If you’re of a certain age, you remember this movie – and it is a good one. You can easily rate it as one of Newman’s best as well as one of the best of the 1960’s. George Kennedy’s Best Supporting Oscar was well earned while Strother Martin completely nailed the role of “the Captain”. But it is also rather horrible and was definitely a piece in the gigantic pysop which essentially talked us into giving up civilization.
What is the story? Well, Luke is a dishonorably discharged WWII veteran who in a drunken haze destroys public property (parking meters) and so gets sentenced to a chain gang. As the story goes on, we find that Luke really doesn’t like rules! He heroically resists the rules! Damn those rules! And, to be fair to Luke, he is treated unjustly – when his mother passes way, the Captain puts him in the box to discourage him from any escape attempt to attend his mother’s funeral. This is wrong. On the other hand, it isn’t exactly the worst thing that can happen to a man.
Step back a moment before that box event and remember that Luke’s mother had come to visit him shortly before her death – and in the scene we find that Luke has a brother who is married, with kids, working the family farm and taking care of his ill mother. We’re supposed to instantly dislike the brother when he hands Luke his guitar and says, “now there’s no reason for you to come home”. Cruelty! But…the brother is taking care of mom and the farm and is supporting a wife and kids and did take time out of his life to make sure his mother could say goodbye to her ne’er do well son in jail. So, maybe not cruelty? Maybe exasperation? A man who could have used some help running the farm and taking care of mom and has just had it with his brother’s pointless antics?
Can’t say – because it isn’t explored in the film, which is a paean to the anti-hero – the man or woman who simply refuses to fit in and live up to the expectations of others. We’re focused in the film on Luke and only get enough of the backstory to understand why he’s in jail…but not why he did a thing which would get him in jail, other than a general sense that he’s a rebel…and a long-time one, too. When mom visits, she talks up about his rebel ways and the one time he almost gave it up to get married to a decent women, but he wrecked that, too. The end of the movie has Luke being unjustly shot and allowed to bleed out but still showing his defiance to the end. Which, was the end of a pointless existence that was very costly to society which not only didn’t receive any benefit from Luke’s existence, but had to pay a lot of extra money simply because he had been alive.
The sum total of the movie is to make people feel that being like Luke is a good thing – that rules are just made up things that the strong impose on the weak. It is, of course, quite the other way around – the rules are to ensure the weak can withstand the strong. End the rules and you get…well, Mexico; where there are no rules in any real sense and the strong take what they want and kill with impunity. But if your goal is to erode Western Civilization – to end Christendom as it used to be called – nothing better than well-written, well-acted movies which subtly but insidiously talk people into thinking that rules are bad…as long as said rules are those of Western Civilization. Bottom line, Luke is the villain. His mother the weak-kneed enabler of the villain. His brother the heroic defender of family. The Captain is the man who has to keep a lid on the villain to prevent bad from becoming outright evil. And there really was a failure to communicate…all through the life of Luke, nobody could ever convince him that being a man requires the courage to subordinate oneself to others.
I’ve written before about how effective advertising is. Propaganda, as it were. The one thing that Hitler really did hit upon – and from Toland’s biography, he hit upon it while he was a down-and-outer in Vienna – was the fact that if you say something with conviction over and over again, people will come to believe it, no matter how absurd it is. The Big Lie works exceptionally well. This is not to say that all advertising is a lie, but that if you advertise a lie often and effectively enough, people will believe it. What movies like Cool Hand Luke were doing – and it just got worse as the decades went on – was telling a society that the sober, the hard working, the honorable were the bad guys…just a bunch of rotten, hypocritical rat bastards preventing freedom. There is a straight line from movies like this to people figuring they can attack cops for merely enforcing the law…the people who jump on cars, set things on fire, loot shoe stores are the descendants of Luke…free to run wild because the Captain is now a career civil servant who figures his pension is more important than decency. And the rest of us pretend it is normal – you see? It didn’t just affect the miscreant…it also affected us. Infected us. We’re not shooting the people who set up roadblocks and set things on fire because…we’re somehow convinced that it’s ok for savages to impose upon us. We don’t want to be seen as the Captain, right? He’s the bad guy! So is the brother! Luke is the hero! Grab those nike’s!
It is going to be a long road back to civilization – and it will take some very tough people making some very hard decisions. I don’t see a completely non-violent way out of this mess. The only debatable point is how much violence there will be…because if the Left wins, they’ll impose violence on us of the most horrific sort, and all we can do is decide how much violence we’ll apply to them to prevent this. We have to stop being so weak – so cowardly. Civilization is a necessary thing for anything above the existence of brutes – and sometimes civilization has to destroy the barbarians…even if they appear dressed nice and speaking sweet words.
