The 300 Savages at Thermopylae: A Response to the Hollywood Film '300'

The recent Hollywood film '300' about the defeat of Dorian Spartans by the Imperial Iranians has created a storm of protest from Iranians worldwide. This is not surprising, since the film makers got the entire story wrong, turning the heroic Iranian victors of the battle, the defenders of Cuneiform civilization, into villains, and morphing the tribal Dorians militants from Sparta into heroes. In fact, the film is full of obvious cinematographic errors: Xerxes is shown as an alien with glowing skin, piercings and vines growing from his body, and rhinos, ogres and dragons are depicted on the Imperial side to further subhumanize the Iranians. This article shall not analyze these aberrations and mistakes, but instead focus on the historical inaccuracies and political propaganda of '300'.

SPARTA, AN APARTHEID STATE

Firstly, the Dorians were not fighting for "freedom". On the contrary; Dorian Sparta shared many characteristics with later totalitarian states; cold-blooded eugenics along the lines of Nazi Germany was practised, and mass racial slavery existed just as in the 19th-century circum-Caribbean and apartheid-era South Africa. Not only were the petty Greek tribal states full-scale slave societies; they were racist slave societies, with the indigenous Pelasgians and other tribes enslaved by a tiny minority of Greek invaders. In the words of Prof. Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, Sparta was an "apartheid state":

The roots of this mentality lie deep in Greek thought, such as Aristotle's belief that some were "slaves by nature". No wonder then that many scholars trace the origin of racism to the ancient Greeks (Isaac 2004). That the brutal Dorian slave society of Sparta claimed to be standing for "freedom" hence sounds as hollow as the similar boast once made by the Confederate States of America.

Whatever "democracy" existed in the Greek city-states was smothered when Alexander of Macedon crushed the Greek tribal states, blotting them out of existence. Paradoxically, Hollywood made a movie a few years ago, called "Alexander" and directed by Oliver Stone, which portrayed the Macedonian demolishers of Athenian democracy in a positive light. The glorification of both Athenian democracy and its destroyers is a contradiction at the very root of pan-Occidentalism.

INFANTICIDE AND EUGENICS

This handicapped Spartan, betrayed by his own intolerant and fanatical Dorians merely because of his physical handicap, naturally turned to the more tolerant and civilized Iranians. Indeed, one may say that it was Ephialtes who was the hero of Thermopylae, for it was he who advocated changes in tactics which led to the crushing Dorian defeat. As if by a sudden turn of righteousness, the cruel Leonidas was defeated by the hunchback whom he had insulted. Thermopylae is hence also about the triumph of mind over brawn, the intellect of the handicapped Ephialtes defeating the brute animal-like brawn of Leonidas.

HUMAN SACRIFICE

Secondly, the film portrays the Iranians as paying no respect for human life, with the Greeks supposedly being the standard-bearers of humanity. This is also totally false, for human sacrifice was rampant amongst the Greeks (Hughes 1991, Schwenn 1915). The Pagan Greeks called human sacrifice as "anthropo-phagia", and this base practice was widespread, in sharp contrast to civilized Iran. In Greek legend, Thyestas' sons were killed and served to Thyestas himself by his own brother, whence the term Thyestean banquest arose to denote cannibal feasts. Minucius Felix' third-century dialogue "Octavius" on the value of Christianity describes the loathsome practice of human sacrifice amongst, "the Romans themselves, who in the past would bury alive two Greeks and two Gauls and who in his own day sacrifice men to Jupiter Latiaris (Oct. 30.1)" (Rives 1995)

In fact, so common was human sacrifice in Graeco-Roman religion that the Christians made this one of their main planks during their debates with the Pagans. In this connection, we see that Clement of Alexandria noted,

PEDERASTY

Thirdly, the film spreads the misconception that the Persians were generally homosexual. There is of course, no historical evidence for this. In fact, it was the Dorian Spartans who were commonly and, in fact, flagrantly open about homosexuality, which was an integral part of Dorian Spartan society. Even Alexander the Accursed, the Macedonian invader and destroyer of cuneiform civilization, was said to have been a pederast. As Keith Wikle notes,

So common was homosexuality in ancient Greece that it came to be known as "Greek love" (Symonds 1901). Further, Lesbianism is named after the Greek island of Lesbos. In effect, the Spartan military barracks had a form of institutionalized homosexual rape, with the seniors forcing the younger recruits to give in to their beastly lusts. Also, the Spartan military camps were nothing but robber schools, for recruits were also not given food so that they had to learn to steal it, in effect making thieves out of an entire nation.

