Regime Propaganda in the 21st Century: the Case of Voyagers, the Movie

Classical-era Athens was largely devised under the one-man rule of Peisistratos. He took advantage of a decline in the power of local merchants because the war with Megara had cut off trade routes, and multiple violations of Solon’s laws by oligarchs intent on keeping power to themselves; and he was able to leverage popular discontent and take power in 561 BC through a violent coup, although he became a rather conciliatory tyrant[1].

Peisistratos was cunning in the extreme. Herodotus reports that he only had bodyguards that he used for his coup because he had earlier intentionally wounded himself and his mules to demand protection at public expense[2]. It’s unclear how much developments elsewhere influenced Peisistratos’ standing in Athens: he was exiled in 546 BC, precisely the same year in which tyrant-hating Sparta defeated Argos and became Greece’s most influential power[3].

Whatever the case, Peisistratos found succor in other tyrants, who helped him return. Back in control in Athens, Peisistratos instituted “traveling judges” who heard cases across Attica, to curtail the power of prominent locals, built the first aqueduct in the city and set up a system of state loans for the poor and forced a breakup of large estates to benefit landless peasants. These measures ensured grass-roots support for his “tyranny,” especially if one considers that such landless people accounted for about half the population of Attica.

It was under Pesistratos’ rule that Athens’ famous agora, the city’s civic center, was completed, although it may have been started earlier. Likewise, a law that mandated the city to provide basic shield and spear for veterans’ orphans so that they could join the phalanx even if impoverished, as well as the institution of a public police force composed of thuggish Scythian freedmen – later notorious – sound like the kind of ideas Peisistratos might have had, but they may have nothing to do with him. Historians are still debating these points.

Peisistratos also used his friendly relationships with other strongmen to broaden Athens’ influence in the Aegean, while cultivating his opponents. He colluded with Megacles, the leader of the merchant class, in a “frenemy” relationship during which he was twice exiled, finally coming on top so that his son Hippias took power on his death in 527 BC.

Hippias was apparently rather smart and capable, and appears to have taken the far-sighted step of reforming Athenian currency to create standardized coins depicting goddess Athena that were used for the next three centuries; his beloved brother and co-tyrant Hipparchus came up with the idea of setting up little busts of the god Hermes (“herms”) as mid-point of the roads between the city and various places of interest.

A patron of the arts, Hipparchus brought Ionian poets like Anacreon and Simonides to the city; and Plato also believed that Hipparchus fomented Homer’s fame in Athens by instituting the performance of his works in relays by rhapsodes. Lasus of Hermione, another writer patronized by Hipparchus, may have been the first scholar to detect a literary forgery: he pored through the oracles presumably written by the legendary Musaeus and compiled by rival scholar Onomacritus, and detected that Onomacritus had inserted at least a false oracle into the collection. Hipparchus therefore expelled Onomacritus from Athens.

However, all the smarts and scholarship in the world meant little compared with the wealth and power of the merchants. They had Hipparchus murdered[4], which made Hippias understandably paranoid; and they finally bribed the Delphic Oracle to tell the Spartans – always eager to listen to the oracle, especially when it asked for the removal of tyrants – to liberate Athens from the tyrant, which they did in 510 BC.

Cleisthenes, Megacles’ son and successor as head of the merchants, immediately came into conflict with other aristocratic families who were interested in the tyranny’s spoils. In 508 BC, rival aristocrat Isagoras garnered support from the Spartans to get rid of Cleisthenes, but the merchants’ leader enlisted the lower Athenian classes to fight back and expel Isagoras, not before they murdered 300 of his supporters. The democrats who balked at the tyrants’ alleged blood-thirst thus launched their project with a blood-bath. Much worse would come in the following century under populists like Pericles and Cleon.

It’s very important to keep all this in mind, even if it’s found nowhere in most modern works about ancient history, and taught in no university. All this information, you must find it by yourself, by going to the sources, dusty old books that cite archeology finds, Herodotus and Plato. But this information helps explain why the Western world moved so decisively against democracy over the next few hundred years, to the point that “democracy” itself would be perceived as a taboo word, to be avoided in the US constitution of the late 18th century — the word itself is mentioned nowhere in the constitution of the first modern democracy.

I was reminded of all this watching Voyagers, a new science-fiction movie that depicts the trouble in a generation ship (one of my favorite sci-fi concepts, of which I’ve written extensively) that has a bunch of teenagers traveling to a distant star. I’m tempted to write that the movie is atrocious, but it isn’t. It simply is one more example of obvious pro-democracy propaganda which, once you learn how to identify, is everywhere and everyday, and can’t be escaped, and is the very water in which all Hollywood movies swim.

