Republicans Reintroduce the Medieval Era to America
As their first initiative in 2015, the RNC has banned all remnants of the Enlightenment and declared the USA a collection of feudal fiefs. Let’s review the similarities of the middle ages to our contemporary America.
At the top, we have our version of the Lords of the Medieval period back in the 5th to 15th centuries. They are the Corporations and 1% who own the lions share of all property. They earned their status by accumulating assets. All other social groups work for their benefit in the Manor. Today’s equivalent to the Manors are our States, which under the Republican plan are a loose neo-confederation.
Next in pecking order are the Barons, Bishops, Vassals and Knights……today’s version being elected officials, sponsored by the Lords. They do the Lords’ bidding in the public and private spheres. The Bishops, today’s mega churches and diocese, have a special place in society; all the necessary protections, but without having the pay homage to the Lords, or in today’s vernacular, taxes. They are tax exempt. Their job is to protect the Lords by declaring their value to the social order.
A special category of the modern Knights, or warriors tasked to protect the Lords are in today’s structure, the defense contractors. Like their predecessor Knights, their reward for service are property and assets. A key task in today’s world is manor or homeland security and preemptive attacks on threatening hordes of barbarians. Additionally, internal dissidents are dealt with by militarized police forces reporting to the Barons and Vassals.
Do the similarities between gated communities and moats ring some bells with you ? How about the torture techniques of the middle ages and today’s waterboarding? Drone attacks and swat teams and village scorching?
Also serving the Barons and Vassals are a few skilled working class, known as our middle class. They provide technical and specialized expertise needed by them as well as the Lords. Their reward for service is limited amounts of property and assets, including small amounts of capital loans to expand their services.
The Lords, Barons and Vassals oversee the work and production of the serfs and peasants. These are mostly unskilled persons who are compensated on a very limited scale to barely sustain their families and whose work is considered easily replaceable should they prove uncooperative or unproductive in their service. They comprise the vast majority or about 80% of the population of the manors or states.
This group is dominated by persons of color and ethnic heritage considered of lesser quality of personhood. As a result, though granted minimal rights of citizenship, those rights are being restricted and suppressed for fear that they might challenge the existing social order.
To maintain this social order, Republicans today emphasize limiting public services to the serfs and peasants, including both education and health care, for fear that strengthening their intellectual, mental and physical well-being could result in insurrection and revolution against the rule of the Lords, Barons and Vassals.
This system served a few very well for about 1,000 years. Seemed to work for them, so why fix what ain’t broke?
Tags: Featured
One of the worst and most skewed “editorials” I have ever read.
I don’t have the time or energy to refute all of the lies and misconceptions, but I will take a stab at a few.
How are the states “manors”? Do you realize that the Federal government owns approximately 30% (more than 650 million acres) of ALL land in the U.S., including 84% of Wyoming. Get your facts straight. Neo-confederation? This is also an example of not teaching history, especially of the founding of the nation. The original federal government was formed under the Articles of Confederation which was approved by the states in 1781. It failed. What followed was the Constitution and a more powerful and central federal government. The 17th amendment (passed in 1913) removed the state legislatures from choosing senators from their state and turned it over to the general population. Hardly confederation. We have never had a more powerful central government.
Churches tax exempt? Maybe the stone and brick buildings, but employees (including ministers, priests, secretaries, maintenance staff, teachers, counselors, etc.) pay FICA, SECA and income taxes. Also, look at the good the religious charities (Salvation Army, Catholic Charities, etc.) do in the country. Speaking of tax exempt, how about the 47% that pay no income taxes? Look at the 45 million or so receiving food stamps. Who buys that?
The knights are the defense contractors and police state? Big stretch on that. I am guessing you mean we don’t need defense or police. If that is the case, prove it and move to Chicago and report back in a year or so.
But the most egregious statement in my opinion was comparing torture in the middle ages to water boarding. Did you ever see Braveheart? That was torture. Water boarding is terrifying and very unpleasant, but nothing like the rack or having your entrails spilled onto a table while still alive or having your head chopped off. Kind of like the recent beheadings we have been subjected to. By the way, combat pilots spend 2 weeks in training for potential capture by the enemy and part of the training is waterboarding.
If you hate Republicans and this country, I guess I can try to understand, but I don’t agree with your logic and lack of facts.
I won’t argue about PP’s facts, or his tone; I often find both lacking in intellectual heft and rigor.
But your own comment is full of, for lack of a more encompassing term, bullshit.
The canard about how much land the federal government owns is a good example: The vast majority of that land is in the mountain west/Great Basin, and it’s owned by the government because it couldn’t be homesteaded like land in the plains; i.e., nobody wanted it.
You clearly have no understanding of the underlying truths — waterboarding is OK because worse tortures have existed? thanks for showing us what gangrenous, worm-eaten conservative morality looks like — and haven’t learned anything more than other morons learn from their biased “news” sources.
In short, go fuck yourself with a light bulb, because obviously you have no capacity for using illumination in any more productive way.
The real deal is that someone is not worthy of the Presidency if they prefer the comfort of terrorists to the lives of the American people and those who pretend otherwise are not worth listening to.
As for this screed of a post, thankfully the extremism that passes for the progressive movement is burned out and will be placed on the back burner of history. Hopefully, it will one day be on the compost pile with Marxism.
So much is wrong with it, that one can barely rebut it without a 5000 word essay to explain the real deal. Let’s say its bigotry against people of faith, the prosperous, and condensation to people of color by ignoring that many are successful is its own parody.
@real deal: condensation to people of color
… and that phrase tells us pretty much all we need to know (in geezer’s term) about your intellectual heft and rigor …
Doesn’t all the condensation get the poor people of color all wet?
Conservatism has been around for a long time. Let’s review all the progress they have stood athwart history and successfully stopped:
Abolition of slavery
Women’s suffrage
Championing religion rather than science
Getting the drift, real deal? It is conservatism that has lost, over and over again, to human progress. But, to be fair, conservatives are generally the last to realize it.
There is one party that has embraced extremism and it isn’t the democrats.
When a rancher doesn’t pay his agreed upon taxes to graze on public lands, thats tyranny of gov’t. But when the gov’t chokes a man to death, shoots and kills an unarmed man or dares to speak truth to power that there is, indeed, a problem with militarism/statism in the nation, they are thugs who “get what they deserve.”
We live in a progressive nation. And in a progressive nation, conservatives are always the last to progress, if ever.
The biggest problem I have with conservatives (especially the far right) is the abject hypocrisy and ignorance in everything they do, want to do, or stand for. They decry government and yet are the first to belly up to the trough, collecting every dime they feel *entitled* to. Their religiosity in public and their debauchery behind closed doors. Their blind faith in the absence of evidence which dominates their blind beliefs even in the presence of evidence. In short, their hypocrisy coupled with their ignorance.
Progressives sometimes fail to remember that people like Mario Cuomo said “…that what is ideally desirable isn’t always feasible…” but hypocrisy and ignorance at least are not their shortcomings.
Geezer like always your history is skewed, biased, and just plain wrong. You are clearly confusing neoconservatism with true conservatism ( liberalism now known as classical liberalism) which is all but absent in our left-right paradigm. In fact your views are founded on the same principles as neoconservatism: coercion, price controls, mercantilism. For all the finger pointing you do at the right, much of which is justified, you fail to see that your beliefs are a different flavor of the exact same thing.
Oh, here we go with “but its not really conservatism.”
Coercion? Price controls? WTF are you talking about? Get back to me after you get a job.
People too F-ing stupid to realize that the tribal political force they suck up to because it appeals to their racial resentments is working against them