For the record, just because I like the Janissaries doesn’t mean I like Turkey. These are just my dorky observations, partly stolen from the pro-slavery antebellum philosopher George Fitzhugh, one of the few pro-slavery writers to not beat around the bush and call slavery “a necessary evil,” but to call it an outright good thing. A lower standard of living might be conducive to good things all around. I know free societies in recent years have won more wars thanks to greater industrial capacity (thanks to capitalism, which as you guys know I’m alright with for the most part) but as far as the men go it seems the ones without much to lose made the most noteworthy fighters, and kicked ass before machines became the primary deciders in war. The Russian soldiers against Napoleon (nearly all serf conscripts) were notable for stoic, suicidal bravery, and they won, the Jappos of course during WWII took two nukes to stop, the Janissaries, the Spartans. I’m not saying people should have to live like shit, but when the only path to riches and bitches is through military service or patronage by a noble benefactor, it creates a lot more innovation than just depending on going through the public school system, winning brownie points to get scholarships or get them for being black, or impoverished, or whatever, and then getting a mediocre job to keep the bourgeois machine running.
The serf’s lot wasn’t so bad, I think for a regular person who isn’t particularly bookish or adventurous they’d be pretty happy. What, you got your church/faith, you have your extended family around you, you have plenty of church specified holidays away from the fields, in you mid 20’s or so you marry some cute teen neighbor of yours, then statistically probably another one a decade or two later when your first wife dies in childbirth (safe in the arms of Jesus, because you don’t know any doubts), and you have a tavern to get drunk in, then you keel over in your 60’s the pater familias of your own little clan in their hovels around yours. It isn’t so bad, but if you wanted more than that there was always the army. General Anton Denikin is an example, one of the generals of the White Army during the Russian civil war. His father was a serf who was conscripted for the customary 25 year service period, did so well he was promoted to the officer class and retired with the rank of major, and then Anton grew up to become one of the defenders of monarchical power in Russia, and a serious opponent of Masonry and (((the tribe))).
“His father’s Russian patriotism and devotion to the Russian Orthodox religion led Anton Denikin to the Russian army.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Denikin
So it seems the serfs themselves were pretty gung-ho about the whole system. One of the characters in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, General Yepanchin, is a wealthy officer who started out as an ordinary soldier, so it mustn’t have been a rare occurrence for that sort of social mobility to be part of the pop culture consciousness. Anyway, it seems like a good means of social mobility.
When you have a free society, of relatively comfy, well off people (compared to the rest of the world) who really don’t wanna be there, and would rather be back home working their own land, or going to school, or working on their own business to get rich, with their own nuclear family founded on the bourgeois cult of independence and romantic love, those guys don’t wanna die. Especially in a wealthy, rationalistic, godless society that offers no happiness on the other side of the grave. They don’t gain anything personally from winning. The guy with a simple life on the rice paddy back home will just go back to the rice paddy if he leaves, but if he wins, at the very least he’s gonna get some gold and he’s gonna get laid, and if he’s very brave and smart, he’s gonna get wealth and luxury with promotion into the higher ranks, and so will his children. Free men with a high standard of living have more incentive to desert, less incentive to give their all and risk injury and death, less incentive to win and take spoils of war. Even the British army used to recruit their enlisted men mostly from the very poorest classes of society; the orphans, the deadbeat dads fleeing child support suits, the paupers, the drunks, the antisocial village brawlers, during the peak of imperial power, and those guys made the best common soldiers, better than the yeoman farmer or the skilled artisan who just wants to go back to his family. The shiftless drunk doesn’t have anything back home, but he gets booze money and flings with exotic local women if he stays with the army and the better he impresses his officers with his bravery and skill the more of that he gets.
The Turks themselves used to be slaves. The Arab sultans in the early Islamic period couldn’t enslave other Muslims, so aside from African slaves they used as laborers on their plantations on the Persian Gulf (people say Islamic slavery was sparse and mild but nah, they had plantations just like the Spanish and us Anglos), they bought pagan Turkic slaves from the steppes to send hollering and Allahuackabaring into the meat-grinders and eventually they started the Mamluk dynasty after forming a knightly caste, similar to the Janissaries, and being freed.
