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.
This is something I see time and time again and it never fails to perplex me so utterly that I can never wrap my mind around comprehending it. Just how can so many people who oppose American policy make such an easy leap to supporting and idealizing our enemies? Why should it be so difficult to express dissent from official US policy and simultaneously see the targets of that policy as evil? It is as if such people are too simplisme to hold that a policy is bad and the target of that policy is also bad.
Of course, it isn't just idealism at play here. The idealism has to be hostile to America, our system of government, or our economic system. Hit on all three cylinders and you are guaranteed fawning coverage on our campuses.
Oh, and if you are wondering about the title, as long as some can call our prisoner policies "tantamount to torture" I think I can use "tantamount to" pretty freely from now on. Indeed, it is tantamount to a license to kill.
