Anarcho-Historian Lesson #8: Economic Elites and the State

 

August 1490 represented a glorious late summer for Renaissance crime, wealth, power, patronage and statecraft, well throughout the entire peninsula of Italy. From the salt water bays of Sicily to the alpine, fresh water lakes between France and Italy, Twelve Families ruled this famous European land. They lovingly murdered and plundered throughout the Boot.

They had the names of Este, Gonzaga, Orsini, Colonna, Montefeltro, Bentivoglio, Petrucci, Baglioni, Malatesta, and then the three most powerful ‘Famiglie’ – the Medici, (the first bankers to the Popes), the Sforza, (the most ruthless ‘condottiere’), and the Aragonese, (possessing the grand Imperial Navy of Spain – later creating the Spanish Armada). And lest I forget, there was also infamous number thirteen – the Borgia, from Valencia, Spain. The great naval empire, republican-oligarchy of Venice, or ‘The Serenissima,’ watched on the sidelines, confident in its own power.

Eventually, the Venetians would also have to resort to the condottieri in order to support their land empire in Italy, and the French monarchy, under Charles VIII, would soon invade the peninsula within a few years. About thirty years later, the last great German emperor, Charles V, would also invade the peninsula. The Italian farmers suffered the sack of their crops through such foreign invasions; but the Twelve families of crime, power and wealth always maintained their rule and preserved their comfortable positions.

During that late medieval period, most of the Twelve Families begot themselves as hired mercenaries, or contract killers. They fought for the Popes, (called Guelphs), or for the German Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, (called Ghibellines), or for other local, powerful families in Italy. They even fought with other European powers – and a few even fought with the Muslim caliphates across the Great Sea, or the Mediterranean. The money was what mattered. These hired killers had the name of ‘condottieri,’ or men of honor under contract.

The successful condottieri, or those late medieval knights, began to acquire landed properties, lots of money, and most importantly, loyal armed followers, called ‘soldati,’ or soldiers, through their legal crimes: theft-pillaging, sacking cities, and murdering rich rivals.

The loyal soldiers remained devoted until the violence, warfare and thefts dried up. Inside the Twelve Families, the loyalty could break apart due to any infraction of the condottieri honor code. There were also lots of illegitimate sons and daughters too – and they also wanted parts of the action.

In 1500, during a wedding of the Baglioni family, a terrible war started, and half the guests murdered the other half! In 1505, inside the Este family, one illegitimate son, the Cardinal Ipolitio, had paid killers to almost gouge out the eyes of his half-brother, Giulio, over the sexual rights to the beautiful Angela Borgia, sister to the infamous Lucrezia. Eventually, brother Alfonso, the legitimate son, had Giulio imprisoned for 53 years.

The Twelve Families of Renaissance Italy generally married into each other’s blood lines – in order to avoid further bloodshed, and thereby create even stronger alliances for family unity. Marriage also brought wealthy dowries that helped keep the wealth, ‘in the family.’

But one family had a different history, and outshined the others. They were the Medicis of Florence. This family began as a merchant clan possessing great monopolies around the city. Their financial successes transformed them into bankers – and especially for the Popes in Rome. Four of the Medici even became Renaissance Popes.

The Medici intermarried into all the other twelve families, including their rivals and enemies. One of the Medici, an illegitimate son, Cosimo di Medici, became a powerful condottiere, and transformed himself into the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The Medici represented the greatest arts patrons of the Renaissance, and even greater than the Venetian Empire.

They patronized the best: Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Cellini, Michelangelo, Da Vinci and Botticelli. Their palaces slowly accumulated marvelous art treasures, all of which still stand in majestic Florence to this day: the Uffizi, the Pitti, the Belvedere, and Boboli Gardens. They even hired the genius of Pisa, by the name of Galileo, as the personal tutor for the Medici children. Machiavelli, the great political scientist-historian, dedicated his book, ‘The Prince,’ or ‘Il Principe,’ to the Medici.

The Medici Family had ultimately controlled the economic, political, military, and most importantly, the ideological reigns of Renaissance Italy. In Italian, this virtue had the name of ‘podestà,’ or simply pure power. The Medici Family transcended into the Godfathers of the Renaissance.

These historic examples from the Renaissance expose the relations between the criminal state and the criminal economic elites. It has been, and still remains, the perfect example of parasitism, or basically, the scheming of parasites.

