Libertarian Movie Quotes

Another example I used in the article, I got from watching the old movie Gandhi. The British – who are basically very moral people – were willing to assault Indians who just wanted to make salt in their own country. The movie dramatizes the scene of British soldiers striking down defenseless people. Why? Why would ordinarily decent human beings do that? Well, they wouldn’t, unless they could be convinced that what they were doing was not oppressing an indigenous population, but upholding the rule of law.

The biggest anachronism, usually, in a historical movie is, again, the author doesn’t want to be thought to in any way share the social conventions or whatever of the time, so there’s always this auctorial alter ego. So you have a movie set in the 1830s where you’ll have a female character who has the attitudes of a twenty-first-century screenwriter. And that to me is a true anachronism.

Let's examine the second accusation first: the idea that pornography is degrading to women. Degrading is a subjective term. Personally, I find detergent commercials in which women become orgasmic over soapsuds to be tremendously degrading to women. I find movies in which prostitutes are treated like ignorant drug addicts to be slander against women. Every woman has the right-the need!-to define degradation for herself.

All the media of modern consciousness—from the printing press to radio and the movies—were used just as readily by authoritarian reactionaries, and then by modern totalitarians, to reduce liberty and enforce conformity as they ever were by libertarians to expand it.

I should say that it was only for me that Marxism seemed over. Surely, I would tell G. at least once a week, it had to count for something that every single self-described Marxist state had turned into an economically backward dictatorship. Irrelevant, he would reply. The real Marxists weren’t the Leninists and Stalinists and Maoists—or the Trotskyists either, those bloodthirsty romantics—but libertarian anarchist-socialists, people like Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Karl Korsch, scholarly believers in true workers’ control who had labored in obscurity for most of the twentieth century, enjoyed a late-afternoon moment in the sun after 1968 when they were discovered by the New Left, and had now once again fallen back into the shadows of history, existing mostly as tiny stars in the vast night sky of the Internet, archived on blogs with names like Diary of a Council Communist and Break Their Haughty Power. They were all men. The group itself was mostly men. This was, as Marxists used to say, no accident. There was something about Marxist theory that just did not appeal to women. G. and I spent a lot of time discussing the possible reasons for this. Was it that women don’t allow themselves to engage in abstract speculation, as he thought? That Marxism is incompatible with feminism, as I sometimes suspected? Or perhaps the problem was not Marxism but Marxists: in its heyday men had kept a lock on it as they did on everything they considered important; now, in its decline, Marxism had become one of those obsessive lonely-guy hobbies, like collecting stamps or 78s. Maybe, like collecting, it was related, through subterranean psychological pathways, to sexual perversions, most of which seemed to be male as well. You never hear about a female foot fetishist, or a woman like the high-school history teacher of a friend of mine who kept dated bottles of his own urine on a closet shelf. Perhaps women’s need for speculation is satisfied by the intense curiosity they bring to daily life, the way their collecting masquerades as fashion and domesticity—instead of old records, shoes and ceramic mixing bowls—and their perversity can be satisfied simply by enacting the highly artificial role of Woman, by becoming, as it were, fetishizers of their own feet.

Sixth, show a deep acquaintance with the same books, magazines, blogs, movies, and plays — as well as the daily life experiences — that your audience knows. Mention them and interpret them in light of Scripture. But be sure to read and experience urban life across a spectrum of opinion. There is nothing more truly urban than showing you know, appreciate, and digest a great diversity of human opinion. During my first years in New York, I regularly read The New Yorker (sophisticated secular), The Atlantic (eclectic), The Nation (older, left-wing secular), The Weekly Standard (conservative but erudite), The New Republic (eclectic and erudite), Utne Reader (New Age alternative), Wired (Silicon Valley libertarian), First Things (conservative Catholic). As I read, I imagine dialogues about Christianity with the writers. I almost never read a magazine without getting a scrap of a preaching idea.

Also, the repeated footage of dead bodies, no doubt intended to shock, proves nothing that is not already known and will do little to impress a modern audience accustomed to eating pizza while watching Alien.

But it would be about tolerating dissent. Now, movies or plays, pieces of art about dissent, they always, I think, flatter the author and they flatter the audience.   WOODS: Yeah.   KAUFFMAN: Because, of course, all right-thinking people are on the side of the dissenter.   WOODS: Right.   KAUFFMAN: You know, who is being persecuted by the narrow-minded peasants, or the clerics who deny that the Earth is round, or that it orbits the sun, or that there’s such a thing as evolution, and it’s just such a cheap and easy pose to stand at this distance of time with Galileo, or –   WOODS: I know, right!