Good shows gone bad...

Time was, I was a big fan of British documentary maker Michael Wood.  He's taken on some big topics, and made some very good shows.

Then I noticed "Legacy" in my Instant Queue on Netflix and watched it.

The show was made in the early 90s (no reference to 9-11, only the '91 Gulf War... and repeated references to the USSR), but the cultural bias is so amazingly HUGE even then, it almost makes the show impossible to watch.

The show is a study on the five starting points of "civilizations" throughout history:  Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Meso-America, and Europe.  It shows the geographical, climatological, demographic and political machinations that brought about "city living" across the scope of history.

I slugged through all the episodes, waiting to get to the last episode (The Barbarian West).  All were good, but I couldn't help but wonder at his over-emphasis on the "peaceful" nature of ALL the first four starting points.  Then I saw the Barbarian West.

You'd think that not a single fist was ever raised in anger that didn't originate in or come in contact with the "West".  The emphasis that our Western culture has placed on the strengths found in individual freedoms in the last two centuries are not mistakes... they aren't even the exceptions.  You'll have to watch it for yourselves... but he really seems to be trying to convince the viewers that our Western society (going all the way back to Alexander, mind you) is the ONLY male-oriented, militaristic, religiously intolerant, imperialist, and genocidal culture to ever have found itself rampant on the Earth.

Where does slavery still exist today?  Not in the "West".  Where is infanticide still a tool of the state to control population?  Not in the "West".  Where is the role you play in society dictated by the form of employment that your fathers and grandfathers were "born to"?  Not in the West.

I was amazed that the man used the Nazi Holocaust as an example of the irrational nature inherent in a culture that proposes to be based in the "Age of Reason"... and dismisses the Japanese Holocaust as "Western" influence in Imperial Japan.  The Chinese first Emperor couldn't be called "genocidal" in the manner and means by which he unified China, and then built the Great Wall?  Kublai Khan wasn't every bit as "militaristic" as Napoleon in his goals and objectives?  Saladin wasn't simply "responding" to the Crusades when he seized, sacked and destroyed Damascus... a Muslim city that the Crusaders couldn't take... he was cementing his own personal power base, just as Saddam Hussein was in 1990.

His assertion that communism in the East has failed because it is contrary to the 5,000 history of the Asiatic peoples is utterly baseless.  Communism, in any guise, is doomed to fail... but communism in China and North Korea bears as much resemblance to its Marxist-Leninist roots as tofu does to pepperoni, so saying that it is a "Western" philosophy that is alien to Eastern culture is utter crap.  Cultures, across the globe, have habitually taken from one society and incorporated into their own.  We owe the Chinese for gunpowder, pasta, the printed page, and shrimp fried rice... but Chinese culture is just as dependent today on things gained from the West, and not all of them are BAD.

What a load of bunk.