The economic elites both influence the state and the state influences the elites. Both clans function together in symbiotic processes similar to worm parasites inside the human body. Like parasitic worms, they move in and out of each other’s spheres and feed off each other. As the parasites take control of certain natural body functions, so the elites take political controls, while the politicians can retire as corporate executives. The state cannot survive without economic elites; likewise, the economic elites cannot function without political bosses in order to enforce their monopoly controls.

The parasitic rule of crime is almost impregnable, but counter-hegemonic blocks, or concocted political alliances, with their many historical absurdities, or as they said in the Renaissance, ‘Mala Fortuna,’ (Bad Fortune), have ultimately defeated such power supports and furtive goals. By the middle of the eighteenth-century, the 1700s, the Medici had lost their power completely, and so, the obese, degenerate Medici offspring married themselves into the powerful royalties of Europe. Their family line had finally ended – forever.

Elite Families are different from the families representing the rest of us. Throughout human history, they have betrayed and murdered each other, so one member could hoard greater controls and more power. It is still this same way for old money elites. Nowadays, they just hide their crimes so much better. Elites families, or old money families, offer higher oaths to their own chosen institutions – the rest of humanity for damnation!

For example, the Kennedy Family in the United States tortured their own daughter, Rosemary, through a lobotomy. They hired a psycho-babble quack to do the ‘surgery’ on her.  The Family wanted her eliminated due to her teenage outbursts and her escape from a convent that her parents had forced her into. Rosemary was always an embarrassment because she was ‘slower’ than the other siblings. Rosemary spent the rest of her life locked up inside a closed institution, with special nurses to take of her, condemned to a life in a comatose mental state. The economic elites never tolerate such humiliations.

These putrid elites generally rule through four chosen methods. They first get away with legal crime and state violence. There is one privilege of law for them, and the full fury of the law for the rest of us. Secondly, they always encourage the settlement or immigration of certain ethnic groups, while they hate, imprison, murder and expel others. Thirdly, they tend to champion and fund certain ideologies over others. Fourthly, they patronize particular artists and artistic styles, and the especially fund modern, public art installations.

Some contemporary examples reference the Amerikan Empire – and the elite parasites within it. The Bush Family always had a reputation for partying, but unlike the poor kids in the ghettos and trailer parks, the privileged sons and daughters never did any jail time for their drug and drinking alcohol indiscretions. During the late Vietnam War period, George W. got a nice spot in a Texan Air National Guard unit, which never had a deployment order to ‘Nam.’

In the United States, there always seems to spark up another ‘immigration debate’ in the corporate media. It is not really a debate at all, but the lobbying of certain elite factions in the United States that want more foreign, cheap wage immigrant workers. Meanwhile, the working classes have no real voice. Powerful urban elites mainly want a docile and cowardly wage slave workforce. These elites are urban sophisticates with money, yet they need slave wage labor for basic cleaning and cooking, and other bad jobs. They also see ‘their cities’ as displacement-gentrification zones.

In Captialist-Fascist Amerika, the enemy group in America’s large cities, are the large African-American, or Black populations. According to the elites, those people must go. They are the official criminal class. The elites use every illegal method to get rid of them. They run the mostly, white skinned privilege police forces to harass, or stop and frisk, colored youths. They defend slumlords, or urban property pimps, in extorting rent for rat infested dumps. They fill the prisons with the real dangerous ones, and they allow higher priced supermarkets to open up in the ‘bad sections,’ which the banks redline as areas for destruction. These political thugs desperately want to replace the dangerous classes, representing ‘the Blacks,’ with docile, first generation immigrant, wage slaves.

One great example was the governorship of Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller Family decided that it needed to enter politics and secure its ill-gotten, yet legal looting. In the 1970s, a couple of Rockefellers secured governorships, heads of international elite institutions, banking CEO spots, urban property pimping and art foundation dealing. The most powerful state bully was Nelson Rockefeller of New York State. During his governorship, he passed through one of the toughest anti-illegal drug laws in the country, called ‘The Rockefeller Laws.’ Even low quantities for ‘hard drugs’ garnered at least fifteen years in prison.

Like the old ‘gun control’ laws, which Rockefeller also supported, these ‘drug control’ laws targeted New York City’s African-American population. During his putrid reign, the prisoners of Attica Prison revolted and demanded reforms for better treatment. Many of the revolting prisoners were African-Americans. Rockefeller sent in the State Police with full immunity to exterminate the revolting prisoners – which was what they dutifully did.

These urban elites always demand more ‘gun control.’ They don’t want to ban guns for their own bodyguards, for the local police forces, or for ‘their private armies.’ Instead, they prefer that the criminal classes, meaning the African-Americans, do not possess the rights to own firearms and to defend themselves.

