democracy by assasination

so, beginning here, feb 22, i can start to talk about things i meant to talk about weeks ago, but was too distracted to do.

i have been reading this really good book from sv about muslim and christian-rejecting corsairs ("pirates") in the 14th to 17th centuries. alex says that pirates are "fashionable", but if you know anything about the history of islam/muslim world and/or the pre-germany history of europe, the interesting things about this period are not just relating to dumb old pirate shit.

i lived in hungary for a while and worked in the national museum, and from this i learned alot of awesome european history of that highschool had never scratched surface. hungarians, like most of europe, have long standing feuds with the muslims- most of hungary was under ottoman rule for 200 years only to be regained under the hapsburg empire in 1849- not that long ago!

i think its amazing how historically alienated from islam the west is, becuase the history is so recent. the history of the migration of islam as a religion as well as the migration of the people carrying the religion is totally relevent today, a fact that gets dampered by the blanket of the west's perception of a two dimentional islam. a really interesting facet of the spead of islam is that of janissaries, where kidnapped/enslaved children were raised as an army for the sultan, and therefore became the very fortification of islam itself. the case of the janissary army is one of the first examples of social mobility in history, where one could move through the ranks of the army and therefore gain power and perstiege without consideration of class or ethnic origins.


anyway, back to the corsair book, a main point addresses the fact that becuase of the flexible and fluid nature of the muslim power structure, converts were generally more free to live as they please than europeans, hence the high number of renegadoes (christian converts). these corsairs were free thinkers who followed and established their own rule- the book beautifully terms as "democracy by assasination".

erected to block scrolling led messages atop the us embassy, cuba

establishing one's own law due to the disparate measures of power in place does not seem so far from contemporary- the current western empires are at odds with thier individual inhabitants (like me!) with little or no agency. perhaps there will be a new rise of pirates after the world free market collapse of 2012. taking free leave of countries/corporations/religions/powers et al can be adventurous without the abandonment of responsibility. castro might be considered a modern day corsair.