Little wonder, then that the Irano-Semitic peoples considered the Greeks to be effeminate. In fact, the terms for Greek in the Irano-Semitic world (Old Iranian "Yauna", Pali "Yona", Greek "Javan" and Prakrit "Yavana") besides meaning barbarian or savage, are derived from the root-word "yoni", meaning vagina. So, even the etymology of this term itself shows that the tall, long-headed and muscular Iranoid and Araboid races, so heroized in the Persepolis bas-reliefs, regarded the short-statured, round-headed and dark-skinned Alpine Graeco-Pelasgian race to be effeminate, in sharp contrast to the depictions in the movie. An illustration of this attitude comes from Mardonius, who stated that "... notwithstanding that they have so foolish a manner of warfare, yet these Greeks, when I led my army against them to the very borders of Macedonia, did not so much as think of offering me battle." (Herodotus 7.9)

NEGROID ELEMENT AMONGST GREEKS

The fourth historical error is the false racial imagery in the film. Thus, the movie seeks to portray the Iranians as black, and the Greeks as white-skinned. In fact, it is the Greeks who have a significant Negroid ancestry (Arnaiz-Villens et al. 2001). This Negroid element would have partly come from some of the aboriginal tribes. Indeed, the Greeks are largely descended from the various aboriginal inhabitants such as the Pelasgi, Leleges, Kuretes, Kaukones, Aones, Temmikes, Hyantes, Telchines, Boeotian Thracians, Teleboae, Ephyri and Phelgyae. Some of these were of round-headed Balkan stock, others were Negroid. A small part may have also entered through slaves imported from "Aethiopia" (Africa). Their round-headedness, and their partial Negroid ancestry, prove that the Greeks are largely descended from the pre-Greek aboriginal inhabitants of Greece. While there is no evidence that the blacks faced any racial hostility in Iran, the fact is that the Iranians were definitely taller and fairer than the Greeks, just as they are today.

GREEK TERRORISM AGAINST THE EMPIRE

The fifth historical error in the film is the claim that the Greeks were being invaded for no reason whatsoever, that it was the greed and imperialism of the Iranians which led to the war. The Greeks are falsely shown as victims throughout the film. In fact, the film does not attempt to even tell its audience why the petty Greek states were being punished by the Iranian Empire. The fact is that the Iranian Empire was retaliating against the ghastly terrorist attacks on its soil carried out by the independant Greek tribes; in particular, for the dastardly Sack and Massacre of Sardis (Kar 2007). As Herodotus himself describes, "Sardis however was burnt, and, among other buildings, a temple of the native goddess Cybele was destroyed; which was the reason afterwards alleged by the Persians for setting on fire the temples of the Greeks." (Herodotus 5.102)

If the makers of the film had at least read Greek history, they would not have embarrassed themselves by making such stupid mistakes. They would have come across this eloquent announcement by Xerxes during the commencement of the War against the Greeks:

Ironically, the victims of these vicious terrorist attacks were mostly fellow Greeks who lived under the beneficial Iranian Imperial rule, primarily the eastern Ionians. Of course, these minor details would not have bothered the Dorian and Aeolian terrorists and mercenaries, for their main goal was to loot and plunder the much wealthier and more prosperous districts of the Empire. The attacks by the Balkanic tribes against the Iranian Empire had exactly the same motive as those of the Germanic tribes against the Roman Empire, or of the Siberian tribes against the Han Chinese Empire: loot nad plunder. Their rich targets could amass their legendary wealth under Iranian rule, which created a much larger common market and consequent overall prosperity. It is on this wealth that the rabble of the poorer and rustic Greek tribes cast their greedy eyes.