America’s economic elites are also very active on their ideological fronts. They fund particular research centers in universities, and contribute to certain ideological ‘think tanks,’ or academic fronts that defend their preferred ideological positions. They push certain nongovernmental organizations, or non-governmental organizations, into ‘international underdevelopment fields,’ and they set up ideological ‘state advising’ organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the World Economic Forum, etc.

Their ideologies represent a hodgepodge of the different factions of economic elites. Some of them want more population controls and support eugenics. Others demand the continual supremacy of the US dollar as international reserve currency. While various elite groups prefer low inflation and high unemployment; most of them definitely support free trade initiatives for multi-national corporations, and their right to off-shore cheap jobs around the world. There are elite groups who push for more ‘literacy in education,’ or a better qualified workforce, while others want to turn education into a secure profit motive with ‘choice in state schools’ and public monies for private initiatives. America’s economic elites have many other ideological stratagems, but for the sake of this essay, it is too numerous to list all of them.

Finally, these top members of the 1% consider themselves the true patrons of the fine and high arts, good taste, refinement and ‘class.’ They are all active within some type of arts organization. The list has included concert halls, fine art museums, arts fellowships, private collection administration, high-end galleries, and modern, public art placements.

Our top-notch elites also enjoy a variety of high-end restaurants with ethnic diversity-plate presentation twists. Yet, the back kitchens of these fine and wretched dining establishments all have lowly paid immigrants who do not possess legal working papers – the most obedient wage slaves.

Elite economic power and influence seem almost unbreakable. But their sick dreams and perverted desires often twist and turn – and not to their liking usually. What the elites actually receive is quite different from their goals. Hegemony and historical absurdity always confound them – and will continue to do so.

They want white hipster, ‘artiste’ heavens with first generation immigrant communities in ‘their cities,’ but they often manage hard to live-in, expensive cities with few good jobs left, and a violent crime rate that keeps spiraling into dangerous levels. They want gun control and open immigration, yet America’s rural working classes and middle classes know their game, and so they always successfully resist the elites every time they pull one of their influence tricks into pushing their agendas. This is the reason America’s economic elites give total support to the police-surveillance-prison state.

Since the beginning of human civilization, economic elites and the state have existed as parasites between each other. They move and feed in and out of each other, meanwhile, they try to impose their wills on the lesser ones. They have generally won in human history, but their victories are always different from their original plans.

The six truths of history always come into play – and will continue as such. Neither the state, nor the economic elites can exist without each other, yet there always farts some competing factions between them. Although they have a lot fewer numbers compared to the rest of us, their powers and privileges of legal crime award them greater unity and strength.

The Amerikan Empire VI: Third World Juntas of Big City Corruption

 

There was something evil about the walk, and the eyes. The man seemed like a borderline obese monster dressed in a fine suit and polished boots. His gait both wobbled and strutted into public buildings. The protruding, balding head had tufts of oiled hair pasted on the side, and the beard possessed a stench mix of tobacco reek, whiskey, rancid beef and pungent perfume. A grotesque and large cretin at first glance, this fetid human specimen was also one of the most powerful politicians in the United States, from the 1850s to the 70s. Boss Tweed was the name of infamy.

He started his nefarious political career as a gang leader in New York City within the rough neighborhood of the Lower East Side, or L.E.S. for short. He grew into one of the top gang leaders through swinging a large axe on rival fire fighter guys during street fights. Houses were of wood in those days, and so for those poor unfortunates that lived inside of those hovels, fires were quite common. Poor tenants had to pay protection money to the fire gangs – if they wanted to save their personal stuff and lives from the flame inundations. And if business was ever slow, the fire and cop gangs could do a little arson action on tenement buildings too.

The obese, axe wielding brute soon caught the greedy eyes of some corrupt NYC officials needing some muscle in extorting votes from the lower class lowlifes, the white ones living in the L.E.S. The politicians were members of a notorious Democratic machine and gang called ‘Tammany Hall.’ Boss Tweed gleefully took on the role as the ward boss, and then slithered into becoming the greatest boss of the city, where even national Democratic and Republican party politicians sought out the chubby thug of destiny.

