Video Title: Why Old Age Makes Us Like Children Again—But Wiser. Source: Off The Left Eye. Date Published: May 11, 2026.
May 9, 2026
The Migration of Myths And The Cross-Cultural Participation In Shared Divine Truths
An excerpt from, "Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion" by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Orbis Books, 1989, Pg. 6 - 11:Wilfred Cantwell Smith, (July 21, 1916 – February 7, 2000) was a Canadian Islamicist, comparative religion scholar, and Presbyterian minister. He was the founder of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Quebec and later the director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions. The Harvard University Gazette said he was one of the field's most influential figures of the past century. In his 1962 work The Meaning and End of Religion he notably questioned the modern sectarian concept of religion.. . .Smith pointed out that terms for major world religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shintoism did not exist until the 19th century. He suggested that practitioners historically did not view their practices as "religion" until cultural self-regard prompted them to see their practices as different from others. For Smith, the modern concept of religion emerged from identity politics and apologetics.Through an etymological study, Smith argued that "religion" originally denoted personal piety but evolved to mean a system of observances or beliefs, a shift institutionalized through reification. He traced this transformation from Lucretius and Cicero through Lactantius and Augustine, with the term "faith" predominating in the Middle Ages. The Renaissance revived "religio," which retained its personal practice emphasis. During the 17th-century Catholic-Protestant debates, religion began to refer to abstract systems of beliefs, a concept further reified during the Enlightenment, exemplified by G.W.F. Hegel's definition of religion as a self-subsisting transcendent idea.
My task in this introductory chapter is to help us become more aware of this truth; or simply to remind us of it. The unity of humankind's religious history is obvious, once one sees it. We have, however, been assiduously trained not to see it. Even more strongly, we have been pressured not to think it; and not to feel it. Yet today it beckons our minds. I cannot, of course, at best do more than hurriedly suggest it and partially illustrate it, in one brief presentation here. An ambition of mine has for some time been to try my hand, before I die, at writing a world history of religion in the singular: century by century, rather than in the more customary fashion of system by system. For the moment, we must content ourselves rather with a perspective opened up by two or three, I hope illuminating, examples.
First we turn to Russia in the nineteenth century, to the figure of Leo Tolstoi. As is well known, this intense and brilliant aristocrat underwent in mid-life a drastic spiritual conversion. After a somewhat dissipated youth, and then for a time the career of an army officer, he had become a relatively well-to-do landlord and illustrious writer; then, in what seemed a sudden right-about-face, he turned, in a dramatic renunciation, from worldly success to an ascetic life of non-violence, poverty and social service. It was a religious conversion of a fairly classic pattern. Behind him lay sufficient fame, and within him sufficient power, that the move had considerable repercussion.
This shift by Tolstoi from the worldly life to the spiritual, by which his personal religious crisis was resolved, appeared sudden. Yet it may be recognised as the product of profound forces that had for long been operating in his mind and personality. In his subsequent Confessions, widely circulated, he indicates that the conversion was crystallised rather suddenly by his reaction to a transparent fable from the Lives of the Saints. Clearly the entire process was enmeshed in the large context of his ambivalent but deep relations to the Church and to the whole Christian complex, most conspicuously his study of the Gospels, as he makes clear in his powerful writings produced at about this time: his attacks upon institutionalised Church and State and his exalting of the humble and meek. This one particular fable, however, seems to have served as a catalyst. In this tale, the human condition is portrayed as like that of a man who, fleeing from a furious beast, falls into a well and is held from dropping into the jaws of a devouring dragon below only by clinging to a bush that will, he sees, presently inevitably give way, since it is being nibbled at by two mice, one white and one black, that go round and round and slowly but relentlessly gnaw at its roots. The two mice are day and night; the bush, which tastes sweet at first but soon loses its savour, is one's worldly position; man knows that he or she must in due course die.
This myth, or parable, evidently made a profound impression on Tolstoi, quite changing the course of his existence. He had come to find his life hauntingly vacuous: meaningless despite his position, wealth and fame. His readiness to turn his back on his worldly goods, and to start afresh by going forth into the world in ascetic piety, was given form by this particular fable and triggered as he accepted it for himself. Of it he writes in his Confession, 'This is no fable. It is a real unanswerable truth.'
Our reason for noting this tale is that it formed part of a complex that had indeed had an altogether remarkable power; not only in Tolstoi's life, but in that of many thousands, if not millions, of others. It came to him from Christian hagiography, in an account of the lives of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, to use their Latin names. This story, still alive and effective in nineteenth-century Russia, had there and elsewhere a striking---one could almost say, stunning---history.
