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

[Michael Hart]

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So, you think the terror of Big Brother is less than of Ghengis Khan, etc?

If so, I can only presume that is because Big Brother has hidden himselves
and his tools so thoroughly among you that you have been fooled into going
about your business as if he weren't there, but obeying the rules, without
enough thought about being revolting to get Big Brother's attention.


Thanks!!!

Give the world eBooks in 2006!!!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg


On Thu, 11 May 2006, cacophonix wrote:

> 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
>
>
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>
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