Starting his illustrious career in public service, He purchased for himself a phony attorney credential, which the state government of New York duly certified as legitimate. Next, he continually got himself ‘elected’ to various political positions, such as city alderman, chairman of the NYC Democratic Club, city commissioner, NY state assemblyman – and even a stint as a NYC congressman in the House of Representatives. Every time he placed his name on the ballot, he miraculously won the election and served out his time in office. Yet with all of his important and innovative political work, nothing ever changed in NYC.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he constructed a stronger pre-mafia gang at Tammany Hall where all the parasites received their cushy jobs. They did not have to work at all really, yet they regularly collected nice salaries and pensions. He also handpicked local, rich bums with distinguished faces to run as mayors of New York. Most of them were from the Lower East Side wards of Irish Catholic immigrants. All of his mayoral candidates fantastically won. Everybody understood: the real power behind city hall government mob was Fat Bastard Tweed.

Tweed monopolized most government posts, and he also monopolized all NYC government construction contracts. Any building that needed repairs or a new facelift had to go through ‘his companies.’ Tweed further capitalized on his loot and became the biggest property pimp landlord in the City through buying up expensive buildings on Fifth Avenue, and then purchasing farm landholdings in the Harlem section of Manhattan.

Some years later, the railroad capitalists Jay Gould and Jim Fisk put up some flim flam municipal bonds in order to raise the stock in their ‘new company’. They needed the master con man Tweed to certify the deeds. Tweed made sure the stock hoax was legit – and demanded that his horde rob a few inflated dividends.

Tweed was such a corrupt master, that the rival Republican machine gang in the City, finagled a deal with the all-powerful boss to completely rewrite New York City’s Charter. Most importantly, Tweed successfully used the different NYC cop gangs as his personal foot soldiers, whether the Municipal Police Force or the Metropolitan Police Force.

Crap historians often look at the Tweed and Tammany Hall Era of New York history as a type of aberration in American urban government. Those historians are not just bad historians, they are also liars. This corrupt urban system in Amerika still functions marvelously, and not just in megalopolis cities, such as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles, but also in supposedly progressive cities, like San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon – and this Amerikan urban gangrene exists in even medium to small cities across the country.

Amerika’s urban juntas have represented the most foul epitomes of criminal neglect against the poor and lower classes, while those same city bosses have continually colluded with urban elites in order to shortchange the local political economy. Amerika’s city father hoodlums have consistently brutalized the poor lives of those unfortunates that must survive inside those infernos of cruelty.. They legally steal, cook the books, monopolize, extort, graft, bribe, and they rewrite the tax codes, public education system, criminal laws, and urban boundary lines to their sick whims.

They have even used the police as paramilitary murderers and jailers against those honorable people who have resisted such tyranny. While the official US propaganda system has brazenly extolled the lies of freedom and democracy, Amerika’s urban states of sinister corruption and criminality have crafted the inner city horrors of abject slums and ghettos.

We are not dealing with Boss Hogg buffoons. These are shrewd card sharp players that know how to filch and swindle through legal fiat and institutional switch and bait. They are merciless to the working class and lumpen populations that lack money, while they offer innumerable monetary benefits to corporations, real estate conglomerations, large business owners and white yuppie transients with money. These municipal crooks have coated their own pockets for their very own individual perks, like free travel and multiple bodyguards, permanent post-retirement mega-salaries and hoarding public tax monies for their own private initiatives.

A short list of some of their more contemporary frauds and rackets will suffice. These gangs of respectable criminals have often used the improper use of TIF monies and economic gerrymandering of ‘enterprise business zones.’

In order to receive more property and city taxes, which also increase their personal salaries, the city hall bosses continually extend the city limits. Once they illegally rob the outlying lands, they hand over the cheap disused fields or farmlands within those ‘limits’ to a low-cost private developer who then receives a monopoly on all work contracts. This nefarious practice also limits other companies from competing for scarce work opportunities and jobs.

Ultimately, a sprawling area of real estate either sits vacant or fills-up, whether for residential or commercial use. Even if it is a bust for the local economy, the privileged property owner continues to pay the low tax rates, while the city government stooges collect their tax bribes.

University administrator hacks have also worked in tandem with these legal gangsters. Local city judges in on the fix will then allow a ’eminent domain’ section to enter the urban map plan. A new satellite university campus is now under construction. The university administrators pay nothing, while the students pay another tuition increase.

The city bosses have used another popular money laundering-bribery scheme through increasing municipal taxes in order to pay for professional sports stadiums. The multi-billionaire sports team owner pays very little and receives his very own team stadium.

City Hall has even more legal and legit frauds under its sleeves, such as Community Development Block Grants, Corporate Income Tax Credits, Industrial Revenue Bonds, Property Tax Abatements, Sales Tax Exemptions and Tax Formula Changes. Meanwhile, the average citizen living in the cockroach and rat infested tenement building receives the icy stare of the donut cop.

