What we're going to talk about today is the concept of a multicultural world in the 21st century. Now in order to understand the present and the future you need to understand the past. So we need to go back into the very dawn of history to get a perspective of what is and what is not the human experience. Unfortunately, in the 19th and 20th century, when white Western European Christian powers seized control in a horrendously bloody and brutal manner of most of the planet, the religious, political and cultural norms of white Western Christian patriarchal society were elevated to some kind of ultimate truth, some kind of final ultimate version of human history and human wisdom. Now this is just simply not true. So let's just take a brief tour of world history to get our facts straight.
ANCIENT EGYPT - THE FIRST MAJOR, HISTORICAL SUPER POWER
Now the earliest recorded major Empire in history is the old Kingdom in ancient Egypt. the point we will be making throughout this is to show that white Western Europeans are not the be-all and end-all in world history and in fact appear somewhat late in the game and do not play a very major role, certainly not a dominant role, until the last 200 years. So as we noted there was one major state or Empire, the old Kingdom of Egypt, and its successor kingdoms that evolved. There was also a kingdom in Babylon, the full extent of which is not entirely clear, but which did not last. That's where you get the laws of Hammurabi and so on and so forth. Now the kingdom of Egypt is very important as that goes really for 3000 years ago right up to the time of Cleopatra and the time when it was conquered by Rome. So that is probably the longest standing empire in history, a really major achievement in many ways, though it went through various incarnations and forms.
ASSYRIA AND PERSIA
Now the next major Empire that emerged was the Empire of Assyria and this is perhaps the first big superpower of the ancient world. The Assyrians got a rather bad press because of their tendency to deport people and by being rather savage and cruel in war, though it's not at all clear that they were anymore savage and cruel than say a country like America that incinerates people in cities and so on and so forth, massacre civilians in cities, and commit genocide against Native Americans and so on and so forth. But anyway, from many historians, the Assyrians got a bit of a bad press. But they did create an Empire stretching from the area around Iraq going to the Mediterranean and including Egypt. Now built on top of the Assyrian Empire and emerging as a true superpower in ancient history was the Persian Empire. The Persian Empire was a geopolitical revolution of the first order. It extended all the way from Greece and Egypt to Afghanistan and the Himalayan Mountains in India. Really an extraordinary achievement. Now unfortunately the way history is taught in the West, you'd never know this. The way history is taught in the West, you'd get the impression that the Greek states of Athens and Sparta were, my goodness, the most important states in the entire world. That just simply wasn't the case. They were nowhere, just nowhere remotely near the Persian Empire in terms of power and influence, and there's a lot of evidence we believe that the Persian Empire was a means by which Asian culture, Indian culture for example, permeated back and forth from the East to the West. The notion that Persia and Greece were involved in some kind of endless Cold War is also absolute nonsense. The Greek city states were often quarreling among themselves and some sided with Persia, and some didn't side with Persia. It was a very complicated situation, but there was a huge interchange of culture. That's why we do not think it's a coincidence that a lot of Plato's ideas are so close to those of ancient India. If it is a coincidence, it's a really mind-boggling coincidence. But again this doesn't quite fit the image on the west ruling the world and so on and so forth.
THE BIBLE AS AN UNRELIABLE HISTORICAL SOURCE
Now another problem with the study of ancient history is the ridiculous interpretation of ancient Israel as major power in ancient history. This is just absolute total and complete nonsense. There is zero, zero archaeological and historical evidence outside the Bible course, for events such as the exodus taking place. There is virtually zero archaeological and historical evidence outside the Bible that the kingdom of David and Solomon even existed. Indeed Israel really does not emerge as a significant power in the ancient world until the kingdom of Herod at the turn of the millennium. That's just the historical fact and Judaic religious ideas are really completely irrelevant to the ancient world until they are distributed through the library in Alexandria, more about which we will discuss later in about the third century BC. So these are some important historical realities that we need to keep in mind.