Throughout mediaeval Christendom it had been extremely popular: more influential than nowadays we can readily conceive. Indeed, it is hard for our non-ascetic and literarily cluttered minds to credit the onetime widespread prevalence of such a legend. The Russian tale was taken from an early Greek version, from which had come also a Latin, which in turn spread of course in Western Europe. Among other Slavonic languages into which the tale was rendered, and in which it became popular, were Czech and Polish. The West had vernacular versions not only in Italian, Spanish, French, German, and the like, as well as Swedish and Norwegian, but also in, for instance, Icelandic, in which there was a translation as early as about 1204. The mediaeval Christian consciousness was in no negligible part formed by this story. Its central theme is the renunciation of worldly power and wealth by a young prince, Josaphat, who, under the influence of the preaching of an otherworldly hermit, Barlaam, is baptised a Christian, abdicates his throne, and goes off into the wilderness in ascetic piety. He has left the world of pomp and pelf and worldly power to seek instead moral and spiritual truth.
Although the story as presented is explicitly Christian, the scene is set in India. Josaphat is portrayed as an Indian prince, converted by Barlaam, a Sinai desert monk.
The Greek version, underlying, as we have said, virtually all the Christian mediaeval ones, east and west, was for long attributed to John of Damascus. It is now known, however, to have been produced rather in the eleventh century on Mt Athos by a Georgian monk; and to have been taken by him from a simpler Georgian rendering, of the tenth or more probably the ninth century.
It was the Georgians - that 'Christian nation of the East' - who had turned the story into a Christian tale.
Their original, however, was Islamic. They had taken the story from a Muslim source, circulating in Arabic. The motif was the same: Muslim piety also at that time was receptive to an otherworldly spirituality articulated in a tale of a wealthy prince who turns his back on the material world to go out in search of salvation in devout asceticism. The Arabic version itself maintained a long and widespread popularity in the Muslim community. For example, in the nineteenth century an edition was lithographed in Bombay, and the new Ahmadiyyah movement in Islam took it up and adapted it for its own purposes. One may note in passing also that, alongside the continuingly prevalent popularity of the Muslim Arabic version, from the Greek rendering of the Georgian Christian modification of this tale there came also later a Christian Arabic version, which circulated among Christians in the Near East.
The story was not, however, original with the Muslims. Rather, they gave it an Islamic form; but they had got it in Central Asia from the Manichees - that fascinating community which for some centuries in Western Asia established itself, grew and flourished, and looked for a time as if it might prove to be one of the most expansively successful of the world's religious movements. Theirs was a syncretising movement; and it is not surprising to discover that they in turn had incorporated into their spiritual lore from Sogdian, Middle Persian and old Turkish sources this particular story, along with others, from the Buddhist movement, which in the first half of the first millennium A.D. had in missionary zeal firmly penetrated Central Asia.
For the legend is indeed a Buddhist one. It was fundamentally the story of Siddhartha Gautama and his setting forth from his palace home, having turned his back on family, wealth and worldly power to go off in search of enlightenment. He became 'the Buddha' on gaining that enlightenment under the Bo tree; at the time of his Great Renunciation he was, not yet a Buddha, but a future Buddha, or 'Bodhisattva'. This word appears then in the Manichee versions as Bodisaf, in the Arabic version as Yudasaf, in the Georgian as lodasaph, in the Greek as loasaph, and in the Latin as Josaphat.
The particular form of this Buddhist story that gave rise to the wide-spreading tale is itself an amalgam, partly found in a text known as the Lalitavistara, composed in Sanskrit in the fourth or perhaps the second century A.D. The Mahayana movement had picked up the motif, and presently carried it also to China and Japan.
The story of origins does not stop here, however. The particular fable with which we began, that of the man in the well with the circulating black and white mice nibbling away at his precarious hold on life, a tale that had become incorporated into the Barlaam and Josaphat legend, and which struck Tolstoi with symbolic force, the Buddhists had added to the story of their own saviour. They picked it up for incoporation from either a Hindu or a Jain source. For both these communities are known to have made use of the fable, in their own spiritual teachings.
There is some suggestion that it may ultimately have had a pre- Aryan origin.
