Our Israeli correspondent MC describes the return of feudalism, after a long hiatus and in a new guise, to Western culture.
The New Feudalism
by MC
Most tyrannical societies seek to recreate a system similar to the feudalism that was widespread in Europe before the Black Death (1348 — 1350). This was a system of aristocrats and serfs, with a miniscule middleclass of master craftsmen, who served the nobility, but in turn were rigidly governed by the guild system.
Now, in our modern environment we tend not to have an aristocratic or religious nobility, but we do have political and corporate hierarchies. So as our democracies increasingly become politically meaningless, we are reverting to a modern form of feudalism where patronage is more important than acumen, and where one must conform in order to ‘progress’.
The educated middle class — those able to think for themselves — is gone, replaced by a generational mindset completely moulded by a box of electronic components and receiving data beamed from the centre, a centre controlled by a hierarchy. There is an electronic ‘carrot and stick’ process in which the stick will mercilessly batter non-conformism, and the carrot will reward those who parrot the status quo as defined by their betters.
The Black Death created a huge labour shortage in Europe, and so began the breakdown of the master-slave culture that was the defining ethos of feudalism. No longer were run-away serfs returned to their owners; they were hired and put to work as freemen to keep the aristocratic lifestyle from disintegrating entirely.
Slowly but surely the working man achieved a level of autonomy and freedom from the oppression of the aristocracy, culminating in the Constitution of the USA and the subsequent Bill of Rights which effectively removed the remnants of aristocratic dominance from the many societies for which it was a model.
In the twentieth century however, something went horribly wrong.
Europe spawned three deadly tyrannies: Communism, Fascism and Nazism. Communism had its roots in Germany; the trashing of the Judeo-Christian ethical foundation of society by the German ‘higher critics’ produced a free-for-all of moral relativity. Marx was able to take advantage of this new uncritical rigor to produce the political religion of Communism. Fascism, Mussolini style, grew from the melding of Marxist/Leninist doctrines with ancient Roman patrician supremacist culture. Hitler in turn blended Mussolini-style Fascism with ‘Progressive’ cultism (especially its race theory) from the USA to produce Nazism. These three tyrannical systems had more similarities than they had differences, and between them they changed the world — violently.
These tyrannies, and their offshoots, put the freedom clock back a thousand years, back to a time when Islam was a rising star performer.
At the end of the nineteenth century Islam was moribund. The destructive nature of the culture had created literal deserts. It was the culture of the fellaheen and the absentee landlord.
Then, “up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude (oil that is); Texas tea” and the desert was awash with money. The motorcar gave freedom to the West, but at a price.
The next thing we know, Islam is buying influence. It has become the new (financial) aristocracy, its slaves being those who take the money and don’t ask questions. We are utterly naïve if we think that Saudis and other GCC nations are not using their wealth to buy political clout.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, Islam once more became relevant. It was a way of perpetuating the seductive, male supremacy oriented appeal of Nazism without having to kow-tow to the Führerprinzip of Hitlerism.
The compatibility between the 1400 year old feudal religion of Islam and the feudal aspirations of the twentieth century tyrannies should not be brushed aside, as it may be the huge clue to the motivation behind the Islamisation of Europe and the West. A tyranny does not necessarily imply that the ‘dictator’ needs to be alive. A dead dictator, for example a ‘prophet’ can still be a very demanding figurehead.
We know that between the wars, Communism and Nazism had many supporters in the West, and their viewpoints did not evaporate with the demise of the Third Reich; they had to go underground. Communism distanced itself from ‘Fascism’ by the age-old method of finger-pointing. The close pre-war relationship between Nazis and Stalinists is explored in the documentary “The Soviet Story”.
It is this same relationship which is becoming a force majeure in our lives now. We see the financial immolation of the middle classes, the dumbing-down of education and therefore of opportunity, and the resultant polarisation into ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ . This is the modern feudal society.
