Harvest WAS Re: [Upd-discuss] The Challenge of Law in the Wave of Ideas

[cacophonix]

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 10:19:21 -0700 (PDT) Michael Hart wrote:

> The truth is that the public domain is becoming an ever shrinking domain,
> containing a smaller percentage of the world'd information, from an older
> and older portion of history.
> 
> We live in an era in which we get more and more information THEY want US
> to be exposed to, and less and less information of the grand total.
> 
> Wasn't there a post WWII distopian story about such a world?
> 
> The powers-that-be provided you with more and more information that was
> basically what THEY wanted US to know, but kept the real stuff hidden
> away for themselves?
> 
> And something about anonymous cigarettes?

   "Now he's doing horse, it's June" - Prince : Sign O' The Times


  The Harvest of the Seasons
  --------------------------

  We cannot hope to recapture today
  the terror
  that the mounted horse struck
  into the Middle East and Eastern Europe
  when it first appeared.

  That is because there is a difference
  in scale which I can only compare
  with the arrival of tanks in Poland in 1939,
  sweeping all before them.

  I believe that the importance of the horse
  in European history has always been underrated.

  In a sense,
  warfare was created by the horse,
  as a nomad activity.

  That is what the Huns brought,
  that is what the Phrygians brought,
  that is what the Mongols brought,
  and brought to a climax under Genghis Khan much later.

  In particular,
  the mobile hordes transformed the organisation of battle.

  They conceived a different strategy of war --
  a strategy that is a war game;
  how war makers love to play games!

  The strategy of the mobile horde depends on manoeuvre,
  on rapid communication,
  and on practised tactical moves
  which can be strung together
  into different sequences of surprise.

  The remnants of that remain
  in the war games that are still played
  and that come from Asia,
  such as chess and polo.

  War strategy is always regarded by those who win
  as kind of a game.

  And there is played to this day in Afghanistan
  a game called Buz Kashi
  which comes from the kind of competitive riding
  that was carried out by the Mongols.

  The men who play this game of Buz Kashi are professionals --
  that is to say,
  they are retainers,
  and they and there horses are trained
  and kept
  simply for the glory of winning.

  On a great occasion three hundred men
  from different tribes
  would compete,
  though that had not happened now
  for twenty or thirty years,
  until we organised it.

  The players of this game of Buz Kashi
  do not form teams.

  The object of the game is not
  to prove one group better than another,
  but to find a champion.

  There are famous champions
  from the past,
  and they are remembered.

  The President
  who supervised this game was a champion
  who no longer played.

  The President gives orders through a herald,
  who may be a pensioner of the game,
  though less distinguished.

  Where we should expect to see a ball,
  there is instead a headless calf.

  (And that macabre plaything says something about the game,
  as if the riders were making sport of the farmers' livelihood.)

  The carcass weighs about fifty pounds
  and the object is to snatch it up,
  defending it against the challengers,
  and carry it off through two stages.

  The first stage of the game
  is riding off with the carcass
  to the fixed boundary flag.
  and rounding the flag.

  After that the crucial stage is the return;
  as he sweeps round the flag,
  constantly challenged,
  the rider heads for home and the goal,
  which is marked in the centre
  of the mêlée.

  The game is going to won by a single goal,
  so no quarter is given.

  This is not a sporting event;
  there is nothing in the rules about fair play.

  The tactics are pure Mongol,
  a discipline of shock.

  The astonishing thing in the game is
  what routed the armies that faced the Mongols:
  that what seems a wild scrimmage
  is in fact full of manoeuvre,
  and dissolves suddenly
  with the winner riding clear to score.

  One has the sense that the crowd
  is much more excited,
  and more involved emotionally,
  than the players.

  The players,
  by contrast,
  seem committed but cold;
  they ride with brilliant and brutal intensity,
  but they are not absorbed in playing,
  they are absorbed in winning.

  Only after the game
  is the winner himself carried away by the excitement.

  He should have asked the President
  to sanction the goal and,
  by missing that point of etiquette in this uproar,
  he has jeopardised the goal.

  It is nice to know
  that the goal was allowed.

  The Buz Kashi is a war game.

  What makes it electric is the cow-boy ethic:
  riding as an act of war,

  It expresses the monomaniac culture of conquest;
  the predator posing as a hero
  because he rides the whirlwind.

  But the whirlwind is empty.

  Horse or tank,
  Genghis Khan or Hitler or Stalin,
  it can only feed on the labours of other folk.

  The nomad in his last historic role as war maker
  is still an anachronism,
  and worse,
  in a world that has discovered,
  in the last twelve thousand years,
  that civilisation is made by settled people.

  ....

  The fifth of the heirs in succession
  to Genghis Khan
  was the sultan Oljeitu,
  who came to this forbidding plateau in Persia
  to build a great new capital city,
  Sultaniyeh.

  What remains is his own mausoleum
  which later was the model for much Muslim architecture.

  Objeitu was a liberal monarch,
  who brought here men from all parts of the world.

  He himself was a Christian,
  at another time Buddhist,
  and finally Muslim,
  and he did
  -- at this court --
  attempt really to establish a world court.

  It was the one thing a nomad could contribute to civilisation:
  he gathered from the four corners of the world the cultures,
  mixed them together,
  and sent them out to fertilise the earth.

  It is the irony of the bid for power
  by the Mongol nomads that when Objeitu died,
  he was known as Oljeitu the Builder.

  The fact is that agriculture
  and the settled way of life
  were established steps now
  in the ascent of man,
  and had set a new level
  for the form of human harmony
  which was to bear fruit into the far future:
  the organisation of the city.

  -- Jacob Bronowski : The Ascent of Man

     Chapter 2 : The Harvest of the Seasons