This is a bit of a different movie review as 180 isn’t a real movie. It’s a 30 minute propaganda piece by fart-logician, Ray Comfort. You might remember Ray from his video in which he proves the existence of God via his perfect creation: the banana – a fruit which has been cultivated and designed almost entirely by man.

Ray has been trying to cause a bit of a stir with 180 as he says it contains arguments so powerful that it can turn you from pro-choice to pro-life (regarding abortion) in thirty seconds. Luckily, Ray likes distributing his stuff for free, so you can watch it here if you like.

The first half of the film is almost entirely about the Holocast. You see, Ray is ‘worried’ that people will forget about the atrocities of Hitler’s armies and that ‘those who forget history are destined to repeat it.’ Ray is a street preacher and has spent most of his life engaging with young people and gangs out in public, often with his camera in tow. His videos often feature those who give the stupidest answers to his fart-logical questions to make his points seem stronger, and this film is no exception. Despite knowing all this, I’m calling shenanigans almost immediately.

Most of the people he shows say they don’t know who Hitler was. One guy even says, ‘isn’t he an actor or something?’ A lot of them are looking nervously at the camera and laughing as they answers, so I reckon they been slipped a cheeky tenner and asked to act like the worse arseholes in the world.

The rest of the film, following the atrocious Hitler-memory-wipe scenes, is an intermingling of several Ray conducts with people from the street. One of them is Steve, a neo-Nazi punk: a white supremecist who loves Hitler and denies the Holocaust. He’s not the only Holocaust-denying anti-Semite that Ray manages to find: there are plenty of people who seem to think that Jews run America and this signals the end times. Quite why he’s talking to these people is unclear, but he does manage to give us a great example of some of the fart-logic he’s prepared to inflict on his interviewees and on us, the viewer:

Ray: How do you spell shop?

Steve: S-H-O-P

Ray: What do you do at a green light?

Steve: Stop.

Ray: I said green light.

Steve: Oh man, you got me!

Ray: So if you’re wrong about something as simple as that, maybe you’re wrong about your entire philosophy.

 

He really makes you think, does Ray. The annoying thing is that I think Steve has got his whole philosophy backward, but not because he’s tricked by a bit of lingual sleight-of-hand. Luckily Ray manages to find some ordinary people too, who think everybody should be treated with respect and that Hitler was, all things considered, not the nicest of people.

Now he’s going ask them a set of simple questions, starting with what may seem like a particularly obvious one:

Ray: [You've travelled back in time to] 1939. You’ve got Hitler in your sniper sights. Do you shoot?

This is the easy question. Everyone is supposed to (and does) say ‘yes’. I’m already humming and harring over this, but let’s give Ray the benefit of the doubt that the man is well on his way to terrible things and killing him may well benefit a huge number of people. In fact, let’s just assume this is so. But then, we get the slightly more difficult question:

Ray: Let’s go back thirty years earlier – Mrs Hitler is pregnant with Adolf. Would you shoot her?

The answer to this question is ‘no’. Let’s not get into a debate here: it’s no. You’ve gone back far enough for Chaos Theory to be an overriding factor in Adolf’s life, so you sneak up to Mrs Hitler’s house and you sneak a couple of copies of the Help Me Be Good books I had as a child and maybe he wouldn’t grow up to be such a cock. You don’t have to shoot a pregnant lady.

Ray is the living embodiment of Godwin’s Law , linking everything he possibly can to Hitler and his evil schemes. We see bodies of Jewish holocaust sufferers being piled up and footage of Hitler parading about in Germany ad nauseum. I don’t mean to belittle the Holocaust – my wife and I visited the Holocaust museum in Berlin and my wife had to leave half way around because she was worried she’d ‘never be happy again’. I understand how terrible it is, but for God’s sake, Ray: not everything is about Hitler!

Anyway, we’re (slowly) heading towards the moment when you and I will miraculously be turned anti-choice, so hang on in there. Ray has some more questions for the folk on the street and… for you and me. Let’s ponder these:

Ray: A Nazi officer holds a gun to your head and threatens to kill you if you don’t bury a big pile of Jewish bodies – some of which are still alive. Do you do it?

