300: Cultural Stereotypes and War against Barbarism

300: cultural stereotypes and war against barbarism

during the era of bush administration and post-september 11th anti-terrorism discourse, the movie 300 was one of the best exemplar of a close relationship between hollywood pop culture products and the neo-conservatives’ political discourse of nationalism. from my point of view, 300 is not an example of outstanding artistic films, but a film that more than any other film contains an iranophobic...

Pacifism and Just War: Beyond the Stereotypes

Barbarism/Modernity: notes on barbarism

"Straight back to barbarism": antityphoid inoculation and the Great War, 1914.

On 27 August 1914, just three weeks after the outbreak of the Great War, Sir William Osler, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, wrote a letter to the Times, in which he urged the necessity of compulsorily vaccinating British troops against typhoid. "In war," he pressed, "the microbe kills more than the bullet," and he reminded his readers that more men had died of dysentery and t...

Stereotypes of Muslims and Support for the War on Terror

We investigate Americans’ stereotypes of both Muslims and Muslim-Americans. We find that negative stereotypes relating to violence and trustworthiness are commonplace and that little distinguishes Muslims from Muslim-Americans in the public’s mind. Furthermore, these stereotypes have consequences: those with less favorable views of Muslims are more likely to support several aspects of the War o...

Multilingual Harvesting of Cross-Cultural Stereotypes

People rarely articulate explicitly what a native speaker of a language is already assumed to know. So to acquire the stereotypical knowledge that underpins much of what is said in a given culture, one must look to what is implied by language rather than what is overtly stated. Similes are a convenient vehicle for this kind of knowledge, insofar as they mark out the most salient aspects of the ...