Archive for November 28th, 2008
Wild Goose Chase into the Old World: Persia 4th century BC
Preface
Ever since I have read the life story of the so-called Alexander the Great I have been restless. I keep considering alternative circumstances of how this mad and impossible incursion into the Old Eastern World could have been stopped.
I felt that writing a historical fiction novel about this period would do me good. It should be historical because people are shying away from current news: They don’t listen to news, they don’t read newspapers, they have no ideas what is happening around them and yet, they feel superior to all politicians and far more capable.
It has to be a fiction because the so-called facts are bitter pills and not so reliable:
They are the facts of the victors and petty facts after all.
I needed to delve and know more about the ancient world. I need to imagine that a few of its leaders and scholars could have foreseen how political systems and technologies would have developed.
How they would dare change the world according to their new visions. Whether they would have been better equipped, spiritually and morally to improve their world, people and environment, at their own snail pace
Alexander’s upbringing
Alexander was brainwashed since childhood. He was made insidiously to believe by his mother Olympia that he was the descended of the God Hercules. His mother kept telling him that the Highest Priest of Egypt was convinced that he is the expected World King for the end of the Aries period (The Belier or two horned mammal).
Alexander was actually a bastard.
His father Phillip, King of Macedonia, strongly suspected that his wife Olympia has given birth to an illegitimate son. At the time, the kingdom of Persia extended from the borders of India to Turkey to Libya in Africa. It included the current countries of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Libya and the coast of North Africa.
Background on the motives of Alexander
Alexander’s goal was to conquer Egypt and receive from its High Priest the crown reserved for the expected son of God so that he can secure legitimacy.
As one of Alexander mentors explained it to him “If you want wealth you steal it by force and if you want legitimacy then you have to snatch it by the sword”.
As the story of history goes, while in Egypt, Alexander received a letter from the King of Persia. The King was proposing to Alexander to accept the coastal land of Turkey to settle their disputes.
It seems that the King of Persia was in a chatting mood and he added a threat that if his proposal is turned down then he will keep retreating before Alexander’s troops, to the confines of his vast Empire until Alexander gives up the chase. The letter warned Alexander that this task would be impossible to carry through.
The King of Persia had just handed Alexander a sweet excuse and a new purpose.
So much for making sense to a hot headed and crazy young adversary! Alexander barely visited any city twice and intended to advance further east to China.
What old “history books” told us
For thirteen years, Alexander barely backtracked in his wild push forward. His military travel took him beyond the Persian Empire to the Southern parts of Russia, Kashmir, Pakistan and parts of India. As matter of fact, Alexander could not have advanced that far if not for the fresh recruits coming from Greece to replace the losses.
The new recruits adored him and wanted to have a share of the glory. Alexander crossed deserts in summers, the highest mountains in winters and most of his soldiers died of hunger, thirst and diseases rather than from wars. Alexander died in Babylon at the age of 30 something and his fiefdoms were divided among his officers after many years of a long civil war.
Lesser known stories
The officers of Alexander, battle worn, sick with disease and confused as to the purpose of this incomprehensible campaign, finally expressed bluntly their unwillingness to go any further and confronted him. Alexander had to stop his advance and convinced his officers to navigate the Indus River and then reach Egypt by sea.
To punish his officers for foiling his dream of reaching the confines of the ancient world, Alexander made his army to cross the southern desert of Persia for 60 days where thousands of soldiers died of thirst.
Wild Goose Chase (30
Posted on: November 28, 2008
Kandahar: Medium-term plan 3
(fiction, continue 30)
At the city of Kandahar, in south central current Afghanistan, Artax appointed a women officer to be General in Chief of all the armed forces in southern Afghanistan. This tactic secured two major benefits;
first, the woman general would hold fast to the new system that secured and solidified women rights, and
second she would allow the force the necessary time to strengthen its grip on the region: the enemy was assumed not to take that seriously a force headed by a woman and thus insure valuable time to taking hold on the mind of the population.
Slowly but surely, the vision and planning of Artax were materializing in flesh and bones around the perimeter of the Persian Empire.
As for the “pilgrimage journey” to China, Artax selected the famous chronicle Battoukha to discover the wonders of China and to dispatch him the diaries: if Artax could not experience in the flesh the discoveries then Artax would share the excitement by the mind.
Marco Polo and before him Ibn Battouta (at least 8 centuries later) relied heavily on the manuscript of Battoukha to plan for their famous journeys to the Rising Sun China.
On the Southern Army
The adventure of the Southern Army of Artax, led by the vizier Khorsheed, was fantastic. This brave army made a series of successful landings in fishing villages and proceeded according to master plans.
Soldiers would enter a town, plaster the scrolls of the Constitution and Bill of Rights on the walls of shrines and local institutions, read them in front of the public; install one judge accepted by the inhabitants then horde the other judges and clerics to a remote training camp for indoctrination.
Educated and learned people in the community were encouraged to disseminate the new system. Young boys and girls were sent to schools. People bent on mischief and who took advantage of a confused central authority was apprehended to give evidence of who is the real authority in maintaining law and order.
