The Parable of Emperor Zigazagazoga

Long long ago and far far away there was a land called Yogania, whose ruler – officially at least – was King Sossidge the Dull.

Sossidge made a reasonable attempt at pretending to be competent, with a semi-convincing virtue-signalling display of caring for his subjects and their land.

But the truth was quite another matter. Like generations of his predecessors, Sossidge was entirely under the control of an evil magician by the name of Razahk the Unbelievably Malevolent.

This cunning and manipulative character, said to be more than 5,000 years old, circled the whole world three times a day and three times a night on his flaming magic carpet, casting dark spells of destruction and control as he went.

He had captured the royal lineage of Yogania, as he had so many others, by taking advantage of their congenital stupidity, pride, greed and sexual degeneracy.

In his hands, the Crown was nothing but a tool to enslave and rob the population – gradually Razahk deprived them of their land, taxed their dwindling wealth, wiped out their customs and corrupted their minds with trivia and vice, all the while hiding behind the “legitimate” façade of the monarchy.

He revelled so much in his power and superiority, sneering so smugly at all the little people he had fooled, that he became over-confident and careless about properly concealing his role.

As the population felt increasingly under attack from the Crown, which did not at all seem to have their best interests at heart, grumbling began to spread, along with rumours about the true nature of the regime.

When people watched Razahk flying in and out of the palace in a red blaze, they wondered exactly what the relationship between him and King Sossidge amounted to.

News of this dissatisfaction reached as far as the monarch himself and the next time Razahk visited, he asked him what he should do about it.

“Hmmm…” said the magician and the next day he came back with a printed pamphlet which he handed to Sossidge, with no explanation.

Scanning through the contents, the King was appalled to see that it seemed to consist of a detailed and accurate account of the truth, including his own appalling deviancies.

“Where did this come from?” he shouted, rising to his feet. “Who is responsible? We must track them down! Lock them up! Put them to death!”

But Razahk was laughing. “Don’t be a silly Sossidge”, he said. “I wrote it myself”.

“What?” spluttered the King. “Why? How? I don’t…”

“No, I don’t suppose you do understand, Sossidge, but you can trust your faithful benefactor. Just leave it to me”.

So Razahk had copies of the pamphlet surreptitiously distributed all over the place and soon the kingdom was burning with outrage and indignation.

When Razahk next flew into the palace, Sossidge could not conceal his panic. “Look what you’ve done!” he cried. “The people are turning against me! I’m done for!”

Razahk simply produced a bundle of papers and thrust it into the King’s hands.

“Here’s the speech you are just about to make from the Royal Balcony”, he said.

“But, but…” began the King.

“Don’t even bother, Sossidge” said Razahk and, poking him in the chest, ordered: “Just read the speech”.

The King’s Speech came to be regarded as a big moment in the history of Yogania, the high point of Sossidge’s reign, for in it he revealed in some detail that the subversive pamphlet was nothing but a hoax.

It contained undeniable falsehoods and internal contradictions that could be quickly confirmed by a re-reading of the text.

Public outrage at the behaviour of the King and the role of Razahk turned to anger at how they had been misled by the unknown pamphleteer.

Now his lies had been revealed to them, they concluded that the whole story about Razahk was obviously an untrue libel.

Razahk was very pleased with himself. “You see Sossidge, the pamphlet was not only fake, but doubly so, thus converting truth into its denial, if you follow my meaning”.

Sossidge didn’t.

The people of Yogania largely forgot about the whole incident and went back to thinking about the Tiddlywinks Premiership and the Great Weekly Raffle, accepting Sossidge’s assurances that their decreasing quality of life, health and happiness was due to changes in the upper atmosphere caused by their sinful thoughts.

But one day a traveller arrived in the capital city, who had fled his own country because of the ill effects of Razahk’s hidden rule, and very quickly realised that the same thing was happening in Yogania.

When he also heard the story of the “fake” claims made about the kingdom, he decided he needed to speak out.

He knew that he would be thrown into the dungeon if he spoke the truth, so he decided to communicate by means of a story.

On the day of the market, he climbed up on to the wall next to the public baths and announced that he was going to relay The Parable of Emperor Zigazagazoga.

“What’s a parable?” came a voice from the crowd that was gathering for the unexpected entertainment. The educational level of the Yoganian public had been deliberately lowered by Razahk over the years, to stop them having ideas above their station.

“A parable,” said the traveller, “is a story that is only true on the inside. It is a fiction that both hides the truth and reveals it”.

