chican@s, and certainly not for LA’s substantial community of Mayan refugees.

The Latin Business Association obligingly gave Gibson their "Visionary” Award. But it’s too late for Gibson to hide behind such contrived “honors.” Even the LA Times pointedly noted, “ it's one thing to acknowledge a work's… merits and quite another to proclaim Gibson a ‘visionary,’ especially at a time when the immigration debate has reminded Latinos that virulent racism is only a few drinks away.”

Genocide is even closer than that. Ask the Spanish. Ask the death squads. Ask Mel, behind the camera or a behind small glass. It’s just a shot away.

________

Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.

45 comments:

Rob said...

Great analysis of Apocalypto--the best I've read so far. In fact, I've linked to it in my Newspaper Rock blog. Keep up the good work!

Marisa said...

Thank you so much for articulating what i highly suspected. I linked to you in my movie review blog www.chokingonpopcorn.com Maybe now people will take my suggestion and not support Gibson with ticket sales!

onewhoteachesHistoryofMexico said...

Mr Santos:

I've commented upon your comments on marisa's site, but I'll do you the courtesy of a direct response. First: my pedigree: I teach Mexican History at the college level and have degrees in Chicano Studies and History (with emphasis on US Southwest/Latin America).

1. I take issue with categorizing it as a "snuff film with a religious theme." While it may be violent, and violence in some quarters is pornographic, lumping it with snuff films goes a bit far. Granted, there may be a religious theme, but only to those who know the religious history of the Americas and who will tie the arrival of the Spaniards at the end of the film as harbingers of the end of human sacrifice in religious practice in the Americas. And, indeed, despite all their transgressions, the Spaniards can be praised for one thing: their arrival signaled the end of human sacrifice as a religous practice, although it took the death of the Aztec culture to accomplish that.

2. I agree, the film is a morality play, but to charge Gibson with "ugly moral intent" presupposes the ability to get inside someone's head to determine intent. Intent can only be inferred from achievement, unless it's stated. The film may be ugly, and it may be immoral, but is that achievement part of what you assume to be Gibson's "ugly moral intent[ions]"? This is followed by your next verb--"Gibson's vile protrayl"--compounding what is an ad hominem attack on the man rather than his film. I'll agree that the jury is out whether or not the Maya were a "macabre cult of deranged killers" but you later note anthropoligist Hansen's allowance for Gibson's interpretation. He's been there 20 years studying the people and culture and uncovering their monuments--would he not have told Gibson that such practices as depicted in the film did not comport with the evidence? My problem with the human sacrifice scenes is that they look more like Aztec sacrifices than what I know of Maya practices. Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the harsh facts: both Maya and Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, a vile and immoral practice by our standards. And how did they get their victims? Some were captured as part of war parties, some were "donated" as part of the tribute expected from the empires' subject domains, and a few were virgins and others selected for the priviledge of being sacrificed, and these went, it is assumed, willingly. How many of the victims exemplefied by Jaguar Paw's cohort went willingly?

I'll agree with the morality play aspect; Apocalypto teaches us the value of the conquest! Like it or not, 100 years after the arrival of the Spaniards, human sacrifice had ended in the Americas, although Gibson's co-religionists will say that it arrived again post Roe v. Wade in 1972! Moreover, the verdict at Villadolid in 1550-51 supporting de Las Casas' contention that the indigenous were gente de razon marked the earliest instance for the Americas that the people subject to the Spanish rule were fully human and deserved respect as such. And so as a morality play, Apocalypto tells the story of the end of one brutal era and the beginning of a new one, one that at least paid lip service to human rights.

3. Your statement that Mayans "did not target the innocent...victims" of the film" raises the question: If the Maya warriors did not capture people from outlying regions, then how can we explain the glyphs and murals showing captives? And, were not the warriors of subject groups drawn from "innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists" part of their groups' war parties? Additionally, any group that practices human sacrifice chould be considered macabre and deranged, if we value human life even a little bit.

