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why there are muslims in bosnia--DATELINE CHICAGO
Daniel A. Foss (DFOSS@CCVM.SUNYSB.EDU)
Mon, 1 Aug 1994 17:14:09 EDT
[Chicago via telnet]
The last Christian king of Bosnia was a fool, a political-military (fused
in a feudal monarchy) imbecile, and a diplomatic numskull, grasper at straws
however nonexistent. Withal, a universal figure due to his sublime confidence
in the Stupidity due to Inferiority of the Broad Masses. This, when serfdom was
in flower, for the first time since the colonate of Late Antiquity, in Eastern
Europe. The Church, as decadent as the State, was deserted by these same Broad
Masses for the Bogomil heresy (originated in Bulgaria, 11th Century; whence
English "bugger"; spread to France, 12th century, as Albigensianism; extirpated
by papal-sponsored Crusade; last traces found via brilliant anthropological
"fieldwork" of Inquisition in Comtat de Foix inspired by bishop of Pamiers, see
Ladourie, Montaillou; trivia brought to you courtesy of our No Society Is An
Island Even When Stuck On One Department).
From Franz Babinger, Mehmet The Conqueror And His Time, Eng. Trans., Prince-
ton, 1978, p. 216:
King Stjepan Tomasevic of Bosnia had known for some time that the sultan's
next campaign would be directed against him. Shortly before his ascension to
the throne early in November 1461, he informed the pope through an ambassador
that the "Turkish emperor was planning to attack him with an army the following
year....He entreated Pius II to help him, declaring that he did not expect the
moon and the stars, but wished his enemies as well as his compatriots to know
that he did not lack the pope's favor. This, he said, would influence the king
of Hungary and induce him to take the field with Stjepan.
"The Turks have built several fortresses in my kingdom and are very friendly
with the peasants. They promise that every peasant who joins them will be
free. The peasants with their limited intelligence are unaware of the decep-
tion and suppose that this freedom will endure forever. It is quite possible
that the people, misled by such lies, will rebel against me unless they see
that I have your power behind me. Abandoned by the peasants, the magnates
have been unable to maintain themselves for long in their castles...."
Some do the work, others altogether do the Civilization, but where a man's
castle is his home, masonry fortifications are quite unsavory to the palate
without special seasonings nowadays sold in your drugstore as calcium pills but
quite unknown in 1461. Second from the top of my booksack is E.P. Thompson's
Customs In Common, his posthumous companion volume to The Making Of The English
Working Class. The "Introduction: Custom and Culture," p. 3, features a
citation from Bernard Mandeville, The Fable Of The Bees, early 18th century.
It was necessary that "great multitudes of People" should "inure their Bodies
to Work" both for themselves and to support the more fortunate in Idleness,
Ease and Pleasure:
To make the Society Happy and People Easy under the meanest Circumstances,
it is requisite that great numbers of them should be Ignorant as well as
Poor. Knowledge both enlarges and multiplies our Desires....The Welfare and
Felicity therefore of every State and Kingdom require that the Knowledge of
the Working Poor should be confin'd within the Verge of their Occupations
and never extended (as to things visible) beyond what relates to their
Calling. The more a Shepherd, a Plowman or any other Peasant knows of the
World, and the things that are Foreign to his Labour or Employment, the less
fit he'll be to go through the Fatigues and Hardships of it with Chearful-
ness and Content.
Hence for Mandeville reading, writing and arithmetic "are very pernicious to
the Poor." (New York NY: The New Press, 1993, paper)
Today, we still hold these lies to be self-evident, but so much so that we
do not want to know that we so hold; will condemn for madness those who remind
us that we do; and even overt egalitarians as I pretended to be, you remember,
"Equality of Result Now!" "We are all the *same*!" "If we do not admit to our
sameness, that condition of none of us being any better than any other, none of
us shall live in freedom to be different." Even I could be, can still be,
depended upon to say, in the *clutch*, consider the alternative! "That one over
there, he she it is *really Stupid*, but I tellya, with *me*, however, yer
making a Big Mistake!" Bullshit! If all of us will not be Equal, then all of us
must be equally Stupid and Inferior, given the immense amount of unartificial
intelligence apparently dedicated exclusively to the reproduction of the social
construction of Stupidity, the evaluators of Stupidity being in strategic
political control of the cognitive.
We are all such a bunch of idiots that one of us Took Responsibility for
engaging in e-mail dialogue from her remote island many thousands of light
years from here, at the other end of the galaxy from Trantor, for obeying
a Newtonian Law, almost, of social behaviour in stratified hierarchical
Advancedly Backwards. This anthropologist, an Earth diameter away, had
sent e-mail to another anthropologist, across the street from here, intended
for me, for whatever reason, excepting only one letter, wherein she explained
that all suppositiously social science statements written by me to her in the
past, however commonplace, howevermuch pieties, verities, or cliches of long
standing and universal acceptance, she habitually, the letter said, "did a
fast-forward," as these were evasions of my facing up to my Drug Abuse.
Elsewise, why am I not living in your neighborhood.
Communication had been conclusively broken off. The clincher was a note at
the desk. My contacts in Chicago misinterpreted my notification that I was
"unable to look for a place to live." Not that it was a question of moving
my body. That problem arises only in the unDrugged state. I'd meant that under
no circumstances, given massive evidence as to how I am socially constructed on
sight, even before the even more damning biographical data has been divulged
in superfluity since I lack the social skills to know how to stop, will I risk
any interaction with any Normal whatsoever without an intermediary. This is
rationally grounded. So I'm living in a retirement hotel, which is even
creepier than my digs in Stony Brook, hence more readily got out of early in
the morning.
Apt. No. 1202
"You've received a Message"
FROM: Deane Bennett [sic]...AT: 2 00 P.M.
...
MESSAGE LEFT FOR YOU: very sorry it was
all my fault
This person's Problem was commitment to Fleawill, whence comes the idiotic
inference, which we all make, but I've been living my ANTHRO-L posts since I
got to Chicago, and you know how I've annoyed you for many many years with my
Class Hatred, you recall; well, it turns out, I was deficient in Paranoia, I
was too easy on you all, I was wallowing in a fool's paradise, the *idiotic
inference that behaving in accordance with social constraints whereto there
cannot be alternatives is her fault, or this one's fault, or any Normal's or
Native's fault. What was the fault, if fault must be found, in this situation
was failure to act and think like a social scientist without ever lapsing into
the condition of Native of the society one lives in.
True, a great dead sociologist once said,
"The true social scientist knows no *after-work* nor any *out-of-the-field."
But this same dead person went on to explain:
"This is a special case of: The trapped rat stoutly maintains that the
enclosure wherein it is confined is the finest ever built, of the most costly
materials, looking out upon the most glorious view; and furthermore, that under
no circumstances and for no imaginable amount of money would it consider
moving." [From: The Sociological Book Of The Dead.]
We cannot transcend our limitations. The intial step in transcending our
limitations is to concede that we cannot transcend our limitations.
The *outside observer* knows, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha....
Daniel A. Foss
<e-mail from the dead>
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