Most of Amerika’s City Hall overseers are also the most rabid supporters of gun confiscations among the local citizens. They are not anti-gun for their own bodyguards or for the local donut brigades, but they will imprison the average citizen for even possessing a shotgun in the home. Crime in these urban Amerikan cauldrons is often rampant and brutal. The urban citizen that defends himself from a criminal act often has to endure a long legal battle or a hard prison term.

These urban bullies only want more control, and more money flowing in to their bank accounts. They also want some extra desserts for their rich friends. The only other group that they tend to stomach are transient yuppies with white skin privilege – as long as they have money to spend. They say they like ‘artists’ too, but the ‘artistes’ only work as the first wave of rent paying transients for their gentrification projects. They have to displace the African-American and Latino poor first. And then the privileged landlords will come for them too.

The cycle of deceit and legal crime continues within Amerika’s cities. Politicians, Financial Banks, Real Estate Conglomerates and Insurance Fraudsters are always the big winners in urban sprawl Amerika. Now we understand why so many big cities in the United States have had all-powerful Mafia families. The regular people have always known that City Hall was on the take, so they went to the wise guys instead for some meager justice. And for the rest of us in the city, we just have to sell ourselves on the rigged market for the bare basics of life: a wage slave job that robs our time and our energies, while paying the rent debt for some privacy and some sleep.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #6: Achieving the Fine Art of Violence and Maintaining Power

The fateful year was 246 BCE, in the middle of January, Chinese New Year’s Day. And this day was truly an auspicious event. The calm winds did blow, and a new dynasty, the most powerful and yet, the shortest dynasty in Chinese history, had drunk from the poisoned cup of power. The great Chin Empire had arranged the sacred rituals for its grandiose reign. The infamous Black Emperor held tight to the wrath, once belonging to the worst of winters, and his holy name was, Ying Zheng.

Originally, the Chin rulers had fought as military knights under the great Zhou dynasty. But many centuries later, the Chin had finally received the mandate of Heaven, and like all new regimes and states built on the foundations of violence and legal crime, the emperor had a new capital built, called Xianyang on the western Wei River. Ying Zheng, as war commander and imperial Black Prince, took less than ten years to conquer all of his rival warlords and eventually unite the Middle Kingdom of China, both east and west, and north from the Yellow river to the south on the Yangtze river.

After Emperor Zheng’s sudden death about twelve years later, one of his sons, Zhao Zheng, or following his new name, Qin Shi Huang – the First Great Emperor, continued the Chin dynasty. He would last only a few years in power before his fateful assassination. The great Chin dynasty actually lasted only fifteen years, from 246-210 BCE.

Yet, this dynasty was the first to unite all the Chinas, the first to build on the Great Wall against the barbarians, the first to exterminate all the soldiers that knew the whereabouts of the Black Emperor, and then recreate them in lifelike quality in stone sculpture buried under the imperial sacred Earth. Chin Imperial power had first successfully used the political ideology of Legalism, under the advisers of Han Fei, Li Si, and Shang Yang.

Many philosophers and intellectuals in both antiquity and modern times have tried to formulate a theory, a law, or a truth that would explain to humanity the essence of human history. For some ancient historians, the understanding of history and conquest emerged from correct moral guidance, law systems, and aligning the actions of justice with fate or the Gods. Medieval historians often wrote about the attainment of both group discipline and group feeling, which enabled the triumph of the Spirit.

For others, it was the power of the Idea, the conception of the truth, while great leaders in history had obtained the access to the Eternal Mind, which led their empires and nations to victory. And for a few others, mostly of the Marxist persuasion, history was nothing but the struggle of social classes, where the poorer classes have been in constant war, movement and retreat versus the richer classes. All of these philosophers, intellectuals, and armchair historians were wrong.

The philosopher Nietzsche came the closest to understanding History, when he stated that history was not a subject worthy of study, for it was simply the study about how the strong, or the Masters, abused the weak, or the Slaves. This was true, but history has never been that simple. Humans have been very complex, have often thought too much, and have generally acted and reacted based on mental absurdities. But the cycles of history, and the rise and fall of great powers, empires, nations and states have all developed through the cultivation of the art of violence and the maintenance of such power. True power comes out of the genius, energy and will to do incredible acts of violence, brutality and cruelty.