It is also important to note that many Greeks themselves invited Emperor Xerxes to liberate Greece: "For, in the first place, it chanced that messengers arrived from Thessaly, sent by the Aleuadae, Thessalian kings, to invite Xerxes into Greece, and to promise him all the assistance which it was in their power to give. And further, the Pisistratidae, who had come up to Susa, held the same language as the Aleuadae, and worked upon him even more than they, by means of Onomacritus of Athens, an oracle-monger, and the same who set forth the prophecies of Musaeus in their order." (Herodotus, 7.6) The reason for this is because these Greeks, mostly from Ionia, had seen first-hand the benefits of Pax Iranica. Hence, another reason for Xerxes' march was an attempt to civilize the savage Balkan tribes. This was part of a more general strategy of the Iranians to bestow their superior and more ancient cuneiform Irano-Semitic civilization upon the less civilized and barbaric tribes of the outlying provinces, thereby reducing the military threat they posed, and bringing them into the sphere of the civilized world. Xerxes' march was an example of a larger, wealthier, more powerful and more cultured empire, trying to civilize a group of much smaller, petty, fragmented and mutually warring pastoral tribal confederations, towns and villages. This strategy worked in Anatolian Ionia, in the Indus Valley and in Libya. Unfortunately for the world, it failed in Greece, much as Rome's civilizing mission failed in Germania.

DORIANS TO SPARTANS

The fact is that such city-names never served as correct ethnonyms. People from London, Paris and Moscow are not called "Londoners" or "Parisians" or "Moscowites", but Englishmen, Frenchmen and Russians based on their ethnicity. In case of the Spartans, the correct ethnonym is "Dorian", for the Spartans were descendants of the Dorian tribal invaders, as the Athenians were always at pains to point out. The reason pan-Hellenists are so intent on disconnecting the Spartans from their Dorian past is because the Dorian invasions plunged Greece into the Greek Dark Ages, leading to the annihiliation of pre-Dorian Greek civilization. That the same "defenders of Thermopylae" were, a few generations back, smashing Greek civilization to smithereens does not make consistent history. It is also inconsistent with the writings of Athenian philosophers, who saw the Dorians as savages and uncivilized brutes.

In fact, if there was a divided group of people anywhere, it was the Greeks. Unlike the Iranians, who forged a single empire which united all Iranians and Semites for several centuries, the Greeks failed to form a single unified state for even a small period of time. The Pagan Greeks never formed a single political unit, they were merely tribal confederations (mis-called as "city-states" in Hellenocentric works) fighting one another.

In this regard, Mardonius stated that, " ... already have we subdued their children who dwell in our country, the Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians. I myself have had experience of these men when I marched against them by the orders of thy father; and though I went as far as Macedonia, and came but a little short of reaching Athens itself, yet not a soul ventured to come out against me to battle. And yet, I am told, these very Greeks are wont to wage wars against one another in the most foolish way, through sheer perversity and doltishness. For no sooner is war proclaimed than they search out the smoothest and fairest plain that is to be found in all the land, and there they assemble and fight; whence it comes to pass that even the conquerors depart with great loss: I say nothing of the conquered, for they are destroyed altogether." (Herodotus 7.9 http://www.iranchamber.com/history/herodotus/herodotus_history_book7.php)

The statements of Mardonius shows that the Iranians clearly recognized the separate Greek tribal nations of Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians, their lack of political unity, and the nearly continuous inter-tribal warfare they waged against each other.

DIVIDE AND RULE: PERSIA VS. IRAN

The seventh historical wrong is to give the Achaemenid Iranian Empire a new name, which the Greeks themselves concocted: the so-called "Persian Empire". Everywhere, on the inscriptions of Persepolis, in the traditional Iranian history as handed down to the Shah-namah, and in the sacred Avesta, it is observed that the Emperors refer to their domain as the "Iranian Empire", the "Shahanshahate-e-Iran", the "Iran-Shahr". Nowhere in the inscriptions, in the Avesta, or in the Shah-nameh do we hear of this silly concocted "Persian Empire". The Greeks might as well have called it the "Persepolitan Empire", a word as comic as the former invention. This was not the rule of the Persian people over everybody else. The Parsa clan were too few in number to have ruled over the entire Irano-Semitic world for so long. It is hence very clear that the Achaemenid Iranian Empire is the common heritage of the entire Irano-Semitic world, and should be properly named as such, on the model of similar names, like the Han Chinese Empire.

