21st century feudalism

Feudalism Then and Now

Jozef Hand-Boniakowski

The business of nation states has too often been war, and, war has always been good business. "Good" in the sense that war advances the power positions and wealth of the war makers and their friends. A "good war" is any war that makes profits regardless whether the war itself is just, legal, or warranted. War is thrust upon the masses, those who do the killing, bleeding and dying. Today, in the post-modern United States, war is sold like any other commodity to a populace groomed into believing that patriotism demands that they, as consumers, buy into any war the military industrial complex puts up for sale. Little has changed over the centuries in the relationship between the rulers and those they rule. Human history shows a continuum of the rich ruling elite, the privileged haves, shepherding the have-nots into perpetual war for perpetual profit. The haves have the profits. The have-nots have their wounds, lost limbs, dead children, misery, grief and poverty. It is the common people, such as Cindy Sheehan, who mourn the death of their soldier sons and daughters while the children of the rich opt-out from "serving their country" avoiding any possibility of sacrificing their rarified lives for some orchestrated "good cause". They may be rich, but the children of the wealthy are not stupid.

US greed capitalism has made war for centuries, first on the indigenous Americans, then on Africans (slavery), the French, the Brits, the Spanish, Canada (Hull invasion War of 1812), Mexico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Hawaii, Germany, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Haiti, China, Russia, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq.... One can go on and on. U.S. capitalism, hard pressed to sustain itself during peacetime, favors and glorifies war. Destroying marketplaces is good for creating the conditions for their profitable rebuilding. Capital invested in constructive destruction is to capitalism, as destroying a city in order to save it, is to militarism. Capitalism destroying and then rebuilding is a double-edged sword of immense profit.

Unleashing the Beast

Unleashing the beast that exploits and devours the resources of others has been the hallmark of capitalism for a long time. In the recent past, the French, Spanish, German, Japanese, British, and Soviet empires unleashed their beast. The empire today is the United States and its beast is unleashed. The contradictions of capitalism, however, make the sun that never sets on an empire unsustainable, regardless of which empire it shines on. All empires come and go.

What capitalism cannot out-compete, it need to overcome through other means, whether by manipulation, coercion, or war. The ever-increasing resources vital to capitalism's continuation must be acquired one way or another. If they cannot be purchased, or otherwise negotiated for, they are taken. Capitalism requires a feudal infrastructure. The regime (nobles) dictates what the empire must have. The CEOs, Pentagon brass, etc. (vassals) serve the nobles. The people (serfs) die in obedience and service to them. Lest one consider the comparison between feudalism and capitalism farfetched, how many of today's nobles and vassals have family members fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan? How many sons and daughters of the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rove, etc., families are in Iraq dodging improvised explosive devices in that country's roadways? How many of their children find military service of sufficient sane value to sign up?

Historically, capitalism refers to the established economic processes that allow the employment of so-called free wage laborers. These workers are supposedly at liberty to sell their labor unrestrained from the constraints of landlords and lords. The parameters under which labor operates, however, are deliberately and continuously shifting. The shifts often preclude viable employment choices as unemployment, low wages, and reduced benefits are manipulated for maximum corporate profitability. Worker status digresses such that workers, in order to survive, must accept something far less than satisfactory employment, i.e., they work for less than a livable wage. For many young people, this opens up the possibility of being easily recruited by the military through a de facto economic conscription. This race to the bottom for cheap labor, i.e., the coercion of the worker, contributes to neo-feudalism posing as post-modern capitalism. Post modern landlords contrive and control most of our lives, including the hourly wage, the rent, the mortgage, the cost of a loaf of bread, a gallon of gasoline, a quart of milk, prescription medication, health insurance, public transportation, what we eat, read, hear on the radio, watch on TV, what we buy, what we think, and who we kill. The lords restructure workers' pensions, often eliminating them when the corporate times get tough. What happens to workers should the sovereign entities, the corporations, fail? While bankruptcy statutes, down-sizing, off-shoring, union busting and federal and state laws protect the corporation and its vassals, the workers, get abused and shafted.

Equality and Equal Opportunity?

