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Terry Jones' Barbarians

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I had heard Jones series was more about American foreign policy than about ancient cultures (i.e., how a supposedly advanced superpower is culturally inferior to civilizations with whom it is at war).

...i watched it and that this was apparently about American foreign policy never crossed my mind, i think some americans tend to be oversensitive and selfabsorbed, you know not everything on this planet is about the US of A... ;)

 

Why? Including the Greeks in his "barbarian" musings is preposterous. The Greeks invented the word "barbarian," and among all their subject peoples, the Roman held classical Greek culture in high esteem.

He does explain that the Greek invented the word "barbarian" but also stressed the point that Romans had little use for the inventive Greek, one point he was raising was "name me one famous Roman mathematician", it just wasn`t the Roman thing to do, the Greeks at the time invented such crazy good stuff its amazing, all the Romans did with it was belittle it or made use of it for amusement, like freak gadgets...

 

...in anycase, as always, first watch it yourself and than judge, hear say is never a good thing, there is a reason why in hear say is dismissed in american court of law... ;)

 

cheers

viggen...

 

p.s. if you want a copy from Amazon i stick you one if you make a review... :)

 

cheers

viggen

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The reviewer pointed out how many Muslim committed atrocities they had overlooked in order to push their revisionist 'Muslims were more civilised than European Christians' manifesto.

A Daily Mail reader? :rolleyes:

 

It's actually historical fact, not fiction or revisionism, that the muslims/saracens were far more advanced than the often brutish 'Frankish' Crusading nations in many respects- street lighting, medicine/surgery, maths, architecture, social refinement and etiquette, etc.

 

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/effects-of-crusades.htm

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On 3/26/2011 at 6:03 PM, Hus said:

It's actually historical fact, not fiction or revisionism, that the muslims/saracens were far more advanced than the often brutish 'Frankish' Crusading nations in many respects- street lighting, medicine/surgery, maths, architecture, social refinement and etiquette, etc.

 

http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/effects-of-crusades.htm

 

No society exists in a vacuum. Remember, those areas of the Arabic Empire had previously been part of a greater Greco-Roman and Parthian-Sassanian axis of intellectual and cultural achievement. These ancient cultures and their intellectual traditions were subsumed by a conquering military force and its ideology.

 

Did these ancient traditions and driving intellectual forces immediately disappear with the advent of a new ideology? Of course they didn’t.

Edited by guy

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Well, I just sat through 4 hours of this. While I don't see any overtly negative allusions to modern foreign policy as has been alleged by some critics, I do see a horribly one sided revisionist agenda against Rome ...

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Possibly, though Rome herself was the greatest culprit in terms of 'biased' propaganda?

 

Maybe Terry was merely trying to unpick some of those entrenched myths?

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