Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> It is true, as Alain Badiou says, that the only means of defense that
> the poor have is "their capacity to act together," and one may call
> that "a popular discipline," but Slavoj Zizek is wrong to see any
> popular discipline at work in 300. In fact, the film's elitist
> ideology is that the populace do not have discipline necessary to
> defend freedom: only the oligarchic Spartans, who are trained in
> martial arts from young age and destined to make warfare their calling
> by virtue of their class, have what it takes, whereas common
> volunteers from other Greek states do not know how to fight and are
> therefore inferior.
Bad history too -- but then Zizek once treated Athenian Drama as though the dramatists wrote for the modern indoor theatre with a proscenium arch. (Or perhaps he quoted, without comment, a Lacanian passage making that error.) Ultimately, the Athenian sailors, not the Spartan elite, defeated the Persians. And until the Athenian elite really fucked up in Syracuse Athens (as Pericles had predicted) weren't doing badly at all against the Spartans.
Carrol