If we turn down the volume of political rhetoric and look at the actions of politicians, we can see this modern feudalism growing, right before our eyes. Its first task is to clear away the debris of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Because the UK had no constitution, its Bill of Rights was swept under the table decades ago without even a whisper of protest, and the advent of the European Union has seen the termination of most rights and freedoms for citizens on the European continent, ECHR* not withstanding For under the ECHR, individual rights have been shown to be secondary to the ‘rights’ of governing entities such as the EU itself.
At the moment there are two major attacks on the Constitution of the USA being mounted by the Obama Administration in concert with the United Nations: the attack on the First Amendment by Islamists seeking to stop criticism of their particular religious mores, and the attack on the Second Amendment posed by ‘gun control’ in the wake of Sandy Hook. Personally I find the similarity between Sandy Hook and the Dunblane shootings (which caused the banning of handguns in the UK) and the Port Arthur incident in Tasmania which prompted a tightening of Gun Laws in Australia in 1996 quite startling.
There was an unprecedented 100-year cover-up as a result of Dunblane, and the question needs to be asked why? Sandy Hook too seems to raise some questions as to what actually happened, and these should be investigated before any knee-jerk legislation is enacted. If, indeed, there is gun control by executive order, then US citizens need to ask themselves whether they have a president or a Führer.
Gun control always precedes large scale government-sponsored massacres, whether Armenian, Ukrainian or the Holocaust itself. Governments do not like it when the common people shoot back, and gun control is the first phase of any attempt to reduce a civilised society to feudalism.
I do not know if Dunblane or Port Arthur were ‘false flag’ events or random incidents where a good crisis was not allowed to go to waste.
Freedom of speech has already been voluntarily sacrificed on the altar of political correctness, and has now been further subsumed by government blackmail of the commercial mainstream media, no compliance meaning no access.
A serf in a feudal society does not even own her own body. The owner can do as he likes, when he likes, and there is no recourse. A child is completely at the mercy of the ruling families and can be abused at will. Is it this that we, the general public, want for our spouses, our sons and our daughters?
The end game of tyranny is the desecration of all that freedom-loving humanity holds dear.
* ECHR— European Convention on Human Rights
Very well done. We are certainly headed for another age of Feudalism. Our “Peculiar Institution”, the Western variant of Socialism, has no qualms with cooperating with the biggest of big business interests. The latter, unlike their predecessors, prefer to avoid large-scale wars and would rather do away with sovereign nations to achieve their goals. The Socialists realized that they could accomplish very little with central planning, so they grudgingly accepted that they needed some private interests to keep the place running smoothly. What they need to do though is limit the amount of private interests so that they can have a greater measure of control. This is where the new regulations come into the picture. By making it ever more difficult to maintain small or middle-sized businesses, the Socialists can limit the participants to a few oligarchs. The sheer hatred of privately-owned firearms that is displayed by the Left is sends a clear message – they need the People helpless in the face of crime and the establishment of a New Order.
Excellent analysis…several further considerations: The late 19th-early 20th century also saw the revolutions wrought by Freud and Einstein.
Freud relativized behavior, even though it was not his intention to render all our own ‘intents’ eternally suspect. The evil perpetrated by those who used his ideas to make everything “all right” to explain away evil was sadly obvious to him at the end of his life. With only a superego to punish us, what point The Moral Life?
And Einstein, who made time itself relative, also had to live with the atrocities piled up onto the popularization and prostitution of his theories.
Philosophy follows cosmology but because we no longer truly educate the philosophers, they produce malignity where the True, the Good and the Beautiful once stood for consideration.
Maybe our version of the Black Death will come via the collapse of the thin but very sharp edge of technology, where those who know how will be the survivors?Perhaps we are witnessing the rise of many Snowdens in their various permutations? An example, slightly off-center:
The horrible “justice” meted out in Florida was partly choreographed by the Attorney General of that state, a woman named Corey. You can be sure Holder’s JustUs Dept was giving her cue cards…and they probably wanted Zimmerman to go free in order to raise a national outrage which in turn would spark a demand for gun control…but…
,,,but…they’ve had several set-backs. One of them is the thin ranks on the ground of the ‘outraged’. There were supposed to be whole cities; instead there were hundreds making lame threats about boycotting Florida.