Interesting moral question – I’d like to say ‘no’, as do a lot of his street folk. Some of them are honest enough to admit they’d probably be too afraid not to do what the Nazi officer asks and they say they may very well bury the bodies. So Ray pulls out this second question:

Ray: Instead, say the officer gives you a machine gun and tells you to finish them all off [or he'll kill you]. Would you do that?

Which again is an interesting question which has been studied in great depth. It has been shown that people are much more reluctant to have a hand in something with negative consequences the more directly involved they are in it. For example: a particular study showed that people were far more likely to switch the tracks to divert a runaway train from a crowd of people into one guy, but they wouldn’t push a massively fat man into the path of a train if they knew it would stop it from hitting a crowd of people. Unfortunately, Ray doesn’t seem to understand the point of the questions he’s asking – he’s really just getting them to admit they value human life. In fact, his very next questions are ‘do you value human life?’ and ‘would you ever take a human life?’ so the whole Nazi scenarios were kind of pointless.

Are you ready for the bait and switch? OK hold on to your uterus, ladies, cause here it comes:

Ray: How do you feel about abortion?

We’re immediately shown images of dead foetuses on the screen. I won’t subject you to that, so instead, here is a muscley dog:

Obviously, we get a diverse range of answers to the abortion question, but in general his subjects are pro-choice. They think it’s a woman’s right to choose what she can do with her body and her life. From this point on, Ray pulls a nasty little tactic of replacing “abortion” with “killing a baby in the womb”. So first we travel down the idea of judging when a smudgey little foetus actually becomes a ‘baby’, with the completely neutral question:

Ray: Finish this sentence: ‘It’s OK to kill a baby in the womb…’ when?’

Understandably, folk are very much hesitant in their response because he’s poisoned the question with his manipulative word choice. But our brave heroes battle through and start to talk about how it’s hard to know when ‘life’ begins or when a ‘baby’ exists. But Ray has come prepared:

Ray: OK, so say I’m a builder [he means demolition expert, I think] and I’m going to blow up a building, but I’m not sure if anyone is still in the building – that is, I don’t know if there if life in there or not. Is it right to blow up the building?

You see! He’s snookered you! You can’t have an abortion, because it might be alive. Or something. But then you think, what does a demolition expert actually do? He checks to see if anyone’s alive in there, right? Just like medical experts have come to scientific conclusions about the health of a foetus when it comes to abortion. Come on, Ray!

Ray: What justifies killing a baby in the womb [i.e. getting an abortion]?

Some of the answers include: ‘If you don’t have a plan’, ‘If you can’t support the child’ and ‘you really need to think about it.’ But Ray is ready for you:

Ray: So, before burying all those Jews alive, would it make it OK if you said ‘OK, let’s think about it first’ and then bury them?

Back of the net!  (That’s an expression right? I don’t watch football). Some people have cited quality of life as a reason to abort – not just being brought into poverty, but also if scans show sign of mental illness.

Ray: The Nazi’s shot [the mentally ill]. Is that ok?

To which some absolute moron replies:

Some Absolute Moron: You’re right… me saying it’s OK for women to choose is the same as saying it’s OK for Hitler to choose.

This guy is almost a walking demonstration of the benefits of abortion in and of himself. But I digress. What we have here, in this film, is another example of Ray Comfort bamboozling the gullible and the thoughtless with his terrible fart-logic: sewing poisoned seeds in their minds with talk of Nazi atrocities, juxtaposing the value of life with the equation of abortion with murder and making people question their own judgement by throwing baffling questions and analogies at them. And they change their minds (apparently)! Every one of them says they have changed their minds about abortion or at least that they need to readdress their thoughts on the subject. Not only that, but he makes sure they say they’ll vote against abortion rights at the next opportunity. It’s asinine.

The man is an idiot.

The film ends with Ray begging us viewers to ’please never vote for a politician who advocates the murder of a child in the womb’ as an image of fucking Hitler fills the screen. You fuck.

If you didn’t follow Ray’s argument, here it is in concise form:

Hitler was bad –> You are good –> Don’t forget Hitler was bad –> It’s a fuzzy concept as to when a foetus can be regarded as a living human –> [scene missing] –> You don’t want to allow women freedom of choice, because Hitler is bad.

 

 

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