Free people are mean assholes. Dependents are loyal and brave, imo. I think the SS is the only example of a military force of free but non-aristocratic soldiers who have the same level of fanatic bravery as the Japanese peasant conscript of WWII or Janissary slave-soldier. And those dudes were promised a big farm for every SS enlisted man and a landed estate for every SS officer in newly conquered Europe once the war was done. I was reading more about the Janissaries today, Wikipedia says: “After completing this period, acemi (new recruit) boys were gathered for training at the Enderun ‘acemi oğlan’ school in the capital city. There, young cadets would be selected for their talents in different areas to train as engineers, artisans, riflemen, clerics, archers, artillery, and so forth.”
To be honest I’m terrible at any and every physical activity, not much of a man’s man, more of a bookish, bug eyed H.P. Lovecraft type, but I don’t mind the thought of dying, I’m not a coward, and while I couldn’t find any more on Janissary clerics, that sounds like a fun job. I know Islam is heresy, and I hate it, but looking objectively, without any religious ideas of my own, getting to wear the big moustache and tall silk hat and charge along with a bunch of big guys with bayonets urging them on with takbirs does sound like a neat position. I think I could enjoy being a janissary. I like to study religion anyway, even if I’m not able to hold a strict standard of religious piety myself. I’ve studied enough to give myself a rational faith in God, I can suspend my disbelief, ask the Lord to help my unbelief, enjoy all the fun fervor and the interesting reading.
“Janissaries also learned to follow the dictates of the dervish saint Haji Bektash Veli, disciples of whom had blessed the first troops. Bektashi served as a kind of chaplain for Janissaries. In this and in their secluded life, Janissaries resembled Christian military orders like the Knights Hospitaller. As a symbol of their devotion to the order, Janissaries wore special hats called ‘börk’. These hats also had a holding place in front, called the ‘kaşıklık’, for a spoon. This symbolized the ‘kaşık kardeşliği’, or the ‘brotherhood of the spoon’, which reflected a sense of comradeship among the Janissaries who ate, slept, fought and died together.”
That is pretty badass, heretical as it might be. I said yesterday in my previous post, it seems that Islam has many esoteric forms like among the Shi’ites and Alawites, or among that Bektashi followers of (white enough) Anatolia, that aren’t the primitive dune-coon gibsmedats of pure, true Islam, like Wahabism.
Ideally, what I’d wanna see, is a common law, enforced by a hereditary king or queen, and I can’t stress this enough. Screw elections, screw ‘meritocracy’, screw distant relatives, when it comes to the leadership it has to be passed parent to child, and if they die childless give it to the next of kin. I don’t care if they’re a hopeless retard with three eyes, no balls and a clubbed foot, the ministers will take care of it, they’ll die and a healthier cousin will most likely get it like what happened in the Habsburg monarchies when the king was sometimes literally retarded. It’s the only way to ensure stability. Russia has had two dynasties in its entire history, Japan only one. The common law protects the common people from abuse by their betters and from each other, you know, outlaw rape, murder, usury, outrageous taxation, just have the common law as a means of protection, and then the Church law decides what’s moral. The King enforces the common law with an army he gets from taxes taken from the nobles who hold the land by his good graces.
Clans helping poor kinsmen, military promotion, and patronage by social superiors like priests and landlords should be the means of social mobility, not industrialized state schools. This isn’t pie in the sky, this is how shit used to work. Common people should have a lot of liberty in their personal lives, politically ruled over by a lord who’s ruled over by a king. And besides that instead of this universal education and career stuff there was patronage, which honestly worked. It isn’t the individuals half the time that make a system work, it’s the nature of the system itself. Our current system churns out people who can take tests and study to be cogs in the cattle machine of a society we have. The system is all goofy. If I were in a position of power, I know who I’d rather elevate, given a choice between some smarmy jackass who got good grades in school and has no connection to me, or the son of a loyal servant or the nephew of a mistress or something, someone who then will totally owe all their position and allegiance to me. Nepotism and cronyism > meritocracy any day because merit is so subjective. Better to have someone you like and trust than some self satisfied douche who you’re nothing but a job to. Stalin even had the right idea! Before he turned on the common people at least, but getting out the officers in the army and the zhids in government and replacing them with honest Russians who owed everything to him. In Denmark cronyism actually used to be an accepted system till Struensee’s damn reforms in the name of the fruitcake Enlightenment changed it, a lot of government officials were former servants or relatives of servants of the aristocracy. General Horatio Gates was the son of the housekeeper to the Duke of Leeds. That’s a much fairer system to the common people. Back to the basics. God save the Tsar!
Yakub's Laboratory 