Climate strikers should heed lesson of 1212 and not be lured by Pied Piper
While they may, in their self-absorbed delusional fashion have believed they were the first young people to stage a rally, in 1212 there was a crusade equally lunatic in ambition as the Climate Strike day, writes Piers Akerman.
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It’s a great pity that thousands of children were encouraged to play truant Friday because I had prepared a history lesson for them.
While they may, in their self-absorbed delusional fashion have believed they are the first young people to stage a rally, they certainly were not.
Before there were “woke” people, there were similarly obsessed groups.
They were called cults.
The immature have always been suckers for such outbreaks of mania.
In 1212, according to oral tradition and subsequent writings, there was a Children’s Crusade, equally lunatic in its ambition as the Climate Strike day participants.
It is understood that crusaders left areas of Northern France led by Stephen of Cloyes, and Germany, led by Nicholas.
According to the legend, the bands of children left their homes with the intention of peacefully converting the Muslim occupiers of the Holy Lands to Christianity though preaching.
Time and the frailties of record keeping have eroded the precise day-to-day details but the accounts seem to agree that bands of children reached Italy, where many were tricked and sold into slavery in Libya, others actually met with Pope Innocent III and were told to be good and go home.
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More recent research would indicate that the first movement was led by Nicholas, an eloquent shepherd, an early Greta Thunberg, who tried to lead a group across the Alps and into Italy in the early spring of 1212.
Paving the way for the equally fantastic predictions of the serially inaccurate mammologist Tim Flannery, Nicholas said the seas would dry when his followers reached the coast and they would be able to stroll across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land.
He was no Moses though. He was more of a Flannery. The sea level didn’t drop, it didn’t rise. It just lapped the shores as it had since the Mediterranean first filled up about 5.33 million years ago after what is known as the Zanclean flood.
Climate change. You can bet some people were drowned when the water surged through what are now the Straits of Gibraltar but it is unlikely there were any schoolchildren protesting the world’s greatest flood. It is unlikely there were any schools.
In the spirit of today’s youthful obsessives, Nicholas refused to say he was defeated and made a second attempt to rally more supporters in Germany.
He didn’t make it back across the Alps. They can get pretty cold at almost any time of the year and he perished.
Back in what was to become Germany, his father was apparently arrested and hanged under pressure from angry families whose relatives had died while following the child.
Those virtue signalling billionaires encouraging today’s kids to get out and shout might think about that. Algorithms can’t replace the real jobs lost because of the cost of subsidised alternate energy.
Stephen of Cloyes didn’t even make it out of France though he claimed to have a letter from Jesus for King Philip II.
Academics were apparently smarter then than now and a group from the University of Paris advised Philip to tell them to go home. Which the survivors did, tired, hungry and footsore.
It would seem there were generally more grown-ups in medieval times.
But that didn’t seem to stop the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper some 72 years later, if another fable is to believed.
It seems that Hamelin was suffering from a rat plague in 1284 and that the mayor promised a chap dressed in fairly brightly coloured clothing a large sum, about 1000 guilders, to get rid of them.
The piper accepted the contract and piped up a storm which attracted the rats out of the town and into the Weser River where they drowned.
However, the mayor reneged on the deal and offered 50 guilders to the piper who then whistled another tune and had the children of Hamelin following him, either to the Weser or to a mountain pass that led to Transylvania.
Either way they didn’t come home for dinner that night, or ever.
But the legend has it that there were three children left behind: one was lame and could not follow quickly enough, the second was deaf and therefore could not hear the music, and the last was blind and therefore unable to see where he was going.
They were able to tell the townspeople what had happened.
Today, they’d be censored for speaking out just as the ABC and the partially taxpayer-funded Conversation attempt to bar voices other than their own.
If some of these protesting children were a little brighter and not subjected to relentless propaganda by the education union, they would be aware that even the UN’s IPCC agrees that its often flawed modelling has found there is absolutely nothing that Australians can do which would have any effect on the climate, let alone global warming.
Perhaps some of the protest’s leaders might stop to ask themselves who benefits from their rallies?
It isn’t the nation, that’s for sure.
Maybe it’s the Chinese who have done a deal with the UN which permits them to build more coal-fired power stations which use fossil fuels — not all Australian by any means.
Have any of these useful idiots considered that their clamour for more solar power and wind generators isn’t helping Australian industry because the cost to business of these unreliable intermittent energy sources have made our manufacturing uncompetitive?
Adults didn’t get caught up in these scams for the simplest of reasons. Most of them knew better.
That’s why the current rush to follow idealistic brainwashed but naive children is both very stupid and extremely dangerous.