Damn the Man - The Original One

The movie begins with music intended to stir the spirit as the "subjects" of the kingdom are introduced to their next non-elected heir, given power as a birthright and not granted by the citizens. All are made to bow in fealty, one assumes under threat of punishment, as the lackey of the government presents the precious new bundle of emperor from what looks like a palace in the middle of the undeveloped isolation.

Just as I was wondering what would happen to any citizen who failed to bow and scrape properly, I found out. The King himself went and threatened his brother who had failed to show "proper" respect. The King is domineering and threatens and bullies his brother by threat of violence... a safe bet considering he is about twice the size of the one he is threatening. That's some good leadership ability, right there.

One day the young Prince decides to call on his uncle, and like his father lords over him with, "Guess what/someday I'll be king, ha ha too bad for you." Scar, ever the patient soul, suggests to the young prince that perhaps he should visit some of the subjects he will soon be controlling, mainly out in what looks like the ghetto-portion of the kingdom... the so-called 'Elephant Graveyard.'

Off goes the young prince (against his parents wishes, who would prefer he not learn about the people their system oppresses), betrothed in tow, and soon meets the supposed "villains" of this film, the hyenas. The hyenas are given funny Mexican accents, are portrayed as stupid and laughing stock, and are even tinted in darker hues just in case there is any final question that these guys aint white.

The reason the king didn't want his son visiting this ghetto area is apparent: the system ignored them, disenfranchised them, and kept them in poverty until all they know is the violence of oppression that the system teaches them. They exert their power in the only way they know how: violence. They attack the prince, the symbol of the authority that has failed them. Of course, the movie presents this situation as if it is the oppressed who are wrong, and the dictators who are the victims. The king makes an appearance to directly suppress the people, who only want their voices heard, in order to save his non-elected heir from the peoples' wrath. The irony is thick; the people, through direct government policy, know only oppression... and they are punished for learning the only lesson the government decided to teach them. The people obviously were directly oppressed, and never had a chance to fit into or thrive in the established system.

Scar, the king's brother, observes all this, and can not ignore the injustice he sees that is inherent in the system. He hatches a plan to free the oppressed peoples from under the thumb of the monarch, using the only asset he has, his intellect. He stages a fairly bloodless coup and removes the ruling family from power, and rightly distributes the wealth of the land to all, for the first time in living memory.

The young prince flees his peoples' wrath in fear, setting up shop with the denizens of a nearby tropical kingdom. It is from here they gather their strength in the shadows of the jungle and plot the return to power, and subsequent re-subjugation of the people. They wait until the fledgling government is at its weakest, then they launch their attack.

They take a scorched-earth approach, literally. Fires rage with destruction as they make their advance; if they can't have the land, no one will. The people put up a mighty struggle against the oppressors, but the problem is that their entire military, the lions, were too well favored under the old dictatorship system. The moral of this story might as well be 'might makes right,' for all the justice that is served up. The weak citizens of the pride lands soon fall under the onslaught of the ferocious, stronger lions.

Simba the Usurper gives his uncle one chance to bow before him in slavery; when Scar refuses to live in chains, he is burned alive as an object lesson to the others. The legitimate government soon falls apart, and the military retakes control. The movie shows this as a "a peace once again reigned" moment, but only a red-state-living fool thinks that world peace can be achieved through rule of force. One assumes that sequels will deal with the rising insurgency problem as the freedom fighters continue the war the only way they can: from the shadows.

Paris Burning: How Empires End

by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted Nov 7, 2005

The Romans conquered the barbarians—and the barbarians conquered Rome.

So it goes with empires. And comes now the penultimate chapter in the history of the empires of the West.

This is the larger meaning of the ritual murder of Theo Van Gogh in Holland, the subway bombings in London, the train bombings in Madrid, the Paris riots spreading across France. The perpetrators of these crimes in the capitals of Europe are the children of immigrants who were once the colonial subjects of the European empires.

At this writing, the riots are entering their 12th night and have spread to Rouen, Lille, Marseille, Toulouse, Dijon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Cannes, Nice. Thousands of cars and buses have been torched and several nursery schools fire-bombed. One fleeing and terrified woman was doused with gasoline and set ablaze.

The rioters are of Arab and African descent, and Muslim. While almost all are French citizens, they are not part of the French people. For never have they been assimilated into French culture or society. And some wish to remain who and what they are. They live in France but are not French.
The rampage began October 27 when two Arab youths, fleeing what they mistakenly thought was a police pursuit, leapt onto power lines and were electrocuted. The two deaths ignited the riots.

Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, a candidate to succeed President Chirac, is said to have infuriated and inflamed the rioters. Before the rampage began, he promised “war without mercy” on crime in the teeming suburbs where unemployment runs at 20% and income is 40% below the national average. He has denounced the rioters as “scum” and “rabble.”

Like the urban riots in America in the 1960s, which the Kerner Commission blamed on “white racism,” Paris’s riots are being blamed on France’s failure to bring Islamic immigrants into the social and economic mainstream of the nation. Solutions being offered range from voting rights for non-citizens to affirmative action in hiring for the children of Third World immigrants.

To understand why this is unlikely to solve France’s crisis, consider how America succeeded, and often failed, in solving her own racial crisis.
While, as late as the 1950s, black Americans were not integrated fully into our economy or society, they had been assimilated into American culture.

They worshipped the same God, spoke the same language, had endured the same Depression and war, listened to the same music and radio, watched the same TV shows, laughed at the same comedians, went to the same movies, ate the same foods, read the same books, magazines and newspapers, and went to schools where, even when they were segregated, they learned the same history.

We were divided, but we were also one nation and one people. Black folks were as American as apple pie, having lived in our common land longer than almost every other ethnic group save Native Americans. And America had a history of having assimilated immigrants in the tens of millions from Europe.

But no European nation has ever assimilated a large body of immigrant peoples, let alone people of color. Moreover, the African and Islamic peoples pouring into Europe—there are 20 million there now—are, unlike black Americans, strangers in a new land, and millions wish to remain proud Algerians, Muslims, Moroccans.

These newcomers worship a different God and practice a faith historically hostile to Christianity, a traditionalist faith that is rising again and recoils violently from a secular culture saturated in sex.

Severed from the civilization and cultures of their parents, these Arab and Muslim youth may hold French citizenship and carry French passports, but they are no more French than Americans who live in Paris are French. Searching for a community to which they can truly belong, they gravitate to mosques where the imams, many themselves immigrants, teach and preach that the West is not their true home, but a civilization alien to their values and historically hostile to their nations and Islam.

The soaring Muslim population is a Fifth Column inside Europe.

Nevertheless, their numbers must grow. For not only do they have a higher birth rate than the native-born Europeans, no European nation, save Moslem Albania, has a birth rate (2.1 births per woman) that will enable it to endure for many more generations. The West is aging, shrinking, and dying.

Yet, to keep Europe’s economy growing and taxes coming in to fund the health and pension programs of Europe’s rising numbers of retired and elderly, Europe needs scores of millions of new workers. And Europe can only find them in the Third World.

Nor should Americans take comfort in France’s distress. By 2050, there will be 100 million Hispanics in the United States, half of them of Mexican ancestry, heavily concentrated in a Southwest most Mexicans still believe by right belongs to them.

Colonization of the mother countries by subject peoples is the last chapter in the history of empires—and the next chapter in the history of the West—that is now coming to a close.
Human Events Online