Why, then, do Hellenomaniac historians and the film refuse to call the Iranian Empire by its correct name, and insist on using the word they invented, "Persian Empire"? The aim is to trivialize the state in question, and portray it as merely the domination of one segment of the population (either from a particular region or a tribe) over the entire whole, thereby fomenting disunity and rebellions within that state. By insisting on using the term "Persian Empire", the Hellenists, after their proverbial cunning, sow the seeds of intra-Iranian division by portraying the state as the rule of the Persian branch of Iranians over the others. Instead of becoming the common heritage of all modern Irano-Semitic people from Morocco to Punjab, the Iranian Empire is devalued to become only the heritage of the Persians of Persis province. Similar strategies have been and are being used elsewhere:

Such usage would be analogous to calling the "British Empire" as the "English Empire", say, or the "Spanish Empire" as the "Castilian Empire". Or, to go one step further, it is the same as calling France the "Paris Republic", Russia as the "Moscow Empire", and China as the "Beijing Presidency" or Greece as the "Athenian Republic".

Now that we have addressed some of the most glaring errors in the film, it is time to turn to the ideology behind it.

PAN-OCCIDENTALISM

Why has Hollywood suddenly embarked on a propaganda campaign trying to glorify pre-Christian, pre-Reformation tribes, who are clearly "Pagan" idolaters? That too, why is it trying to lionize a clearly pathetic military defeat, which failed to stop Xerxes' advance to Athens, and which could not stop him from burning it down, in revenge for Sardis? Why celebrate an event, after which all of the southern Balkans were, for a short while, ruled by the Empire? Even if the inflated numbers of Greek historians are to be believed, this was only a minor skirmish from the Iranian point of view. "Pagan" Italo-Balkan civilization is clearly distinct from the much later Protestant Anglo-Saxon civilization of Hollywood. Not a drop of Greek blood would flow through the veins of the typical White Anglo-Saxon Protestant of New England. Historically, the Dorians couldn't have heard of Jesus, because Christianity wouldn't be invented for another thousand years. So why boast of a civilization which their own creed erased soem 1700 years ago?

The reason is a now declining stream of thought called pan-Occidentalism, which seeks to confound all the distinct civilizations of "the West" into one great porridge. Of course, Nordicism, pan-Germanism, Anglo-Saxonism, Latin nationalism, Macedonianism and Hellenic Exclusionism have all hobbled away at this outdated dogma. The Greeks, of course, had no concept of "Europe" (Burke 1980), and even considered the Macedonians as non-Hellenic. The whole concept of the supposed "West" was only coined recently; according to the Oxford Dictionary, Chesterton was the first to use the expression "Western Man", that too only in 1907. What is commonly called "Western civilization" in the Anglophone press is in fact a popular abbreviation for "Anglo-Saxon Protestant" civilization, which arose with the Protestant Reformation. This is the reason why Brazil, Columbia, Mexico and other Catholic countries are not considered "Western" by most authorities on the topic.

Furthermore, scholars also question the very heterogeneity of the concept of "Graeco-Roman civilization", or what is more properly called, "Italo-Balkan civilization". The reason is that the Latins was responsible for many attacks on Greek culture:

HISTORICAL DISCONTINUITY

Second, Greek cultural accomplishments in the arts, literature and architecture - themselves largely derived and adapted from the Irano-Semitic cultures of Egypt and Phoenicia - were decimated and eventually nullified with the triumph of Christianity in the 3rd century A.D. Under the Byzantines, most of the hated "Pagan" Greek literature and culture was destroyed and simply vanished forever. As examples, the Suda, quoting John of Antioch, mentions that the Emperor Jovian destroyed Julian's library at the Temple of Hadrian in Antioch, and in 391 A.D. the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all Pagan temples. The Byzantine Patriarch Theophilus then proceeded to destroy the Library at Alexandria (Mutahhari 1997), which was a storehouse for Pagan Greek wisdom:

