I’ve never been much of a moviegoer or TV-watcher, so I hadn’t consciously noticed what kulak is discussing here:
“El Cid” (Charlton Heston) releases enemy raiders who’ve just burnt down a village … for no reason.
“All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
-Edmund BurkeThe reason the boomers are the way they are, and the reason no one in the west fights back against their dispossession and replacement is an 80 year long program to indoctrinate an Ideology I call “Hollywood Anti-justice”.
In almost every piece of media to do with violence, crime, justice, and individual heroism of the past 80 years there is a scene: The “Hero Forgives” scene.
Upon violently defeating, disarming, and capturing the villain, the hero, in spite of his every instinct, in spite of friends screaming at him and reasoning with him with arguments he can’t counter, in spite of the villains mocking unrepentance, dead to rights evidence, gleeful confessions, and even vows to reoffend.
Even if the villain is guilty of hundreds of murders, rapes, and treason, even if the hero himself has killed hundreds of henchmen to capture the villain …
The hero will refuse to kill or punish him.
Sometimes the hero will insist that he must go through the courts … Sometimes the villain will openly mock him that the courts are corrupt and will never convict him, and the hero still will refuse to take matters into his own hands …
Sometimes the hero himself IS the lawful authority. Sometimes the hero is a Military officer, post apocalyptic militia captain, Medieval Knight, Greek Hero, Roman Centurion … etc. And in fact his private judgement IS the official lawful means of passing judgement and executing obviously guilty villains … And he STILL refuses to punish or kill them.
I recently saw El Cid, where the hero, a Knight, refused to hang brigands who had pillaged, raped, burnt a town, confessed and were themselves quite resigned to dying, and even as his fellow knights berated him that the law itself demands he hang them, that it is his sacred duty to hang them, and that it would be treason for him not to…
And the Hero simply cuts their bindings and lets them go … Choosing to be forsworn as a traitor rather than hang the confessed and red-handed guilty. Now this may be a historical, but as far as I’ve been able to find such an event never occurred, it’s been made up for the film, doubly egregious because the historical El Cid almost certainly executed many criminals and brigands, committing and ordering justice … Which is NOT depicted in the film.
Even if the hero has been in this exact position before and spared the villain only for more to die, sometimes even his own family and friends, demonstrating the failure of this unspoken philosophy, the hero will STILL let them go … AGAIN.
Ussually there is some Deus Ex Machina that makes this all workout some ironic or divine punishment will find the Villain through their own folly … but not always. Indeed entire franchises have been perpetuated on THE SAME serial killer villain being forgiven, released, allowed to escape, etc. over and over again.
And audiences consistently hate this, this is always the most cliched, poorly written, out of character, film breaking scene in the entire work … Supposedly great kings, ruthless bounty-hunters, outlaws, veteran knights, military officers, grey and black market criminal anti-heroes, smugglers … All of them transformed into the most inconsistent pacifists for exactly this scene. I’ve seen audiences groan and scream at the TV “Just kill him” and yet the hero, often entirely contrary to their character, will not.
This is not an old literary trope, this is a Hollywood trope.
You can read the original Greek legends, the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, early modern nationalist heroes’ stories, the adventure stories of the Napoleonic officer, the Boys’ Own adventures of empire, and well into contemporary fiction westerns, crime stories, military science fiction, historical fiction, etc.
And in all of them you will see heroes kill their enemies in cold blood, order executions of the guilty, demand deserters, spies, and traitors be shot, seek revenge, order mass hangings … Etc.
Nor is this some uniquely American madness … As late as the 1950s the vigilantes/terrorists of the original reconstruction era (1864-1877) Ku Klux Klan were treated as folk heroes… Birth of a Nation was played at the White House when it was released. The idea of vengeance, wild justice, and vigilante killings being some unconscionable moral horror was simply not the case in the first half of the 20th century … It was celebrated, much as it had been for the previous 3000 years of the west.
In 1915 the legitimacy of Vigilantism, Vengeance, and Private Justice was so accepted that even arch-progressive, Princeton University Professor, and US President Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante-terror campaign, at the White House.
Why did Hollywood invent this trope?
Where Hollywood producers just so attached to an idea of Christian forgiveness and pacifism that they just HAD to include it over the groans and often shouting of their audiences?
Were any of these writers, directors and producers even Christian to begin with!?
Why would the communists, atheists, Jews, and pedophiles that comprise the core of Hollywood writing include such an unusual Christian theme so insistently and often story breakingly?
Well. why do they insist on bullshit girl-bossery, race mixing, and woke theming today over the protests and disinterest of their audience?
Because it benefits them to brainwash the masses that way.
The Hollywood writers never identified with the hero refusing to kill an enemy … they identified with the villain and quite liked for him to get away (indeed many Hollywood writers will openly say as much, that they identify with the villains and much prefer writing them).