Blogs For Victory 
Mark,
I’m curious if there are any countries today that would meet you idea of civilized. After doing a lot of travel over the last few years I would say the most civilized countries in the world visited are the Notic countries. Low crime, very few homeless, well educated population; great infrastructure.
Nordic civilization:
Nordic civilization:
Nordic civilization:
Great civilization you got there! Awesome! So inspiring! Free health care! Except part of “health care” is being offed by the docs if your treatment is too expensive. You get what you force others to pay for, right?
Seriously, Cap: you’ve been coming here for, what?, like 20 years now? Have you ever just sat down and actually thought about anything? Read what I – or anyone else writes – and then ponder it before posting? I write a pretty clear and concise article about how the standards of civilization have been eroded and even if the barbarian is well-dressed and well-spoken, he’s still a barbarian and you come back with the rote “the Scandinavians have made Socialism work” tripe we’ve seen for decades…which is part of the psyop to get us to give up civilization in return for allegedly “free” healthcare.
FFS…
Mark,
You didn’t answer my question if there are any countries today that would meet you idea of civilized. That said, what you mdid was pull up a few ramdon items and used those to to represent several countries. I spent time in each of the countries. I talked to the people who lived there. You will also find that the life span and overall crime rate are lower in everyone of those countries compared to ours. Is there a country today that you feel is doing a really good job?
And you still don’t pay the least attention.
“How are things here in ol’ Sweden?”
“They’re great! We have wonderful commuter trains and healthcare is free and we’re all just having a grand old time!”
“I heard that rapes increased by 7% in just one year. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“We have trains!!!!”
I don’t care what some dumb a** person you met said to you…dumb a**es are what are causing the death of civilization…people who will live in a country where women are being raped as if its under enemy occupation and still just slap that grin on their face, shout “f*** Trump!” and say everything is just fine!!!!. The whole point of my article is that we’ve been conditioned to think that savagery is ok…some price we must pay, that it is all ok as long as health care is free.
Caspar, Savannah Guthrie should not be wondering where her 84 year old mother because in a civilized society there are zero people who would target an 84 year old woman. Don’t you get it? Don’t you think at all?
Oh, forgot…you’re more interested in the choo choo…
I’ve done a lot of traveling, too, and one thing I have learned is that tourists see very little of the life the citizens live. We stay in the nicer parts of towns, we casually chat up the people who live or work there, and we never touch on the reality of life there. What we experience might not be actual Potemkin Villages, but we tend to see the high points, and instead of true documentaries we just have snapshots. People love their countries and when talking to foreigners, especially Americans, they focus on the most attractive aspects of their nations and cultures. My late husband and I spent a lot of time in England and made friends there, so we had ongoing relationships with people who felt comfortable letting their hair down, so to speak, and being more candid about the problems of the country, and the conversations we had with them were very different from the chitchat with hotel employees and vendors and people whose jobs revolved around dealing with the public.
We have a couple of decades of Casper here, and we know from experience that he is very superficial. He used to lecture us on the Constitution, and his interpretations were so shallow and silly it was distressing to realize this person was actually teaching this nonsense to students. When someone is flattered to be compared to Maizie Hirono it tells you a lot about the depth of his intellect. I’m sure that he “talked to the people” who live in various countries, but given experience with the quality of his insights and processing of information I would not expect any observations by Casper to be more in-depth than a picture postcard.
I didn’t witness any of the savagery you think exists there. The streets were safe into the night. The people were easy to talk too and it was easy to get around. I didn’t just visit Sweden. I also spent time in Greenland, Iceland, Finland, Norway and Denmark in addition to other parts of Europe. I know that none of the places are perfect, but I thought they are definitely getting some things right. My question was if there are any countries today that would meet you idea of civilized. I’m guessing from your response that the answer is no.
SOME streets are “safe into the night”. I can say the same about Denver, for example—yet I had a conversation at DIA with a young black man, tall and strong and muscular, just back from doing volunteer work in Haiti, while we were waiting for our rides, and he told me that he will no longer to go the 16th Street Mall at night. Not too long ago, the 16th Street Mall was a favorite place to go at night, strolling the pedestrian mall, checking out the stores and bars, grabbing a bite at one of the restaurants in the area. Now it is off limits after dark.
Yet there are streets in Denver where I would not hesitate to walk at night. I can easily think of a dozen neighborhoods I think of as still safe but in general Denver is turning into SF Lite and many parts of it are a jungle. I have often written of an experience about four years ago when I was driving through downtown on Interstate 25, sunny day, traffic moving briskly, in the center lane as I came into the center of town in the middle lane. Then I saw a man lying on the interstate, barely inside the tiny strip of road between the left lane and the concrete median. I called 911—and about 20 minutes later I gave up. I had two phones with me and tried on both, and never did get an answer, just a repeating loop about how important my call was and to not hang up.
