We are still Strong

Premonitions

"The aether gifts me visions. I see a threat far more deadly than gene-hungry tyranids. A scream, and a dark promise. A ship in the shadow, a relic from our secret past. I feel the tightness in my gut as I perceive a cataclysm as yet unseen. The Umbra Mortalis descends upon us. The shadow of death."

We return to Gombak.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T7Pl8JbsXAY/maxresdefault.jpg

Immortality and Building a Metropolis: A View from Mad Max

Hype is a pernicious and all-too-prevalent phenomenon in today’s film industry – but even with that caveat it is quite difficult to overstate the quality of Mad Max: Fury Road.

While not a classic in the truest sense (for this, the exemplars would be Psycho or the Godfather, or even Shawshank Redemption), and while arguably not superior to the second instalment of the original trilogy (Mad Max: Road Warrior), it certainly is a piece of original genius and achievement that could place in the lowest ranks of a credible (say, the American Film Institute’s) “Top 100 of All Time” list. By no means is it mediocre.

I believe that the brilliance of the film speaks for itself, so there is little point in further adding to the praise it has garnered. (That’s not to say that I agree with everything in the film, or that it is without imperfection, but such flaws as it has are really few and far between.)

Instead I thought to draw out one aspect of the film which struck me – how to build a functioning society from nothing, and what that entails: treating people as meat resources, requiring a strongman to hold all in check, holding that leader in deep respect, veneration even. (Further similarities exist between this and the Sumerians, as described elsewhere in this blog, but this is not the place for elaboration.)

I looked upon Immortan Joe and I beheld our very own Old Man, Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

I looked at the one / And beheld the other.

Citadel from radioactive desert wasteland / Gleaming and prosperous metropolis from mudflats, swamp, fishing village in hostile South East Asian jungle

Functioning and ordered society from apocalyptic war and conflict over scarce resources / Functioning and ordered country from racial riots, political turmoil, insecurity and chaos, economic uncertainty, Indonesian Confrontation

Green place with fresh agriculture / Garden city with booming economy and high standards of living

People as meat resources – living blood banks, milk banks, ova banks / People as economic units, economically productive, financially self-sustaining citizens, or conscript soldiery

Scarce resources (water) used as means of societal control / Scarce resources (money, land) used as means of societal control

Religious cult built around the leader / Veneration of the founding PM and his “values”

One-man rule / Benevolent dictatorship

Breeding schemes / Eugenics and graduate mothers schemes

Men coated in white as ruling class / Men dressed in white as ruling political party

A scene popped into my head:

Mr Lee Kuan Yew was on a platform on a cliff face emblazoned with the CPF symbol in place of the Immortan’s steering wheel-and-skull insignia, and he pushed titanic policy levers forward to release a spasm of CPF monies to the grasping masses far below.

“Do not become addicted to welfare,” he intoned, “It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence."

Is there a moral lesson to this? There is obviously a moralising grain to the film but I’m not sure if this can be transplanted wholesale, unmodified, to a proper evaluation of the life and work and legacy of the late Mr Lee. What is right in film can be wrong in reality. Film is simple, real life – and real politics – is complicated, and all that. We certainly cannot justifiably measure both Immortan Joe and Mr Lee with the exact same rod. And even if we did, we would possibly find them separated (perhaps just barely) by the benchmark of strict necessity.

And yet, and yet, the similarities remain stark – and disquieting.

Stop, stop, Arsenal is already dead

Why do I keep following them?

It's just like:

Reflection: 15 Feb 2016

“The first unambiguously attested states yet known emerged round about 3200 BC in the Nile Valley and in southern Mesopotamia – ‘unambiguously’, because writing had been invented in those two areas, and we have documents instead of merely archaeological records. There must certainly have been states before this: city-states, at least, since Jericho had massive walls and a temple shrine as early as c.6500 BC – but we know nothing of its social and political life. Likewise, there were important states after this which, if we could interpret their writing, might well disclose a political order to match the Egyptian or Sumerian: Minoan Crete, for example, that flourished between 2000 and 1450 BC. These states, however, all have another characteristic besides unfathomability: they were ‘one-off’ states, dead-end states. As they arose suddenly and in mystery, so they perished suddenly, in mysterious circumstances; and, dead, left no progeny. Their very existence was unknown until their ruins were exposed by the spade within the last hundred years.