Carl Sagan in Cosmos also notes that the murder of the Greek woman-philosopher Hypataea by Byzantine Christian mobs occurred during this time. Furthermore, the ancient Greeks were decimated, and the modern Greeks are mostly descendants of Slavs (as Fallmeyer as shown) and a Pelasgian-Negroid mixed survival. At Thermopylae, the Iranians were not fighting Protestants or Crusaders on a holy war. They were attempting to civilize a backward wasteland inhabited by savage tribes - many of whom were called barbarian by the Athenians themselves. And they succeeded in Ionia, laying the foundations for later Greek civilization, which later flowed to Doris and Aeolis in the Balkans.

Howeover one point stands out: in the eyes of the occidentalists, the Achaemenid Iranian Empire is no different from its successor state, the Arabian Caliphate. This should act as an eye-opener to the anti-Semites amongst the Iranians. Part of the shock of many Iranians living outside Iran is that the Pre-Islamic heritage of Iran should be seen by the West in the same light as Islam itself. There is no discontinuity in Iranian history in the eyes of the Occidentalist historian, there is no longer any reason why there should be any amongst Iranian historians any more.

WHO WAS CIVILIZED ?

It is pertinent to answre the important question: who stood for civlization at Thermopylae ? The 300 members of the Dorian tribe from a village called Sparta, or the 400,000 strong army of the largest and most powerful empire the world had seen ? This is just like asking whether the rabble of Goths at Adrianople stood for civilization, or the legions of the Roman Empire. The answer should have been obvious even to a bunch of Hollywood film-makers, yet the Iranians and their Semitic allies are portrayed as hateful barbarian monsters throughout the film. Hence, a detailed comparison of the Irano-Semitic civilization with the Greek is required here:

The cuneiform edicts at Behistun, written in Elamite, Babylonian and Old Iranian languages, illustrate the legitimacy of the Iranian Empire as the heir to the Elamite, Babylonian and Avestan traditions. This is exactly analogous to the way in which the Muscovites inherited the Byzantine civilization to inaugurate Slavo-Byzantine civilization, or the manner in which the Romans inherited Greek thought to form the Graeco-Roman, or more correctly, Italo-Balkan, civilization. Furthermore, the Iranian Emperors were crowned as pharaohs, and liberated the Jews, leading to several laudatory verses in the Bible, so that the Achaemenid Iranian Empire represented the highest pinnacle of Semitic civilization.

In fact, the diffusion of civilization into Greece from the Irano-Semitic East itself shows the origin of Hellenic culture. It was Ionia which had the benefit of being under Iranian rule, and was consequently the most civilized part of the Greek-speaking world, being illuminated by the rays of Irano-Semitic civilization. It is hence the Ionian language which was the predominant language of the Greek-speaking world for a long time.

BALKAN BARBARISM

A recurring theme in history is that of a great Empire failing to pacify barbarian tribes on its borders, and then ultimately being overthrown by these barbarians in a subsequent age. Thus, the Roman Empire failed to pacify Germania, and was later brought to its knees by Germanic invaders. Han China failed to civilize Siberia, and it is from here that the barbarians issued who ultimately overthrew that state. The Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary failed in the northern Balkans, and were engulfed in the ensuing World War. Similarly, the failure of the Iranian Empire to pacify and civilize the Greeks, Macedonians and Thracians of the southern Balkan wastes had fateful consequences centuries later, when these same unpacified barbarian tribes brought about the fall of the Achaemenid Iranian Empire. Yet, in this case, the consequences of this conflagration were far more severe, for not only did a great world-empire disappear, but Cuneiform civilization itself was annihilated.

