วันศุกร์, ธันวาคม 09, 2559

The futility of Prayuth’s war on truth. What Prayuth can learn from a thousand-year-old tale of royalty





A new article from New Manda by ANDREW MACGREGOR MARSHALL


About a thousand years ago, a king called Cnut ruled a large swathe of northern Europe including Denmark, Norway and England. His father was the fearsome Sweyn Forkbeard, Viking monarch of the Danes. A description of him in a 13th century Icelandic saga says Cnut was a very handsome man, “except for his nose”, which was rather ugly.
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Cnut’s life is mostly forgotten now, but he remains famous for one incident that has been repeated in various forms over the ten centuries since his reign.
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According to Henry, one day King Cnut ordered his courtiers to carry his throne to a nearby beach. He sat facing the sea, and commanded the tide not to come in. But of course, the waves didn’t stop, and the tide came in, and soon Cnut’s royal ankles were under water. At this point, according to Henry, the slightly sodden Cnut proclaimed: “Let all the world know that the power of kings is empty and worthless and there is no King worthy of the name save Him by whose will heaven and earth and sea obey eternal laws.

The moral of the story remains the same. Kings are human beings just like the rest of us, and they don’t have any magical abilities or supernatural powers. Nobody can stop the tide coming in, and anybody who thinks they can is stupid....


Link for the whole article:
http://www.newmandala.org/futility-prayuths-war-truth/