4. You say that the film is a "conscious lie" in that these cities "deserved to collapse." Here your interpretation is aligned with today's islamists who think western civilization deserves to collapse because of our blatant sexuality and other evils so opposed by the jihadists. OBL, perhaps, thought that the US economy would collapse with the falling of the towers, and that's certainly what he wanted--as do some of the apocalyptic voices who see the US and Western Europe as going the way of Rome, as depicted by Gibbon. Still, the question remains: does a society that subjects its neighbors to the ultimate tribute of the blood of their kinsmen to support the religion of the Empire deserve to collapse? I would hope so.

You also ignore Gibson's conflating of two Empires--Aztec and Mayan--and then add the loaded noun, genocide, and reference "superior culture." Here I'll disagree with you; I think any culture that considers all, even its subject peoples as gente de razon and which ends human sacrifice, or as in the case of the Brits in India, suttee, or in the Americas, as superior to the indigenous culture. Moreover, are you not, by using English instead of Maya, acknowledging that one language is superior for discourse than the other? Who would listen to you if your post was in Maya?

As for the use of genocide--that's a loaded word. It implies a conscious action dedicated to the eradication of subject groups, as the Turks with the Armenians, Stalin with the Ukranians, or Hitler with Jews, Gypsies and gays. Genocidists separate out people for eradication; it is a volitional act. Granted, the Spanish were dastardly homocidal bastards, no different from anyone else in the 16th century. But eradication of indigenous people was at variance with their economic interests; they wanted cheap labor to staff the encomedia system so they could send goods back to Spain and become rich. The deaths of the indigenous due to epidemic, every one tragic, were not part of any genocidal campaign and resulted in the necessity of purchasing expensive Africans for their plantations. Rather, they were part of a number of epidemics that followed the arrival of the Spaniards, but not all were due to the Spaniards' arrival! For instance, as UNAM epidemiologist Rudolofo Acuna-Soto has discovered in his research, there were hantaviris epidemics in Yucatan in the 1540s and the 1570s. Hantavirus is not European--it's indigenous to the Americas.

True, millions in the Americas died of typhus, smallpox, influenza or measles--but not all victims were indigenous people. Likewise, while plagues were raging in the Americas, they were raging in Europe and Asia as well--for instance, the population of England fell from 7 million to 2 million. So your use of 100 million dead is, if not a Gibsonian "conscious lie" at least a conscious overstatement using the highest estimates of indigenous population in all the Americas at the advent of the conquest. One estimate has the population of Anahuac at around 20 million at the time of the conquest, with less than a million population counted 80 years later by the Spaniards. How accurate is the 1521 estimate, and how accurate is the 1600 counting, given the proclivity of native peoples to hide from governmental counters, not wanting to pay taxes/tribute. So, you might want to do a little more research to see how Acuna-Soto's findings comport with what is being taught today in ethnic studies classes.

5. You also charge Gibson with stereotyping the Maya as barbaric, offering up that they were "a very sophisticated culture." Sophistication does not deter barbarism--as the stories of symphonies playing whilst Jews were roasting in Hitler's ovens will attest. Tenochtitlan may have been the most beautiful city in the world in 1521 but there was the stench of decaying flesh noted by some of the conquistadors.

I'll stop here. I could say more.

Rob said...

Re "Nevertheless, there is no getting away from the harsh facts: both Maya and Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, a vile and immoral practice by our standards":

I don't think Jose tried to get around that fact. Rather, he denounced the presumption that the sacrifices were "widespread" rather than limited.

If the practice was limited, it's not much different from our execution of murderers or slaughter of Iraqi civilians. That is, it was no more "vile and immoral" than our vile and immoral actions are. In that case, portraying it as widespread is indeed a "conscious lie."

So which is it, teacher? Was the Maya practice of human sacrifice limited or was it widespread? Much of your criticism depends on the answer.

As for the genocide issue, I've addressed it at length at Genocide by Any Other Name.... Feel free to check out my comments there.

JUAN RAFAEL SANTOS said...

Let’s get clear, “onewhoteaches”

Your comments mark you as a holocaust denier. As a “teacher,” if, in fact, that is what you are, it is your job to know your subject area, yet you completely evade the historical realities of genocide in the Americas.

By laying a claim to being a “teacher,” you’ve forfeited the excuse of ignorance: Certainly you are not ignorant of American Holocaust by David Stannard, published by Oxford University Press. No scholar in your field is unaware of this text. It is a classic.

