🎭The Fables of Power – Old Grudges. new costumes. timeless quarrels
📖 The Fables of Power – The Curtain Raises Again 🎭
✍️ Author’s Note
These weekly fables, published every Tuesday for the next 14 weeks, are written by a lifelong observer of politics, history, and human nature — someone who believes that satire can sometimes explain the world more clearly than solemn analysis. After decades of watching nations quarrel, leaders boast, and history repeat itself, the author has chosen the fairy tale as a mirror: light enough to amuse, sharp enough to reveal.
✍️Prologue: The Curtain Rises Again 🎭
🎭What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
— Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle
Discerning readers may detect certain… familiarities. Any resemblance to persons currently striding the world stage, demanding tribute, or redrawing borders is, of course, entirely coincidental and absolutely deliberate.
Welcome to the theatre of life, where old grudges, new costumes, and timeless quarrels unfold in weekly performance. Here nations appear as eccentric relatives, leaders as Mob Bosses, Princesses, Witches, Pied Pipers, Mandarins, Prophets, and Bears. Their dramas of power echo like family quarrels around an endless table.
These are not prophecies, nor solemn lectures. They are parodies with a purpose: to remind us that the struggles of our time echo the oldest stories we know.
And so, in the theatre of political dreams and illusions, the quarrels continue…
🎭 Closing Line
The stage of the world is never empty. The next fable is already being written…
🗼 Next Fable Preview
📖 The Princess, the Mob Boss, and the Black Knight👑
Lady Europe, timid and hesitant, faces Donald the Magnificent and the rider from Muscovy in a medieval chronicle that rhymes too closely with today A boastful builder trades bricks for lies, calling every trial a witch hunt while his followers cheer beneath crumbling walls.
🎭 The Fables of Power – A Satirical Theatre
Prologue
- 🎭 The Curtain Rises Again
Why fables? Because fairy tales sometimes explain the world more clearly than solemn speeches.
Act I – Quarrels and Illusions
- 👑 The Princess, the Mob Boss, and the Black Knight
Lady Europe, timid and hesitant, faces Donald the Magnificent and the rider from Muscovy in a medieval chronicle that rhymes too closely with today. - 🪢 The Fable of Family Quarrels and the Distant Cousin
Old grudges and tangled loyalties drag a quarrelsome family — Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and America — into yet another inheritance dispute. - 🐀 The Rat Catcher of Harmelen
A piper with spun-sugar hair lures villagers with a tune of nostalgia, forgetting that no bread bakes itself once the strangers are gone. - 🧹 The Witch Who Wanted the Palace
A daughter of a disgraced warlock smiles sweetly and speaks softly, but her cauldron still bubbles with the old brew of fear.
Act II – Towers, Walls, and Masks
- 🗼 The Mob Boss and His Golden Tower
A boastful builder trades bricks for lies, calling every trial a witch hunt while his followers cheer beneath crumbling walls. - 🤡 The Jester of NATO
Once a prime minister, now a court jester juggling promises to please the Mob Boss, until his bells trip him up to the laughter of all. - 🧱 The Emperor’s New Walls
A ruler builds barriers so tall the sun itself cannot climb them — only to discover they trap his own people inside. - 🏰 The Sleeping Beauty of Bruxelles
An enchanted castle of clerks slumbers until the sound of crisis wakes it — briefly — before it nods back to sleep.
Act III – Wolves and Knights
- 🐺 The Wolf Who Called for Votes
A cunning wolf howls as the “voice of the people,” but when given the keys to the farm, the chickens disappear. - ⚔️ The Black Knight of Muscovy
Riding with gold and poisoned words, he offers power to witches and warlocks — always at the price of chains. - ⚔️ The Black Knight i the Labyrinth
Wandering his Kremlin corridors, the Knight is haunted by czars and generals, torn between ambition and decline. In seeking to secure his legacy, he finds himself lost in the very maze of power he built.
Act IV – Distant Horizons
- 🌬️ The Mandarin of Cathay
Patient as still water, the Mandarin sails the seas, waiting for the east wind to prevail while collecting more than he gives. - 🔮 The Prophet of the Corridors of Power
In the holy land, a ruler wraps himself in prophecy, mistaking mirrors for divine light and ambition for revelation.
Epilogue
- 🎟️ The Curtain Falls
The storyteller closes the book — but reminds us that the stage of the world is never empty.
📌Blog Excerpt
Welcome to The Fables of Power — the theatre of life where old grudges, new costumes, and timeless quarrels appear as a weekly performance. Here you’ll find witches who long for palaces, mob bosses who build towers of lies, knights who ride with bags of gold, and princesses who hesitate while the world burns. This satirical series retells politics and history as fairy tales and remind us that the stage of the world is never empty.
Signed: William J J Houtzager, Aka WJJH, September 2025
In what kind of world do we wish to live 