Re: China was founded by Germans.

From: intelligentsia (vd1739_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/30/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 12:23:15 +1000

I am no expert on Alexander, but you seem to be picking on minor details
which do not effect the overall story. There many ways in which history is
written, you ALLWAYS omit facts which you consider unimportant, yet others
might consider them more relevant. Besides, literature in history differ
and you will get slightly different accounts of events from different
sources. Historical evidence is always incomplete and some of it very
questionable which leads to many historical publication being in
disagreement on certain issues. There are always new facts being discovered.
I am not at all surprised that one historian disagrees with another
historian, that is perfectly natural.

"Jona" <adsl294196@tiscali.nl> wrote in message
news:4109435B.91E8FFC@tiscali.nl...
> intelligentsia wrote:
> >
> > Racism can mean hate expressed in harmful ways, or it can mean a
scientific
> > study of the races. The former is often illegal while the latter is
> > perfectly legal. I consider the website above to be a truthful and
> > scientific collection of facts.
>
> Okay, granted, for argument's sake: racism can be a scientific way to
> explain something. In my country, it is a bit out of fashion, but okay.
> I am not a "real" academic (I have no appointment at an university), but
> I think I am a specialist in one of the fields treated on the website,
> Alexander the Great. (My book is set to appear in October, see
> http://www.pothos.org/alexander.asp?paraID=68 .) I have read the
> Alexander chapter from your "truthful and scientific collection of
> facts": http://www.white-history.com/hwr11.htm.
>
> In general, I admit that I expected something far worse (believe me,
> there's a lot of crap on Alexander). Yet, I can not agree that it is
> truthful or scientific. Below, I have summed up the errors. If this is
> the quality of the remainder of the site, please ignore it, because it
> is simply not a "truthful and scientific collection of facts".
>
> Jona
>
> FACTUAL ERRORS
> "After firmly establishing Macedonian unity, Philip set about invading
> the Greek peninsula, occupying Athens in 338 BC."
> >> Wrong. He defeated the Athenians in 338 and concluded a treaty. The
Macedonians occupied the city after the reign of Akexander.
>
> "He then turned his attention to the Persian empire to the East."
> >> Wrong. The first blows of the war with Persia date back to 340, before
Philip brought under control Greece.
>
> "Philip was given a royal burial, his tomb being discovered intact and
> in pristine condition in 1977 AD."
> >> Outdated information. The decoration of the tomb includes a lion hunt,
a theme that is picked up in western art after the conquests of Alexander.
>
> "In doing this he managed to unite most of the Greeks"
> >> Wrong. Most Greek cities hated their overlord. There was considerable
support for his Spartan enemy Agis; in the year of Alexander's death, war
was being prepared.
>
> "crossing the Dardanelles with an army of 35,000 Macedonian and Greek
> troops"
> >> Correct, but ignoring 10,000 Macedonians under Parmenio already in
Asia.
>
> "His chief officers [...] were Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus"
> >> Wrong. At the beginning of the war, Alexander's chief officers were
Parmenio, Philotas and others. They were replaced by a second generation of
officers, which included Craterus and Perdiccas. The three men mentioned
were to rise to fame after Alexander's death.
>
> "the victory was overwhelming, and as news of the decisive victory
> spread throughout Turkey, all of the sub-continent submitted to
> Alexander without putting up a fight."
> >> Nonsense. Alexander had to fight at Miletus and Halicarnassus. The
siege of the latter town was almost a defeat: he took part of the city but
could not storm the citadel, which held out for almost two more years.
Alexander lost the strategic initiative.
>
> "Still only having around 35,000 soldiers,"
> >> Wrong. Alexander's army at Issus had been reinforced several times.
Modern scholars (Donald Engels and others) think there were about 41,000
