[PEN-L] Terry Jones's "The Barbarians"

[Louis Proyect]

Now available from Netflix and other outlets, Monty Python alumnus Terry 
Jones’s “Barbarians” is a superlative exercise in historical 
revisionism. As this 2 DVD set makes abundantly clear, the real 
barbarians were the Romans, not the people they robbed, murdered and 
raped. The first disk looks at the Celts and the Goths, while the second 
takes up the Persians, the Goths and the Vandals. On almost all criteria 
associated with “civilization”, the Roman Empire comes off looking 
atrocious. The central point that Jones keeps hammering away as narrator 
and writer as he travels about Europe in pursuit of the truth is that 
history is written by the winners. If American and British history has a 
triumphalist and self-vindicating character, so does Roman history.

By correcting the record, Jones implicitly helps to undermine the 
imperialist mindset of today, which by no accident appropriates many of 
the themes of the Roman Empire. Within the walls of the civilized world 
(New York, London, Paris, et al), there is reason and goodness; outside 
that world (Baghdad, Tehran, Khartoum), there is nothing but insanity 
and evil. This worldview is virtually the same that the Romans put 
forward as an excuse for their conquests. As Jones points out, the real 
motivation for the conquests was the desire to control gold and other 
precious resources, not to “civilize”.

full: 
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/terry-joness-the-barbarians/