Let us, next, supplement our following back of the complex and rather astonishing career of this story by retracing our steps, forwards. From its prevalence in the Muslim world it spread then also to Jewish circles. Abraham ben Hasdai in Barcelona in the early thirteenth century produced from the Arabic, with appropriate adaptations, a Hebrew version, and this became widespread in the Jewish world. Of the Jewish tale, the sixteenth century saw a Constantinople edition, and an Italian; the eighteenth, German and Polish. Also in the eighteenth century a German translation appeared, followed by another German paraphrase; and as recently as the nineteenth century it re-emerged in a Yiddish version.
We may, however, push the matter still further. Although it is entrancing to discover that Tolstoi, in nineteenth-century Russia, had his spiritual life given shape by a story that we can trace from the Jains, and perhaps from pre-Sanskritic India, and although it is also significant that his writings about his conversion, although suppressed for a time within Russia, were published in Geneva and translated into most Western languages and circulated far and wide, none the less the story does not end there. It is not merely a question of the West's being influenced from the Orient, a situation that has marked its religious history for long. Also striking is that at the turn of this century, in London, a young and brilliant Westernising intellectual from India, who had come there to study British law, met such works of Tolstoi's and was in his turn profoundly stirred by them. His name was M. K. Gandhi.
The impact made on the young Gandhi by reading Tolstoi was great; not only in the sense that it hit him hard at the time, but also in that it changed the course of his life also, with consequences ramifying throughout his career and ultimately throughout the world. He did not immediately abandon 'the world.' He did turn to a concern for service to others; for spiritual inwardness; and for moral purity and ascetic discipline. He read the Bhagavad Gita first in London, in English. In South Africa, somewhat later, when the welfare of his fellow Indians took precedence for him over his own career and other concerns, he established near Johannesburg as the embodiment of his then vision what he chose to call Tolstoy Farm. For a time, Tolstoi's influence was perhaps as decisive in Gandhi's thinking and feeling as that of any one thinker. No doubt over the years, not least after he left England and later South Africa and settled once more in India, he turned more and more back to his own Indian tradition, in a complex way both Jain and 'Hindu': and there (and in the influence that of course he had consciously and unconsciously absorbed from it as a child) he rediscovered nurture for, deepening of, and elaborations from, his in one sense new spiritual and humane orientation. Yet, as with Tolstoi, and with others, a particular matter had served as a catalyst for spiritual capacity deep within him, long tacitly developing, and for spiritual response to an ancient tradition round about him. One might almost say that he spent the rest of his life as it were repatriating to India and exploring the Indian basis of and articulations for the impetus and aspiration of a style of moral living that India as a whole had never lost but for which Europe had at a given moment supplied him with the activating symbol --- a figuration that Europe itself a millennium or so earlier had borrowed for its own spiritual life, and whose dynamic he was now, as it were, taking back home.
We should seem, then, to have come full circle: from India to India via Sogdiana, Baghdad, Georgia, Mt Athos, Kiev, Geneva, London and Durban.
The circle does not stop spinning, however. Gandhi's most important twenticth-century disciple, it has been suggested, is perhaps Martin Luther King, whose non-violence both as a formulated ideal and as a deep character orientation he learned in substantial part from Gandhi.
May 4, 2026
"The Red Baron" Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten On The Success of The China Model
Apethorpe Palace, home of Tudor and Stuart monarchs, now the property of Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten, and made available for public tourism in July and August.
Jean Christophe Iseux, Baron von Pfetten zu St. Mariakirchen (born 11 November 1967 in Lyon), is a diplomat, academic and landowner.
Pfetten was the first European appointed as member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at local level.
Pfetten hosted a series of private meetings on Iran's nuclear programme attended by top military commanders from Iran and Israel as well as senior officials from the P5 nations.
. . .Pfetten received his BSc and MSc (Physics and Chemistry) from the University of Strasbourg, and, his Dipl. Eng. Geophysicist from the Institut de Physique du Globe (admissible to the Ecole Normale Supérieure) and thereafter won a European Erasmus scholarship. In 1989 he patented two inventions in the fields of nuclear submarine and of hydraulic fracturing which he presented at the SPE (Society of Petroleum Engineers) Production Operations Symposium on April 7–9, 1991 in Oklahoma, USA. In the same year he received a master's degree in management studies from Templeton College, Oxford University and a Master of Philosophy in international relations from Trinity Hall, Cambridge University. In 1992 he attained a master's degree in political science from the University of Bonn.
. . .Pfetten currently holds non-executive positions on the boards of several multinationals. Pfetten has been credited with attracting around 2% of total foreign direct investment into China since 2002.
