by Satchidanand
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 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. In fact the evil Sacrificial Cult where sometimes 84,000 victims were sacrificed over 4 days was in fact the Inca in Mexico whose civilization fell apart in exactly the same way. Gibson is saying there is absolutely no proof that the Maya did not sacrifice and they may have been the same as the Inca.
Gibson 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 from within, and that they became weak through this and thus were taken over 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 an exploitation of weakness; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered by its own weakness whose symptoms of cruelty and control required the fear of death, being sent to the sacrificial slab, to maintain control. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya control of its population through fear as a force of profound evil.
Here’s a taste of what 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” Gibson did. Rex Reed calls the population controlling fear of the Maya Gibson’s “huge cast of spear-carriers from the Oom-Gawah-Bwana School of Dramatic Art.” This fear as in the Chinese Cultural Revolution which killed only 35 million people in the name of maintaining Mao's control or Stalin's Rule of fear using Gulags and Secret police which killed only 60 millions.
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 America'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 American fundamentalist leaders using old school Spanish methods.
A
British anti-war organization
writes of the American control
through fear in South America:
”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 represent all the people killed by psychopathic leaders in the name of Control through Fear
They
represent psychopathic 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 religious and political views.
He casts Mayan priests and leaders
as demonically malevolent at a time
when interest is growing world wide
in the politics of Fear – and the Zaptistas –
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 possibility of vengance
for the politics of fear and the
psychopathic way Great Leaders have
treated the world since Alexander
the great. He is pleading for the
killings to stop because if they do
not, this will be the result.
The Maya who survived the killing in
Guatemala and elsewhere and other
populations in South America 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 Americans 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
as in
Cameron's Avatar and those on the
American Right who
want to “bring on” Armageddon.
The larger 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 South American genocide haven’t seen Apocalypto yet – no
one has'
One can’t help but wonder how
Apocalypto will play to South
American
audiences, whose populations have
been attacked by every Big Kahuna
going over thousands of years, and
now mainly blame the Americans for
everything. But in this they are not
alone, every population in the world
has been continuously attacked by
psychopathic leaders over thousands
of years in the name of Control and
Taxes and making money.
But one thing is a sure
bet: Mayans will be deeply disturbed
to see their culture portrayed as a
madhouse of American 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. Divide and conquer said the
Romans recently updated by
Machiavelli so this is easy to
confuse the real perpetrators of
World Terror but what we are seeing
throughout the world is that
psychopathic leaders kill and create
fear in the name of control. They
have killed 200 millions of people
throughout the World in the last 100
years.
One viewer misunderstood
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.”
In fact, "Bloodthirsty Mongrels" are
the norm in every society in the
World and this desire to kill them
all by the psychopathic majority
brings on the self fulfilling
prophecy of doom stated by
Apocalypto
The son of a Holocaust denier,
who thinks that Hitler and Lenin
were brought to power by foreign
interests in Europe, Great Britain
and the USA in order to take out the
legitimate rulers and gain lucrative
contracts from the new rulers, 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 tool of propagandists world wide.
As a defense the film’s PR campaign has carefully
skirted potential opposition and
negative exposure. Despite that
effort paid 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."
In fact this is true. Psychopathic leaders make the rescue of their poor suffering populations worldwide a necessity. Unless we know the games going on behind the scenes we get taken in by them. And Gibson is saying that when things go badly, the rulers always tighten the screws on the populations they control by means of Fear, Sacrifice and War.
When this occurs historically things always get worse.
Those who left Germany before Hitler
prevented the Jewish population from
moving freely were the lucky ones.