What of the principal of equality and equal opportunity for all in this the 21st century? This much cherished ideal found in the country's founding documents is made into a mockery as permanent prosperity for the rich is enshrined through congressional legislation, i.e., tax cuts, inheritance tax elimination, bankruptcy laws, so-called energy policy, and the legal recognition of corporations as being de facto persons. The workers, meanwhile, are subjugated by minimum and low paying service sector employment with decreased rights and benefits, often without health insurance. Post-modern capitalism has turned life in the United States into neo-feudalism with the token figurehead noble, the president, serving the corporate masters of war. The monarchy may not look like traditional kings, yet it exists within the community of billionaire and multi-millionaire power brokers that make foreign and domestic policy decisions. The chains of 16th century feudalism have morphed into a 21st century version where slaves without chains hustle to make ends meet as the nobility dines on the world's carved up resources.

In the feudal times of the Middle Ages, witches were blamed for many ills within society. There were the so-called Middles Ages "bitches" and other heretics. There was Christine de Pisan, the abbess and musician Hildegard of Bingen, and the patron of the arts Eleanor of Aquitaine. There were the scientific thinkers persecuted by those they threatened with their knowledge, Copernicus, Galileo, et al. The nobles accused these people of treasonous behavior diverting attention away from themselves. They blamed, stigmatized, and summarily prosecuted anyone opposing them. Today's nobles blame "feminazis", gays, dissidents, environmentalists, peace and social justice activists, disabilities rights advocates, anti-imperialists, and war protestors, diverting attention away from the regime's heinous failures. Everyone not in agreement with the US regime is castigated as a "traitor" in the attempts at drawing the spotlight away from its corruption and malfeasance.

Today's lords, as in feudal times, have co-opted the churches in controlling the masses. This symbiotic relationship between State and Church is mutually advantageous. The more things change throughout history, the more they remain the same. The more knowledge that humanity acquires, the further backward the populace goes. The poorer people become, the less they know, or care to know. Caring less makes the prospect of taking control away from the masters less probable. We, the people, have become, we, the serfs. We will remain serfs as long as income is taxed instead of wealth, and as long as workers are willing to contribute their sons and daughters to die fighting for the lies and profits of the rich. The yoke of oppression is alive and well within US capitalism, for it and feudalism, are the same.

In the book, We Can Change the World, in the chapter "Hope and revolution, Dave Stratman writes,

Revolution, in my view, does not mean simply a new economic structure, and it does not mean control by a new elite. It means transforming all the relationships in society to accord with the values, goals and idea of human life of ordinary working people.

Being Discredited?

Karl Marx has been and continues to be "discredited" by capitalists who point out that no successful Marxist society exists today. The extent of the necessity to continue vilifying Marx suggests a recognition otherwise. If Marx is dead, why is it necessary to continuously bury him? If capitalism's so-called triumph over socialism is the "end of history" as the fall of the Soviet Union was depicted to be, then why does history continue to repeat itself? Why does capitalism and neo-liberalism continue to fail the vast majority of the world's population? Why does the massive poverty of the many exist amidst the massive wealth of the few?

Often, capitalist apologists draw a distinction between capitalism and what they call the free market. They state that the term capitalism refers to imbalances within the free market and that criticism of capitalism is erroneous as the two terms are nor interchangeable. Critics of Marx accuse him of skillfully and treacherously chastising capitalism for the temporary setbacks attributed to free market imbalances. They argue that Marx's dialectic is more successful as a method in maneuvering a pro-capitalist opponent into a losing argument than it is for revealing the failures of capitalism as a system. Regardless, whether one embraces Marx's definition of capitalism or not, capitalism is as Marx predicted, in crisis. Whether participatory economics can or will replace capitalism is questionable. The world, however, cannot continue the obscene imbalances between the haves and the have-nots to continue. Whether we call this imbalance capitalism's inherent internal contradictions, or the free market's anomalies is irrelevant, as capitalism once again nears its breaking point and humanity considers moving beyond feudalism, again.

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Howl - Allan Ginsberg


American Corporate Feudalism

Neither human beings nor corporations are free to run rough-shod over people and nature. Both must be held accountable for the abuses they inflict on others.

In the last four Administrations, a kind of libertarianism has been awarded corporations as though they are ends unto themselves. The open license of corporate imagination to profiteering has resulted in conspiratorial liberties that have hurt a lot of trusting people; there was Enron and the likes, now its money lenders defrauding homeowners.

