SUPERSTITION!
AN INFLUENCE IN HISTORY(Investigator 43, 1995 July
In December 115 A.D. an Earthquake levelled Antioch. Trajan, Emperor of the Roman Empire, blamed the Christians. To placate the rage of the Gods he had them all massacred.
In 116 A.D. Trajan invaded Mesopotamia. The Parthian Emperor, Chosroes, in Bagdad, tried to stop Trajan by sacrificing 100 slaves to appease his gods. No Good. Trajan took Bagdad and Babylon, captured Chosroes' wives and daughter and treasure, and advanced to the Persian Gulf.
Then rebellions in Egypt, Israel, Cyrene and Syria occurred, took a million lives and forced Trajan to give up his recent conquests. All this was a much greater disaster than the Antioch Earthquake!
In the 16th century the Spanish destroyed the Aztec Empire in Mexico. One reason for the Empire's quick collapse was the vast resources wasted by Aztec religion and government in sacrificing tens of thousands of people every year.
In April 1942 the Japanese had the opportunity to capture Ceylon, Madagascar, the Suez Canal and control the Indian Ocean. The British defence of North Africa would have collapsed and allied positions throughout Asia undermined.
The opportunity, however, was lost in part because German and Japanese propaganda portrayed each as the superior race which made mutual support difficult. Hitler even considered sending 200,000 German troops to help the British against the Japanese! (S. Howarth, Morning Glory, pp. 274 - 278)
Racism had been known to he scientifically unsound and scientifically untenable since 1915. There seems to he no single gene or set of genes such that an alleged race differs in it to all members of another alleged race.
Eight months after that strategic mistake of April 1942 the tide of war turned against Germany and Japan!
On April 5 1945 Hitler sent four veteran panzer units away from Berlin to Czechoslovakia. Millions of other troops were left stuck in Italy, Norway, France, Denmark, and Latvia. And yet the Russians were about to hurl thirteen armies at Berlin!
Hitler and Goebbels (Minister for Propaganda) had consoled themselves with several astrological forecasts which predicted tough times until early April 1945 followed by an overwhelming German victory. (C. Ryan, The Last Battle p. 227)
By April 27 Berlin was a flaming holocaust. Half of all houses were rubble. Hundreds of thousands of Russian and Asian troops were streaming in on trucks, on tanks, on bicycles, on foot and even on horseback! Tanks crashed through barricades. Desperate battles raged in streets, buildings and suburbs. Berliners were dying at 10,000 per day and 5,000 women per day were being raped. As each suburb fell Russian troops lined up the tanks and artillery to level the next suburb. Sometimes their opposition consisted of 11 and 12-year-olds who had hastily been shown how to fire a rifle and then sent to stop them.
The "overwhelming victory" for Germany never came and the battle for Berlin ended on May 2.
Decisions and policies of government and military based on superstition and rejection of science are major features of history!
By rejecting known facts – for example that sacrificing people to appease gods is useless, that astrology is worthless, and that racist beliefs are nonsense – the decision makers have made colossal history-changing errors.
B M
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