In days of yore when knights were bold, women were chaste and sheep were nervous, those competing for the Crown of Pawns held jousting tournaments to decide sovereignty through the honourable medium of two candidates trying to knock the other bloke off his horse, and then hack the unseated one into pieces small enough to provide food for all concerned in a celebration of an attractive merger later in the afternoon.
The death count of precisely 1 [one] seems to me not only the archetypal description of the mediaevel 'Champion' principle, but also a near as damnit bloodless settlement of an argument between the landowning Lords.
Although many historians would have you believe that these "barons" gave their fealty to the King, events don't support the idea on the whole. English Sovereigns at the time usually had pretty flakey claims to power....and often showed themselves to be incompetent in their weilding of it. An arrow in the eye at the battle of Hastings in 1066 did for King Harold of England, but his real downfall (that brought victory to Guilaume le Conquereur) was based on the reality that most noblemen saw him as both slippery and a loser...be the enemy Goths, Normans or Norsemen.
Either way, the cost in lives lost in 1066 was circa 8,000. Not particularly good value for money of you wound up a dead English Yeoman....and a massive inflation of pointless death over the outcome 350 years earlier.
Truth be told, looking towards the Island Race's future, moving from Harold II to William I was the foundation of the British Empire. Having been attacked in turn by Romans, German hairies and Swedish Vikings, the score was 0-3. However, the less one is a victim and the more one becomes Imperially colonialist, the more you have to fight against indigenous freedom movements in those acquired territories.
The bottom line remains: empires steal wealth whose value increases, but kill increasing numbers of their own and other citizens who may well have been better employed spreading peaceful employment at home, and more just commonwealths abroad.
To defend the British Empire during the First World War cost the UK 880,000 British soldiers dead - 6% of the adult male population and 12.5% of those serving.
To do the same in the Second World War required 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, plus a higher civilian death toll: during the Blitzkrieg bombing of 1940-41, 40,000 civilians died in the seven-month period between September 1940 and May 1941 alone, almost half of them in London. By the end of the War, over a million Brits had lost their lives.
From 1 in circa 5oo AD to a million in 1945 shows an unparalleled inflation of State-mandated death. The big difference this time was, the UK ended up broke, off-loaded its empire based on a dodgy melange of principle and cost, quickly becoming Washington's poodle.
The net post-war result was the emergence of the formerly isolationist United States of America as the Global Policeman....a role most main street Americans did not want. But for the CIA, the Pentagon, the US arms business, bioweapon development via Global Pharma and Congressional Cold Warriors, it was manna falling free from the skies.
Far from being the view of long-haired Peacenik student paranoia during the 1960s, the entire analysis was worked out in the brain of Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1958-9 as his second term in office drew to an end. In his December 1960 briefing of the inexperienced John F Kennedy, Ike shocked the new President to the core with this simple warning: "While the Sovyets will try to exploit US fears of missile gaps and a new POTUS putting trust in fantasy State Department advice, the real threat to freedom in our Republic is from the hawkish assertions of the Unelected American Military-Industrial complex".
His terminology now might look dated, but his wisdom is eternal.
Tomorrow marks the exact half way point in 2024. It is bound to unmask - to one extent or another - the degree to which the 'Free West' as a beacon of democracy has been first perverted and then assassinated since the Dallas Hit of 1963.
Quite quickly, I sense, the United States of America is going to find itself fighting a global war on at least six fronts...up to and including the Home Front. These are the Secret services keen to complete the Coup d'etat it began over sixty years ago, the war on Russia it cannot win, the loss of Dollar hegemony, Mutiny among the EU electorates, supply problems and delusions of grandeur in the hitech community, and the evil alliance between the Secret, Military and pharmaceutical sectors.
If you think anyone in the US [or indeed anywhere] is likely to emerge on January 2nd 2025 with all the civil rights that "matter" intact, chances are you accept that Antony Fauci was in Wuhan in July 2019 for the skiing.
You could of course argue - as relativists so often do - that there is nothing new in what's going down at the moment...and up to a point, you would indeed have a point, albeit somewhat lacking in mustard-cutting.
That's to say, the wheel meant it took two guys to get the Vit C output still fresh to market, as opposed to eight blokes knackered by floating the crop down-river on a basic canoe while being eaten by piranhah fish along the way; and trained horses could get wheel-driven coaches to wholesale destinations using just one coach-driver-guy going at twice the speed of plinky-plonky donkeys.
In turn, one spinning-jenny weaving four hundred square metres of wool with more excactitude (and in five percent of the time of the tricoteuse witches beneath the 1790 guillotines) taught the New Bosses how to employ fewer workers while executing the depraved anciene regime at twice the previous best of the amateurs that preceded The Terror.
Next came the internal combustion engine measured for some time in terms of "Horsepower". Ironically, it wiped out the employment of transport using Coachman skills, while rapidly becoming the elite sport (variously) of eventing, steeple-chasing and The Races in general as a form of stylish betting among the Upper Classes keen to ape the hohenzollern-cum-Windsor dynasty. Like so many things, the waging of war became Sport.
But then came The Tank with impenetrable walls. And the lumbering horrors of World War One became the Blitzkrieg that brought an end to horrific trench warfare death....but as ever, with two guys rather than six able to inflict vicious death upon the human fodder outside at twice the speed.
After World War ll, such things were given euphemistic titles such as mechanisation, labour saving devices, one-coat paint, vacuum cleaners, Call Centres, DIY Sheds and so forth, but what they all did was dilute and even disrespect the acquired skills of painters, plasterers, sparks, gas men, cleaning ladies, woodworkers, interior designers, honest customer complaint sensitivity executives and all the other invaluable human beings that make clients and customers either cynical or loyal.
In short: human endeavours designed to serve without the appalling stink of slavery have finally reached the stage where it's not their job which is at stake, but rather their usefulness as human beings. This is no longer a case of a citizen's contribution to civilisation, but rather the profoundly insulting suggestion that - from here on in - transhuman Bots will produce a better result than Homo sapiens.
But Bots and their "values" will always be programmed on the "Shit in >Shit out" principle: viz, 'This is what we feed in - 'more efficiency and realisation of citizen poential'. Therein lies the problem....imagination can only be transfered to Robots whose programmers go to endless lengths to explain what it means to be alive, to have species aims, and to subjugate passing personal pleasures to the greater understanding of what we currently refer to as the metaverse.
I am relieved in my conviction that a live consciousness cannot explain such a miracle to a machine.
Nevertheless, the surreal totalitarians working hard to make the American Sovyet State irreversible will discover by May 2025 [and probably earlier] that they face devastating defeat on on at least four of the six military, fiscal, geopolitical and currency battles they face.
What happens next? Stay tuned.
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