Heroes

The most reliable way to be a hero in Western culture is not to be a great thinker, philosopher or artist but rather to wield a gun and die or kill in the name of your country. This is visible through the entire Western world including Islam. Ennobled violence is a foundational belief of European civilization. It pervades its movies, games, comic books.

Alexander the Great
Europeans love the Greeks but have a very strange relationship with them ideologically. Alexander the Great is important, but is merely a footnote in our history, with a distant Northwest king named Porus surrendering to Alexander the Persian. While Alexander was educated by Persians and was a Macedonian himself, Greeks are eager to claim him as their own. Alexander repeatedly prostrated himself before the Persian kings he conquered militarily - a sign of obedience to an order that does not equate military victory with absolute victory or even greatness.

 

The myth of Alexander the Great is actually perpetrated by another European conqueror who tapped into the changing winds in Europe. Rather than rely on the myth of one true God, the peoples of Europe began to delve into history - reviving old dead heroes like Charlemagne and retrofitting their original purposes to suit modern political agendas. Napoleon lusted over Egypt, a land that hadn’t been held in ‘European’ hands for quite some time - the last great European conquerors to do so being the Greeks through the reign of the Ptolemaic kings. These kings ruled over a large Egyptian populace, not quite of the people but not distant either, setting the tone for how the Mughals and other imperial powers saw themselves in India and other holdings across the world. Alexander was never revered before Napoleon revered him - there were no great statues or honorariums for the massive violence he caused in the name of a personal quest for glory (which Napoleon re-purposed as a national quest for dignity, then finally a civilizational quest for civility).

Columbus
Cover Christopher Columbus as worse than Muhammad because he sold little children in to sexual slavery