Corporate globalization, e.g., NAFTA, is profoundly and fatally flawed by the dissolution of corporate ethics. Religious fundamentalism, not to its credit, has hitched its wagon to corporate absolutism and has been party to republican overreach. Corporate profiteering on war and weapons of war by the U.S. is a world scandal doing incalculable hurt to the American people.

The social ethic of another era, which held employers accountable to their employees and to the public, has been ravaged by an anti-social (religious “right”) republicanism which abides arrogance, ignorance and obsession to control and plunder. Such corporate libertarianism defeats fundamental civility and moral rationality.


Feudalism: a myth or mother of all ills?

In 21st century Pakistan, the privileged argue that there privileges and the socio-economic hardships of the underprivileged are both a myth. The people of this country are neither dense nor dumb. Many similarities emerge as we look back at the economic development path of the developed West. All those aware of Pakistan's fiscal crisis and its distorted structures of politico-economic power would further know where the similarities end. The similarity ends when we display a lack of courage and will-power to effect change for the better.

Bastille was demolished on July 14, 1789 and feudalism was abolished on August 4, 1789 through a series of "Decrees Abolishing the Feudal System." The opening words were, "The National Assembly abolishes the feudal regime entirely ....." The decrees did away with many kinds of manorial obligations to begin with. The decrees also abolished special tax privileges and opened all offices to all citizens "without distinction of birth." Cornerstone to build a modern France had been laid.
The second important decree was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen passed late August 1789. The second decree came on the heels of the first decree about abolishing feudalism and privileges. The decrees were thus logically sequenced. Without the first one, the second would have been meaningless.

The French Revolution did not end in the year it started. Rather, the Revolution kept consolidating itself even in the 19th century until the Napoleonic era. Even though Napoleon turned despotic, the ideals of the Revolution were pushed forward forcefully on nearly every front in his era. These ideas were also exported to Italy, Spain, and Prussia. Germany would then provide further intellectual thrust to the ideals of the enlightenment. Unfortunately, these ideas have yet to be assimilated and internalized by us.

We remain backward as we try to build a modern society on the traditional repugnant value system most prevalent in the countryside from where it also gets exported to the urban so-called modern sector. Thanks to this age of rapid and effective communication, one is saved the agony of personally witnessing the oppression in the villages. There is enough evidence available about life in rural areas on the basis of which serious students of economics can draw the sad conclusions from which the big farm lords wish to look the other way. It is true that behaviour and attitudes in other sectors of the economy are also repugnant in many ways. However, one needs to determine not just the "sources" of ills in the society but rather the "causes" of them. If a cause-effect tree is constructed, it will converge to the major problem identified way back in 1789 by none other than the French which is "feudalism." Later in the 20th century, it was identified by the Japanese, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, and the Chinese as soon as they embarked on development and modernization. However, China is ignored by many in this country due to its totalitarian political disposition. We may then travel Westward and find a case in point in the liberated France which exported the idea to other parts of Europe.

Until such time that the root cause is addressed in Pakistan, it would be very difficult to reform the rest of the society. Rather, it is impossible to reform if the major sector of agriculture or big agriculturists continue to occupy the privileged status that they do. They continue to wield the same amount of power as they did when their sector contributed over 40 per cent to the GDP in the 1950s and the 1960s. They might well know that their sector's contribution to the GDP stands declined to about 25 per cent in the decade of the 1990s. It is, therefore, not a "predominant factor" as still imagined by some of them. They should not, therefore, be allowed to continue to dominate the value system which some of them think is their birth right by virtue of the sector's significance in the economy.


21st-century feudalism

What might Nero have done if he had possessed a 757-200 jetliner? On July 1, in a display intended to rally the GOP-aligned "NASCAR dad" demographic, Dick Cheney buzzed the Daytona International Speedway in Air Force Two at an altitude of 1,000 feet prior to the Pepsi 400 stock-car race. After taking a leisurely lap around the course in a black SUV, the vice president posed in front of a giant American flag with the event's 43 drivers arrayed behind him as a backdrop.

Allowing for some creative anachronism, it's easy to imagine Nero conducting a similar flyover of the Circus Maximus in Rome, then forcing the charioteers to pose with him in front of the Imperial Eagle as he harangued the masses while distributing sparsiones (imperial gifts of grain and money) to the crowd.