All powerful state entities know this historical truth, including the sociopathic liars that now run the real United States Government-World Power. Historical entities that have fine tuned their methods of violence to greater legal webs of direction, such as prisons and concentration camps, massive laws codes, greater technological prowess in war, unbelievable controls in information and state secrets, amazing propaganda techniques, sophisticated uses of genocide, shocking acts of mass murder, various layers of legal state crimes, and the utter destruction of multiple enemies, have been the same entities that have triumphed through the attainment of power status on the world stage. Mao Tse Tung, the last known emperor of China, albeit a Communist one, stated that ‘all power comes out of the barrel of a gun.’ He was also partly right.

Violence has not just represented physical extermination, such as war, military divisions, guns, urban destruction, legal murder and state criminality. Violence has also signified institutional levels of brute force, such as laws, codes, work systems, schools, prisons, media propaganda, information gathering, intelligence spying, and surveillance mechanisms. The state apparatuses and empires that have successfully used and perfected all of those different levers of institutional violence have been the same empires that have achieved the most sublime victories on history’s pages for the battle of ideologies.

Think on the first great European empire, the Spanish Empire. At the beginning of the seventeenth-century, this Empire ‘where the sun had never set,’ had just murdered millions of indigenous people in the Caribbean, and yet it constructed a durable colonial regime from the Rio Colorado in New Mexico to the Rio Bio Bio in Chile for three hundred years. The ancient Assyrians also possessed great victories for hundreds of years, and they also held their special methods of torture and death in dealing with recalcitrant nobles that refused to respect them. The Chin Emperors of ancient China understood this truth fully through their ideological supports, called the Legalists.

For example, the Legalists advisers of the Chin ordered the confiscation of all illegal weapons. They also counseled the emperor on the nature of warfare, both internal and external. The emperor had to win the battle at all costs. The Chin also abolished hereditary noble privileges and they willfully executed scheming court eunuchs, massacred suspect villages and buried alive dishonest Confucian intellectuals. The Chin introduced forced labor conscription in order to build royal palaces, roads for war chariots, extensive canals, and gigantic walls that stretched thousands of miles in order to keep out the barbarians. They expelled non-Chinese foreigners and forcibly resettled minority cultures. The emperor did not just lounge in his palace, but he toured his empire on a war chariot accompanied by royal advisers and noble knights.

The Chin emperor forced the nobles into continual wars, so as to keep them occupied from parasitism. The Chin also employed the first court bureaucrats and did allow for some internal criticism. The emperors mandated a large family policy, larger agricultural tribute taxes, and the control of marriage partners, so that the poor would not marry the wealthy. The Great Emperor also demanded the burning of historical records with the final unification of Chinese legal and writing systems. According to the Legalists, the emperor kept a neutral stance on all policy, but his will reigned supreme handing out both punishments and favors, while he always favored the duress of the Law against favoritism and privileges.

After the overthrow of the Chin, another dynasty emerged to rule China. They had the name of the Han Dynasty, and unlike the Chin, they would rule for another 400 years. The Han emperors condemned the old Legalist methods of the Chin, but they also used similar violent methods in maintaining control. Sometimes the officials would cancel taxes, and other times they raised them. Sometimes the officials increased the number of laws, and other times they did not enforce them. The Han Chinese attacked Manchuria, Annam, (northern Vietnam), Mongolia and Korea, in order to expand their empire. The Han used Confucian scholars over Legalists, yet for the posterity of history, they used the same methods of violence and legal crime in order to keep up their power.

The historical lesson is simple. All states that want to advance in power and grasp their historical glory must increase their deeds of violence, brutality, criminality and cruelty. Violence does get the results, because the State, as historical entity, bathes in its own power to commit admissible violence and legal crime. There is no way to have a state without acts of torture, rape, imprisonment and murder. This truth goes for all states: democratic or parliamentary, republican or dictatorial, monarchic or oligarchic, theocracies or socialist juntas. Whether the methods are coup d’états or elections, resignations or palace revolts, the activities of the state speak only to unrestrained violence. Human culture changes, but the state has never changed – nor will it ever.

Anarcho-Historian Lesson #5: Seven Classical Methods in Maintaining Social Control over Subject Populations

A violent year was ending; this ‘august’ day was also in the middle of a hard winter – and it was even rougher inside the moderate climes of Rome. This particular year was 27 BCE. It was the month of January, and the  new emperor of the great Roman Empire claimed the day of the 16th as an imperial holiday. The emperor’s name for historical posterity was Octavian Augustus.