I had just sold my Denver house and thought how lucky I was to get out of that miserable city when I did—how can you live in a city where you can’t even call the fire department in an emergency, much less the police? But to a superficial mind spending a few days in a nice part of town I’m sure the city would get four or five stars and a comment about how “the streets were safe into the night”. This is a failed city, or at least one clinging to life support. But it still has its nice neighborhoods and charming enclaves of restaurants and night life and shopping.
And the state is a hot mess, spending literally millions of dollars to maim and kill dozens of wild wolves to capture enough to drop into the red parts of the state where they rampage through livestock and pet populations in the virtue-signaling simper of “reintroducing” wolves to the state—as if bringing in foreign populations is “REintroducing” anything —-and the homeless have turned the city streets into camp jungles complete with human excrement and used needles and people passed out on the street. The state leads the nation, if that word is appropriate, in car thefts, and the once-vibrant petroleum industry is on life support with what I charitably assume is the unintended consequence of driving out small companies and leaving what is left of the industry in the hands of a few big powerful companies which have folded the old support companies into their monolithic control.
Ask a Colorado Dem about the state and you will probably see that cultist-quality bright-eyed enthusiasm for the latest social engineering scam being promoted, but ask anyone else and you may be interrupting a move out of a failing state. But you can still find some pretty postcard-like mental snapshots you can use to blog about what a great place this is.
Lost control, says Swedish PM as immigrant gangs take over Sweden
Sweden, a country of mild-mannered people, is seeing a record rise in heinous crime. Ten people were shot dead on Tuesday. Such has been the rate of blasts and shootings, that Swedish PM Ulf Kristersson was forced to admit that the government had “lost control”. This is how immigrants from the Middle East and Balkan nations ended up taking over the European nation.
……………….
The land of the mild-mannered is witnessing frequent gang wars in its cities of Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm. Here, flats are blown into smithereens and shopping centres see broad daylight shootings.
…………….
Sweden has the EU’s highest rate of brutal gun violence per capita in 2023. In the last month of 2024, 40 people have been shot dead in Sweden — a chilling number for a European country of only 10-million people, according to a Reuters report.
But a pudgy American tourist with limited mental processing skills knows more, after a brief visit and “talking to some people”, about life in Sweden than the Prime Minister of the country.
And, anyways, go back to that 1.44 total fertility rate for Norway – which is similar to not only the rest of the Nordics, but all of Europe.
We’ve got 100 Nordics…50 guys, 50 gals. It is 2026 and they’re going to have 72 children. In 2046 those kids will produce 52 children. In 2066, 37. 2086: 27. 2106: 19. 2126: 14. Here’s a clue: happy people don’t die out. If the Europeans don’t start immediately breeding, then in a century it doesn’t matter what they think…they’ll be a tiny number of people living in the ruins of a civilization, even if they stop immigration…even if they force remigration. The second century Romans thought everything was just peachy, too…but Italy wasn’t even producing enough to feed itself and they weren’t producing children…so when the barbarians started to attack late in the second, the only place they could find soldiers was…among the barbarians, thus starting a process which ended up with a barbarian chief dismissing the last Roman Emperor in the West in 476. Didn’t even bother to kill him. There was no need to.
The West was sold a bill of goods – suicide in return for taxpayer subsidies. That the Canadians now have MAID is just kinda very direct about it all. It doesn’t matter, ultimately, what anyone thinks about any particular place or policy…what matters is that we talked ourselves into suicide. The good news? Among Conservative Americans – who make up at least half the population – the total fertility rate is above replacement and apparently rising. We get to keep our country. Europe? What parts of it aren’t taken over by Islam will be taken over by us…because nobody will be living there.
Broadly speaking, I think people who want to have children see themselves as part of a continuum of society, of life, while those who don’t just see themselves as isolated pinnacles of identity. This ties in with the loss of faith, as these people acknowledge no authority higher than their own, unless it is their choice of government.
You will also find that the life span and overall crime rate are lower in everyone of those countries compared to ours.
If they’re so great, why would their life spans be lower?
Well if Casper didn’t see it, the crime must not exist lol. I will point out that the Nordic countries are not Socialist countries. They have very robust capitalist economies with generous welfare systems and you know why they can do that Casper???? Because they are homogenous countries of primarily WHITE people who (use to) have strict immigration policies. Maybe it was all the white people you liked being around Casper …. And I can understand that. A multicultural, multiethnic country, will always fail.
