Recently, Donald Sensing bashed a fairly good movie called The Day the Earth Stood Still, and then decided to add another helping by posting a link to Jonathan Gerwitz's negative review.
There are some valid criticisms of the movie. For example, it is implausible that a 10' tall robot could destroy an entire world. Many people's reactions were exceedingly 2-dimensional. The initial reaction of shooting the space alien, "What to do about the alien? Kill him? Obviously. But how?", and "Just wait until you see my name all over the newspapers, then you'll think differently about me" were remarkably... consistent in their mentality. The idea that virtually all human beings are dangerous and suspicious in the extreme was hammered on in a way that suggests the author's dictionary lacked an "s" section. Still, while this was an exaggeration, it was at least an exaggeration of something real.
Had this been the substance of Reverend Sensing's criticism, it would be a little harsh but quite sensible. Instead, Reverend Sensing applies a criteria which is nearly wholly antithetical to other things that he has (correctly) espoused:
Klaatu is really an emissary of the "civilized" races of the universe, but he is revealed in the film's denouement as a galactic bully, a mere thug delivering a cruel ultimatum: either humankind stops making war or "the earth will be turned into a cinder."
Moreover, it is Gort, not Klaatu, who holds the earth's fate in his hands. Klaatu explains that his race created Gort and others like him to annihilate any people or any planet that breaks the peace. The robots' power is absolute and cannot be revoked, says Klaatu. The result is that they live in peace, and if humanity wishes to survive it must accept the dictatorship of the robots.
What Klaatu seems not to understand is that while he and his fellows live in peace, it is literally the peace of the grave. They are slaves. Their message to earth is simple: becomes slaves like us or die.
Klaatu never issued a demand that we stop warring with each other on earth. Klaatu explicitly said that his race didn't care at all. So long as we were just killing each other, they didn't care at all (another reason Klaatu is a bad Christ-figure if he's indeed meant to be). What concerns them is that we're developing the ability to export our war into space, and that they won't tolerate. To that end, they developed the robots like Gort to kill whoever launches aggression first. It's made rather obvious that this means interplanetary aggression, not pickpockets spell doom for their world.
This is really a somewhat more deadly version of what America recently did in Iraq. So long as Saddam Hussein kept to torturing his own people, we were (shamefully) content to let him do it. He was not content to keep inside of Iraq, however. Instead he was bent on exporting violence beyond his borders using weapons of mass destruction. This we would not allow, and so we destroyed his government. We're nicer about it, we didn't kill all of the Iraqis, but otherwise the actions are rather exactly parallel.
Aside from ignoring the human suffering beforehand, it was a perfectly reasonable thing for us to do in Iraq. Aside from the instant planetary destruction via Gort-bots (instead of instant regime change via Gort-bots), it was a perfectly reasonable thing for Klaatu's species to do.
As Steven Den Beste periodically points out, it is US policy that using weapons of mass destruction against us will result in a maximal nuclear response. It has been since someone else had nukes. Klaatu's message is something that US ambassador's were themselves busy delivering very few years later, only to other countries rather than other planets.
Yes, we won't nuke ourselves; unlike Klaatu with the Gort-bots we retain control over our threat of annihilation and can choose to allow some people to launch inter-country war. However, the rest of the world does not have this ability, on the US control's its extensive nuclear arsenal. Does the rest of the world live in the peace of the grave, slaves to the US military? Is our message to the rest of the world, "be our slaves or die"?
Perhaps it is. There is much in common between the Pax Romana and the current sort of Pax Americana that it may one day turn out existed. The Romans were big on slaves, perhaps America's slaves are just more subtle. There is something to this.
What there is to it, however, is just the recognition that man is finite. Human beings have been at the mercy of our surroundings since as far back as we can remember and will until the end of time. Even if one does not believe in the lordship of God, there is the lordship of volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and disease. If we some day conquer them, there is the lordship of time, the inevitability of death. Human beings are not gods; we are slaves always to something.
As an aside, this directly relates to the "good news" of the Christian gospel. While the main message is that there is a way out of sin, there is also the news that we are free: the lord of all creation will not exercise his divine right to predestination. We are to be the friends of God, not merely his servants.
Jonathan Gerwitz said:
The filmmakers' invocation of wise aliens strikes me as a collectivist dodge (with a not-so-subtle anti-American leitmotif in the guise of anti-nuclearism). It's as if the moviemakers didn't have the nerve to say, "We are socialists and want to tell the rest of you how to live." So instead they invent some super-cool authoritative extraterrestrial dudes to say it for them (and - so advanced and humane of them! - threaten to kill us if we don't comply). Yeah right. This is nothing more than a cheap appeal to authority, like saying my big brother will beat you up if you don't accept my argument. I think the proper response to any such crew of sanctimonious space pricks who land on the White House lawn would be, "Who elected you?"
And Klaatu's proper response would be, "We did." Alternatively, "Gort." Life is ultimately a struggle, and in the end force ends all conflicts. If such space aliens ever come to the earth, we can rant and rave about their right to dictate to us, but the answer which would settle all of our ranting would be pointing at Gort. People ask what right America had to invade the sovereign country Iraq. Ultimately, we had our own principles and our military, and they were unanswerable.
What right does a country have to interfere with another country, or a person with another person? What justification is their for the police? Yes, some of us elect the police force (indirectly), but I doubt that the criminals do. You can talk all you want to about implicitly accepting the police by staying in the country, but I'm sure that Klaatu's people would say that we implicitly accepted the Gort-bots by not moving to another supercluster of galaxies.
We live in a world where force rules and naked force has no answer but naked force. Most reasonable people accept this and understand that in the when someone who is stronger forces correct morality upon others (at least as far as their actions which hurt other people go), he is doing something morally correct. That doesn't cease to be true merely because we're on the butt end of it, even in a movie.
That was ultimately the point of The Day The Earth Stood Still: we are behaving immorally. Its message was not that space aliens are going to come save us from our trouble, it was an indictment of our culture and our behavior. It is right or wrong based on how correct that indictment was. I have grave doubts about how correct it was, but its use of the principle that the guilty will be punished was not its flaw.
Update: Reverend Sensing took issue with this post, and I responded, quoting from the movie to explain why his interpretation is wrong.