The other snafu is from techno world: (shades of Snowden) the guy who ran Corey’s IT department questioned the legality/ethics of something she was doing. Corey takes no prisoners, EVER, and she booted him immediately, writing such an awful dismissal letter he’d have trouble ever getting another job. So guess who is now a whistle-blower? And *his* attorney in the case? Why, another lawyer that Corey had fired from that office previously. What goes around and all that.
So maybe you geeks will take over the world after all?? Since you’re mostly libertarians at heart, the slavery will be umm…sketchy at best.
The would-be overlords have refused to learn the technical stuff they need to run the world and y’all are too contrary to be tied down for long…
…but all the shoes haven’t dropped off that economic centipede, so who knows.
Besides, what happens when some Ashkenazi genius invents a cheap replacement for fossil fuel energy? It sure won’t be green algae, but don’t tell Obama.
The bad guys got us to the moon. The good guys have been breeding feral pets to destroy our civilization.
what happens when some Ashkenazi genius invents a cheap replacement for fossil fuel energy?
It has already been invented. Several versions. The group name of the new technologies is LENR or CANR, Used to be called “cold fusion”, but the jury is out on the fusion part, the observed heat producing reactions may be transmutations.
Scientific reports on the phenomenon is collected here:
http://lenr-canr.org/
Google LENR to find several news sites on the subject.
Solar panel tech is improving by the year. Battery/energy storage lags behind (price/performance wise), but a LOT of research goes on in that field.
General news for all possible alternative energy sources, served by people who insist on independent confirmation before any “crazy” news is published: http://revolution-green.com/
Go inventors and engineers, go!
To call the current trend a return to feudalism is a mistake. The Feudal period (in Europe at least) included the concept of social contracts where the rulers were bound by duties to the ruled. The Magna Carta was an explicit expression of that belief system. The current effort to create a distopian leviathan is different from the Medieval world in that ego is unconstrained by any concept of a social contract. In addition, the Medieval period was an age of faith, and behavior was bound by the realization that we were all Pilgrims for whom this was merely a journey to the next. Under such circumstances, faith established boundaries. The modern world that the ‘leftists’ are creating is unbounded by faith and so is boundless in its ambition for control of the here and now.
I agree to a certain extent, but the contracts were whimsical, depending upon time and place and the disposition of the Lord of the Manor.
Much like Slavery in the USA, where there were ‘rules’, but those rules were administered by the slave owners themselves, and were thus subject to ‘interpretation’.
The net results were always the same, what the slave owner wanted, he usually got.
See Joseph Hogarty on the birth of Europe on this question. He actually suggests that the Visigoths in Spain were the first to create a recognizable Occidental Kingdom.
A weak constitutionally
Limited king supported by Counts and Barons balanced out by Bishops and cardinals.
Yes the Church as an alternate power structure, which can be used to counter over-reach and the “secular government structures vice versa. The Church(es) was a power base, a sanctuary for those who opposed the Communist governments and even the Nazis.
I think what is being discussed here was termed noblesse obligue. Which was abandoned in the US for example with the demise of the WASP Elite. Now it’s every man and group for themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige
Erratum – The Dunblane cover up is for 100 years, ostensibly to protect the children…..
But consideration should be given to the idea that the perp was a known paedophile with supply connections into the very highest of government circles
Sorry, MC — I thought that was a typo. My bad. I’ve changed it back.
It didn’t make sense, since it was just 17 years ago. But now I understand.
There’s nothing wrong with Europe between 1000AD up until the Puritan takeover of Britain in the late 1650s. Our institutions are fundamentally based on these people. The damage has been wrought by equalitarianism since the American and French revolutions and the financial chicanery of upstarts.
Interesting video about the grotesque skewed wealth distribution:
The New (Ab)normal, When 200 People Have More Wealth Than 3,500,000,000
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there was nothing wrong with feudalism, but the point that it did have firmer (though certainly not absolute) limits on the atrocities which could be committed by the rulers against their subjects is significant and worth consideration.