. . .The Financial Times, Newsweek and The Spectator reported that between June and October 2013 Pfetten organized two rounds of back-channel diplomatic meetings on the issue of Iran's nuclear program. The first round, hosted by the Institute for East West Strategic Studies and held at Green Templeton College, Oxford, brought together senior Chinese and Israeli officials. A second, more confidential round of talks, hosted by Pfetten in his French chateau, was moderated by former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke and French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie. Attendees included Major General Huang Baifu, vice chairman of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies; a former chief of general staff of the Iranian Air Force; as well as General Doron Avital, chairman of the Israeli Knesset's Security and Defense Committee. Pfetten told The Financial Times that the "Track II" meeting was "aimed at persuading Beijing to take a more pro-active involvement in the Middle East" and emphasized 'the willingness of China and the US to work hand-in-hand in resolving the Iranian nuclear issue.'
Apethorpe Palace, formerly known as "Apethorpe Hall", is a Grade I listed country house, dating to the 15th century, close to Apethorpe, Northamptonshire. It was a "favourite royal residence" for James I. After restoration by English Heritage the house was sold in 2015 to Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten as his "private residence", under an arrangement where it is "open during July and August for pre-booked tours only", these managed by English Heritage.
An excerpt from, "Red Baron's Jacobean Apethorpe Palace marks its rebirth with party" by Maev Kennedy, The Guardian, June 13, 2016:
Just 18 months after Jean Christophe Iseux, Baron von Pfetten, spent £2.5m on a house with 48 bedrooms but no running water, he has decided to give a little party. A few score of his closest friends, including the Duke of Kent, are invited for champagne, music and dinner on Tuesday evening, with entertainment by the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
. . .Von Pfetten, a diplomat, Oxford academic and champion foxhound breeder, has been nicknamed “the Red Baron” for his years as an adviser to the Chinese government on everything from inward investment to Iran’s nuclear programme; the Chinese guests will include a government member and the head of an oil company.
. . .The house served as a borstal for much of the 20th century until it was bought in poor repair by a Libyan businessman, Wanis Mohammed Burweila, said locally never to have spent a single night there. He left abruptly, never to return, after the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher at the Libyan embassy in 1984.
The house only survived through the heroic efforts of the elderly gardener, and the caretaker, George Kelley. Their salaries stopped but they kept the grounds in check, patrolling the house, chasing off vandals, putting buckets and saucepans under leaks, collecting dead pigeons and blocking up broken windows. Despite their efforts, the house seemed doomed to join the long roll call of lost mansions until the government finally stepped in to save it. Kelley, who was awarded an MBE in 2008 for his efforts, has now retired but returns most days to walk his dog in the grounds.
Von Pfetten insists Apethorpe will be a family home but not a closed world, and has signed an agreement to admit the public for 50 days of each of the next 80 years – this year by guided tours in July and August.
An excerpt from, "Democracy in China" by Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten, Xinhua, March 7, 2023:
The re-emergence of China as a considerable source of economic and political power in the international sphere, the disturbances to Western democracy, and the attempt of various people to re-establish something akin to the Cold War between the West and the East, make it essential, if we are to avert another world catastrophe, that we understand each other better. In particular, the West needs to understand how China works today.
China and the West are deeply different in their culture and history. Western thought is based on a monotheistic tradition, derived from Christianity. There is one God, and religion consists of a bundle of elements, including ritual, dogma, eschatology and ethics. In Asia, on the other hand, there is no such bundle.
At the heart of the difficulty to understand China through a Western lens is the difference in logic between the West and the East. In practical terms, Western logic gives the Western world a Judeo-Christian principle of right and wrong (or black and white, with few shades of grey), while Eastern logic gives China a Confucian "Doctrine of the Mean" (principle of harmony with many shades of grey, and little that is black or white), where everything is in a transitional state of becoming (yin and yang).
Western social structure is based on extreme individualism, particularly in the Anglo-sphere, as opposed to the group-based system of China where family comes before the individual -- the individual still being respected within the group.
There are many other deep differences. The basically competitive and aggressive, militaristic world of the West, with constant wars, struggles and fights, is totally different from the tradition of China based on harmony, the avoidance of war if possible, and collaboration rather than competition (Sun Tzu).
. . .The multi-party system is difficult to apply to China for reasons to do with stability. China has experienced many appalling civil wars, invasions and outside imperialist pressures. This means that it is incredibly difficult to create a system that holds together a population of almost 1.4 billion people, extending over an area as large as Western and Eastern Europe and Western Russia combined. China is also culturally hugely diverse, with many minorities and many languages.