And Casper, I will mention again that I go to Mexico a lot and LOVE it. The people are amazing, the food is off the charts and the climate is perfect. And everyone we always encounter are wonderful … that being said, I know the country is falling apart. Two things can be true at the same time
Casper, here is a teachable moment for you … When Jesus came upon a group of men ready to stone to death a woman for her promiscuous activities, Jesus said … “Let those without sin cast the first stone”, and they all dropped their rocks. Then what did Jesus do?? Did He comfort the woman? Did He empathize with her? Did He validate her? No. Jesus walked up to the woman and said “sin no more”. And that right there is Truth and Grace.
What you do Casper is over emphasize Grace and ignore the Truth. You would castigate the rock throwers for sure, but then you would probably turn around and absolve the woman of her sin, simply because she was being oppressed in your opinion, and that would do nothing to help the woman. The “oppressed” as you perceive them, are usually equally as sinful and while Grace will be extended, they need Truth more than Grace.
One of the biggest faults of Democrats is not seeing the Truth. The Truth is that we are all sinful by nature and in order to have a God enriched life and a fully functioning society, we all have responsibilities to exist in His Truth. Order is Love. Order is Peace. Order is Gods will. The world, and our country is out of Order.
Let’s all say a prayer for Savannah Gurthrie’s mother. I have friends who live near there and everyone is a little shook as that part of Tucson is upper scale with very little crime.
Think of all the misery this country could have avoided if we lived in Truth that illegal immigration, subjecting women to rape and abuse, and disrupting Oder, is not compassion. Bleeding heart liberals create much more chaos then they realize.
Casper, here is what your focus on Grace, and ignoring Truth leads too
An illegal bio lab was just raided in Vegas. It is directly linked to the secret Chinese lab found in California in 2023, which was oozing with E. Coli, HIV, and Malaria. Congress must pass our bill to find these illegal labs and shut them all down.
Speaking about the Truth, there is one, nearly universal truth, and that is, regardless of geographic location, here or abroad, the vast majority of areas that experience the highest crime and homeless problems are run by Leftists. There are exceptions, of course; just being a Conservative doesn’t make someone a good administrator, and being a Democrat doesn’t make someone a bad administrator. Fort Wayne, Indiana, is a good example. I spent the first 50+ years of my life there, and we had good and bad Republican Mayors and good and bad Democrat mayors. One of our most liberal mayors was a Republican. The longest serving mayor, an old-school Democrat, was into his fifth term when he died of cancer a couple of years ago, but he won 5 terms because he got behind things that people liked, and accomplished things that made life better for the majority. The city experienced a renaissance during his tenure. A decaying downtown became a destination with a world-class minor league ball park, a major expansion of parks and recreation areas, a revitalization of the three rivers that converge in the center of the city, new restaurants, hotels, and expansion of the convention center. Bad administrators almost always lose sight of what their primary responsibilities are, which is to preserve and protect the rights of the highest number of citizens as possible, and create the atmosphere for increased prosperity for everyone, AND THEN GET OUT OF THE WAY! That last part is something Democrats never seem to master.
Yep – but even your Democrat mayor lived in a GOP area; he had to perform or he would get tossed out. That is the real thing – the old and massively corrupt Democrat machine politicians who ran the cities made sure that the cities were livable. They had to – or they’d get tossed. But starting in the 30’s and just increasing as time went on, the deep Blue cities started to crumble and yet, oddly, the Democrats still never lose…which is proof that they learned it is easier to just use fraud…don’t have to deal with that tiresome stuff like keeping the streets in repair and crime under control; just stuff a ballot box and call anyone who objects a racist.
But also look at this:
Walz: born in Nebraska.
Frey: Virginia.
Ellison: Michigan.
But, there’s more:
Pelosi: Maryland.
Elizabeth Warren: Oklahoma.
Brandon Johnson: Didn’t even try to run in his home town of Elgin: moved to Chicago early on.
Bernie Sanders: he’s from Brooklyn.
Tim Kaine: Minnesota.
Biden: Might be Scranton Joe but he bailed out to run in Delaware.
Richard Blumenthal: He not only avoided service in Vietnam, but he also avoided running in his home of Brooklyn.
Hillary: Illinois but then married into Arkansas but shook the dust of that hick place from her feet and ran in New York.
Jasmine Crockett: born in Missouri but ran for office in what was one of the deepest Blue pockets in Texas.
These people just go around to wherever they think they have the best shot of gaining power…no real connection to the people or history of the area. They just look at the political landscape and then tailor themselves to it. To be sure, some Republicans do this as well (McCain was only a Republican because of the voter registration numbers in Arizona). But this is a problem when people do this…the mayor is supposed to be from the city. The Senator from the State. So then can, you know?, actually represent them. And when the Democrat areas are shot through with corruption, the only real criteria for office is: will you play ball?