There is no real question among those who have studied the various agendas competing for the final design of the next global organization of humanity that all of them include mass extermination of 60-98% of the population as “undesireable elements”. The exact criteria for determining whom to exterminate vary far more than the scale of extermination, but people who object to such an extermination in principle are on every list.
The mass extermination of unnecessary population isn’t even the worst atrocity contemplated by the various global agendas in competition, but it is a consistent item. The Black Death was a catastrophe to those who ruled feudalism (the name “feudalism” itself is instructive as to why). Those currently seeking to impose their will on the world not only welcome, but plan to actively enact, a far more destructive reduction of humanity.
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Modern Europe, a place where Europeans are unrepresented.
Reading sites like this sometimes gives me the hope that our civilization might yet be saved.
But try reading the “Huffington Post” or “Media Matters.” The articles are appalling, but it is the comments that are truly terrifying. We may be doomed.
Dear MC,
Brilliant and well written analysis. I have only one objection – let’s hope that Internet has killed the Feudalism once and for all.
The immortal Danish writer Storm Petersen said: “It is difficult to foretell – especially regarding the future.”
netsearch on Dunblane Unburied by Sandra Uttley. It’s at
Amazon, and there’s some YouTube videos now. The parallels are
indeed startling, and one might mention Virginia Tech and Port Arthur
in Australia.
Our culture is fundamentally feudal. Its values and assumptions – our world-view – has not evolved since what we refer to as the time of feudalism. Feudalism is simply the rule by force. It is accepted as a law of nature, a decreed-by-god way of life.
The roots of our spoken-word language have not changed since the Roman times, maybe before. Understanding how the spoken word informs us of the meaning of our world helps one to identify the cause of our malaise and to facilitate our quest for freedom from the chains of our imprisonment.
Words are made of sounds, sounds made by the body. Those vocal sounds express/convey emotional states. They are a type of body-language. Saying the sounds, simply as individual sounds, – phones -, that make up our words may assist one to perceiving their emotional import.
When we use these body-sounds to refer to things, as we do when we talk, we associate the emotional effects of those sounds with the things to which those sounds refer. The referent defines the referred-to. The medium is the message: the map defines the territory. We need to understand what we are telling ourselves about the thing to which we refer when we use our language.
Each language carries with it its own culture and therefore, potentiates its own patterns of behavior among its practitioners. Think of the various languages with which you are familiar and the cultural characteristics of those who speak them. If we would evolve culturally, we should free ourselves from the SPELL of our current languages/cultures. Making up new words is not against the law, it is merely controversial. Imagine someone on a bus or airplane making vocal sounds that are not recognizable words. People would become apprehensive and be likely to move away from the offending person. “Babbling” is tabu in every society, except in rare, prescribed circumstances, such as talking in tongues churches and while scatting jazz. Babbling is tabu because it confronts peoples’ sense of order, it threatens their culturally-derived world-view. The more insecure among us are confused by the disconnection of the sounds of words from the familiar things which we define with those sounds. We tend to experience a sense of ORDer from our wORDs. The ordinary is the ordinance, it is our weapon against the unknown. The horrors of our imagined threats reside on the other side of the horizon, the horror-zone.
We must realize that we really do not know the meaning of anything, absolutely and that the only material sense of meaning we have comes from our spoken-word language. If we are willing to sacrifice that circumstantial sense of meaning for the freedom of accepting the mystery of the unknown, we, at least, leave the slate clean and ready for whatever is written on it by grace. Worshiping no idols frees the deck for the presence of the truth.
If you are interested in this, and I hope you are, please contact me for more information at .
Please distribute this, I don’t really have a very big audience.
An Essay On Force, Control, and Freedom.
“Gun Control” is nothing new. In fact, it’s been around for much longer than guns have existed. It’s been a universal phenomenon amongst human societies. And it’s never been about public safety. It has been, and always will be, an act of caste stratification and population control.
