Hey! Is that Saddam or Darius...

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?