This is emphatically not true of the Sumerian or Egyptian civilisations, which passed their tradition on through space and time. In a world-historical perspective, the Middle East is the cradle of organised government, and it was to retain its cultural, political, and military supremacy even under increasing pressure for over 2000 years.”

-   Finer, Vol I, pg 99 

http://sghardtruth.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/lky-singapore-out.jpg

The last time I heard talk of a thousand-year polity, it did not end well.

One suspects this city state would cleave more closely to the example of Minoan Crete. Born in sudden surprise, gone quietly – or worse – into the night. Gone without meaningful trace – all physical foundations built for and on transient finance, no real attempt nor even minor success at creating lasting purpose, culture, ideas, belief. Little, therefore, beyond a study into pecuniary transaction, for the archaeologists that come digging centuries hence; nothing, thus, for those seeking high culture and classical civilisation millennia from now.

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Post Script:

But, of course, none of this is to say that the Island Republic didn’t have parallels with Mesopotamian antiquity. The parallels are present. But at this point, I suspend moral valuation. The drawing of parallels which follows does not suggest measurement against ideals – good or evil, right or wrong – none of that. The history cited here simply describes what was. And, in turn, we simply find that it uncannily reflects what is.

“The terms ensi and lugal do not make their appearance before c. 2750-2600 BC (early Dynastic II)... The word lugal is, simply, lu-gal, ‘great man’. Significantly, however, ‘this is the only term available in Sumerian to express a master’s complete control over his slaves, or an owner’s over his house’. It seems to have escaped notice that this meaning is identical with the one Aristotle attaches to the Greek term ‘despot’. The fact that (later, of course) all administrative officials are ‘slaves’ (Sumerian ir) of the kings (inscribed on their seals) reinforces the point.” – pg 114

“The king of a city... sat on his throne specifically to order the people’s service to the gods and on him depended not only the routine business of the city, or even its safety and independence, but its well-being and the bounty of Nature itself. This immense responsibility of rulership implied an equally immense duty of obedience on the part of his subjects. The people had been created to serve the gods. The ensi or lugal was the surrogate of the gods. Hence the people had been created to serve the king...

The whole concept of the sacral monarchy was monist: one king over all the gods, so one king over all his subjects. We reiterate: the very word lugal signifies lord and master of a house, a field, a household (oikos) of slaves.” – pg 117

“The Sumerian city-state was an oikos... Supreme power vested in the ruler, and the oikos as a whole consisted of his palace as a master-household and a number of others, arranged hierarchically in relation to it... The Sumerian word e means, precisely, an oikos. But this was not the small, face-to-face community of Rodbertus, but a statist organisation, authoritarian and highly bureaucratic, which, outside its social and religious function, existed to satisfy the wants of the lord and master, the en and lugal – despots to the Greeks. It was, therefore, a production unit, comprising domains – lands, villages, administrative centres, dwellings, workshops, storehouses, and granaries – and it was run by bodies of administrators, accountants, supervisors, and inspectors.

Not merely that. One of its principal characteristics, implicit in the concept of oikos, is that it was a storage-redistributive organisation. Products were brought into storehouses and granaries and went out again in the form of rations, dues, and gifts. Lands, particularly the cereal lands on which the entire oikos depended, were the god’s – hence, in some sense, the ruler’s. The temple’s lands were cultivated by the temple’s servants and administered by the chief priests in the name of the god, hence, the ruler.” – pg 121

Sand and Time

I’ve just started on Samuel E. Finer’s magnum opus, The History of Government from the Earliest Times. The opener on the Sumerian City-States, set in the desert cradle of human civilisation, is already a piece of classic writing in itself.