In the movie, there two main protagonists, the Bad Guy and the Good Guy. At first, they are friends, but it soon becomes obvious that the Bad Guy is a rapey authoritarian who lusts after power, while the Good Guy is just a brilliant, decent, good-looking muscular kid who only wants the best for everyone, fairness and the triumph of humanitarian ideas.

After the Elder in charge of the ship dies in mysterious circumstances, the People (the other teenagers in the ship) elect the Good Guy as the next Leader, because WE ALL KNOW THAT DEMOCRACIES ALWAYS ELECT THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST TO RULE THE REST. Haven’t you followed any democratic process in any country? But trouble ensues: Bad Guy conspires to gain power — and this is terribly depicted in the movie, in the form of boilerplate speeches — and convinces the rest that an evil alien killed the Elder, and may have been unleashed in the ship by the Good Guy, and he just takes power as King.

BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW THAT IN DEMOCRACIES THERE ARE NO WITCH-HUNTS, no obsessive mass media campaigns against inexistent enemies like the Russian agents who put Donald Trump in place (hey, I thought democracies always elect…) and no manipulation of any kind! In fact, the movie is remarkably clear on that point: Bad Guy takes power not through another clear election, but by manipulating and scaring people. He’s never actually elected, because we all know that democracies always elect the best and the brightest.

This being an American movie, the remaining 40 minutes of run-time are not devoted to high-minded speculation or complex machinations: they are all about teenagers chasing each other along the ship corridors, shooting and killing each other until, in a grand final fight, Good Guy kills Bad Guy, the tyrant, but not because he wants to, but because there was no other way to bring peace to the ship.

The final twist is just lovely. Bad Guy being dead, all his minions just accept that they were brainwashed by an anti-democratic conspiracy and they hold another vote. And in this vote they select the Girl (Good Guy’s girlfriend, after whom Bad Guy lusted) as the ship’s Leader, because women are just better. And her rule, she explains in a voiceover, is then marked by constant voting about everything, because we all know that constant voting about everything is what makes democracies work best.

This movie is good propaganda, clumsily executed. Ideology is not what you get in party meetings, reader: ideology is what you get on a Saturday night, while trying to watch a medium-budget sci-fi movie with your wife and kids. Just remember this and you’ll be fine, and you’ll see through it. If you want to ponder the differences between law-abiding monarchy and other regimes, don’t expect that Hollywood will make it easy for you. I recommend that you check this here about how we may need an idiot for a king.

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[1]    Despite the occasional execution, Peisistratos was held in great regard by future Athenians. As Aristotle reports, it became a common saying that his tyranny had been a golden age, during which the foundations were laid for the rise of Athens during the following century – including the rise of Athenian imperialism, through military efforts to gain control of the Hellespont.

[2]    This is the earliest example of this sort of trick, later used by Francois Miterrand to gain prominence in France in 1960, by staging an assassination attempt against himself.

[3] Sparta’s conflict was Argos was resolved in a very heroic fashion: 300 champions were chosen by each polis, and fought to the death until, by nightfall, only two Argives and one Spartan were left alive. The Argives marched home to report the victory, and the Spartan considered himself the victor. None of the two sides accepted the result, and the Spartan army defeated the Argive army in the final battle next day. In 420 BC, during a lull in the Peloponnesian War, Argos challenged Sparta to a rematch of the Battle of the 300 Champions, but Sparta declined.

[4]    By two Athenian lovers, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, later to be mythologized by the merchants and their democratic allies, and forever known as the “tyrannicides,” even though Hipparchus was a close associate of a tyrant, rather than a tyrant. Thucydides, a prominent democrat, claimed a century later that Hipparcus was rejected by Harmodius and later shamed Harmodius’ family; Aristotle even later corrected Thucydides, explaining that it was another son of Peisistratos who courted Harmonius. Whatever the circumstances (and it’s likely that the romantic plot was a mere pretext, entirely made up), the tyrannicides broke with Athenian tradition by using a religious festival to commit their murder, and their allies later claimed that Aristogeiton died after torture, but without denouncing any co-conspirator – which clearly indicated that there were co-conspirators to be denounced, to start with. Years later, the sculptor Antenor made a publicly-funded statue of the tyrannicides, standing by itself at the Agora with an inscription by the poet Simonides, and their families secured government subsidies. Multiple adventured happened to this and other statues of the tyrannicides, including one by Praxiteles. Even longer lasting with the impact of the lovers’ sexuality: in the 4^th century BC, the notorious demagogue Demosthenes used their example to defend a political ally against an accusation that he had prostituted himself as youth.