I encourage others to read the reviews at Amazon, then the book.

Let’s keep it simple. Roughly 95% of the 25 million people of what is now Mexico died in the American Holocaust. Roughly 95% of all Native Americans died throughout the hemisphere. Stannard makes it plain: they were the victims of mass murder. 100 million of them. That you dare to draw a comparison that seeks to justify this holocaust – on any grounds whatsoever – marks your argument as both Eurocentric and pathological.

As a “teacher,” you are certainly familiar with this material and with the debate around it. As a “teacher,” you are no doubt aware of the recent genocide against the Maya. These events serve as the spine of the argument as I constructed it in Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide. Unless you address these central matters you have offered nothing but red herrings and circumlocutions around the core of the material.

You are, of course, aware of the intrinsic evil of the Conquest; that you seek to justify it, that you seek to deliberately obfuscate the truth makes you complicit in the crimes you seek to mask. As Ward Churchill put it, “Scholarship is never "neutral" or "objective"; it always works either for the psychopath or against him, to mystify socio—cultural reality or to decode it, to make corrective action possible or to prevent it.”

Juan Santos

Garth said...

Supurb expose of one of our most underhand propagandists.

Rha7 said...

@onewhoteaches: Ahh, your students... what a pity. By the way it's Valladolid.

Victor said...

Great, Great documented acknowlegment you should be proud. Now I do agree with the so called expert Mr. Santos, that the mayans in fact were sacraficing their own people, but just like the movie APOCALYPTO it only talks about the cruel side of the mayans he and teh movie don't talk about the importance of a great civilization. The mathamaticians of the century, how they created a calendar that was milliniums past their life time, and how they were always correctly accurate, also how they were so much smarter than anyt other civilization, and how they were even to smart for themselves. also how you last 2 comments talk about what they think, they are just jealous for the great project you did. I'm a chicano, im a mexican, and i know excatly what happened to the mayan people because i been to their villiages and temples i know what I'm talking about, just keep working hard.

Garrett said...

First let me start by saying, Andy, I encourage you to read a book.

Ok, I am coming at this movie from a different angle than has Juan and others. I think most people watching this movie understand that the Spanish arrival to the Americas marked a new era of (at least) some of the most brutal actions ever taken by humanity against humanity (and of course the planet). I say "at least" because although I too view it as genocide, there are obviously competing definitions of the word throughout these postings. Whereas genocide, I would argue, is the systematic extermination of people, no matter in what way they are put to "use" before they are killed, it seems that the "teacher's" concept of genocide wouldn't apply because they were put to use before they were killed. So I want to steer clear of that debate at the moment because I have something else to say.

Like I mentioned, anyone with any knowledge of this part of the world knows millions of people were killed after the arrival of Europeans. For this reason, I didn't see the arrival of the Spanish (at the end of the movie) as a positive. I was watching the film with my mother and as soon as I saw the ships, said something to the effect of "after all that (meaning what Jaguar Paw had gone through) it's only going to get worse." For this reason it was easy for me to dismiss the ties others are making between the quote at the beginning of the movie and the arrival of the Spanish at the end. It seems to me that if Gibson was trying to show that the arrival of the Spanish was a positive development in the history of Mayan affairs, he failed miserably.

Further, (although I think this was probably unintentional on Gibson's part) I think the film showed the benefits (bad word but I can't think of another one right now) of living outside of a "civilized" society. The turning point for me was when Jaguar Paw jumped off the water in escaping his pursuers. Before the jump, Jaguar Paw was cloaked in the blue paint smeared upon him by his captors. As he emerged from the water, he was once again his own color; cleansed of the taint of civilization, if you will.

After this, Jaguar Paw proclaimed this was his forest, and in it he would be protected by those who live their lives in the filth of a civilization, with its slave-labor, its deforestation and all around general misery which we know civilization brings. He goes on to one by one kill his pursuers in the most ingenious ways. I purposely say "ingenious" because that is what it was to me, having grown up so apart from nature. Whereas his captors were limited by their civilized tools, Jaguar Paw knew how to work with the earth to defeat them; something they could not do because of their separation from the earth.