In ancient Feudal societies all around the world, notably China and Japan and many parts of Europe and the Middle-East, peasants and plebeians were prohibited from owning weapons. When the ruling Aristocrats and feudal land-owners required a military force, their trusted retainers would issue arms to conscripted peasant-levies, and send them into battle as vanguards of the main force. After battle finished and the troops had looted the field, the retainers would retrieve these weapons and send the serfs back to work. Why were the commoners prohibited from possession of weapons?
Simple.
To prevent uprisings.
Remember that in these points in history, society was rigidly stratified, and the only individuals who could possess arms were men who had proven their loyalty to their rulers. These men were regarded as dignified individuals, men of honour and upstanding moral virtue, while commoners were regarded as little more than productive units in the inventories of their lords and masters. Just look at the culture of respect for the Knights and Samurai of old.
Control of the disarmed populace in turn went on to reflect and perpetuate such social stratification. Without the means to change their government by force, these societies were ruled by the strongest and wealthiest men with armies composed of a loyal minority to defend them.
Force is, and always has been, the highest, most fundamental form of authority. All other authorities have been, and always will be, derived from the means to exert and resist force.
In the late 1700s, the colonists of America knew this lesson from history all too well. During the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers fought against a tyrannical and oppressive government which sought to restrict the means to exert and resist force, and sought to take the majority of wealth away from the colonial population. The Second Amendment to the American Constitution was written to ensure that common citizens would always have recourse to the highest form of authority so that in the inevitable event of the ruling body no longer looking out for the interests of the common people at heart, they would be able to resort to force-of-arms to at least stand a chance of overturning a corrupted system.
With the advent of mass-media broadcasting and the rise of the New Feudal-Capitalist caste system, the ruling elites have gained a most powerful weapon: brainwashing. No longer have religious institutions been required to control the masses. Fear imparted by widespread propaganda now does it for them. Even more perceptive people can, and often are, influenced by this conditioning process during the formative years, developing attitudes of apathy.
Which brings us to the nature of Gun Control. A wise man once said “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself” (a quote often misattributed to Joseph Goebbels). This is the insidious nature in which the elites of the world have been consolidating their power, by disseminating lies about the nature of force and the nature of weapons. This is most evident in the conditioning of unfathomable numbers of otherwise rational individuals to believe that there are never circumstances where recourse to force of arms is justifiable, and that “non-violent” action is always the best action, which has been demonstrated by history repeatedly to rarely be the case.
This propaganda also revolves around twisting of the facts and manipulation of popular preconceptions, with strong emotive undertones. All too often people remember the times when people use weapons to kill indiscriminately, but all too rarely are people informed of the millions of instances globally where weapons are used to mitigate unnecessary losses of life.
Firearms in particular represented a shift in the paradigm. No longer was it only the strong, quick-witted and talented who may wield arms, but now any individual with the inclination, time and access, has means to exert and resist force. A conceptual precursor to the firearm, the crossbow, drew similar ire during the Middle Ages, where a Papal Decree was issued to prohibit their use in warfare claiming that the ability to give a common peasant the ability to defeat the armour of a wealthy Knight and thus kill him, was an aberration to the natural order. Regardless, control over such weapons and their possession by the peasants was sufficient enough that most rulers saw possession of these weapons as justifiable.
Just as we in this day and age should understand that now, more than ever in history, possession of the means to exert and resist force is not only justifiable, but a necessity.
Now more than ever we see a disparity between the wealthy and powerful and the poor and disempowered. Gun-control advocates live in ivory towers, and all too often the most powerful voices amongst them possess the weapons themselves, and/or retain individuals entrusted with such weaponry. This is damning evidence of the hypocrisy and elitism behind laws of personal weapon restriction. We live at a precipice of history, at the branch in the road where we may choose between a society where the minority of wealthy and strong are more equal than the majority, or a society where all men may stand as equals guaranteed by their capacity to exert and resist acts of force.
We are already descending down the path of the former, but it is not too late to stop this decay. The hardest part is overcoming the incessant propaganda, which is the reason why I have written this essay.
Remember; you only have the power, if you have the will.
Blessings upon you all.