A while back down the Yellow Brick Road I decided that the Medieval Romance, as in King Arthur and his Knights of the Holy Grail, was a stitch-up job, minstrels in the castles of the medieval barons converting thug barons into pretty stories of noble knights looking for damsels-in-distress to rescue.
And, it seemed to me that lefties have conducted a similar stitch-up job representing lefty thug rioters as noble peaceful protesters. So in 2020 I wrote about “The Left’s Neo-Knight Errantry.” I wrote:
We know a bit about what those barons and bishops and knights were really like. They were rascals. Here is the Frankish drive to the east under Clovis, in 500 AD from The Barbarian Conversion by Richard Fletcher.
It was the obvious direction for Frankish kings to turn when the annual campaigning season came around: let us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Golly. It seems really similar to modern progressive government that depends upon "regular, successful, predatory" taxation to reward the regime's supporters and maintain political power.
In our day we have similar "romances" to tell the glorious story of the progressive intellectuals and reformers.
Imagine my shock, when reading lefty David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5,000 Years, that he tells almost the same story about the Medieval Romance starting on page 293.
The romances were a new sort of literature featured a new sort of hero, the “knight-errant,” who roamed the world in search of… perilous challenges, love, treasure, and renown…
The curious thing is that it bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real “ knight-errant” ever existed. “Knights” had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the young or, often, bastard sons of the minor nobility… Many of these bands became little more than roving gangs of thugs… [T]he tournament, the joust — all these were more than anything ways of keeping them out of trouble…
Of course, Graeber is a lefty, organizer of Occupy Wall Street in 2011. You wouldn’t expect him to make the connection between the second-layer thugs of the Middle Ages and the second-layer “peaceful protesters” of AntiFa. And so you wouldn’t expect him to write, as I did
In progressive narrative riots and rebellions are represented as "demonstrations" a polite way of saying "show of force." But then "demonstration" was further softened into "peaceful protest." And thus a "mostly peaceful protest" is the modern term for a violent riot.
Thus rebel is transformed into "revolutionary" rather than "agitator" and now into "activist."
And street riots are turned into the street theater of Extinction Rebellion that provides opportunities for well-born maidens to dress up and do their hair.
Am I right or am I right?
So what is the bigger story? Are we talking about putting lipstick on a pig — the thug understrappers of the feudal nobility and today’s “overproduction of elites” proposed by Peter Turchin? Or does the ruling class, any ruling class, just lie to our faces about their routine thuggery and put out a Narrative that they are fighting the dark forces for your benefit and you’d better not disagree, peasant.