You know how in the past 5 years, Islam has been increasingly demonised
by the controllers of the West? You know how it's reached a point where
Muslims who oppose BOTH Hollywood AND the Saudi 'royal' family are
called 'Islamists' and 'extremist Muslims'? Or in other words, they are
called 'very Muslim', or 'Muslim to a far more than tolerable degree'?
Well I wondered whether the following article in the 'Guardian' might be
an early shot in a propaganda campaign focusing on the Persian empire,
as part of a cultural change sup****ting an invasion of Iran.
The article is entitled 'The evil empire' and was printed in the arts
section.
The author is obviously a skilled propagandist, who keeps to his theme
with relish. One of his statements is as follows: "All western political
theory is implicitly defined against the ghost of Persia". Oh really?
Machiavelli? Montesquieu? Strauss? Obviously the statement doesn't stand
up for five seconds, but this guy states it with 'conviction' and
basically builds a 'position' around it. He's writing a book about
'Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and the art of war' apparently. So
let's not pretend he doesn't know what the West is all about, and how
its major claims about itself are lies. 'Implicitly defined', did he
say?
The author also arrives at the statement that "Persia is now Iran".
Nothing 'implicit' about that - he says it completely explicitly.
Anyway, we will soon find out whether more such propaganda follows.
I would be interested to hear if anyone knows of any other such
'evil Persian empire' articles placed in western publications.
Certainly, 'profound cultural changes' are being brought about and
prepared...as called for, for example, in an article by a former head of
Mossad, in which, responding to the 7/7 bomb attacks in London, he
called for "world war": <http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename
=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1120702711778&p=1074657885918>
If an invasion of Iran is part of the plan, as many believe it is, one
might expect propaganda such as this. 'Clash of civilisations' ****, to
replace or update the 'Atlanticist' **** dating from the last century.
(Incidentally, this guy does not know what he's talking about, where
Marx's ideas on 'oriental despotism' are concerned).
The 'evil empire' article is from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1564733,00.html
***BEGIN ARTICLE***
The evil empire
Persia's kings are history's great villains. Does the British Museum's
show do them justice? By Jonathan Jones
Thursday September 8, 2005
The Guardian
The title of this exhibition is a bit misleading. Forgotten Empire, the
British Museum calls its spectacular resurrection of ancient Persia. Yet
the Persians are as notorious in their way as Darth Vader, the Sheriff
of Nottingham, General Custer, or any other embodiment of evil empire
you care to mention. They are history's original villains.
In its day, which lasted from the middle of the 500s BC until the defeat
of Darius III by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, the Persian empire ruled
a vast ****tion of the then-known world from the Nile to the Indus. It
connected the Mediterranean with modern Afghanistan. Rich beyond dreams,
powerful beyond dispute, the great kings ruled from their mighty palaces
at Susa and Persepolis, tolerating the religions and cultures of subject
peoples and harvesting the creativity of near eastern civilisation that
had already, before they came along, invented writing and urban life. It
should have been enough to earn them historical immortality.
Yet, of course, the leader whose name resonates down the ages is
Alexander the Great. The Persian kings, from their lofty thrones,
perceived the turbulent islands on the western fringe of the empire as a
marginal irritant, and yet the Greeks were their nemesis. For the
Persians had the misfortune to be the others, the enemies - in short,
the Orientals - against whom the first European civilisation defined
itself.
The Middle East invented writing, but ancient Greece invented history.
Herodotus, "the father of history", takes as his epic theme the struggle
of the Greek city states against the vast Persian empire - and sees it
as a war of liberation. The idea of democracy was born in the fight
against Persian despotism: that is how Herodotus tells it. The Persian
king Xerxes is the supreme overlord of all baddies, turning his eye on
the plucky little Greek cities who, unexpectedly, fight back. Now you
remember the Persians: the guys with the strange beards whom the
Athenians beat at Marathon. Until Marathon, says Herodotus, "no Greek
could even hear the word Persian without terror". In finding the courage
to fight Persia, the Greeks discovered their own identity as citizens.
All western political theory is implicitly defined against the ghost of
Persia - from condemnations of "tyrants" in the Atlantic republican
tradition to Marx's caricature of "oriental despotism". In winning their
nationhood, the Greeks consigned the Persians to a miserable place in
the world's memory.
The most vivid ****trait of a Persian ruler isn't even in this
exhibition. It appears in a mosaic found in Pompeii, now in the Naples
Archaeological Museum, based on a lost painting of Alexander the Great
in battle. Through a tangle of horses, men and spears, Alexander
charges. Darius stands helpless in his chariot, his face startled and
appalled, like a frightened rabbit. So much for Persia!
This is how history is made - by writers and artists recycling stories
and images down the centuries. This mosaic decorated the House of the
Faun in Pompeii centuries after the fall of Darius; millennia after
that, the victories of Alexander are still box office.
It takes Neil MacGregor's idealistic British Museum to put the Persian
point of view. Everything about Forgotten Empire is calculated to turn
history on its head. This is archaeology meeting world politics. The
very existence of the exhibition is a diplomatic coup: in case you
hadn't noticed, Persia is now Iran. The loans from Tehran that have made
Forgotten Empire possible were negotiated before the recent change of
government and had to be renegotiated at the last minute.
