In one of his many heroic roles in epic movies of the 1950s and 60s, Charlton Heston demonstrated the range necessary to depict the quirky anti-slavery fanatic Chinese Gordon, known by that name until he died defending Khartoum against the Mahdist Jihad. The ideas of English Anglo-American abolitionist theology, of the 1800s, was well preserved in this fairly accurate depiction of a famous British last stand. Of course, Gordon was the only Brit there—for his nation had forsaken the blacks of the Sudan to the slave traders of Islam that he had earlier crusaded against in a very administrative way.
Today this treatment comes off as grotesquely politically incorrect. For although the seat of human trafficking in the world remains Islamic over Bantu, we are taught that slavery may only be inflicted by people of European descent and may only be experienced by Africans. The reality break provided by the movie Khartoum was refreshing, as the Expected One, the Mahdi, played by Laurence Olivier, extolls his faith honestly as a system of control, and Gordon, played by Heston defies the Mahdi and his masters in London, by using his celebrity status and his willingness to die in a just cause, as a way of forcing his government to posthumously crush the man he cannot withstand in battle…but will doom in death.
The anti-slavery interpretation of Christianity, which requires disregarding or misrepresenting vast swaths of the Old Testament and the New Testament does not hold up to serieous inquiry. Only by claiming that Spartacus and the 150,000 slaves who went to their death against Rome in what Rome named one of its three Slave Wars, were not slaves, by virtue of the fact that they were not black, can the Christian abolitionist claim Christianity—the faith that semantically doomed hundreds of millions of European serfs to a 23-year life of misery in its satanic bargain with the temporal powers—as the faith of freedom from bondage.
It was heart-warming to see the crystalized, distilled and secularized version of social justice Christianity of the late 1800s, depicted accurately in the 1960s as a self-sacrificing and very real crusade of passive compassion. Gordon—and many another missionary figure of the Victorian Age—were willing to ape Christ on the cross in the hope, and in Gordon’s case, cold calculation, that their death would bring down the world-straddling war machine of the British Empire to right the wrongs they sought to eradicate from the earth.
The fact that these ends were achieved most often and most sanguinely by conscripted soldiers—men forced against their will to bear arms and kill other men and die in combat, and who are by any rational definition slaves—is incapable of penetrating the indoctrinated mind of Modern Man, for the soldier is granted death-dealing and god-like powers and is therefore compensated as a temporarily free actionist by some twisted logic embedded in our slave minds.
The contemporary viewer might think it is corny that Gordon refuses to fight and faces down an army until he is speared and that many of them regard him as a supernatural threat—yet they were right. For he knew, if he fell at their hand, that hunting his killers would become the cause celeb and the glory hunt of the lesser morale lights of his globalist class of adventurers. Few men so accurately calibrated the impact of their demise as had Gordon.
An interesting aspect of that long gone age of imperialism, where the absurd notion of “white supremacy” was born, is depicted in the movie quite accurately, that every man of European descent was expected to bear arms against the enemy of his endeavor or his nation. This was the only race-based aspect of the founding documents of the United States, that “white” men would die for it. The scene where the colonel armed civilian men to run a gauntlet down the Nile on a riverboat, echoes eerily as an anachronism in this day, when the idea of that same shade of man shouldering a weapon is regarded as obscene.
It was particularly interesting to be treated to the grand nobility of the white man liberating the black man from the brown man only a few years after the actions of the U.S. opened back up the ancient slave pens of Libya, reminding the viewer that the might of the British Empire and the Guilt of waning Christianity would only liberate the African for a few generations until the universal guilt of Post-Christian America cast him –the black Christ—back into chains on one hand as he is proclaimed a Meta-Christ on the other hand. Gordon understood both of those historical hands. We, at our remove, are only capable of perceiving one dimension of anything, so that the resurgence of chattel slavery is now denied. Just as the bondage of Europeans is denied today, the bondage of their chronological inheritors is likewise denied.
Injustice, it seems, is fair in its ironic way.
