CASSANDRA
Cover of Hillary Bailey's PAN BOOK(1)
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Cassandra, the Trojan fortune teller, is a legend. Varying myths exist about her. They have one thing in common. Her predictions came out, but no one believed her.
When she foresaw trouble - that was quite often, it was a turbulent time - the future victims were often angry. And some try to cool their anger at the prophets of doom. She survived. Apparently, because her royal father cared much about this daughter. Revenge on the mischief messenger is repetitive stupidity. Many of those in power have since followed it. A call for volunteers to report a loss of a battle to a monarch as a courier was therefore usually unanswered.
Now, admittedly, we know a lot more about people's behaviour than she did at the time of the Greek heroes and their conquests. But I think at the time the beautiful, unhappy princess also knew her pappenheimers well. I'm sure that helped her make predictions.
I am not endowed with supernatural gifts, but I've learned a thing or two about mine's behavior. That is how I know, if a lot of people believe something, that belief is almost inexorable.
I am not just thinking of the 100 million bipeds who are convinced that the world is carried by some white elephants; or of Columbus' crew; who contrived mutiny not to fall off a flat earth. That was about 2000 years after Egyptian astronomers discovered the Earth was round. They had even measured the radius of our sphere at 5% accuracy.
The America discoverer himself, who knew about a spherical earth, thought that the circumference was half as large. That's why the Americans of the time were called Indians for centuries.
I was there when a Roman Pope recanted another stubborn
faith. That was nearly 400 years after judges at his church court imposed house arrest and publication bans on Galilei. He was not to mislead the people with his story of an earth orbiting the sun. That judgment was delivered on the basis of the testimony of the most learned Italian astronomers at the time. So you could say that it was in line with the 'settled' science. 400 years passed before a large herd was deprived of the wrong faith.
That made a big impression on me. Not because a Pope finally wanted to listen to me and my co-physicists, but that it had taken 400 years before it had come to that. And that after we have considered ourselves enlightened for centuries.
I warned the church prince at that
event. He told me he wanted to visit my country soon. I told him to prepare for tomatoes to be thrown at him. He asked rather surprised, tomatoes? I repeated, yes tomatoes; not stones. They don't do that usually in Holland. Maybe if you said something bad about gay people or abortion shortly beforehand, they may throw eggs. He laughed a lot and hoped to meet me again in the Netherlands.
I still wonder if he remembered when he was pelted with tomatoes by rioters in Utrecht. (For any evil-minded people, I should add that I have an alibi. During his visit I was staying in America far from Utrecht.) So this Cassandra scene of mine ended with laughter.
Now, after reading Hillary Bailey's novel(1) with yet another legend about her life, I realize I was lucky. I got off better in Rome than many of the aforementioned involuntary volunteers. And much better than heretical ancestors who were burned alive. My Pope's predecessors didn't start all of those fires themselves. That's what religious ambitoners did. They feared God's wrath for unpunished heretical sin. The victims, funnily enough, usually did not go beyond the fact that they believed that a Pope sometimes makes a mistake. Or that their other sins could not be redeemed by buying an indulgence.
Unfortunately, now I see other omens.
They warn me to look after a protective monarch. Because, as I wrote, I am not blessed with supernatural gifts, that requires explanation. The instructive events above suggest that people used to be dumber than they are now. However, it is not like that.
When Lenin and his companions set up a new state of salvation in 1917, he built on the teachings of learned societal scientists of his
time. From the most famous among them, Karl Marx, even the name of the state philosophy of that new Utopia is derived. (Although Marx himself was not happy with Vladimir's interpretation.)
Among the residents there were many who were not happy with the innovation. Those who resisted were killed by the proponents. Lenin's successor Stalin continued. He did not restrict his purges to those who actually resisted. It was also the turn of the disseminators of a deviant doctrine and finally even several millions, of which there was only a suspicion that they had the wrong faith.
Those events are pretty recent. And the happily sporadic believers still live among us.
About the same time not long ago, there were scholars, who expanded the doctrine of heredity with the idea that it also applies to human behavioral
characteristics. That belief infected societal thinkers in many European countries. Again, not necessarily the people on the sidelines. Their teachings found a lot of following.
Among them, it was a small step to attribute some misbehaviory of someone who was counted among a certain group on the basis of completely different characteristics. This time, Jews and Gypsies were the culprits. They were seen as the cause of the world's flaws. They were shunned. Their existence was made more difficult.
Hitler and his cronies used that faith to come to power. The victims were isolated first. He was going to purify the world. The consequences are known. Although many of his followers could not, or did not want to know, that the final solution resulted in extermination, we then experienced one of the worst killings that have plagued humanity.
