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How Mel Gibson helped to turn us into Nazis
Jonathan Foreman On The Secret Fascism Of The Patriot
The Guardian, July 10, 2000

The week before The Patriot opened in America, the British press lit up with furious headlines. Truth is first casualty in Hollywood's war,' read one in the Daily Telegraph. Another story, about the historical model for Mel Gibson's character, was headed: The secret shame of Mel's new hero.' The articles complained that this epic about the War of American Independence portrays British redcoats as bloodthirsty and unprincipled stormtroopers' and bloodthirsty child-killers'.

The historian and biographer Andrew Roberts called the film racist' in the Daily Express, and pointed out that it was only the latest in a series of films such as Titanic, Michael Collins and The Jungle Book remake that have depicted the British as treacherous, cowardly, evil (and) sadistic'. Roberts had a theory: With their own record of killing 12m American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt onto someone else.'

I can only imagine how much angrier Fleet Street's pundits will be once they have actually seen the movie. When The Patriot opens on Friday, Britons will see a supposedly authentic historical epic that radically rewrites history. It does so by casting George III's redcoats as cartoonish paragons of evil. If you didn't know anything about the revolution, you might actually believe the British army was made up of demonic sadists who committed one atrocity after another.

The Patriot is well made and often exciting. But it is disturbing in a way that many weaker, dumber films are not. It's not just that it distorts history in a way that goes way beyond Hollywood's traditional poetic licence; it's the strange, primitive politics that seem to underlie that distortion. The Patriot doesn't get' patriotism in either the modern or the 18th-century sense of the word. The only memorable political
sentiment voiced comes when Gibson's character declares that he sees no advantage in replacing the tyranny of one man 3,000 miles away for the tyranny of 3,000 men one mile away. The deliberate lacuna demonstrates a lack of understanding of, or even a hostility to, the patriotic politics that motivated the founding fathers. You could even argue without too much exaggeration that The Patriot is as fascist a film (and I use the term in its literal sense, not as a synonym for bad') as anything made in decades. It's even more fascist than Fight Club.

The Patriot presents a deeply sentimental cult of the family, casts unusually Aryan-looking heroes and avoids any democratic or political context in its portrayal of the revolution. Instead, it offers a story in which the desire for blood vengeance for a son shot by a British officer turns Gibson's character into a patriot'. Meanwhile, the imagery piles up: blond pre-teens are turned into the equivalent of the Third Reich's boy-soldiers; Gibson becomes one of those bloodied, axe-wielding supermen so beloved in Nazi folk iconography; and the black population of South Carolina where the film is set are generally depicted as happy, loyal slaves, or equally happy (and unlikely) freedmen.

But the most disturbing thing about The Patriot is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of the jingoistic Independence Day) and screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticised for excluding British and other Allied soldiers from Saving Private Ryan) depict British troops
as committing atrocities, but that these bear such a resemblance to war crimes by German troops particularly the SS in the second world war.

In one scene in The Patriot, the British regulars murder wounded American POWs. In another, they order the execution of an American soldier captured in uniform. Such crimes were common on the eastern front of the second world war, but were never committed by regular troops during the War
of Independence, according to Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage magazine. Of course, irregular militias, terrorist bands allied to both sides and Indian proxies did some very nasty things. And, sure, spies and traitors were hanged. But regulars on both sides made the distinction between those categories and uniformed combatants. Snow understands the outrage in the British press: They should be upset.'

The most outrageous of The Patriot's many faults is that Emmerich and Rodat show the British committing a war crime that closely resembles one of the most notorious Nazi atrocities the massacre of 642 people (including 205 children) in the French village of Oradour sur Glane on June 10, 1944.

At Oradour, the Waffen SS's Das Reich division punished local resistance activity by first shooting all the men and boys. Then they rounded up the women and children, locked them in the town church and set it on fire. You can see Oradour today exactly as it was just after the Nazis carried out the mass murder the French have left it as an empty memorial.

There was one major case of British regulars burning a town during the revolution. It was Groton, Connecticut, and the troops were under the command of Benedict Arnold. The houses they burned were empty. Yet in The Patriot British dragoons lock scores of civilians, most of them women
and children, into a church and set it alight. According to both Snow and historian Thomas Fleming, no such incident took place during the revolution. As Snow says: Of course it never happened if it had, do
you think Americans would have forgotten it? It could have kept us out of
the first world war.'

By transposing Oradour to South Carolina, and making 18th-century Britons the first moderns to commit this particular war crime, Emmerich and Rodat have done something unpleasantly akin to Holocaust revisionism. They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences
against the unique historical horror of Oradour and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis.

If the Nazis had won the war in Europe, and their propaganda ministry had decided to make a film about the American Revolution, The Patriot is the sort of movie you could expect to see. Doubters should take a look at Goebbels's pre-Pearl Harbor efforts at inflaming isolationist Anglophobia.

It's just as well for Sony-Columbia that Emmerich, Rodat and Gibson didn't make a film like this about the French, the Chinese or even the Arabs. If they had, there would probably have been government protests, popular demonstrations and boycotts. But they have still told a big lie about the war that brought the US into existence, one that feeds an even greater lie about the war and the enemy that the US and Britain fought half a century ago. It's a shameful way to make money. And it's particularly
insidious in a film that goes to such lengths to avoid anachronism in clothing, weaponry and battle tactics.

It's hard to define, but there is clearly a point where dramatic licence shades into something much more sinister. If you made a film in which Africans raided Europe for slaves to bring to America, or Jews provoked pogroms by drinking the blood of gentile children, you would have passed that point, even if such films were exciting, well acted and starred Mel Gibson.

I don't blame Gibson so much: it's no surprise when actors overlook historical accuracy for a good role. Especially when they receive Dollars 25m for their trouble, as Gibson did for The Patriot. But I'd like to introduce Emmerich and Rodat to the families of those massacred at Oradour.

Jonathan Foreman is film critic for the New York Post.