RUSH: Mr. Snerdley tells me that a number of you people have been calling today wanting to talk about the ‘propaganda’ of the movie 300. That infuriates me. You’re going to worry about a movie about the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, and you’re going to soak up like an idiot sponge everything in Algore’s stupid propaganda tripe? I’m getting no calls complaining about the propaganda of Algore’s movie but a bunch of you dunderheads want to talk to me about the ‘propaganda’ of 300. Snerdley hadn’t put any of those calls up because he didn’t know I was going to talk about this today.
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Now on to the movie 300. How many of you people know about the battle of Thermopylae? It’s one of the most famous battles in all of battles. The battle of Thermopylae happened in 480 BC. That’s 480 years before Christ. What happened was the Persians were on the march to try to take over Greece and a bunch of Peloponnesia. Now, Greece had a bunch of city states. Sparta was one of them. I don’t know how much you know about the Spartans, but there is a reason why the term Spartans means spartan. Spartans were all born and bred to be nothing but warriors. There was not one convenience in their lives. I’m speaking of the times. There was no leisure. The Spartans were just pure, 100 percent warriors. It was the reason they lived. Three-hundred of them withstood a battle at the Thermopylae pass in the face of thousands of Persians, led by their king, Leonidas. In Greece there is now a huge monument to him. Now, they were wiped out, but they delayed the thousands and thousands and thousands of oncoming Persians long enough that the rest of the Greek army was able to head them off in naval battles and other areas. In fact, there was a traitor involved in this.
The traitor hooked up with the Persians and gave them an alternate route beyond the Thermopylae pass to get where they were headed, and that was a factor in this story. Anyway, this movie 300 was filmed in Canada and totally filmed inside a warehouse. Not one frame of this movie was shot outdoors. It’s set a box office opening weekend record for the month of March, anyway, at over $70 million. So, lo and behold, ‘An Iranian official on Sunday lashed out at the Hollywood movie ‘300’ for insulting the Persian civilization, local Fars News Agency reported. Javad Shamqadri, an art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, accused the new movie of being ‘part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological war aimed at Iranian culture,’ said the report. Shamqadri was quoted as saying ‘following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the U.S. initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture.”
Persia is what Iran now is, for those of you in Rio Linda.
‘The movie’s effort wound be fruitless, because ‘values in Iranian culture and the Islamic Revolution are too strongly seated to be damaged by such plans,’ said the Iranian official.’ Yeah, there might be some license taken with this. I haven’t seen the movie. I doubt, for example, that the Spartans wore leather Speedos into battle. I mean, this was a beefcake movie. But nevertheless, history is history, and this has been well documented. Just more evidence that to these people, you leftists and Hollywood types are in their crosshairs if they ever get here. Mark my words. Anyway, this is not the first movie depiction of the battle of Thermopylae. In 1962, there was a movie called The 300 Spartans, and Richard Egan was in the movie.
The Persian king was Xerxes. That was his name. I just remember Richard Egan. A girl I was dating at the time had a crush Richard Egan — not in ’62 (I was only 11), but later on. She had a crush on Richard Egan. That should have been my first clue the whole relationship thing was a failure. After that was a crush on Tom Jones. Anyway, where were the Iranians back in 1962 when that movie came out? This is just pure poppycock. There’s no attempt to besmirch the Persians here. This is a movie. It’s absurd to even be talking about it. It’s a movie, period. The History Channel or Discovery, somebody has done a great, great piece — I saw it years and years ago — about the Spartans in general and they focused on the battle of Thermopylae and the 300 of them. It was something incredible.
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RUSH: John in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, you are up, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush, this is John. My name is John Walter from Pennsylvania, and I listen to you quite a bit, and one thing I got out of this movie, 300 — not the one thing, but there was many messages, and I don’t even know if they tried it, but when I was a kid I had learning disabilities and my mother used to tell me about the story of Leonidas and the 300 and the one thing that I got out of this was that their politicians couldn’t agree on going to war or not going to war or funding the war or anything, so he had to take his personal guard — not the Spartan army, but just his personal guard — up to fight this horde of invaders who were going to overtake Greece completely.
RUSH: That’s true. He did have support. There were 700 others.
CALLER: Thespians.
RUSH: Thespians, that’s right. But they were sort of like the Democrats of the day. They were just there watching and trying to come up with the deadlines to quit.
CALLER: Right. Even in the movie they show a guy drop a bag of gold with Xerxes’ face on it or whatever. I don’t know if that actually really happened or whatever, who was a politician, but, you know, it’s like Soros having his coffers filled from Iran or whatever.
RUSH: Well, let me tell you about Xerxes. The Iranians — by the way, for any of you Islamofascists in the audience from Iran, the Iranians were the Persians back then, had great respect for warriors who were opponents. But this Xerxes was so outraged at what 300 Spartans did to his army that when they found the body of Leonidas, they beheaded it and they didn’t return the body to the Greeks for 40 years. That’s how agitated and irritated they were over this loss, and that’s how bummed out Xerxes was that he lost his army to 300 people.
CALLER: Right, and then finally when they fought at the battle of Platea against the whole Spartan army his men were already scared and they were supposed to be the best in the world.
RUSH: Anybody would have been scared of the Spartans.
CALLER: But the movie is awesome. You’ve got to see it.
RUSH: Well, I’ll see it. I unfortunately didn’t get a previewing screener for this, so I’ll see it when it comes out on DVD, because I don’t go to theaters. I can’t go to theaters.
CALLER: Yeah, I don’t go that much, but my mother told me this story all my life because I had learning disabilities and now I have my own business of commercial diving and diving education.
RUSH: Well, congratulations. I’m glad you got to go. Thanks for the call.