infantry and 6,000 cavalry.
>
> "probably due to his genius as a military leader, Alexander won the day
> at the Battle of Issus, in 333 BC - which saw the utter rout of the
> Persian forces."
> >> Wrong. Actually, there not so much about genius. Alexander fought
bravely, but the real mistake had been made by Darius, who fought on the
wrong site. Nor were the Persian forces utterly routed; they could still
advance to Anatolia, Cyprus and Egypt.
>
> "in quick succession occupied Egypt, the disorganized and enfeebled
> non-White chieftains there offering little real resistance."
> >> Wrong. According to the standards of the website under discussion, the
garrison was commanded by Aryans, i.e. Persians, i.e., whites.
>
> "Cyrene, the capital of the ancient North African kingdom of Cyrenaica"
> >> Wrong. It was an independent Greek city.
>
> "the city of Carthage, where his Indo-European Nordic troops set up a
> ruling aristocracy"
> >> Wrong. There's simply no evidence for this whatsoever.
>
> "It was while on this return journey that Alexander contracted fever and
> died in Babylon."
> >> Wrong. He contracted fever at Babylon.
>
> "dying at the age of 33"
> >> Wrong. A man born in July 356 and dying in June 323 is 32.
>
> "Alexander himself publicly declared himself to be in favor of further
> racial integration."
> >> Wrong. There is simply no evidence for this statement.
>
> "He ordered for example that all his generals to take wives from the
> conquered peoples, most of whom were racial mixtures of Semites,
> Arabics, Negroids and original Whites."
> >> Wrong. The marriages at Susa included Macedonian men and Persian
ladies, both, in terms of the website under discussion, great white nations.
It had nothing to with a policy of racial fusion; Alexander needed the
subject people to govern his empire, which was too large to be ruled by
Macedonians alone. Intermarriage was a simple way to appease the subjects.
For the same reason, he had taken Roxane as his wife.
>
> [skipping some remarks on the Susa marriages, which, I think I have
> refuted by now]
>
> "there was no obvious successor to Alexander (as his one son was very
> young and the other was retarded - both were murdered in 305 BC"
> >> Three or four errors in half a sentence. Officially, there were two
successors: his mentally unstable brother Arrhidaeus and his still unborn
son Alexander IV. Arrhidaeus did in fact rule and was killed in 316;
Alexander IV was killed before 310.
>
> "Alexander's General Ptolemy"
> >> Wrong. He was a somatophylax or body guard / adjutant.
>
> "Most of these lands were however lost to military attacks by the
> Seleucidians [...] around the year 220 BC."
> >> Wrong. Should be 200. The expression is Seleucids. This line is
illustrative for the carelessness of the author of this webpage.
>
> "a White ruling class over the large mass of mixed race inhabitants"
> >> Wrong. The book to read is Koen Goudriaan's *Ethnicity in Ptolemaic
Egypt*, which clearly shows how fluid ethnic boundaries were.
>
> "fairly soon their [the Seleucid] empire also began to crumble under the
> pressure of trying to contain large numbers of widely diverse racial and
> ethnic groupings within the borders of one state."
> >> So passé. Read a book like S. Sherwin-White, *From Samarkhand to
Sardes*, which is really excellent.
>
> "In the northern parts of the Seleucidian empire, for example,
> descendants of Macedonian soldiers"
> >> Wrong. This refers to Sogdia, where Greeks had been settled.
>
> "to form the relatively short lived states of Bactria and Parthia."
> >> Short-lived?! The Indo-Greek states had a longer history than, for
example, the USA.
>
> "Some of these Indo-Europeans were in fact marauding Celts"
> >> Wrong. There never were representatives of the west-European Iron age
cultures in Sogdia.
>
> "The greatest contribution of the Alexandrian age was however the
> transference of a large amount of classical knowledge to the new power
> in Europe - Rome."
> >> Incomplete. One should ask that the Greeks/Macedonians accepted much
knowledge from other people, e.g., astronomy from Babylonians and medicine
from Egypt.
>
> --
> Jona Lendering
> http://www.livius.org

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