Following George W Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, National Public Radio broadcast a program called Writers and Artists Describe the State of the Union. Frank Miller was one of the people interviewed. Speaking of the so-called “War on Terror,” Miller said, "For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genitally mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbours were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built."

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that the vast majority of Muslims don’t decapitate or genitally mutilate anyone, and that there are lots of non-Muslims who do. You’re thinking that women are treated very differently across Muslim countries and even across regions within Muslim countries, and that many non-Muslim countries treat women deplorably. You’re thinking that Muslims have made many scientific and technological contributions to our global civilization. Most of all, you’re thinking, “Who the hell is Frank Miller, and why should I give a damn what he thinks?”

Well, Frank Miller is Hollywood’s hottest new commodity. The movies Sin City and 300 were faithful adaptations of his comic books. Miller has long been a force to be reckoned with in the comic book world. Among his other achievements, his multiple award-winning 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns redefined the caped crusader as an authoritarian misanthrope for generations to come. Since Miller’s imagination has rippled across American popular culture, we should pay attention to his opinions.

Because Miller loves the movie 300, and since far more people will see the movie than read the comic, I’ll focus on the film and the ideology it espouses.

The movie is based on the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, when 300 Spartans and 700 Thespian volunteers battled half a million invading Persians. The Greeks lost the battle, but only after inflicting heavy losses on their enemy.

300 uses a heavily-mythologized Sparta as a vehicle for Miller’s philosophy. The narrator tells us, “There's no room for softness. Not in Sparta. No place for weakness. Only the hard and strong may call themselves Spartans. Only the hard, only the strong.”

The Spartans begin separating the strong from the soft at birth. An early scene in the movie shows Spartan elders deciding whether or not a baby is fit to live. They stand upon a cliff; the chasm below is filled with tiny skulls. If the child is spared, and if it’s a boy, then before he reaches puberty he’s cast into a predator-filled wilderness. If he survives a year on his own, he’s declared a Spartan. His upbringing will thereafter be ruthlessly militaristic, and will teach him to value his duty to Sparta above all other things.

These scenes reminded me of something Hitler said: “My pedagogy is hard. Whatever is weak and mildewed must be struck away with the hammer. (Eric Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, Stanford University Press, 2004). And, indeed, Hitler spoke highly of Sparta: “Sparta must be regarded as the first völkisch state. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more human than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.” (Hitler’s Secret Book, Grove Press, 1961) This reference to Hitler isn’t intended to be inflammatory. 300’s emphasis on the purification of the body, the mind, and the state through military indoctrination and the brutal elimination of weakness is only one of several defining features of fascist ideology in this movie.

The Spartans’ hyper-masculinity is contrasted with the effeminacy of the Persian King Xerxes, a giant RuPaul of a man. This combination of homophobia and homoeroticism can be found throughout Miller’s work. Miller invariably depicts evil men, like Xerxes in 300 (1998), the Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and Dick Grayson in Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2002) as both feminine and weak, while he gratuitously highlights the powerful physicality of his heroes. In the movie the Spartans go into battle wearing only capes and Speedos, while the comic displays almost as many Spartan penises as Spartan spears. This sublimation of homoerotic desire for militaristic ends is a consistent feature of fascist art; incidentally, it often plays a large role in the fantasies of men who repress and despise their own homosexual tendencies.

Whereas the Spartans have a uniform physical perfection rarely seen outside of gay porn, their dark-skinned enemies are varied and deformed, and some are actually monsters: their ranks include crab-clawed ogres and fanged giants, and during a Persian orgy scene a blue-furred humanoid goat can clearly be seen smoking a hookah. The movie uses the Persians’ monstrosity to symbolize the supposed irrationality of their culture. In contrast, Greece is called the "world's one hope for reason and justice," and a Spartan claims that it’s their responsibility to “rescue the world from mysticism and tyranny." Again, typical of fascist art, 300 espouses a Master-culture narrative with decidedly racist undertones.

Comments made by Chris Hedges about Christopher Hitchens in a June 4 2007 article for New Statesmen apply equally well to Frank Miller: “(Hitchens) embraces a self-serving and simplistic view of the world. This allows him to create the illusion of a dualistic world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality. And once this vision has been adopted, as the events of the past six years prove, it is possible to view military intervention, occupation and even torture—anything that will subdue the ‘irrational’ or ‘dangerous’—as necessary.”

So who exactly is 300’s target audience? While the movie has been favourably received by both critics and North American theatre-goers, I suspect that it’s geared primarily to young Americans who are being disenfranchised by fascist developments in their country’s economic and political structure.

In Friendly Fascism (Black Rose Books, 1980), Bertram Gross describes the evolution in America of a new form of fascism, a variety in which Big Government does less pillaging of, and more pillaging for, Big Business, but maintains a number of basic similarities with classical fascism: “In each, a powerful oligarchy operates outside of, as well as through, the state. Each subverts constitutional government. Each suppresses rising demands for wider participation in decision making, the enforcement and enlargement of human rights, and genuine democracy. Each uses informational control and ideological flimflam to get lower-and middle-class support for plans to expand the capital and power of the oligarchy and provide suitable rewards for political, professional, scientific, and cultural supporters.”

As America’s middle class collapses, as its military-industrial-congressional complex becomes more powerful, as its imperial ambitions become more desperate, and as its increasingly unaccountable executive branch continues to centralize political power, the institutions of democracy are losing ground to oligarchic rule.

Totalitarian movements thrive on the kind of widespread economic instability and despair being experienced throughout the United States. As the oligarchy gains more power, American workers are left seething with humiliation and fear. This makes them very susceptible to ideologies that promise power, pride, and revenge against scapegoated and dehumanized “others.” American youngsters who’ve grown up in this emotionally poisonous atmosphere are even more vulnerable to these ideologies than their parents are. Many of them enter the military, and many are attracted to fascism. The Southern Law Poverty Centre reports that relaxed recruitment standards have allowed thousands of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists to infiltrate the military. Stan Goff argues that “This not only allows more of these dangerous ideologues into the military, it gives them unprecedented access to other combat veterans, brutalized into the sociopathy of war and inured to white supremacy through the inevitable racialization of the occupied enemy.” (Stan Goff, Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America, Truthdig, October 3 2006). This is the core audience that 300 caters to.

Personally, I would like to see another movie made about Sparta, one that focuses on Sparta’s decline. That decline was brought about by Spartan demographics. Ninety percent of Sparta’s population was made up of Helots, an occupied and enslaved people the Spartans hunted for sport. A small portion of the society was made up of people called Perioeci, who were free but who weren’t citizens, and who provided Sparta with its artisans and tradesmen. Spartan citizens were a small minority in Sparta. To be a Spartan citizen, one had to be born to Spartan citizens. Spartan men were forced to be soldiers, and those who couldn’t complete extensive military training lost their citizenship. Coupled with their eugenics policy, this meant that the actual number of Spartan citizens fell dramatically over the centuries in a process known as oliganthropia. Oliganthropia left Sparta weak and vulnerable, and eventually turned it into a backwater. For Sparta, valuing “only the hard, only the strong” was ultimately suicidal. This is the story about Sparta that Americans need to hear, but it’s one Frank Miller and Hollywood are never going to tell.