As Helen of Troy is about to be portrayed as black in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, the latest episode in the war for the soul of the West questions our very fundamentals. You see, Greek history marks the beginning of the West, so the Trojan War is the first great Western story. And in the Bronze Age, Greeks were white. Same as all Europeans ever. In fact, the Western civilisation, in all its glory and tragedy throughout the millennia, has been a predominantly white affair. Beyond good or bad, this is a fact.
The Kenyan Lupita Nyong’o may be the most beautiful and talented actress on planet earth. Still, she cannot be Helen of Troy. The same way that Matt Damon cannot be Shaka, the Zulu king, and Leonardo DiCaprio could not dare imagine playing Martin Luther King. Because all the film-watching ignorants, children and teenagers out there must know that African warriors and US civil rights movement leaders were black u just as Helen of Troy was white. Elsewise, we produce uneducated fools.
Fortunately, the rumor that Nyong’o will portray the “face that launched a thousand ships” has ignited a firestorm that got people to talk about it. On one side, we have Elon Musk, who brought the subject up. On the other, Christopher Nolan – a director we once trusted with the gravity of history. Musk’s verdict was characteristically blunt: “Nolan has lost his integrity”. But this is not just a dispute over casting. It is a diagnostic check of civilisational disease.
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