Extrapolating from current economic trends, I'd wager that a fair number of those who witnessed Cheney's Bread and Circuses stunt are probably separated from economic disaster by a paycheck or two. Many have probably taken out adjustable rate mortgages and face the prospect of being turned "upside down" as interest rates rise and a contracting real estate bubble undermines the value of their homes. And most probably find it increasingly difficult to meet household expenses as wages remain static while price inflation rages.

As an architect of the Iraq War that has contributed to vast and expanding deficits and triggered a dramatic spike in the "risk premium" incorporated into oil prices, Dick Cheney has done more than his share to pauperize our struggling middle class. According to the July 2 issue of Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Cheney is positioned to profit from the economic ruin that will most likely result from the official profligacy he has abetted.

Examining the vice president's recently released financial disclosure statement, Kiplinger's concludes that Cheney and his financial advisers "are apparently betting on a rise in inflation and interest rates and on a decline in the value of the dollar against foreign currencies." Cheney has salted away between $10 million and $25 million in American Century International Bond, which "buys mainly high-quality foreign bonds," primarily in Europe.

Reacting to the Kiplinger's report, economic commentator Mike Whitney exaggerates little if at all in concluding that "we're sinking fast and Cheney and his pals are manning the lifeboats while the public is diverted" with peripheral political squabbles and extravagant public spectacles. While the elites bail out, they're leaving to the rest of us an "insurmountable debt that will be shackled to our children in perpetuity, and the carefully arranged levers of a modern police-surveillance state," concludes Whitney.


"We Are Trying to Crush Feudal Autocracy"

TIME: To outsiders, the war in Nepal, between King and Communist army, seems like it belongs to an earlier time. Is Nepal still fighting the battles of the last century?

Prachanda: This is a very interesting question. First, our party neither represents dogmatism nor revisionism. We are trying to defend, apply and develop our [communist] science to the national and international situation. We are different to how outsiders imagine us: remaining firm in our ideological orientation, but very flexible. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a unified science of social revolution of the proletariat, developed through the earth-shaking struggle of the masses. Being a science it deserves continuous and consistent development. The "Prachanda Path" is the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism to the condition of Nepal, and its enrichment also. Our People's War is a totally new 21st century war. Our party is not only fighting autocratic monarchy—so many countries have already finished this task over the last centuries—but also the evil of the imperialist world, the hypocrisy of so-called democracy that a superpower like the U.S. represents. Everybody knows that these so-called democratic countries don't support the democratic demands of the Nepalese people, but rather this hated feudal autocratic monarchy with huge military assistance.

TIME: Do you truly believe your revolution will spread across the world?

Prachanda: The imperialist world order makes a handful of rich richer and the vast majority inhumanly poorer. Developing sharp differences between the haves and the have-nots generates the basis for world revolution. Anybody can observe the growing global unrest at this world order. We deeply believe that what we are starting in Nepal is part of a worldwide 21st century revolution.


From Feudalism to corporatism

Of the many institutions that flourish under the over-arching chhatri of the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation, I am fascinated most by the project they call the City Within a City (CWC). The Maharajas (and this, its sole Maharana) were derecognized in 1970 by imperious Indira Gandhi, who also took away the privy purses that had sustained the princely rulers after they had acceded their native states to the Indian Union in 1947. Now the CWC reflects in microcosm all that the original macro was, and should be in the new millennium. Here, business acumen and environmental concern whip life into a decadent heritage which otherwise would have collapsed under the weight of its own irrelevance.

The distinguishing feature of Arvind Singh Mewar – apart from the snowy beard, which he wears, parted down the centre like his great-grandfather, Fateh Singhji – is his refusal to wallow in an indolent past. He suavely rubbishes my romantic notions of the burden of noblesse oblige. He is as dismissive as his royal upbringing permits him to be of some of his peers who continue to live a treasury-to-mouth existence – 'Sell-enjoy-sell-enjoy'.

“The past is inspirational and a reference point, but you have to move on. I had to think a lot about it. You understand the awesome scope of responsibility to make you occupy the chair (and it came to him not as a birthright, but because his elder brother forfeited the right to primogeniture when he insisted on a partition of assets during the lifetime of their father, Shriji). I hope I've been able to achieve the crucial crossing of the threshold”.

