300

300 brave Spartans defeated the Persian evil empire and in the process saved the civilization. Two assumptions; two lies!

Xerxes was the king of Archaemenid Persia whose founder, Cyrus the Great - Xerxes’s grandfather, gave the world its very first charter of human rights, the Cyrus Cylinder (a replica of the cylinder is kept at the UN headquarters near the entrance to the Security Council).

Greeks did not save the civilization and democracy by defeating Persians. These are Herodotus’s assumptions, readily accepted in the West, and recycled again by Hollywood. There are no facts available to support such claim. Greece had its own democratic traditions, even though the Greek democracy and its benefits were limited to and enjoyed by a selected few. Persia had its own charter of human rights, which more than 2200 years later were used by America’s Founding Fathers in creating the Bill of Rights. Recasting the Battle of Thermopylae into a clash of civilization between Western democracy and Eastern savagery is recycling an old lie and in the process spreading racism and ignorance, especially in a world suffering from both.

Warner Bros. studio tells us that 300 is a work of fiction and loosely based on an historical event, and it is not meant to disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political statement. This is precisely what they have done!