If the end of the film had concluded with Jaguar Paw praising the Spanish for their arrival, I would have been incredibly disappointed. But it didn't. It ended with Jaguar Paw and his family turning their back on the Spanish. If you remember, when they were first spotted, he was not at all impressed with their boats or their clothes, whereas his pursuers (now numbering two) were. This symbolized to me that people "of the forest" such as Jaguar Paw, were uninterested in the ways of the civilized. Whereas the civilized, his now two pursuers, were in awe.

moni_epatl said...

when i read the opening line at the beg: of apocolypto, i thought, "here we go" another brutal depiction of what people want to believe about Mayans Aztecs Mexika Natives - we are all savages blood thirsty greedy and spiritually way too superstitious, like we live in a paralell universe or something. But thank you for the insightful review i was with you all the way! im just glad i rented the movie for free from the public library and didnt waste $10bux at the movies or even $5 to rent it. cuz the apocolypto, to me, happened at the very end when the spanish ships were shown; too bad the movie didnt begin from there, but what do we expect from, sorry, a caucasion actor/write director; for him to be considerate of history[accurately] or the propaganda that history didnt happen till before we were graciously defeated and civilized? that will never happen in the movies, not hollywood. sad but true. until we are supported by the world at large and seen as a race, we will always be considered savages animals dirty and have less rights than most other races who immigrated across oceans to be here, as we migrate back to our land of ancestry, rightfully, this makes me sick of course, but i am here to exist, and learn more about my ancestry and the ways of tradition; i am here and i havent sacrificed a single person today, but its still early, ay!

Tomas Kalasuriia said...

hello Juan, and thank you for your very valuable analysis of Apocalypto. yes, as all Mel Gibson films, there is morbidity and vengeance as downbeat themes, playing to the vilest of our pulsions : the will to hate and to give it back to those bad guys. the Patriot was like that already, PAssion is like that. i suppose much has been said. But Apocalypto also reminds me of something else which will frame well with one of the themes you develop quite a lot in your (very good) pages : that of a fascist day of yore where brutality was not tainted with morality and the supposed forces of nature could be harnessed by one more savage than they. Apocalypto reminds me of Leni Riefenstahl's photographic book on the Nuba of Sudan. even thought he pictures are beautiful, it is difficult to forget as you watche them, that Miss Riefenstahl was one of Hitler's official cineamtographers, mainly responsible for the "Gods of the Stadium (I'm translating from French, this might not be the name in English). and that is precisely what Apocalypto is about : a biased, western, fanatically christian man's vision of the pure and fresh, yet brutal days of yore . it talks of a fascist purity and mystics of blood, anger, savage gods, etc... : the usual anthropologically, historically and psychologically false hype.

thank you for your site and articles

Tomas Kalasuriia said...

hello Juan, and thank you for your very valuable analysis of Apocalypto. yes, as all Mel Gibson films, there is morbidity and vengeance as downbeat themes, playing to the vilest of our pulsions : the will to hate and to give it back to those bad guys. the Patriot was like that already, PAssion is like that. i suppose much has been said. But Apocalypto also reminds me of something else which will frame well with one of the themes you develop quite a lot in your (very good) pages : that of a fascist day of yore where brutality was not tainted with morality and the supposed forces of nature could be harnessed by one more savage than they. Apocalypto reminds me of Leni Riefenstahl's photographic book on the Nuba of Sudan. even thought he pictures are beautiful, it is difficult to forget as you watche them, that Miss Riefenstahl was one of Hitler's official cineamtographers, mainly responsible for the "Gods of the Stadium (I'm translating from French, this might not be the name in English). and that is precisely what Apocalypto is about : a biased, western, fanatically christian man's vision of the pure and fresh, yet brutal days of yore . it talks of a fascist purity and mystics of blood, anger, savage gods, etc... : the usual anthropologically, historically and psychologically false hype.

thank you for your site and articles

vasilisa13 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
vasilisa13 said...

i just wanted to compliment you on this excellent and thoughtful analysis. thankyou for thinking so deeply and sharing the truth.

LouCar said...

Wow! Thank you for this insightful analysis; it's given me a lot to think about. You are a very talented writer. Keep up the good work.

Raineodel said...

