I haven’t had time to watch much TV or any movies for over a month now, but I was able to take some time late last night to rewatch the original Conan the Barbarian movie, and damn…I had forgotten what a great movie that was.  There are, of course, many reasons for its greatness, but I want to focus on one particular part, which part features one of cinema’s most gloriously barbaric pronouncements.  For those of you have seen the movie, you probably have a good idea of which part I’m talking about.  It is a scene where Conan, played by that Teutonic slab of beef, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has been captured and brought before the warlord Thulsa Doom (played by James Earl Jones), who asks Conan: “What is best in life?”  To which Conan replies with a quote so raw, so unapologetically vicious, it could make a vegan choke on their kale smoothie: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”  That is an absolutely poetic breath of fresh air compared to the milquetoast moralizing of our flaccid, over-civilized age.  Here’s a bit of a kicker: the quote is not even Conan’s.  It’s a riff on Genghis Khan, the horse-lord of havoc, who allegedly spat some version of this credo while stacking skulls like a medieval Martha Stewart.

In a world drowning in performative empathy and trigger warnings, this quote is a grenade lobbed into the pastel nursery of modern sensibilities.  It’s not just about violence; it’s about domination, about the unadulterated thrill of reducing your foes to quivering heaps and reveling in their despair.  The “lamentations of their women” bit?  Yeah, that’s the part that makes the pearl-clutchers hyperventilate, and good.  It’s not a call to misogyny; it’s a reminder that conquest, in its purest form, leaves no one unscathed – not the warrior, not the vanquished, not the bystanders wailing in the ashes.  It’s the kind of line that demands you confront the lizard-brain lust for power we all pretend we’ve evolved past.

Let me put my English teacher hat on for a bit and dissect the semiotics.  The word “crush” is like a sledgehammer – monosyllabic, brutal, evoking not just defeat but annihilation.  “Driven before you” conjures a cattle-prod vision of your enemies as broken beasts, shambling under your lash.  And “lamentations”?  That’s the coup de grâce, a multisyllabic flourish that drips with Old Testament gravitas, implying not just tears but a cosmic keening, a soundscape of sorrow that’s practically orgasmic in its intensity.  It’s like a Wagnerian opera compressed into 17 words.

But let’s also admit the dirty truth: this quote is fun.  It’s the kind of thing you mutter under your breath when you’re stuck in traffic behind some Prius-driving, kombucha-sipping NIMBY who’s signaling their virtue harder than an ’80s televangelist.  It’s a fantasy of unfettered agency in a world chained to HR manuals and social media bans.  Conan, or Genghis, or whoever the hell first belched this axiom, wasn’t worried about getting cancelled.  He was too busy swinging a broadsword and laughing about blood sprayed.  And in 2025, when every other tweet is some sanctimonious screed about “harmful rhetoric,” there’s something liberating about imagining a life where your only KPI is how many skulls you can stack before lunch.

Of course, the perpetually offended will cry foul.  They’ll call this quote toxic, patriarchal, a dog whistle for every -ism in the book.  To which I say: tough titty.  Art doesn’t owe you comfort.  Conan’s world – much like Genghis Khan’s – wasn’t a safe space.  It was a crucible where strength, cunning, and sheer balls-out audacity decided who ate and who got eaten.  If that scares you, go knit a cozy for your feelings and leave the rest of us to revel in the unfiltered id of a line that’s as much a middle finger to modernity as it is a battle cry.

So, what’s the take away?  Maybe it’s this: in a world obsessed with “doing better,” sometimes it’s okay to fantasize about doing worse.  Embrace the part of you that wants to roar, to dominate, to laugh in the face of chaos.  Because if Conan and Genghis teach us anything, it’s that life’s too short to tiptoe around the fragile egos of the perpetually aggrieved.  Crush your enemies, dammit, see them driven before you, and if you hear a lamentation or two, crank the volume and grin like a bastard because it is validation that you are fighting the good fight.  That, my friends, is best in life.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bench-press a yak and howl at the moon.

N.P.: “In The Air Tonight” – Marilyn Manson