« $165 Billion Bailout for Union Pensions | Main | When Commies Attack! »
May 26, 2010
Profiles in Countermoonbattery: Robin Hood
Posted by Dave Blount at May 26, 2010 10:57 AM
Liberal elites use their control of the media and education to redefine historical characters both real and legendary in accordance with their agenda. For example, the radical leftist Adolf Hitler has been absurdly portrayed as a conservative. Big Government RINO Herbert Hoover — whose disastrous spendthrift policies were extended by FDR as the New Deal — was reinvented as the libertarian too laissez-faire to let the Feds do anything about the Great Depression. In some minds Robin Hood, the ultimate anti-government rebel, has been mutated into the sort of Marxist thug who would fit right in among Comrade Obama's czars. Regarding the latter, a new movie might help to set the record straight — to the outrage of the moonbat disinformation establishment:
In New York's leftist weekly, The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that "instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about 'liberty' and the rights of the individual" and battles against "government greed"; the film, she scoffs, is "a rousing love letter to the tea party movement." On a similar note, the New York Times' A.O. Scott mocks "Robin Hood" as "one big medieval tea party."
A-hole Snot sneeringly derides Ridley Scott's Robin Hood as "a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles."
Contempt for liberty drips from these vermin like slime from a sewer rat. The Robin Hood of yore would have recognized them for what they are: toadies of the greedy, corrupt, and oppressive establishment he opposed.
At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not wealth redistribution — and this is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.
As scholars have noted, the earliest Robin Hood ballads, which date back to the 13th or 14th century, contain no mention of robbing the rich to give to the poor. The one person Robin assists financially is a knight who is about to lose his lands to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous monks at an abbey. (Corrupt clerics using the political power of the Church are among Robin Hood's frequent targets in the ballads.) The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin's chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs' role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of loathing by peasants and commoners. Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit permitted to nobles and strictly forbidden to the lower classes in medieval England; in other words, he is opposing privilege bestowed by political power, not earned wealth.
In other words, hell yeah Robin Hood was Sherwood Forest's version a Tea Partier.
On a tip from TrickleUpPolitics. Hat tip: RedState.