Good analysis but u ppl have to know movies arent made for fcats but entertainment. it was a very entertaining film and i rate mel gibson for it. true it wasnt historucally accurate but people know the fact... this is entertainment and in prevailed in that category... and i agree with andy..its a movie..it didnt say based on a true story.. its fiction people...get over it or shut up!

Raineodel said...

Good analysis but u ppl have to know movies arent made for fcats but entertainment. it was a very entertaining film and i rate mel gibson for it. true it wasnt historucally accurate but people know the fact... this is entertainment and in prevailed in that category... and i agree with andy..its a movie..it didnt say based on a true story.. its fiction people...get over it or shut up!

PotemkinVillage said...

But in this fairy tale there is only one evil, the good that exists is either defeated, annihilated or driven away – Mikita Brottman “Once Upon a Time in Texas” (review of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”)

The complete extermination of the “people of the land” (on planet Earth) is inevitable says James Cameron in “Avatar”

Media Blackout on Black Masks

Coverage of indigenous liberation movements is, for the most part, strictly verboten in neoliberal globalist media discourse. Reporting is problematic because these movements are not as easily demonized for propaganda purposes as are, for example, their highly infiltrated “Islamist” [construct] brethren. Self defense posture mixed with bricabrac radical participatory socialist-anarchist principles and syncretic spirituality make unappealing copy for the sanguine globalist media.

Hence, through the post-humanist back door – this version of “his-tory” – comes Mr.Gibson with yet another Pentagon infomerical at the behest of his paymasters at Fox (CIA asset Rupport Murdoch) and Disney (Nazi sympathizer Walt “Fantasia” Disney). That, intuitively understood, is the entire patriarchal one-eyed point of Apocalypto.

For most viewers these – other – aspects shall remain ghosts of what-never-was. Suppression of historical memory adds further phantasmagoric weight to “controlled demolition” collapse. Gibbon’s son (Gibson) wants to destroy western civilisation as well – but for all the “wrong” reasons: a certain inverted primitivism of the elite is somehow involved.

The eugenicist / transhumanists desire more genocide - the eating it fills them with light - a continued “destructive “joussiance”.. of the “people of the land” in order to more easily facilitate the creation of multiple synthetic spider-woman’s webs. (using one small modual of this..synthetic web..right now). “People of the land” talk too much–[without saying a word] – they leak “state secrets.” That’s a very big problem for the Foxy Walts, who want the sheep to remain constipated by continually feeding them abominable “choco laxatives” until they burst.

Along the same lines, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s recent campaign slogan indicates: “a future fair for all.” Speaking of “fair”, they don’t call her Sarah “Palin” for nothing. And if you hadn’t noticed “Sarah” keeps getting “paler and paler” everyday with assistance from panoptikon enabling IBM-Life Services Nordic and IBM Life Services Tel Aviv; in the same way “thoughts and personality are channeled into a synthetic body” (behind the scenes of Avatar) …continued firm support for the mythic Biblical State of Israel from the undeniably “paler” non-ethnically Semtic “Jews” and Christian “Zionists” as civil liberties keep..sinking into the “sand” in “slow-mo” fashion.

Some people just want to watch the word burn..As the World Burns...as it should be rightly called is a long-running American daytime soap opera.

Who in their right mind is “like” going to “spend” the rest of their life dissecting horrifically over complicated, bizarre, and nonsensical distortions of every simple principle?

ce399

http://deathsupportsystem.wordpress.com/

http://ce399.typepad.com

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I just saw the movies over the weekend and my final thoughts were "so is be saying they (Mayans) deserved what happened after the boats made it to shore??? Thanks for letting me know I'm not crazy ans that Gibson has pretty much always been a dick.

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Click imdb apocalypto watch online free on megashare9 now. I just came back from the theater and i am disappointed. The movie is pointless. There is no real subject and the characters lack substance. I love the footage and the scenes, actually everything about the image, but there is an obvious problem concerning the script, or maybe the director. I have nothing against Mel Gibson but i am just wondering why all that brutality in his movies. I mean Tarantino is quite brutal but Quentin's brutality is an art that obviously Gibson will never share. I know that people will fill the theaters to see this movie and this is due to the huge promotion it has. the thing that gets to me is that happy ending Apocalypto has, typically American.

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