YAWN! Just what the world need now. Another TRUE story of Alexander the Great called “The True Story of Alexander the Great by Professor Peter Woodward” on History International.
Here’s a screen shot of how Darius III is portrayed. It’s a dead ringer for Saddam complete with beard, kaffeyah, and the douerest swarthiness.
It’s the same old biased re-telling of the all-righteous Westerner (faintly based on the story of Alexander) overcoming the all-evil Easterners (strongly based on stereotypes of today’s Middle Easterners), told by yet another English Professor, and backed up by an army of American colleagues. You know the one: an army of 40,000 Greek freedom-loving, hot-waxed, virtue- machines defeating 600,000 terrorists/Persians. It’s a wonder the parade of scholars didn’t credit Alexander with inventing sperm! They are absolutely giddy about him.
It’s a tale of an American/English democracy spreader (an absolute monarch, in reality) from ancient Greece (Macedonia, in reality) delivering civilization to evil-doers (and bringing back their gold, in reality) only to be “seduced by their vices” (come to appreciate their noble culture, in reality), and dying (breaking up a functioning multicultural emipre and throwing the world into chaos for the next hundred years). It’s a lovely, uplifting tale.
If it has become mandatory for Western academia to write several books a year drooling over a fantasy of Alexander, and for documentary channels to produce at least one “definitive” record of Alexander, can they at least do away with the we-are-those-greeks overtones, the “I want to have that man’s child” undertones, and the over-the-top stereotyping of Ancient Persians? Or, is that the whole point of these works?