During the subsequent years of his reign, he would use all of the ancient classical methods in maintaining social control over Rome’s subject populations. The Roman Empire would never experience its previous civil wars again, yet he snuffed out the Roman Republic from its existence. He replaced the Republic with an Empire and the rest was history.

The first method in social control was Octavian Augustus successfully claiming the rituals, images and titles of legitimate authority. His second method ingeniously utilized slow and repressive tyranny with token reforms. The third method represented the mastery of the bread and circuses spectacle. The fourth used the infamous, and always-triumphant, political technique of divide and you shall conquer. The fifth aspect of control made use of naming enemies and aggravating the public fear of such enemies. The sixth system of statecraft employed selective justice and pardons for some, while making brutal examples against a few easier targets, or called ‘the carrot and the stick’ approach. The final one, and most important method tied with the first one, availed in him creating state mythologies out of selected events.

And many patrician elites, the senate, the army, common plebes, farmers, artisans, foreign citizens, resident merchants and even slaves would commend the name of August for historical posterity. In fact, this dictator’s name now has the English synonym of prestigious. A month in our Gregorian calendar also has the name August. This short story is how it got that way.

On this day, the 16th of January, 27 BCE, called ‘the first settlement,’ his friend and associate, Lepidus, received the spiritual title of the top priest in the Roman religion, ‘the Pontifex Maximus.’ Lepidus and Augustus acted through a complete religious ceremony that included animal sacrifices and sacred rituals. Lepidus dressed accordingly in the beautiful robes and hat of a Pontifex Maximus. Octavian was not finished however, for he soon dashed into the public state theater in his imperial purple and crimson toga over his old military outfit, when he was previously a military commander of a victorious Roman legion. In one full super event, he claimed all three state powers and legitimized his rule: spiritual, political and military. Octavian Augustus would eventually take the imperial spiritual title of Pontifex Maximus from his old client Lepidus.

While Octavian claimed the semi-divine powers over life and death within the entire empire, he also instituted some important reforms on this sacred holy day. He symbolically handed over his legislative power to the Senate, where a faction of that body had warred against his late, assassinated protégé, Julius Caesar. Augustus made sure that the name and title of Caesar also possessed a semi-divine stature, and Octavian took the name of Caesar as the eternal symbol for the Roman emperor – and which would signify emperor even until modern history, with such bogus titles as Kaiser and Czar.

The entire ritual set up featured senators, military commanders with their officers in full military campaign dress, and a flourish of Romans, equestrians, gentleman farmers and distinguished citizens standing in awe inside of the imperial city, surrounded by grandiose, cleaned white temples and Roman imperial majesty. With all of the state pomp and ritual, which utilized all of the five senses and displayed the flourish of power and greatness, the emotional crowd screamed the new titles and powers of Octavian: ‘Princep,’ or First Citizen, ‘Consul,’ or legislative-military adviser, and ‘Imperator.’ or military commander.

This public ritual super event solidified both his power and legitimacy to rule, while he simultaneously showed his historic preservation of the old Roman values of ‘Dignitas,’ or public honor, ‘Gravitas,’ or public temperance, and ‘Auctoritas,’ or valued wisdom. In an ancient historical age without the Internet, video, television, film, radio and photo-print media, Octavian the Great had prepared a true masterpiece of state theater.

Octavian the Augustus claimed even greater honors, all for his ‘duty’ to Rome. He set up another date of glory called the ‘second settlement,’ where he claimed the powers of the ‘Tribune,’ or the sacred interests of the people, called the ‘Popolus.’ Augustus even claimed that the massive conglomerations of Rome actually represented one great family on the Earth, and so his ultimate title was ‘Pater Patriae,’ Father of the sacred country. In an Empire that swarmed on three different continents while possessing many different languages and cultures, this new truth was certainly something else to believe.

But sacred state rituals and costumes in the service of legitimacy needed some more backing for wider public support. Augustus became the Roman game and circus leader extraordinaire. Normally, such games and circuses happened only during Roman holy days, or holidays. But Augustus kept the party spirit burning with lots of back to back contests of chariot races, gladiator fights, mock battles, and even naval ones, and public contests of lyrical-musical, religious, poetic and physical glories. During these festivals and spectacles, Augustus distributed rations of bread, killed bull meat, and watered down wine to the anxious urban crowds in Rome. The theatrical comedies were in full operation, and the emperor even rebuilt the great Theater of Apollo.

