It's hard to tell exactly what the content will be -- other than the gruesome and graphic depictions of crucifixion -- but it's clear that Gibson is building political chits among the punditry well in advance. See, for instance, today's Lloyd Grove column:
Mel Gibson's Washington Power Play
- Yesterday's secret screening at the Motion Picture Association of America included columnists Peggy Noonan, Cal Thomas and Kate O'Beirne; conservative essayist Michael Novak; President Bush's abortive nominee for labor secretary, Linda Chavez; staff director Mark Rodgers of the Senate Republican conference chaired by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.); former Republican House member Mark Siljander of Michigan; and White House staffer David Kuo, deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
"I find this sad," said ADL National Director Abraham Foxman, who hasn't been permitted to see the movie. "Here's a man who appeals to the mass audience, but he feels he has to surround himself with a cordon sanitaire of people who back him theologically and maybe ideologically and will stand up and be supportive when the time comes. My request still stands: I would like to see the movie, and if it turns out I was wrong, I'll be the first to say so."
Were it anybody else, the concern might be misplaced. But Gibson -- who has displayed a talent for starring in revenge melodramas over the years, ranging from the first Mad Max to Ransom, Payback, Braveheart and The Patriot -- has made a series of public pronouncements that have been troubling. Some of them are a reflection of Gibson's extremist father, Hutton Gibson.
The issue came into focus this spring when Christopher Noxon of the New York Times wrote a piece titled, "Is the Pope Catholic . . . Enough?" that featured bizarre and outrageous remarks from Gibson, his father and his mother. There was a brief flurry of stories about it that quickly dropped from the radar, notably this ABC report:
Gibson Family Under Fire for Anti-Semitism
Of particular note was the bizarre conspiracy-mongering of Hutton Gibson, accompanied by a full dose of Holocaust denial:
- The actor's father, Hutton Gibson, told The New York Times he flatly rejected that the terrorist group led by Usama bin Laden had any role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11.
"Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson told The Times.
"So what happened? They were crashed by remote control."
He and the actor's mother, Joye Gibson, also told The Times that the Holocaust was a fabrication manufactured to hide an arrangement between Adolf Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany to the Middle East to fight Arabs.
"Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told The Times. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?"
Said Joye Gibson: "That weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe."
And then there were Gibson's plans for the movie:
- The comments from the Gibson family come just after the actor built a church in near Malibu that caters to a revisionist version of Catholocism. According to The Times, the church has a congregation of 70, including the star of such films as "Braveheart" and "Conspiracy Theory."
Mel Gibson, a devout Catholic, is directing and co-wrote an upcoming movie "The Passion," rooted in a theological movement known as Catholic traditionalism that seeks to return the faith to its pre-1962 period, before the Pope issued what is known as Vatican II, a series of proclamations that did away with the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.
Bill Berkowitz addressed the underlying issues further at Working for Change:
- Does Mel Gibson have a Jewish problem?
Gibson's theology, writes Christopher Noxon in the New York Times, "is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives -- including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson's father."
In the 1992 El Pais interview, Gibson said that "For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the 60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules.
"Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated. ... The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don't believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends. It's the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it," he said.
Frederick Clarkson, the veteran right-wing researcher and author of "Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy" (Common Courage Press) told WorkingForChange in an e-mail that "Traditionalist Catholics describes those who insist on practicing the Latin mass and other features of the church prior to the reforms of Vatican II. Some Traditionalists operate within the Church; others belong to a faction, the Society of Saint Pius X that has been excommunicated en mass for disobedience to the Pope. Its far right views include conspiracy theories that the Catholic Church is controlled by liberals as a result of an ancient conspiracy of Freemasons."
According to thelatinmass.com, a web site that aims "to foster devotion to the Tridentine Latin Mass and traditional forms of Roman Catholic piety, and to propagate the orthodox Faith of the Church," Gibson "attends the Tridentine Mass exclusively."
Also worth noting, but not available online, is a piece by Allan Brown in the Sunday Times of London from May 5, 2002, titled "Braveheart and the Nazis," which included this:
- Euan Hague, an academic who has investigated the development of Celtic supremacist ideas in the United States, describes the perception of "a pure white culture where the men are strong and the women dance. For most American followers, Highland games mean having a beer and a laugh with 10,000 other people. But, for some, they can be a way to assert their whiteness".
That the KKK was founded by two emigres from Paisley is embarrassingly well-documented, a matter of historical record dating back to the 1860s.
Far more recent, however, is the passion of the other parties for Celtic racial mysticism; traceable almost entirely, believes historian Tom Devine, to the rise of "Braveheartism" in the mid-1990s, which overnight made William Wallace the new kid on the neo-Nazi block.
As their battles contracted to squabbles over the need for secession from larger states or economic protectionism in the face of rampant immigration, Wallace and his efforts were recast in the extremist mind as a kind of medieval Neighbourhood Watch scheme.
A particular fan was William Pierce, the "Farm Belt Fuhrer" and head of the National Alliance in America, whose novel of white supremacism, The Turner Diaries, was published under the pseudonym (or nom de guerre) of Andrew Macdonald in tribute to his Scots ancestry. He considered Braveheart a hymn to the need for personal sacrifice in the name of one's cause.