Dangerous news arrived to Artax from his Southern Army which stopped his grandiose plans on their tracks: unless Artax assembles a strong naval force in the Persian Gulf, his Southern Army might not hold its terrain against the onslaught of the usurping Monarch.
This vast desert area along the coast requires constant supply of fresh water and food for his army that was dying of thirst and heat strokes. Artax had to advance along the Indus River which empties in the Indian Ocean.
He had to hire and stock enough ships to rescue the Southern Army or eventually to evacuate it honorably in an orderly fashion.
The lousy desert parts of his Kingdom were of no concerns to Artax anymore, though he had to support his army there in order to divert the forces of the usurping Monarch from the more critical parts of his secured bases in the Kingdom.
The rear bases of Artax stretched from the fertile lands of current Karachi in Pakistan to Goa in India. Artax messengers were carrying orders and instructions to all armies and governors along secured routes. In every region that the King authority was entrenched, municipal elections were held and the spirit of the Constitution and Bill of Rights were disseminated, gradually but surely.
Changes in societies need time, patience and genuine zeal in convictions to make any headway.
Artax primary duties to his people was to keep close contacts, involvement, and interactions with the institutions and taking close attention to the training camps programs for the reeducation of the newer generations as to the spirit of the articles in the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
The dissemination of information about the new cultures in remote lands was a most important ingredient in Artax educational system. Artax motto was: ignorance and isolation from other civilizations is the drug of choice exploited by the religious extremists who abhor civil supervision of any governing body.
Do you want to get a handle on your mind? (November 27, 2008)
Are you disturbed that your mind has this nasty habit of wandering every which way when you need to focus? I guess it depends on what you are focusing on? There are moments when time fly by working on something and you know then that you were focused. There are systems (religious, political, ideological, philosophical, and disciplines) with a definite purpose to controlling your mind (brain washing?) and rob you of your rights for individual reflections. You can learn to control your mind but the trick is to have total faith in the methods or the philosophy or the guru. The benefit of what you learned is not guaranteed to be what you really wanted in the first place or that your new skills are directed to doing the right thing. Faith is a very effective knife with two sharp sides and the probability is 50% for satisfying your desires. Critical thinking is also a knife with two sides but they are relatively blunt and the wounds can be reversed and healed; man can learn and develop with critical thinking but faith is definitely lethal when applied against the rational mind.
Since time immemorial, man knew that when he named an object, a feeling, or an emotion then whatever was named started to exist to him and acquired real value. After naming came the desire to define what was named along with the necessary constraints, limits, and boundaries in order to control the urge for classifying, categorizing, and putting everything that was defined in the proper slot. Naming created an entity in the mind but it required a definition to attribute connotative values. Thus, a civilization that borrows definitions has forsaken the spirit of its civilization.
It all started with a desire for giving individual values to existing things, living things, the surrounding, and the universe. It ended with man creating the science of law and order. The ultimate science was establishing mental paradigms that the whole community should believe in regardless of individual reflections; failing to do so result in ostracism as an individual unfit for the unity, safety, and security of the tribe.
Everything in this universe is in waiting. Light is in waiting for man to decide how it should be; it would be wave and it would be particle and it would be a combination of anything that man set up his experiments to discover. Light can have a fixed speed or changing speed. Particles in atoms can rotate around a fixed boundary or be in three places at the same time or they might not. The Universe is in waiting how man wishes it to have started, existed, developed, transformed, and how it will end. The particles, light, and the universe are not affected and don’t care but our mind is.
God is in waiting; He is waiting for man to get his mind straight of what and who is God; He can be the compassionate, the forgiving, the cruel, the neutral, the all knowing, the pre-destined future actions of man, or the free-willed man. God is in waiting to satisfy the wishes of man. The sets of moral values are in waiting; they are waiting for your conscious to decide what is right and what is wrong. As long as man is in the conceptual phase then there is no problem: man can clap his hands or rub the magical lamp and every wish would be accorded.
Man survived in the paradigm that the sun revolved around earth and he survived when earth revolved around the sun. The universe didn’t care but the quality of life might have been affected since what exists is the making of man’s mind. If you feel confused about a theory or a concept or an opinion just recall the fundamentals of the game: man set up the boundaries, the conditions and the constraints. Decide to change the parameters of the game and your mind will see another universe and live happily in another universe; the universe does not care. It is your individual right to change parameters in the game; remember though that the concept of individual right is related to personal investment in time, energy, and dedication; individual right is also atrached to responsibility and sacrifices or you have to check in mental hospitals.
Once man crossed the conceptual to its applications in the real existence (like dropping atomic and hydrogen bombs and affecting the equilibrium of the atmosphere), once man desired greed for greed’s sake then man has to pay for crossing the red line. Man tempers with Earth and the universe for crazy needs not related to survival of the species and the real world goes into smithereens. The game has crossed the limits of the virtual. Man can still clap his hands for a time; let what we wish for be of values
