EC 398 / War Against Byzantium
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The Institutionalization of Persecution

Most of us know someone by the name of John, or Ian, or Ion, or Jean, or Ivan, or Johann, and by names that come in many more variations. All these names are, in effect, cognates. What is less clear is what word of these cognates (daughters) is their progenitor. I confess that I do know, yet suspect that the word originates in a name of an occupation, in this case, the occupation of a herder, re Yan.

The Yan herded whatever animals lent themselves to herding. Such behavior is not noted only among humans. Some ants, too, herd insects, for example, aphids, who excrete and provide them with sugar. Thus, for all I know, the original name for ‘ant’ may have been ‘yant’. This may not be as far fetched as it may seem, as any word that begins with a vowel may supplement that vowel with a Y sound. Thus ‘Iesu’ or ‘esu’ may come to be written and pronounced ‘Jesu’.

The herder may facilitate his trade with various tricks of the trade. For example, he may castrate the male animals of his herd, which procedure tames them, and allows them to be trained for work. Thus, a castrated stallion becomes an obedient plow horse, and a bull becomes an oxen pulling the woodman’s cart. For long centuries, castration was also applied to prisoners of war, which the victors then turned into obedient serfs or slaves.

The Chinese Han dynasty, may have named itself Han, because Han may be also pronounced Yan, that is, the Hans may have come from a tribe of  reindeer herders—as did the Vikings. The Hans used castration widely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castration and passed it on as a tradition to other Chinese dynasties.
 

Because castration was widely resisted by human males, who in order to avoid being castrated would choose death before surrender, which made subduing an enemy that much more difficult, castration gradually disappeared as a tool of governance.

Nevertheless, the temptation by the elites to make other men compliant did not cause the secession of violence as a tool of social control. Instead that tool became extreme social prejudice (the more collective by its nature the better), for example, such as Western Christians were encouraged to exhibit toward Jews (see previous blog) and Christian heretics as these were defined by the elite of the church.

These latter forms of social control gradually replaced the seemingly more primitive forms of control practiced by the herders, because the institutionalization and subtle divinization of taxation by the New Testament enabled the practitioners of taxation (the Vikings) to accumulate such large amounts of wealth as caused the dissemination of prejudice, aka demonization of a social group, to be practicable.

Today society is being controlled by ever more subtle forms of subjection, by such as reducing the role of government in governance through the ‘privatization of everything’, and through advertising, which promotes less a product or a ‘sale’, as it advertises perpetual ‘growth’.

As society is experiencing this ‘growth’ syndrome currently, those of us who are able to step back a little from the phenomenon, may see growth to be sooner a snake that mistakes for ‘growth’ the act of it devouring itself. At the beginning of our times, such a snake was called a dragon, and the process of devouring one’s self ended at one’s face which projected violent rage. The violent rage became, in turn, two horns or tusks, which became two armed men, who immediately took the other for his enemy and both dueled until both were dead.

Early Christians portrayed such mutual anihilation through a number of stories. In one, two giants (Otus and Ephialtes) decide they wish to rape Artemis, the very Mother of Earth. To have a better chance of catching Artemis, who has turned into a deer, each brother goes his own way. Artemis is clever enough to avoid the brothers until they are on opposite sides of a clearing in the wood when she appears to both brothers at the same time. When the brothers throw their spears, Artemis applies her magic and turns invisible, but the spears continue their trajectory until they reach the brothers who stand directly opposite each other.

Is this scene not the very scene now taking place in the Ukraine? Brother East, metamophosed over the centuries into the likeness of Brother West, has sprung from the same dreadful face of our times as his brother. Those of us, who hope to survive, hope to see the brothers dead.