THE HELLENISTIC COSMOPOLIS
Now the next major world Empire that appears, after the Persian Empire, is of course the Greek empire of Alexander the great. Now see part of the problem here is that the ass backwards analysis of ancient history by modern so-called democracies in the West tries to reinterpret this as — oh Greek democracy must have marched over Persia — nothing can be further from the truth. Athens as a matter of fact sided with Persia in the great cataclysmic struggle that followed. Alexander the great despised Greek democracy and Greek democracy also basically kind of committed suicide having lost — started an imperialist plot and then lost the Peloponnesian war and most of the great minds of Greece despised Athens and democracy, but that historical fact doesn't quite fit modern concepts of how everything was supposed to work. Anyway, Alexander the great basically swept up what was left of democracy — which wasn't much — into the trashcan of history and set up an enormous Empire which basically took over the Persian Empire, it was known as the transition from the polis of ancient Greece democracy and all that, to the cosmopolis, the world state, where Alexander basically adopted a good part of the administrative and political ideas of Persia. Now when Alexander the Great died, succession planning was not one of his strong suits, since he was supposed to have asked been asked who he was leaving this big Empire to, and he was supposed to have whispered right before he died "to the strongest." Anyway, needless to say, there was a big power struggle after he died and two major Greek empires emerged. One was Ptolemaic Egypt, the other was much less well-known and in scholarship but equally important the Seleucid Empire, which in some ways more important, which stretched from the ancient Mediterranean all the way up to ancient India. Now the Greek invasion of India by Alexander the great triggered a lot of political activity in India leading to the creation of the first great empire in India, the Empire of Chandragupta the first, the so-called Mauryan Empire, and on this course was not a democracy, it was a totalitarian state, it was a racial totalitarian state. But that was the next big power that emerged.
THE RISE OF CHINA
Now about 100 years later you had a totalitarian revolution in ancient China, where the state of Qin, the Sparta of ancient China, crushed its opponents in an incredibly brutal manner and set up a totalitarian state, the genesis of the Chinese Empire — the state of China. So let's just get our facts straight here, that you had four great powers, you had Ptolemaic Egypt, the Seleucid Empire, the Mauryan Empire and the Empire of China. Now in the West at this time was the emergence of a highly militarized war state, the state of Rome, which did have democratic aspects and as time went on Rome became more and more powerful. By the turn of the millennium, Rome had conquered a good part of the Western Mediterranean world and under Caesar and Augustus Caesar, seized control of Egypt which was extremely significant. So that controlled the Mediterranean world and would later expand its power up into France, which was then called Gaul, and into the southern part of England. However, contrary to a recent documentary I heard on the Roman Empire — it said Rome ruled the ancient world — no it did not, at the time that Rome achieved perhaps the peek of its power under Trajan, there were not one, but four major empires in the world. There was the Roman Empire, there was a Parthian Empire which ruled from Persia to around Syria and there was a constant series of wars between Rome and Parthia, then there was the Kushan Empire in India, and then there was the Han dynasty in China. The point we're trying to make here is that the Western powers were not the dominant force in world history, that's just the way it worked, but this is not the way history is taught in Western schools.
THE OBSCURE CULT OF CHRISTIANITY TAKES OVER ROME
Now without going a lot of details in this thing, in 395 an obscure cult, of which...in the case of Jesus as in the case of the rest of the Bible...there is virtually zero evidence — this is a very well-documented time in ancient history — virtually zero evidence of the so-called Jesus story in any source other than the Bible. None. So that's kind of an interesting thing. But anyways, once this obscure cult seized control — when so-called Christianity seized control of the Roman Empire in the year 395 they unleashed a reign of terror the likes of which the world had never seen. So this created a model Christian state and everybody went to church and lived happily ever after? Well no, in the West it led to the wholesale collapse of the Roman Empire, in the East the Byzantine Empire continued. Now we're going to continue this lecture later, but the point we're trying to make here is that the idea that there was some white Christian patriarchy that was running things back from time immemorial is just nonsense. It's just absolute nonsense. And we will document how that this was not a major factor, not a dominant factor in world history until the last 200 years.