28 Neocons Later

I recently saw the preview for the film 28 Weeks Later. It's the sequel to a British horror film called 28 Days Later. With talk of the sequel in the air, I decided to get off my butt and watch the DVD of the original 28 Days Later, and what I found was a very interesting and probably unintentional Neocon allegory.

Don't call me crazy just yet, hear me out, and be careful if you haven't seen the film yet, here there be spoilers.

The premise of the film is that a virus called Rage has wiped out civilization in England and probably the rest of the world.

The virus was safely contained, but was let out by a group of radical animal rights activists. Sort of like Europe's Political Left's welcoming of radical Salafist and Wahabi groups into their countries to and to dominate their Muslim populations. The Political Left, like the animal rights radicals in the film, claim, and may even believe that they're doing the right thing, but instead, they unleash Rage that leads to violence and death.

The people infected with rage are incapable of maintaining the technologically advanced infrastructure of a modern state, and things begin to rapidly fall apart. Sort of like what's happening to countries already under the sway of Salafist/Wahabi leadership that don't have the benefit of being propped up by petro-dollars and foreign expertise.

In 28 Days Later the survivors are woefully unequipped to deal with the outbreak of Rage or even to defend themselves against those who do have it. It kind of reminds me of the European Union's ongoing plans to disarm the populace and making things like self-defense illegal. Heck the survivors in the film don't even see guns until after they meet some soldiers, forcing them to run in terror or struggle with improvised weapons at the arrival of any of the infected when a simple pistol could save lives. The whole film is really a big fat argument against gun control.

And when they meet the soldiers, led by a Major West, who have all the guns, it does not turn out well. They're sequestered in a fortified mansion waiting for the infected to starve, and luring survivors in order to kill the men and keep the women in order to 'repopulate the country.'

Now some may say that it's a pretty harsh statement against the military, and that's probably what the filmmakers intended, but on an allegorical level it says something a little different.

The soldiers struck me as most like the EU's bureaucrats and politicians. Their duty is to protect and serve the nations of Europe, but instead they spend their time making vague bullsh*t promises of having 'the answer' to the problems of the day while their real intention is to get their rocks off at the expense of personal freedom and everything they claim to stand for.

They also match the EUrocrats by justifying their crimes as being for the 'greater good.'

And what's the final image of the movie? The image of hope for tomorrow needed to wrap up the film's fairly grim story?

It's an American military fighter jet.

Yep, no matter how bad things get, those pesky Yanks, who they love to deride, will come to save them.

You can't get more Neocon than that.