With the Allied victory, it came to an end.
But my impression is that even the craziest faith has not gone away with that. Ideology is perpetually perpetuated.
Even in our time, faith in certain myths leads to massacres.
And fittingly in today's fashion, believers elevate them to "scientifically proven" truths.
Genetically, Palestinians are more original Jews than those in Israel. The Israelis are more strongly mixed with European, West Asian and African. Although, of course, an Arab or a crusader sometimes came along in the Levant, who sprinkled some seeds. The difference between the two groups was mainly due to adherence to faith by forced emigrated immigrants multiplying elsewhere. And by converting to Christianity and Islam of those left behind after the departure of the Romans. This experimentally confirmed, explosive conclusion by o.m. geneticists in Tel Aviv, accords historical revelations by historians such as Shlomo Sand(2).
Muhammad's cleverness in making unbelievers pay taxes and believers has helped a lot.
But in my view, it is a tragic, ideologically motivated struggle by Jewish descendants against Jewish descendants. How many deaths and displaced persons are the result of the rebutted myth that only the immigrants descend from the old Jewish population, I do not know. But the newly resented battle in May 2021 has already claimed the lives of more than 240 offspring. And before that, there were already several wars and uprisings with a multitude of dead. And the end is not yet in sight.
Summarising: Ideological contradictions, which are supposedly based on 'scientifically' obtained truths, are despicable. And that brings me back to the tragic Cassandra. Unfortunately, we don't have her picture, because she was very beautiful. Painters fantasized about her. A reproduction adorns the cover of Hillary's book(1), from which I derive the headline photo.
Today, there is a fervent scientific battle over the global
climate. One party claims to be certain. CO2 has been the cause of global warming since about 1880. The other doubts, or believes that more atmospheric CO2 has a barely perceptible effect. The majority of the population seems to have the first conviction. And governments, too. It is now the guiding ideology. The arguments for this can be heard on a daily basis in all public media worldwide.
The opposing party stands weaker in the debate. There is no unanimous answer to the question: If not CO2, what is? Yet the counter-arguments are thoroughly scientific. A good overview of it, written by Willis Eschenbach (in Dutch), was on the web this month.
I myself have largely made my considerations as an opponent public (some in Dutch others in English)
on a web site.
Many scientific disputes resolve in their own
circle. They hardly interest the general public and usually not the governments either. But in the climate battle, it is different. As in the examples in this essay, the followers cast themselves as world saviors. Not yet by punishing sinners, killing anti-communists, exterminating Jews and Gypsies, or driving Palestinians away from their homes, but by eliminating CO2 emissions. And that puts me in the plight of Cassandra. I predict that the CO2-hunt and the associated hasty energy transition will unlease a global disaster.
The prosperity and well-being of the population is due to sufficient energy. Poverty and hunger await without sufficient energy. Everything people do, eat, live, heat, transport and produce depends on that. And because wealth in the world is unevenly distributed, the poor will first die in the event of shortages. I foresee a genocide that has never been the same in history.
Predicting mischief was one brand of Cassandra, but the anger of her listeners the other.
For a while, I thought, oh come on. The shore will turn the ship around, and I'll wait to see how it ends and who's right. That is no longer the case. The first omens of a bloody ending have already appeared. In the Netherlands, judges have taken sides. World rescuers under Urgenda's name are recognized as such. And now the government is forcing draconian steps. Without such, she would be violating Human Rights.
The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is now putting a shovel on top of that. It has declared clubs, presenting themselves on behalf of humanity, admissible with their complaints. So far, procedural errors prevented that.
And the judges who will judge on their case have already shown themselves to be partisan in various public appearances. The item is: Is too little CO2-hunting a crime against humanity? The details about the course may be found here (in Dutch). The judgment of these magistrates is, in my view, inevitable (Cassandra-1). If there is a crime, there are criminals and accomplices. So my future verdict is also predictable. The CO2-arrest team can already prepare. The punishment for such offences is not light (Cassandra-2).
I am already isolated by my refusal of a corona
vaccination. Now comes the climate detention and then the Gulag? Or one of those English inventions from the Boer War, neatly called a concentration camp. That is still uncertain. But to my knowledge, the Dutch have not yet been vaccinated against Stalins or Hitlers. And there is already a so-called Rutte-Kaag virus floating.
In the past, there was still a small place in Europe on the North Sea where, for their refusal of faith, dissidents could hope for shelter, if they were very lucky. But since we have delivered the European climate pope and its likely topinquisitioner here, your Cassandra seems to have lost that possibility.
Who knows a suitable hiding place?
Nieuwegein, Netherlands
2021 05 22.
Notes.