Alexander the Great defeated the Persian army in what is now Iraq.
To me, it is statements like this one, commemorations like this one, which best explain why the human world continues to be the failed mediocrity that it is. "Alexander the Apalling", "Alexander the we-should-be-ashamed", "Alexander the brutal murderer, destroyer of entire countries, reducer of people to slave-captivity". Please name one thing that he did - not his friends like Ptolemy¹, but himself; one thing, that added something positive to the human world? No, not the cities that he founded - they were mere replacements for the cities that he destroyed in conquering countries that he destroyed by destroying their cities, and their people in the process. And what were his cities anyway, at that time? Garrisons merely, just like the castrae which the Romans put up everywhere they conquered: fortified police stations and army barracks from which to control the subjugated populace.
But maybe, the thought insists itself upon me, maybe I've missed something, so I have typed "what did Alexander the Great actually achieve" into my Google search-engine, and it has come up with:
"Conquering the mighty Persian empire and others and thus creating one of the largest empires ever."
"He was King of all Greek nations, Shah of Persia, Pharaoh of Egypt and ruler of many more lands."
"He founded multiple cities and named them after himself (most famously Alexandria in Egypt)."
"He was responsible for the inception of several Greek dynasties in foreign lands (such as the Ptolemaians in Egypt)."
"He solidified the economy of the vast lands by creating a single currency."
In other words: a very large Ego for Alexander, but absolutely Zero for humanity.
Yet we say "Great", despite the fact that there is no distance at all between Alexander's defeat of the Persian army and the second item on my "amber" list, below.
When the Romans conquered Egypt, adding it to their empire, Julius Caesar, another of the "great men" of history, ordered the total destruction of its library - which was the equivalent of say, Oliver Cromwell deciding to demolish both Oxford and Cambridge universities to the last piece of shreddable paper and botany dish. The illustration at the top of the page shows that Caesarian breach of civilised behaviour. The one on the right shows Claudius Ptolemy with his rather greater instruments of rational human development.
Amber pages
Vladimir Horowitz, Russian pianist, born today in 1903
Today in 1946, Martin Bormann sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg - the end of the Nazi empire. GER!
But still the belief in the merit, value and validity of empires goes on: this one in 1949, Communist China founded.
And as to the building of universal empires: today in 1958, NASA was inaugurated. I have expressed elsewhere in this blog my hope that human attempts to colonise other planets will end in disasrous failure and then be abandoned; bad enough we have turned this planet into a black hole, but we should not be planning ways to endanger the species of other planets too.
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