Perhaps the spirit of responsible custodianship, as opposed to self-absorbed ownership is also integral to his particular inheritance. The Maharanas of Mewar have never considered themselves rulers, but merely the mortal representatives of the resident deity, Shri Eklingji, to which they trace their dynasty. The princely state of Mewar sprang from a boon given by the sage Harit Rishi to Bapa Rawal, the cowherd who had chanced upon the Shiv lingam, Shri Eklingji, in the forest, Bapa Rawal could claim for his own all the land he could traverse.

In the steamy catacomb of storehouses, which has now metamorphosed into a sleek, air-conditioned library, are stacked the traditional, red-cloth-bound bahidas, the diaries and accounts maintained by 75 generations of Mewar rulers- the nij kharch and the hokum kharch, the personal and state spending kept meticulously apart. The income from the state now belongs to a democratic India; the Maharana's challenge is to make the bequest of his forefathers self-supporting, and, more important, relevant.

The CWC project builds on the present-day reality. It nurtures back to pride the creators of age-old crafts who had been forced into soulless clerkhood: miniatures, wood painting, jewellery, textiles and inlay. It clears diesel-chocked air and lake by supporting research into solar-powered vehicles and boats, assisted ironically by oil majors. The upgraded sewerage system of this complex is now a model for the town beyond the ornate Tripolia palace gates. The courtyards of the fabled zenana earn their keep by becoming venues for the marriages of ersatz maharajahs: NRI grooms riding in on greenbacks.

It can't be easy to be forced to have strangers trampling all over what was your private domain for 15 centuries, less so for a dynasty that fiercely protected its Hindu identity. Alone among the rulers of Rajasthan, the Mewars refused marital alliances with the Moghuls or martial arrangements with the British Raj. Now it is an enlightened exploitation of the patrimony. The Maharana needs foreign investors to bankroll his projects, but he cherry-picks them to ensure that they bring the right sensibility in addition to equity.


Feudal mindsets still extant in Dubai and Malaysia

The report (Straits Times, 1 March 2000) tried to be as diplomatic as possible. Headlined "Easy does it for the Emirates", it reported that the lunch meeting between Singapore's Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister of the UAE, "was scheduled at 12.30 pm. More or less. This is the Arabian Gulf region, where time is as fluid and shifting as the sands of the desert."

"In the end, it is 2.30 pm when the meeting takes place, because he [the UAE Deputy Prime Minister, Sheikh Sultan al-Nahyan] was held up at the airport where he was welcoming back his elder brother Sheikh Khalifa al-Nahyan."

Both, it was explained, were sons of the Ruler of Abu Dhabi, who was also the President of the United Arab Emirates. Abu Dhabi is one of the 7 emirates that make up the UAE.

"Lunch proceeds with clockwork efficiency," it was reported, "and is over in an hour." Sounds like it was rushed through.

Further down the article, the significance of Sheikh Khalifa was explained. He was the nominated successor to his father, the 85-year-old Ruler of Abu Dhabi.

Whether that significance justifies being 2 hours late for lunch with a visiting prime minister from another country, I leave you to determine for yourself. I just shook my head in near-disbelief.

Near-disbelief, not total disbelief, because I heard similar stories when I visited Dubai in 1996. This one, for example, was told to me by an Indian national working there: a new primary school was to be ceremonially opened, and a bigwig sheikh was the guest of honour. He was nearly four hours late, and all this while, the little boys and girls were waiting in proper formation in the courtyard, under the blazing sun. The sheikh arrived, with nary an apology, said a few words, cut the ribbon, and was chauffeured off in his air-conditioned limousine within 15 minutes.

If a prime minister can be kept waiting for 2 hours, the children must count themselves lucky to have suffered only four.

For most of us, it is completely incomprehensible why greeting an elder brother at the airport is considered more important than keeping an appointment with a visiting prime minister. That is because, I'd venture to say, that we generally see brothers as casual equals, and a prime minister as a very important person ("VIP"), especially if he's on an official visit.

But the two stories above indicate that quite different priorities are operating in their society. The internal pecking order is of paramount importance. Junior sheikhs must pay respect to senior sheikhs, and sheikhs don't have to pay much attention to how they treat ordinary people, schoolchildren included. This system of requiring deference and obedience to be paid to social superiors, and expecting uncomplaining deference and obedience from inferiors, is nothing short of feudalism.