It bespeaks a well-researched, elegantly narrated, rigorously analytical account of an utterly vanished, half-forgotten polity from mankind’s dawn. It promises an epic exploration, the likes of which can only be obliquely reflected in the wildest cinema adventures of the famed Indiana Jones and Lara Croft; an expedition to lost cities and once-mighty empires, to crumbled, crumpled cyclopean ziggurats amidst palm-speckled oases, to monumental ruins rising from dune-covered desolation. It uncovers a tantalising glimpse of timeless truth from the long past. It foretells whispers, pregnant with portent and omen, of inescapable lesson for even the farthest future. It makes for a compelling read:

“This History begins with the Sumerian city-states because it has to: these city-states in the south of Mesopotamia are the first states we encounter in recorded history. They first appear c.3500 B.C. By the time their form of writing had developed from pictograms to the true cuneiform script, c.2900-2800, the clay tablets on which it was impressed were numerous enough for Sumerologists to form an impression of the way these states were constituted, and – in very broad outline – how they were governed.

But there are further reasons for beginning with these city-states. Not merely are they the first attestations of the state-form, but the polity we infer from the archaeology and the clay documents is no primitive emergent structure, like some of the African ones described by anthropologists. What is amazing is that here, at the very dawn of recorded history, we should find, not states with few functions and feeble means of execution, nor fragile and exiguous political structures, but the very opposite: states that are organised and administered, so it would seem, to the last degree. It is as if government as we conceive it today had already arrived, fully fledged, at the first moment the records begin to speak. The same miraculous parthenogenesis will be witnessed, not much later, on the banks of the Nile.”

- Finer, Vol I, pg 104 (emphasis is my own).

http://arch-nsha.deviantart.com/art/Ozymandias-200946633

SG100

Everybody from the First Citizen to the meanest street urchin, swept up in waves of nervous jubilation and scripted ecstasy, has taken the event of the 50^th anniversary to be the herald of the 100^th. Thus the deluge of fantasies as to what the future entails.

I, too, have a vision for 2065, and it is this: 

http://jonasdero.deviantart.com/art/Singapore-Ruins-308934161

But my future is, as always, anchored in another's past:

Glorious Istanbul, once known to the world as Constantinople, heart of Byzantium

“... passionate debates took place in an atmosphere of material decay. Despite the brilliance of its scholars Constantinople by the close of the fourteenth century was a melancholy, dying city. The population which, with that of the suburbs had numbered about a million in the twelfth century, had shrunk now to no more than a hundred thousand and was still shrinking. The suburbs across the Bosphorus were in Turkish hands. Pera, across the Golden Horn, was a Genoese colony. Of the suburbs along the Thracian shores of the Bosphorus and the Marmora, once studded with splendid villas and rich monasteries, only a few hamlets were left, clustering round some ancient church. The city itself, within its fourteen miles of encircling walls, had even in its greatest days been full of parks and gardens, dividing the various quarters. But now many quarters had disappeared, and fields and orchards separated those that remained. The traveller Ibn Battuta in the mid-fourteenth century counted thirteen distinct townlets within the walls. To Gonzalez de Clavijo, in the first years of the fifteenth century, it was astounding that so huge a city should be so full of ruins; and Bertrandon de la Broquière a few years later was aghast at its emptiness. Pero Tafur in 1437 remarked on its sparse and poverty-stricken population. In many districts you would have thought that you were in the open countryside, with wild roses blooming in the hedgerows in spring and nightingales singing in the copses.

