IOLKOS: CROSSING THE ASIA-EUROPE SEAS

The thousands crossing the seas between Asia and Europe these days continue the ancient adventures of Fertile Crescent peoples who developed their agriculture and ship building with the mythical Argonautes as one of the oldest sea voyagers around.

Jason, you may like to know, was the leader of those Argonautes and Prince of Iolkos. He got a ship built in the port of Pagasai. Timber was brought in from Mount Pelion and oak from Dodona and a new excitement arose in the port city. Hammer blows echoed through the streets of the city, until the ship was completed and called Argo, the swift one.

The Argonautes sailed the distant seas and set foot at unknown coasts. When they finally fulfilled their mission by capturing the Golden Fleece, they took off for their homeward journey. They sailed River Danube through the Balkan countries and miraculously arrived in the Adriatic Sea. They continued upstream River Po in Italy and downstream River Rhine through Germany, before returning to familiar waters of the Mediterranean and landing on the island of Crete.

Upon his return in Iolkos, Jason handed the Golden Fleece to the king and demanded to be king himself. But violent family affairs endarkened Jason’s long awaited relief once back in Iolkos. Amidst intense love affairs there was torture, betrayal, corpses cut in pieces and fights over kingdoms that obscured his life.

What will happen with those thousands who sail the seas between Asia and Europe in boats not built with the care and craft of Pagasai carpenters and navigated by skills of Jason? What will be their fate when they move up along River Danube and downstream River Rhine? Will they ever be able to conquer golden fleeces and see Pagasia and Iolkos again? And what turmoil will they go through once back in their homelands?

PERCEPTIVE PEOPLE HAVING TO DEAL WITH JUNGLE GENES

Perceptive people are said to feel more uncertain because they have more impressions to deal with than others. But perhaps there is an additional force that counts, a force that has to do with our distant past and is still stored in our genes.

Humanity could not have survived for seven million years of evolution without the deep sense of uncertainty that gave us the situational awareness needed in dangerous nature. That basic sense of uncertainty, a blessing in the face of danger, got simply engrained in our genes.

Only in the last 10,000 years, when our ancestors started the agrarian revolution, we went for control of nature and belief in the creation of safety. Modernity, with its belief that once-and-for-all control and total comfort are possible, has been the final outcome sofar.

This culture of control makes us believe that a sense of uncertainty is inconsistent with what society achieves or wants to achieve. It can even be seen as an undermining of the collective belief in control. Uncertainty feelings remind us of the permanent alertness that was needed to survive in the jungle but we now find uncomfortable and suppress.

However, our genes have not been eliminated by the control culture. They are still geared towards permanent alertness in the natural environment. So, our genes go on undermining the control culture, while we dislike that undermining and try to suppress it.

But those perceptive people who are in close touch with their own system, including their genes, may feel the awareness that made our ancestors survive in the wild. Because of that awareness, they have to deal with the contrast between what they authentically feel as sound and what society wants them to suppress.

Therefore, those in close touch with themselves get perplexed by this genes-society friction that nobody explains to them. No wonder that their perplexity produces a second layer of uncertainty, an uncertainty that they also learn to see as wrong and to be suppressed.

Courtesy: Richard Leakey, Pedram Shojai; Elise Pattyn

WHY DID PALESTINIAN REFUGEES NOT MOVE TO EUROPE?

West Asia regimes that bring about large refugee problems are not only of Asad and IS. The Israeli regime is far worse. According to the UN, Israel created a plight for the Palestinians that has become the most protracted and largest of all refugee problems in the world.

http://www.irinnews.org/report/89571/middle-east-palestinian-refugee-numbers-whereabouts

Why did the Palestinians not migrate in large numbers to Europe but remained in refugee camps ‘in the area’, in Lebanon, Jordan. Syria, Gaza, Israel, Westbank and Egypt, in due course turning fragile tents into stone houses?

In contrast, present-day Syrians do leave their refugee camps, albeit in relatively small proportions, and move to Europe. Perhaps the social media, higher incomes and more open borders make travel to Europe seen as an option.

Photos: Palestinian refugee camps in 1948 and nowadays, and a recently started Syrian refugee camp