One of the drawbacks of seeing the world through western eyes, with thus a disproportionate regard to western history, is that we think of feudalism as something long gone, 900 years ago. We are a little stunned when we see it in operation today. Even to Chinese eyes, we are stunned. Chinese history had a long feudal period, pre-Han Dynasty, and after that, some 2,000 more years when it was an extremely class-conscious society. The mindset of deference to social superiors persisted throughout. But after more than a century of serial revolutions, one cresting after another, Chinese politics and culture have been upheaved. The ideals of republicanism and egalitarianism, if not quite communism, have embedded themselves in modern Chinese thinking. As someone westernised, but also Chinese, I am shocked at this evident persistence of feudalism in the 21st century. As must have been the entire Singapore delegation in the UAE.


Fascism, Feudalism, and the Future

The words “feudalism” and “fascism” appear so often and are used so loosely in this context that it's worth remembering that they actually do have exact meanings. Feudalism is a specific form of social organization that springs up in the aftermath of sociopolitical collapse. When central government disintegrates, money economies implode, and pervasive violence is everywhere, one of the few effective responses is a radical decentralization of power that hands control over small regions to magnates who can raise a corps of professional warriors, feed and support it with local agricultural produce, and defend their fiefs against all comers.

A feudal society is a legal hierarchy of decentralized force. In feudalism, the place of every human being from monarch to serf is measured precisely by that person's ability to wield violence, and is matched by an elaborate hierarchy of rights and responsibilities. It bears remembering that the Magna Carta, the foundation of Anglo-American constitutional law, is a quintessentially feudal document; under feudalism, serfs had rights that at least in theory, kings could not arbitrarily set aside, though those rights were doubtless honored about as often as the rights of the poor in industrial societies today. Harsh and by modern standards unjust, feudal systems nonetheless flourish in desperate times because they offer an effective bulwark against violence and chaos, and provide each person some measure of security under the rule of law.

Fascism, even in the broadest sense of the term, is a far more culturally specific phenomenon that sprang up in Europe and Latin America in the aftermath of the First World War and faded out, where it had not been forcibly blotted out, after the Second. Allied wartime propaganda from the 1940s still has most people thinking of the metastatic nightmare of Nazi Germany as the archetype of fascism, but the mainstream of the fascist movement came out of Italy, where Benito Mussolini launched it with with his seizure of power in 1922. In Italy as elsewhere, fascism was a radically centralized socialist-capitalist hybrid that opposed communism while borrowing many of the Soviet regime's own features.

In fascist societies, property remained in private hands, but capitalist competition was replaced by government coordination, and wages and prices were set by edict; labor unions existed, but workers were forbidden to strike and disputes were arbitrated by government tribunals. Public officials were appointed by the party leadership rather than being elected by the people, as in democracy, or inheriting their positions, as in feudalism. The rule of law was explicitly abandoned in favor of the “will of the nation,” which in practice meant the will of the party leadership. Fascist political philosophy explicitly argued that there should be as few levels as possible in the chain of command between the leader and the individual citizen, and the result was unfree but distinctly egalitarian – that is, everyone outside the top leadership of the party had the same lack of rights as everyone else.

Compare fascism to feudalism and massive differences outweigh the few similarities: a radically centralized society versus a radically decentralized one, a complete lack of individual rights versus an elaborately detailed code of rights for each person, the unchecked will of the leader versus the formal rule of law, and the list goes on. In the modern world, certainly, the two have also appealed to different social classes – fascism to the lower middle classes and skilled laborers, feudalism to the old aristocracy. It's not an accident that the most sustained opposition to Hitler's regime in Germany came from the Prussian aristocracy; the famous bomb plot that nearly vaporized the Führer and ended the war most of a year in advance was planned and executed by as blue-blooded a conspiracy as any in history.

So what on earth would a feudal-fascist regime be? A radically decentralized centralized state with an egalitarian hierarchy that both had and lacked individual rights and the rule of law? Clearly the words “fascism” and “feudalism” are not being here used to mean what they actually mean. Rather, they are what S.I. Hayakawa used to call “snarl words:” terms of abuse invoked because they evoke a predictable emotional response.