At the south-east end of the city the buildings of the old Imperial Palace were no longer habitable. The last Latin Emperor in his extremity, after selling most of the city’s holy relics to Saint Louis and before pawning his son and heir to the Venetians, had stripped the lead off all the roofs and disposed of them for cash. Neither Michael Palaeologus nor any of his successors had ever had money enough to spare to restore them. ... Nearby the Hippodrome was crumbling; the young men of the nobility used the arena as a polo-ground. Across the square the Patriachal Palace still contained the Patriarch’s offices; but he no longer ventured to reside there. Only the great cathedral of the Holy Wisdom of God, Saint Sophia, was still splendid; its upkeep was a special charge on the state revenues. ...

The Venetians had a prosperous quarter down by the harbour; and the streets allotted to other Western traders, the Anconitans and the Florentines, the Ragusans and the Catalans, and to the Jews were close by. There were warehouses and wharves along the foreshore, and bazaars in the area where the great Turkish bazaar still stands. But each district was separate, many of them surrounded by a wall or a palisade. ... There were still a few fine mansions and monasteries and nunneries scattered through the city. You might still see richly clad lords and ladies riding or carried in litters through the city, though it grieved de la Broquière to see how small was the escort that accompanied the lovely Empress Maria as she rode from the Church of the Holy Wisdom to the Palace. There was still merchandise in the bazaars and on the wharves, and Venetian or Slav or Moslem merchants, who preferred to do business in the old city rather than with the Genoese across the Horn. There was still a yearly inflow of pilgrims coming, mainly from Russia, to admire the churches and the relics that they contained. The state still maintained hostels to house them, together with such hospitals and orphanages as it could now afford.”

(- Runciman, S., “The Fall of Constantinople, 1453”, Cambridge, 2010, pgs 9-11)

But Byzantium was so much more than a city, however splendid, however magnificent, that One City was. 

Byzantium, c. 565 AD

  

So much more, that is, until its twilight.

Byzantium, c. 1355 AD

And even more to the point, unlike Byzantium, glorious and sublime, magnificent and subtle, we have neither art nor intellect – only market-grubbing crassness and brute utilitarian calculus.

But a little more about the Byzantine Empire. While modern dictators' dreams of thousand-year Reichs have thus far failed to materialise, this was one of the few entities in world history that literally lasted for a thousand years.

I suspect that, in our own way, we shall die hard, like Byzantium. Byzantium suffered but had this extraordinary capacity for bouncing back. Beginning with the glory days of the founder Constantine and the great Justinian, Byzantium came back from the dark ages of the 600-700s with the epic victories of Basil II Emperor, called “Bulgaroktonos” (the “Bulgar-Slayer”); from the depredations of the Mediterranean Normans* and the disastrous battle of Mantzikert in the 1000s with the deft diplomacy of the Komnenoi emperors, such as Alexios; from the ravages of the Latin West's Fourth Crusade^ with the recovery of Constantinople by the Nicaean House-in-Exile.

It was only in 1453 that the final triumph of Turcoman arms was assured, that the thousand-year empire was finally extinguished as a political entity.

The victorious Sultan, Mehmed II, enters a city - to recast it anew in Osmanli imperial splendour

And yet, we bear in mind that Byzantium was also granted repeated extensions of life by events far beyond her control – the sudden arrival of the Mongoloid hordes that disrupted the Arab caliphate’s plans for assault on her, the blitzkrieg of Tamerlane's hosts which forced Sultan Bayezid from besieging her beloved Constantinople. If the survival chances of such a great empire floated on the eddies and currents of history and fate, what can one expect for the tiny city-state trading republic? What of SG100, when we have as witness BZ1000?

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Footnotes:

* The Normans (Norsemen), those Scandinavian tribes amongst whom can be counted the Vikings, spread far across Europe during the second half of the first millennium AD, settling across such far-flung places as the Kievan Rus (Ukraine), northern France (the eponymous region of Normandy - later conquering England in 1066), and Sicily.

^ The Crusaders of the Catholic faith, hailing from the Western European states, were en route to the Middle East to war against Islam when they got mixed up in Imperial politics. Having failed to receive promised funds from the Byzantines, they turned against Byzantium and seized Constantinople in 1204, and thence proceeded to carve up the Byzantine Empire: