Friday, December 17, 2004

MOVEON.ALEXANDER

From Bruce Thornton's review:

Instead, Stone gives us the visionary Alexander, the great idealist who pursues his vision until he burns out, and whose excesses are the lamentable byproducts of such noble ambition. And here's the most illuminating point about this forgettable movie: once more we see the left's romantic admiration of any mass-murderer who cloaks his slaughter in idealism. Wasn't it Lenin who said you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs? The "omelet" of Communist idealism took, as we now know, 100 million dead human beings, and ended up inedible anyway. But that hasn't stopped the left from continuing to excuse murder on the grounds of "idealism," provided it comes from the left (after all, Nazis were idealists too). Thus Stalin, Ho Chi Min, Mao and Castro continue to be more popular on college campuses than Ronald Reagan, and ex-terrorists like Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn are professors at taxpayer-funded universities.

Once more we see the bankruptcy of the left, the hollowness of its populist rhetoric and democratic idealism. Behind all that lofty rhetoric is the old lust for power and domination, contempt for the average person, and a burning confidence in the superiority of its ideas no matter how bloody their application or how often they are discarded in the trashcan of history. Stone's Alexander may not tell us much about the Macedonian killer, but it reveals a lot about the pathology of the left.

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