Quote Originally Posted by TWFanatic View Post
With all due to respect, getting angry over these issues only serves to dilute your own arguments TPC by making it a simple case of one pride and arrogance vs. another. You are certainly capable of either brushing those comments off or responding to them in a calm and detached manner. There are plenty of bloviators online and you can't bother to educate them all. I don't think Aemilius Paulus is an academic anyway.

I think that one of the major problems here is that many professors try to press their ideology upon their students. Anyone who doesn't comply is exiled from the academic community, resulting in a strong dogma in many corners. I cannot tell you how many grade reductions I received because of a refusal to comply with the "superiority of the west" nonsense espoused by, for instance, Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War and Carnage and Culture. I learned the hard way that losing my temper did me no good. Debating those persons in a civilized manner is far more effective, especially when the evidence is on your side as it is here.

All that said, the lack of educational freedom in Iran is even worse. One of my roommates fled Iran so that he did not have to join the army. He was only just learning of the Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanid empires because his former government forbid the teaching of pre-Islamic history. By forcing teachers to profess that everything before Islam was a dark and evil age, the dogmas of Iranian historiography are far more effective in suppressing the study of ancient Persian history than any feeble attempts by westerners.
You misunderstood the nature of my post. I realize that my previous entry had a very crude phrasing to it, but on the other hand it serves to prove that just because I am capable of composing an essay-like refutation, it does not mean I can't lose some steam composing a message which clearly conveys my distaste, without the crud or the convoluted bullshit. Allow me to disagree for a moment with your rationale; I have debated Islamic apologists for years and quite frankly, trying to argue with individuals who are very firmly indoctrinated in their set of beliefs, in a language beyond their comprehension emphasizes absolute futility. A historian who seemingly fails to convey his message to the unbeknown, it does not matter if he has written an impressive catalogue or accumulated some of the most recent scholarship, he will realize the wasteful shame of even bothering.

I don't get angry on the Internet; I do however get disgruntled at certain writings, and the fact is that this way, I can clean out the crud, and instead of giving some lengthy lecture where I enumerate some of the greatest achievements of the ancient Persianate cultures to the worldly heritage itself, I'm just simply putting a halt to the man's crusade in "breaking the silence of political correctness". What political correctness? Has he seen some of Hollywood's "epic" blockbusters lately? That is my point. I don't need to wear a shit-eating grin, or a fancy facade and get into abstract terms when I can cleanly, and bluntly say "Okay, well you are full of it and you have next to no clue what you are talking about, and add to it, it would take too fucking long to copy-paste a few articles for your enlightenment.". It also goes to show just how much courtesy I accord to his "politically incorrect" opinion.

As for the bogus historiography propagated by the Islamic regime of Iran, trust me, you don't even want to go there as far as I'm concerned. All I know is that for each time the dogmas that still are allowed to permeate in "western" scholarship and to poke us in the eyes, the Islamophilic demagogues get another opportunity for a really serious sucker-punch. We are talking about professors and lecturers getting laid off, severed funding, and single individuals being ostracized by the regime in a number of ways, either through persecution, suspended payroll or in a worst case scenario, murder. Nothing gets done, and Iran is virtually an embodiment of historical wealth in archaeological terms. It's like you're stuck in the middle of an ocean and you're suddenly getting thirsty, realizing there is not even a drop to drink!

People are wondering why there is almost nothing written left by the ancient Iranians, but the moment you say "Maybe Islam had something to do with it", whoa, it turns into blasphemy and instead, what happens. They'll think that the ancient Iranians never wrote anything to begin with and start to think of them as illiterate savages. Oh yeah, they apparently bothered to do some lengthy inscriptions on a fucking rock in some remote place in the middle of nowhere, but they didn't know how to write on parchments? Right! That makes sense, of course!

No. I'll stand by my words as they were initially given. If nobody likes it, well, it's really not my problem. All I know is that regardless of the tone or attitude I write in, I asked legitimate, albeit rhetorical questions.