Quote Originally Posted by Supreme Shogun
http://www.ancientmacedonia.com/alexander.html
I'm sorry, but those are propaganda stuff (and yes, I did take the time to look through it).

1) The author fixates on the word "Macedonia" and takes both the meaning of ancient Makedon, a Hellenic state, and the modern FYROM, which is a modern Balkans National state. This confusion is fatal. When ancient writers wrote about Makedon, they wrote about it in the same way that they wrote about Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse; each of which are seperate political entities in their times, often with distinct characteristics, but part of a greater Hellenic cultural group that Western studies constitute as "Greek." So it is that when they wrote about the Spartan king's invasion of Asia Minor, it was written with the Spartans in mind, and not Athenian.

Prior to Philip Makedon was a relatively weak border state; his victories mirror, say, Genghis', in uniting different peoples, states and the like, into one powerful force. Do you think the Mongols are made up purely of "pure" Mongols?

2) Why you Balkans countries hate each other is not relevant to the historical study. Period. I'm afraid if it sounds hard then because modern politics have absolutely no bearing upon scholarly discussions on historical issues.

Of course the Athenians like Demosthenes despised Philip. They were deprived from the power they deemed as theirs. The Spartan hegemony was equally as despised by the Athenians (and Thebans, and so on) -- if it's less then it's because their grip was less strong.

Another point: late 1800s rhetoric were driven largely by Nationalist motives, and weren't exactly reliable as second sources pointing out to claims of antiquity.

3) The research is crap. Not only that it is not peer-reviewed, its tone borders that of racism in trying to associate modern Greeks with a "sub-saharan" ethinicity, as if to make out that black -- sub-saharan -- is somehow inferior, and that the Greeks, being made to be such, are inferior.

That and when you take into mind the fact that the region went through so many serious catastrophes, wars, and migrations, the assertion of some sort of majority direct-descendants is implausible. From the "barbarian" migrations and pillaging of the late Roman Empire to the domination of the Ottomans, if there was even a single ancient Macedonian ethnic entity in the first place they would've gone through a great many diasporas already.

4) "Greek Racial Discrimination against the Macedonians in Northern Greece," whether that claim is true or not, does not bear relevance to whether or not a modern FYROM citizen is Alexander's direct great-great-great-great...grandson.

5) Simply a conclusion drawn from other points, of which I've argued against already.

By the way, on a side note: does it matter that much that your country has to be directly descended from Alexander's Empire? Quite frankly, when considering how half the National Epics of the Southeast Asian countries are actually variations of the Indian Ramayana of one form or the other, and that none of them went to war over who could claim direct descent from Rama, I find this a rather ridiculous squabble.