Octavian had also made sure that his rival enemies ended up fully destroyed and discredited. Octavian’s greatest concern was Caesar’s cousin and Roman hero, Mark Antony and his relationship to Cleopatra in Egypt. Octavian managed to pull the Roman Senate against the Mark Antony, and he had even read the supposed will of Mark Antony to the Roman people in the Forum market. Like a skilled manipulator, Octavian moved the public sentiment against the ‘dictatorial degenerate’ lying in waste at Cleopatra’s palace in Egypt. Eventually, Octavian managed to seize a Roman legion that exterminated his followers, and he even ordered their son, Caesarion, killed. Any Roman associated with such a rabble became a public enemy of the Roman people.

While the circuses and bread distribution progressed, Octavian warned the Roman people of the coming sacrifices ahead in order to maintain their wonderful empire. Continual war was the other standard in Octavian’s rule. The Celtic nations in Gaul, or France, and in Hispania, or Spain, still needed the iron discipline of Roman blood and fire. Augustus also had to exterminate the pirate danger in the Mar Nostrum, or the Mediterranean Sea.

Earlier, Octavian had finished off one of the sons of Pompey; Pompey the Great was an old Roman General and ally, later enemy, of Caesar. His sons still had a base of operations in the wilds of Sicily. Augustus’ latter warfare eventual paid off with full victories in Spain and in France. His Germania, or German campaigns, did not gain much territory. In fact, his war campaign against the German nations ended in defeat, but the Roman blood would demand future sacrifice in subduing them. His descendent Claudius would do the faithful job.

In the east, he took Egypt, grabbed more territory from Dacia, or Rumania, and Rome successfully battled the Parthians, or Persians-Iranians, whereby the Roman imperial standards moved from Mesopotamia, or Iraq, into Northern Africa, and on the northern periphery, from the Danube to the Rhine river. Octavian Augustus had many spectacular public triumphs in his city of Rome. His unforgettable triumphant returns featured marching Roman legions in sync, loud war drums, megalith flower displays, stolen religious objects on pedestals, massive stone gods brought back on ships, and thousands of unfortunate captured slaves in chains.

Octavian always maintained the astute politician role. He knew when to offer pardons and patronage, and with other unfortunates, exterminate them mercilessly. He had all of the Senatorial conspirators associated with the assassination of Caesar exterminated – including the noble Cicero, yet he lavished power and patronage on the rest of the Roman Senate to help ‘govern’ the Empire. He exterminated the last heir of Mark Antony and Cleopatra, yet he pardoned Mark Antony’s brother that warred against him in the Perusine War. He ultimately exterminated the sons of Pompey, or the Pirates of Sicily, and yet, he redistributed lands in Italy to his Roman soldiers that faithfully fought with him and even with those that fought for Mark Antony – and he pardoned his old ally Lepidus when his old and disgruntled client decided to battle against him.

Finally, Augustus was the master in creating a renewed imperial and cultural mythology. His death culminated in Roman holiday celebrations that included a monolithic funeral cortège of flower wreaths featuring his noble family and the successor emperor, Tiberius, the Roman Senate, the Roman Praetorian Guard, or elite soldiers, equestrian Roman cavalry, Roman legions stationed near the city of Rome, and throng of innumerable Roman nobles, plebes and citizens in mourning. Augustus financed many public work projects, and his most famous was the construction of the Pantheon, which still stands in the actual Rome of today. His burial took place in the sacred corner of the temple, and his ‘Genius,’ or essence received deification. His eulogies also spread to other writers, intellectuals and historians that Augustus patronized. The greatest work was the epic tale of the Romans, called the ‘Aeneid,’ which traced the early history of Rome back to the honorable and courageous, Trojans – and finishing with Augustus, of course.

And so, the mythology of Octavian Caesar Augustus still lives in historical grandeur, or historical infamy, if you are an Anarchist. His statecraft also continues to breed its monsters. Since those ancient times, uncountable emperors, dictators, thugs on thrones, tyrants, princes, kings, queens, dukes, state criminals, sociopaths, prime ministers, presidents and self-proclaimed leaders have utilized the same methods and have unfortunately made them work.

Now the readers know the truth of such tactics and we can counter them. Anarchists can tell this story and other such examples to the angry and the ignorant. The astute reader can also see how the current monstrosity of empire, the United States of America Empire, has also used, and continues to use, such sinister practices of public manipulation.

But the current evil Amerikan empire has even greater power at its disposal in statecraft and social control. This criminal regime in Washington D.C. has been, and always will be, the greatest at utilizing particular modus operandi: media advertising through image-phrase repetitions, emotional manipulations, and blatant news speak propaganda.