China's 2,000-year-old imperial and bureaucratic system, established by the first Qin Emperor in 221 B.C., is being replaced by a new system, which combines old and new. This is being done through consultation within the wider society at every level of the administration and with lively debates among intra-party factions. The process answers the modern principle of multi-party representation. I have witnessed this process during my time sitting at the CPPCC in Changchun, where wide-range consultations with local farmers were conducted at a grassroot level before any changes to internal directives were implemented relating to China's entry into the WTO.
. . .The Western system needs to be re-thought in the age of the Internet, heightened globalization, multiculturalism and massive technological and social changes.
The CPC's historic mission is to accomplish the rejuvenation and modernization of the Chinese nation, building-up the CSCDS to become a model that works for China, is not a threat to the world, and provides basic human rights for all. While many Western countries privilege "liberty" and individual rights, in China it is different.
More communal and less nebulous "rights" seem more important -- the rights to enough food, housing, jobs, security, peace, health, education -- and hope for the future. These are what the Chinese government has provided at an amazing pace over the last 40 years. It is not surprising, that the trust in the Chinese government by the people over the period 2016-2021 was over 90 percent, whereas it was below 40 percent in the United States, according to recent Pew Research Center polls.
Video Title: GLOBALink | CPC's ability to meet people's needs contributes to its success: expert. Source: New China TV. Date Published: October 11, 2022.
Video Title: China Insights - Jean Christophe Iseux von Pfetten. Source: youcafoscari. Date Published: December 18, 2015.
May 3, 2026
Late Merovingian France
by Paul Fouracre and Richard A. Gerberding, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1996.
Richard A. Gerberding is professor emeritus and former director of classical studies at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He taught Latin and Ancient History courses at Willamette University between Fall 2013 and Spring 2015.
Gerberding's early studies were in psychology but he became dissatisfied with the subject and switched to history which he felt offered a greater insight into human nature. Later, he was one of the founders of The Society for Ancient Languages.
Gerberding wrote the entries for "Gregory of Tours" and "Fredegar" in The Encyclopedia of Medieval France (Garland Publishing, 1995) and on "Pippin the Short" in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Germany (Garland Press, 2000). He wrote the chapter on "The Later Roman Empire" in Volume I of The New Cambridge Medieval History (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Paul J. Fouracre is professor emeritus of medieval history at the University of Manchester. His research interests relate to early medieval history, the history of the Franks, law and custom in medieval societies, charters, hagiography and serf-lord relations in the eleventh century. His recent work on the cost of the liturgy, focusing on the social and economic effects of providing "eternal light", is a study of the interplay between belief and materiality.
Fouracre was co-ordinating editor of Early Medieval Europe from 2005 to 2009 and editor of the first volume of The New Cambridge Medieval History (2005). From 2014 to 2017 he was editor of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. He is a Member of the Chetham Society, serving as a Member of Council since 2004 and as President since 2005.
Description of "Late Merovingian France: History and hagiography, 640-720":
This collection of documents in translation brings together the seminal sources for the late Merovingian Frankish kingdom. It inteprets the chronicles and saint's lives rigorously to reveal new insights into the nature and significance of sanctity, power and power relationships. The book makes available a range of 7th- and early 8th-century texts, five of which have never before been translated into English. It opens with a broad-ranging explanation of the historical background to the translated texts and then each source is accompanied by a full commentary and an introductory essay exploring its authorship, language and subject matter. The sources are rich in the detail of Merovingian political life. Their subjects are the powerful in society and they reveal the successful interplay between power and sanctity, a process which came to underpin much of European culture throughout the early Middle Ages.
Slander Comes Before The Slaughter: From Ancient Rome And Medieval Islam To Modern Israel And Global Government
"In the summer of 782, ‘4500 Saxon prisoners were beheaded on a single day at Verden on the River Aller in northern Saxony, on the orders of Charlemagne, King of the Franks.’ So, bluntly, reported the author of the Royal Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be venerated as a saint, and also, with more historical justification, celebrated as the founder of both France and Germany. The annals made the beheadings at Verden known to a wide audience just as Germany’s identity was becoming contentious; Charlemagne’s reputation survived because the Saxon victims were thought to have been pagans, their fate necessary to his Christianisation of Saxony. By the 18th century, however, that no longer washed. French as well as German writers were appalled by the barbarian warlord whom Voltaire called ‘a thousandfold murderer’, and in the 19th century the events at Verden made Charlemagne a problematic hero for German nationalists. The issue was revisited by historians in the 1930s. To those, mainly northerners, who denounced the brutality, others, often southerners, replied that the exemplary punishment was justified by its outcome. Non-historians took sides as well. While Himmler put up a monument to the Saxon dead, Hitler forbade his chief ideologue, Rosenberg, from calling ‘a hero’ like Charles the Great ‘the butcher of the Saxons’, adding that ‘without violence, no one either in Charles’s times or in ours could have brought together the German peoples with their thick heads and their particularities.’