"That, I think, is one of the strongest things in our people and is something we need to call on and recognise, and for more people to be willing to do whatever is necessary, as William Wallace was," Pierce said.
In Italy, meanwhile, Umberto Bossi was heading the fascist Northern League in its attempt to secede from the southern half of the country. By displaying a Braveheart poster on his office wall he was equating the struggle of Wallace with his own against Roman dominance. These days, the newly-respectable Bossi serves in Berlusconi's government and his fondness for nebulous ideas of racial integrity has given way to a more naked aggression against all forms of economic immigration.
"Bossi has no real international outlook and no real passion for Scottish politics," says Joe Farrell of Strathclyde University. "He capitalised on something that was in the air at a certain time. The downside is that the follow-up is so tainted with racism."
Finally, there's the interview Gibson gave in Playboy, July 1995 (Vol. 42 ; No. 7 ; Pg. 51). Some excerpts:
- PLAYBOY: What does he [Hutton Gibson] have to do with the Alliance for Catholic Tradition, which one magazine called "an extreme conservative Catholic splinter group"?
GIBSON: He started it. Some people say it's extreme, but it emphasizes what the institution was and where it's going. Everything he was taught to believe was taken from him in the Sixties with this renewal Vatican Council. The whole institution became unrecognizable to him, so he writes about it.
.........
PLAYBOY: Do you believe in Darwin's theory of evolution or that God created man in his image?
GIBSON: The latter.
PLAYBOY: So you can't accept that we descended from monkeys and apes?
GIBSON: No, I think it's bullshit. If it isn't, why are they still around? How come apes aren't people yet? It's a nice theory, but I can't swallow it. There's a big credibility gap. The carbon dating thing that tells you how long something's been around, how accurate is that, really? I've got one of Darwin's books at home and some of that stuff is pretty damn funny. Some of his stuff is true, like that the giraffe has a long neck so it can reach the leaves. But I just don't think you can swallow the whole piece.
PLAYBOY: We take it that you're not particularly broad-minded when it comes to issues such as celibacy, abortion, birth control --
GIBSON: People always focus on stuff like that. Those aren't issues. Those are unquestionable. You don't even argue those points.
PLAYBOY: You don't?
GIBSON: No.
PLAYBOY: What about allowing women to be priests?
GIBSON: No.
PLAYBOY: Why not?
GIBSON: I'll get kicked around for saying it, but men and women are just different. They're not equal. The same way that you and I are not equal.
PLAYBOY: That's true. You have more money.
GIBSON: You might be more intelligent, or you might have a bigger dick. Whatever it is, nobody's equal. And men and women are not equal. I have tremendous respect for women. I love them. I don't know why they want to step down. Women in my family are the center of things. An good things emanate from them. The guys usually mess up.
PLAYBOY: That's quite a generalization.
GIBSON: Women are just different. Their sensibilities are different.
PLAYBOY: Any examples?
GIBSON: I had a female business partner once. Didn't work.
PLAYBOY: Why not?
GIBSON: She was a cunt.
PLAYBOY: And the feminists dare to put you down!
GIBSON: Feminists don't like me, and I don't like them. I don't get their point. I don't know why feminists have it out for me, but that's their problem, not mine.
.................
PLAYBOY: How do you feel about Bill Clinton?
GIBSON: He's a low-level opportunist. Somebody's telling him what to do.
PLAYBOY: Who?
GIBSON: The guy who's in charge isn't going to be the front man, ever. If I were going to be calling the shots I wouldn't make an appearance. Would you? You'd end up losing your head. It happens all the time. All those monarchs. Ifhe's the leader, he's getting shafted. What's keeping him in there? Why would you stay for that kind of abuse? Except that he has to stay for some reason. He was meant to be the president 30 years ago, if you ask me.
PLAYBOY: He was just 18 then.
GIBSON: Somebody knew then that he would be president now.
PLAYBOY: You really believe that?
GIBSON: I really believe that. He was a Rhodes scholar, right? Just like Bob Hawke. Do you know what a Rhodes scholar is? Cecil Rhodes established the Rhodes scholarship for those young men and women who want to strive for a new world order. Have you heard that before? George Bush? CIA? Really, it's Marxism, but it just doesn't want to call itself that. Karl had the right idea, but he was too forward about saying what it was. Get power but don't admit to it. Do it by stealth. There's a whole trend of Rhodes scholars who will be politicians around the world.
PLAYBOY: This certainly sounds like a paranoid sense of world history. You must be quite an assassination buff.
GIBSON: Oh, fuck. A lot of those guys pulled a boner. There's something to do with the Federal Reserve that Lincoln did, Kennedy did and Reagan tried. I can't remember what it was, my dad told me about it. Everyone who did this particular thing that would have fixed the economy got undone. Anyway, I'll end up dead if I keep talking shit.
Gibson, of course, is entitled to his beliefs, as is any extremist. But it is troubling when they are given such a powerful forum as the national distribution the film no doubt will receive.
And it is even more troubling when they are given the imprimatur of high-profile mainstream conservatives. It is another clear sign of the increasing tolerance for radicalism among the ranks of conservatives.
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