Continued from part 4, book 10...

Book Eleven

As Rorschach and Owl make their way across the frozen tundra under the watchful eye of Ozymandias, we delve into our last origin episode. Ozymandias gets his turn in the limelight.

His origins reveal an highly intelligent and rich young man who falls in love with history, specifically the life of Alexander the Great. When he gets old enough and after his parents pass on, Ozymandias decides to travel the ancient world in Alexander's footsteps on a quest to learn what it all means.

A young Adrian Viedt was impressed by Alexander's ability to sacrifice some for the greater good of the empire. And he was further taken when he traced Alexander to the ancient land of Egypt's Pharaohs. Here he saw the Pharaohs as the embodiment of all that was sublime and decided to "apply antiquity's teachings" to the modern world. To young Adrian, the newly dubbed Ozymandias, King of Kings, that meant "conquest ... conquest not of men, but of the evils that beset them."

At the end of the recounting of his early days, as told to his three assistants, he announces that, "today that conquest becomes assured." Unfortunately for those same three assistants, Ozymandias poisoned their wine and the end of his tale was told to deaf ears. Ozymandias is just at the start of his sacrificing the few for the many in an imagined emulation of his hero, Alexander the Great.

Unfortunately, Ozymandias' real reasoning is somewhat vague as we are left in the dark as to his ultimate point thus far. Moore did not explain how Ozymandias goes from Alexander the Great, to the Pharaohs, to imagining that ancient Egyptian philosophy is "enlightened." No are we treated to his understanding of how that philosophy might be put into use in today's times. This is just another example of Moore's weak writing.

Rorschach and Owl finally approach Ozymandias who easily subdues the duo preventing them from causing him harm. Yet, as the pair continue to attempt to capture him, Ozymandias, in typical Comic book form, reveals his plot in dialog during the action.

He laments that he spent so many years attacking "only the symptoms leaving the disease itself unchecked" in his crime fighting days.

In another paean to leftist tropes, Ozymandias reveals that The Comedian was protecting Nixon the day Kennedy was shot in Dallas, hinting that Nixon was involved in the Kennedy assassination. A silly conspiracy theory depicting the left's most hated president as the deep, dark villain. But we have to realize that Nixon is doing double duty for the left's more hated president as of the writing of Watchmen; Ronald Reagan.

At this we can take a moment to chuckle over Moore's wild-eyed conspiracy mongering, and wonder at its subtlety when placed in the context of a comic book. Quite ingenious as well as underhanded, if not insidious it is. And it's amusing how well it fits with a Leftist world-view.

As Ozymandias drones on about how diseased the world had become and how he despaired about how to fix it all in heroic fashion, he also gives voice to another one of the left's sacred mantras -- it's all about the arms race.

On page 21 Ozymandias says, "I saw east and west, locked into an escalating arms spiral, their mutual terror and suspicion mounting with the missiles, making the possibility of disarmament progressively more remote."

He ends his anti-arms soliloquy with this bit of lefty doggerel, "Simply given the mathematics of the situation, sooner or later, conflict would be inevitable."

The left was so sure, so utterly sure, that the arms race had to end in nuclear war between the US and Russia during those cynical days. It is funny that at the height of arms race propaganda and fear emanating from the left it was all coming undone, even then during the run of the Watchmen series. As President Reagan forced the Soviets to over commit their ever waning resources toward arms production, the USSR came to the realization that they could not compete and were looking to diplomatic solutions even as they found the concept so dreadfully distasteful.

Reagan knew he had the upper hand and forced the issue pushing the already shaky Soviet government toward further internal pressures. Only five years after the Watchmen series ended, the Soviet government fell to the new democratic government of Boris Yeltsin in 1991. Not only did no nuclear war occur, but barely a shot was fired even in revolution in Russia.

The Left's decades of fear-mongering, years of pronouncements of supplication to totalitarians, and their constant bending over backwards to excuse communist mass murder all came to nothing as that sunny politician from the old movies came to town and devastated every one of the Left's arguments and precepts. His optimism and confidence made the lie to that so-called mathematical surety of nuclear war. Even today the Left refuses to admit their error.

As the book comes to a close we discover the full extent of Ozymandias' plot tying everything together. From The Comedian's murder to the missing scientists and writers to the end game all is explained. It is no less than a plot to end all war and to unite mankind to a single, peaceful purpose.

It begins with The Comedian's death. Unfortunately for the grim Comedian, he stumbled upon the deserted island where those missing scientists, artists, and writers were working on a gigantic fake monster for some ultra realistic movie -- at least that is what some of them were told. This fake but biologically created monster, is supposed to represent some gigantic alien race that is plotting to take over the world. But, it turns out it wasn't a movie prop on which they labored. The Comedian discovered the larger truth.

The aforementioned company called "the Institute for Extraspatial Studies" had developed a teleportation device based on the work of Dr. Manhattan. Though the device could not be made to teleport live creatures still they had a working teleportation device.

Ozymandias had planed to use the teleportation device to teleport this giant, biological "alien" construct that he had his island scientists constructing right into the heart of New York. He planned on accompanying this startling teleportation with a psychic wave that would kill millions of the city's inhabitants. The world would see what would be perceived as a first wave of attacks from an alien race and would unite as one people to work to stop it. War between men would instantly stop and all men would band together to plan a defense against a threat from without.

Once the Comedian discovered that his world of undercover plots, secret missions and enemy threats would be eliminated for this world of united purpose, he threatened to reveal his discovery to the world. That is why Ozymandias himself killed The Comedian. He also framed Rorschach as well as created the situation that would cause Dr. Manhattan to banish himself from the Earth, all to keep them from discovering his secret truth.

Ozymandias admitted that he would kill millions of people in New York, but if it caused world peace, well, some had to die for the good of the many. He admitted killing everyone who had any part of his plot, killed so that word of his scheme would never get out.

The Owl and Rorschach still think they might stop the plot until Ozymandias tells them that it has already happened. New York was already destroyed. They had missed their last chance to be heroes. Once again, the theme of futility reigns and now we add mass murder to the list of the Watchmen's woes.

Click to continue to book 12...

Home|Prelude|Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Book 1|Book 2|Book 3|Book 4|Book 5|Book 6
Book 7|Book 8|Book 9|Book 10|Book 11|Book 12|Epilogue|Footnotes