Charlemagne is still widely regarded by Western Europeans as a foundational figure. In 768 he inherited a Frankish kingdom covering modern France plus Belgium and Luxemburg, and extended it to include the Netherlands, much of Italy and most of modern Germany: by the time of his death in 814, he ruled an area almost exactly co-extensive with the original European Community. Scholars in all those countries have contributed to the huge modern historiography on Charlemagne. Aachen, where he made his capital from the 790s onwards, and where the Charlemagne Prize is awarded every year to the politician who has contributed most to European co-operation, is a site of memory for 21st-century Europeans. That his name is less well known in the UK is symptomatic of British isolation within Old Europe.
Yet Verden 782 stubbornly resists euphemism. Alessandro Barbero, in Carlo Magno: Un padre dell’ Europa (2000), notes that even before 782 the Franks were represented as new Israelites, and interprets the massacre as inspired by Old Testament precedents such as the slaughter of the Amalekites and Moabites. In Charlemagne (1999), a large book, Jean Favier mentions the event in a single line, without comment. Dieter Hägermann, in the still larger Karl der Grosse (2000), devotes four pages to exculpation. But German historians still differ sharply: what one recently characterised as ‘an orgy of violence’, another minimised by suggesting that the word decollare in the annals, meaning ‘behead’, was a medieval typo for delocare, ‘relocate’." - J. L. Wilson, 'Go away and learn,' London Review of Books, April 2004.
Barbarian. Infidel. Goyim.
Regardless of the term a conquering civilization uses to classify the outsider, the enemy, and the stranger, the effect is the same: mass slaughter.
In every imperial civilization, petty tribe, and religious cult, slander comes before the slaughter.
Even Christians, known for their religious piety and turn-the-other-cheek approach to violence, murdered pagans who did not yield to the Christian God wherever they found them. During their heyday they killed with the best of them. They built churches on the worship sites of their enemies. The transfer of sacred geological power to Christian hands was always a bloody event.
The state killers today don't need religion to wash their crimes away but they do need something very close to it.
The terms in fashion today by the pedophile ruling elites to denigrate their victims before the coming global slaughter are "useless eaters" and "terrorists."
The killing off of a majority of humanity is being dressed up with scientific reasoning and the lingo of state security.
Modern climate science and climate security have always been linked with mass killing policies. The engineering of the weather serves a multitude of purposes, but at its core it is about global depopulation.
The gay and trans agendas are also mainly about the worldwide campaign to achieve a massive reduction in the global population.
We saw during the manufactured Covid event that governments the world over are willing to kill their own populations by the hundreds of thousands at a time, especially the best and brightest in society.
And that drawn-up event was only the start of the global genocide. They learned a lot during that crisis which they will apply to the next one with greater precision and will.
What they learned is that modern societies adapt quickly and comply to new social rules and standards almost instantly.
In a matter of weeks businesses, shops, workplaces, and government offices were basically following the same script.
At the end of the day man is a social animal, and where the herd is directed to go, even off the cliff, is a simple matter. It takes a few words from positions of authority to change the direction of society. And if that fails, violence against a rebellious few can bring the herd back into line.
And we see this now most of all in a war-torn society like Ukraine, where the people in power are running away with loot to faraway islands while the large underclass of Ukrainians are being led to pointless deaths in eastern Ukraine.
In this case, the nearby enemy provided by the Russian threat was enough to secure early compliance from wayward Ukrainians, but the longer the war has gone on without success the greater the need for the captured Ukrainian state to sweep aside all pretenses and wage war against its own people.
In Iran, the turn towards tyranny happened quickly after the staged Revolution in 1979 and the subsequent war with Iraq. Wars allow for the consolidation of state power unlike anything else, which is why the state of Israel has been at war for its entire existence. Without constant war Israel wouldn't exist. It wouldn't know how to function in peacetime, without the eternal threat of enemies.
What would Israel be without Palestinians or Jews without Goyim? What would a Muslim be without the Infidel to cast aspersions upon?
Psychologically these cults and states wouldn't know how to operate. Slandering and slaughtering is all they have ever done.
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