This is the kind of exhibition I expect of the British Museum. Here at
last is the enlightening encounter with another culture that, in the
Bloomsbury museum's years of decline, was replaced by crap like an
Agatha Christie show. At the same time, it's laudably different from a
Royal Academy blockbuster: less swank, more thought. I can promise you
will not only be delighted by gold daggers and chariots but leave with a
sense of Persian history. It's first rate.
So why was I disappointed? I was left flat - not by the superb show but
by the Persian empire itself. The British Museum wants us to believe
Persia was traduced by the Greeks. It wants to show us an alternative
Persia from the evil empire vilified by Hellenic historians. Yet
everything confirms this Greek "myth" of a supremely rich, powerful,
bureaucratically faceless empire. The real difference between the Greek
version and the version we get here is that the Greeks made the Persians
glamorous in their villainy.
The Persian kings, their wives, ministers, soldiers and myriad subjects
are a void at the heart of this exhibition. They don't emerge, in their
own art, as individuals, only as warriors in profile, with the same neat
beards. In Herodotus, the Persian ruler Darius, when he was told of
Athenian sup****t for rebels in Asia Minor, called for his bow, took an
arrow, shot it into the air and cried: "Grant, O God, that I might
punish the Athenians!" Compare that with the real voice of a Persian
king, on a clay tablet telling of the construction of the palace at
Susa: "Saith Darius the King: Ahuramazda, the greatest of the gods - he
created me; he made me king; he bestowed upon me this kingdom, great,
possessed of good horses, possessed of good men ..." The Greek fantasy
of a monarch convulsed with anger, demanding his bow, is so much more
dramatic, more human.
The same contrast between Greeks and Persians is unavoidable when you
contemplate the most imposing monuments here. Unfortunately, they appear
in a 19th-century collection of plastercasts; the reliefs that survive
on the ruins of the palace at Persepolis are inaccessible, unless you
fancy a trip to Iran. I find it hard to enjoy reproductions.
Nevertheless, some judgments are possible. The celebrated frieze of
various peoples paying tribute is imposing. But the figures have a
static quality. No one runs, nothing overlaps. Even the wonderful
carving of two immense lions, or the black stone mastiff from Tehran -
an original - succeed through mass rather than movement.
If you wanted to claim, as a newspaper did this week, that Persia was
"the greatest of all ancient civilisations" you'd be better off picking
a venue other than the British Museum. Just a walk from the show are the
Elgin Marbles - the frieze of the Parthenon created after the Athenian
acropolis was razed by the Persians. The Greek masterpiece is full of
motion and emotion, from horses barely reined in, to a heifer being led
to sacrifice.
Where's the passion in Persian art? Its very beauty - and it is
beautiful - lies in its strange stillness; you see this most in the
painted brick profiles of palace guards. Yet this praise has to be
qualified. This kind of glazed brick decoration isn't original to the
Persian empire; they got it from Babylon - to be precise, from the neo-
Babylonian kingdom that they subdued. This isn't about east versus west.
With our idiocy being what it is, the British Museum runs a risk of
confusing us into equating Persia with the near-eastern origins of
civilisation. The Persian empire followed, and conquered, the Assyrians
and neo-Babylonians - and was about two millennia after Ur. All these
cultures were greater than Persia's, as a quick tour of the British
Museum will indicate.
The Persian empire was admirably curious about the cultures it absorbed:
in Egypt the Persian kings paid homage to Egyptian gods. It assimilated
the cultural heritage of the entire eastern Mediterranean world,
including that of Greece; a wonderful silver and bronze amphora handle
in the shape of an ibex rests on a mask of a Greek satyr. But all this
openness has an emptiness at its heart. No one is even quite sure what
the Persians believed - how strange, in an ancient world so full of
gods, from Osiris to Zeus to Jehovah, that only a single case is filled
with religious offerings. Were they just boring bureaucrats?
Yet we do get a glimpse of what they loved. They liked to live it up.
The most startling things here are gold and silver drinking vessels in
the shape of horns - just a taste of the opulent lifestyle of the
Persian court. That, too, becomes a little offputting as you admire one
gold bracelet too many.
It sounds as if I'm kicking against this exhibition. I suppose I am, yet
it is archaeology at its most impressive. You might even say it is
archaeology versus history. The Greeks wrote history. The Persians are
recovered here through archaeology - the study of objects retrieved from
the sand. Yet history wins. The Persian empire visible in its surviving
artefacts turns out to be as grandiose, luxurious and remotely despotic
as Herodotus said it was.
· Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia is at the British
Museum, London WC1, from tomorrow. Details: 020-7323 8583
***END ARTICLE***
--
banana "The thing I hate about you, Rowntree, is the way you
give Coca-Cola to your s***, and your best teddy-bear to
Oxfam, and expect us to lick your frigid fingers for the
rest of your frigid life." (Mick Travis, 'If...', 1968)
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