This cataclysmic event occurred in a series of invasions from the Balkans. The savage Balkanic invasions of the Argeaedae under Alexander the Accursed, the Seluecidae, the Antigonidae under Antigonus the Cyclops, the Dorians of Agesilaus, and other assorted tribes of savages led to the demise of the Cuneiform stage of Irano-Semitic civilization. The Argead invaders sacked Persepolis and Babylon, hunting down and burning most of the Avesta and Zoroastrian scripture in fanatical book-burnings, a loss which could only be partially retrieved under the Sassanian revival. The Towers of Babel, the ziggurats of yore, disappeared under the sands of Iraq under the impact of the Antigonid invasions of Antigonus the Cyclops, a man as monstrous as his name implies. The savage Seleucid era of tyranny was a long period of incest, patricide and horrible mass murders. At the end of the Seleucid age, the cuneiform and heiroglyphic scripts had died out, ensuring that the knowledge enshrined in the Semitic cultures of Babylon and Egypt disappeared for millenia. Several centuries of history in eastern Iran, homeland of the Avesta, simply do not exist. Coins must be used as the sole reconstructive mechanism for this lost period of history. Half of the Irano-Semitic world was ruled by alien and savage invaders for centuries, and were only liberated from non-Irano-Semitic rule by the Arabian Caliphate.

Yet, this conquest of Greater Iran by the Balkan horders was simply a Zufallstande, a mere coincidence, an occurrence against the fundamental laws of nature. It represented the triumph of the savage over the civilized, the weak over the strong, the effeminate over the masculine. This statement is proven by the fact that Alexander's warlord territories broke up into myriad competing states even during his lifetime.

ANTI-SEMITISM

Finally, Hellenocentrism has a long history of Anti-Semitism in general, and Anti-Judaism in particular (Lazare 1894). The Roman Sack of Jerusalem and the Macedonian Seleucid wars with the Maccabeans of Israel are only a few instances of the Anti-Semitism running through Italo-Balkan culture. As the Iranians liberated the Jews under Cyrus, and formed an important element of that empire, so the old Nazi-era hook-nosed stereotype of the hated Jew re-appears as well amongst the Iranian characters. The Anti-Semitism of the film hence taps deep into various stereotypes created by a long history of Hellenocentrism and pan-Occidentalism.

CONCLUSION

The ideology represented by the film "300" is nothing but brute barbarism, senseless savagery and mindless Hellenocentrism and Balkanism. It is this barbarism which wiped out the entire cuneiform civilization of the Babylonians and Egyptians, turning back the clock of knowledge by thousands of years. It must be fought tooth and nail by the entire civilized world. If it is not stopped now, Hollywood will move on to make yet more and more films demonizing Irano-Semitic civilization. Native Americans, Blacks and Hispanics have long fought to free Hollywood from negative portrayals of their communities. One does not see any films justifying enslavement of "inferior niggers" any more, nor does one see any glorification of General Custer or other cowboys, despite freedom of speech. It is time the Irano-Semitic peoples took up the same struggle.

Indeed, the strength and success of the reaction from the Irano-Semitic world has upset the pan-Occidentalists. This is evidence that the Irano-Semitic world is not yet vanquished, in spite of the best efforts of the barbarians from the Dorians down to the brutish British, and now Hollywood. To date, the reaction to 300 is one of the rare time that Iranianists and Islamists stood in unbreakable unity. 300 has in fact forged unity amongst the disparate elements of Irano-Semitic civilization, a lesson which should anyway have been learned from Mutahhari (Mutahhari 1987).

All Irano-Semitic nations - both Muslim and Jewish - should band together in solidarity and demand an apology from the makers of the film. A strong ideological counterattack must be mounted, not just against the film, but against pan-Occidentalism, pan-Hellenism and brute Balkanism. Warner Brothers should issue an apology not just to Iran, but to the entire Irano-Semitic civilization as a whole. Or they should now make a film showing the Iranian Empire in a positive light. They should apologize to the Jews and clarify their position, for having apparently fomented Anti-Semitism by casting their homeland and Cyrus in a bad light and allegedly reviving the Nazi hook-nose stereotype. Jews worldwide must note the widespread Anti-Semitism enshrined at the very roots of Pan-Hellenism and Pan-Occidentalism (Lazare 1894). Asking for a ban on the film in countries with total freedom of speech is a wrong approach. Instead, the story of Thermopylae must be told from the Irano-Semitic perspective. It is time the Irano-Semites came out with a film called "Alexander the Monster", or, better still, "The 300 Savages".