Beginning his tale of Emperor Zigazagazoga, he took care to make his account as superficially far from reality as possible, explaining that this ridiculously-named monarch had, ten thousand years ago, ruled over the people of the Moon.

He described how this ruler, like Sossidge, had been secretly controlled by another entity, but to muddy the waters, he described this as being a gang of crooked money-lenders.

The traveller described how the people of the Moon had been cheated and robbed and tricked by this gang, who used the Emperor’s prestige as a front for their own criminal activities.

And he also told of how rumours of this reality had started circulating among the people there.

The cunning gang had decided to put an end to this by sending an accomplice to pretend to have proof of the suspected ill-doing.

He turned up in Moon City with a giant telescope, which he said he was going to focus on a cosmic mirror at the end of the galaxy, which would reflect back images of past events on the Moon that had been speeding out into space at the speed of, naturally enough, light.

When people looked into the instrument, they indeed saw what appeared to be Emperor Zigazagazoga and the money-lenders counting piles of gold, raping children and stealing from poor peasants.

But as the Moon folk grew angrier and angrier at what was being shown to them, the Emperor himself strode up to the telescope – on the orders of the money-lenders.

He pointed to a mirrored glass tube that led from the instrument into a nearby house and, triumphantly flinging open the door, revealed a team of actors playing out the supposedly real scenes.

There was no cosmic mirror! The telescope man was a fake! The rumours about the Emperor and the money-lenders were all lies!

Life went back to normal on the Moon, nobody ever again had a bad word to say about Emperor Zigazagazoga and the money-lenders and they all lived happily ever after.

To a ripple of polite applause, the traveller concluded his tale and climbed down from the wall.

But, while he had been talking, spies in the crowd had sent word to the palace, and King Sossidge the Dull, sensing vaguely that he was being targeted by the strange story, sent his guards to arrest the man, before he could leave the city.

“You fool!” said Razahk to the King when he heard what had happened. “All you had to do was ignore him. When word gets around that he is in the dungeon, those idiots will start to think about what his story was trying to tell them”.

So that night Razahk had his henchmen allow the traveller to escape from the dungeon and out of the capital city.

He then had these same men slaughter three entire families who lived on the road from the dungeon to the city gate.

It was announced to the public that this madman had murdered innocent citizens in his bid to escape justice and the immediate reaction of the public was, as one might expect, great distress and rage at the foul deed.

But some started to think that something didn’t add up. How was it that the man had managed to escape not just from the dungeon, from which nobody had escaped before, but out through the always-guarded city gate?

And why, for that matter, had he been arrested in the first place?

These suspicions increased when Razahk, somewhat over-doing it, had his men paste up “wanted” posters for the “escaped” man, which described him as a “terrorist and liar”.

“Liar?” people asked themselves. “But he was telling a silly story. Nobody in their right mind would believe all that nonsense about the moon”.

They thought about the content of the story and the brightest among them started to see the connection with their own history and the incident with the fake pamphlet.

Their annoyance at having been manipulated was turned to fury by the dawning realisation that the King and Razahk were no doubt themselves responsible for the murders of the families blamed on the storytelling traveller.

As the mutterings increased and the atmosphere in the city and across Yogania became increasingly tense, Razahk began to feel alarmed that his tricks were no longer working as they always had.

He had King Sossidge make a new speech from the Royal Balcony, announcing that a mysterious new disease was afflicting the kingdom, which had been medically proven to have been caused by “conspiracy-mongering, hate speech and slander”.

To counter this, he had created a new heavyweight secret police force, called the Fat Cheka, which would ruthlessly hunt down anyone spreading such health-threatening “misinformation”.

While this certainly ramped up the fear element, it did nothing to calm the seething resentment at the utter corruption and repression of the regime, which had now become so blatantly obvious.

When King Sossidge ventured out of the palace for his next Sunday Stroll Among the People, he was virtually invisible behind all the rows of heavily-armed guards protecting him.

But as the crowds watched the procession in sullen silence, one grizzled old man with nothing left to lose shouted out: “You’re not our King! You’re a puppet of that blasted Razahk! He’s using your name to rob us, to cheat us, to rape our children and destroy our country!”

When the guards moved to grab the old man, the crowd came to his rescue and thus begun the Great Uprising that led to the deposing of King Sossidge, who spent the rest of his life cleaning the lavatories at the City Infirmary, and the disappearance of Razahk, on his fiery flying carpet, back into the deep bowels of hell from which he had emerged.

And the moral of this story is that, in times of terrible tyranny, fiction is often the most effective means of communicating fact, although ultimately the plain truth will have to be spoken out loud.

I sense we are now approaching that point.

[Audio version]