Chapter 9: The Material Conditions of American Exceptionalism: Part IV

I spent so much time analyzing the political structures of medieval England through its linguistic substrates in order to demonstrate something important, something overlooked by modern leftist discourse that will be important, especially in the next chapter. The Norman Conquest turned the society of the early Anglo-Saxons from something that would've looked like apartheid done to Celts into something a bit more egalitarian, at least as far as Anglo-Saxon relations with Celts were concerned. The French aristocracy dulled the distinctions between them, and William of Normandy's "Harrying of the North" (a polite liberal term for the genocide of the settler-colonial Danelaw) depopulated much of northern England and thereby directly raised the cost of free labor and indirectly raised the cost of serf labor, by letting them drive a harder bargain with their lords.

In both instances, the organically democratic institutions of the Anglo-Saxon state spread the benefits of these fallen civilizations' imprint on the land as widely as possible. Even feudalism and a strict racial hierarchy in early England did not endure forever. It wasn't possible given England's institutions, and it wasn't possible given America's to set up an aristocratic racialized exploitation structure there either. Attempts were made (see: the Confederacy and its many Civil War participation trophies), but the bourgeois liberal democratic institutions were used by the working class in both cases to block it, as unfree labor was strongly against their economic interests. And those bourgeois liberal democratic institutions evolved directly out of nazbol savagery in both instances.

Medieval England was not a democracy, but it did have surprisingly advanced elements thereof, some more advanced than our modern corresponding institutions. Subjects of the King were judged by a jury of their peers, meaning that the enforcement of even the most draconian laws was mediated by how much the commoners agreed with it. The "mother of Parliaments" and the Magna Carta also date from this period; starting over with a nazbol society on top of the ruins of Roman Britain gave England a broad-based economic advantage that was gradually extended towards all subjects of the English crown over the centuries.

Nazbollery, premised as it is on military strength, cannot maintain the master race forever. Sooner or later, the rank and file will have their hearts bleed towards at least some of the people they ruthlessly exploit, and the definition of the "master race" will creep outwards bit by bit over the years to include more and more people. No less a genocidal nazbol monster than Andrew Jackson adopted a Native child as his own son, presumably because a tiny glimmer of goodness was buried in his coal-black heart of sin. This is what happened to the Celts that the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons conquered too: after the Norman Conquest, they too were now Englishmen, united in national catastrophe.

Genghis Khan did the same thing, and the children he adopted from the tribes he ethnically cleansed often grew up to become the top administrators of his empire. White European Christian Russians, who by ibn Battuta's accounts were the absolute oppressed dregs of Mongol society, nonetheless eventually decided "screw being a peasant, we're going to flee to the swamps and do a Mongolia" and became cossacks. "Cossack" means "free raider," and that's exactly what they were. First they raided the Mongols, but by living as Mongols lived, they became as mighty as the Mongols themselves. The khans happily availed themselves of these free raiders, and the cossacks were now the token Christian whites inside the khan's tent. After the rise of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, the cossacks were strong enough to go over to fight for him and help him overthrow the "Tatar yoke." As the last grand duke of Moscow became the first Russian tsar, he granted the cossacks the same privileges they enjoyed under the khans, and then some. Cossacks were the shock troops of Russian imperialism, the first to exploit, trade with, and enrich themselves off of the new territories they won for the tsar. The privileges they won nazbollically from the Mongols endured until the Russian Civil War. There, the cossacks were the most reactionary of the forces of the White Army, because they had benefitted most of all the commoners from tsarist rule. But when the Red Army won anyway, they still were in some kind of hock to the democratic nazbol institution of the cossacks: the Russian peasantry and proletariat knew how nice the cossacks had it, and expected to have it at least as good now that they had won the war. Bolshevik rule was dedicated in the long run to vindicating that expectation.

So yes, nazbollery is bad. But the long term effects of nazbollery do lead to more egalitarian outcomes centuries later. So nazbollery is bad, but in much of the medieval world it was the correct line, allowing something better to one day rise in its wake in a way that conservative monarchies or liberal mercantile republics of the time never really did. (The Hapsburg Empire stagnated and died for a thousand years, as did the Most Serene Republic of Venice.) Without Genghis Khan, we never would have gotten Lenin or Stalin or the Kims.

Or to frame it another way: just as the prime bourgeois ideological position of liberalism decays in the direction of fascism, the secondary bourgeois ideological position of nazbollery decays in the direction of socialism.

And so, it must also be questioned: without Washington and Jefferson, would we have the prospect of global world socialist revolution that we do today? What American Lenins and Stalins await this generation because once upon a time, lazy nazbol slaveowners gave themselves too many political and economic rights, and the table for that feast of rights has been broadened over the years to the point that the proletariat now has the education and the political rights to free itself on this continent?

Continue reading Part V