09-10-2016, 11:43 AM
Recognizing the limits of technology in the Middle Ages... if the State could hardly exercise power beyond the property of the King and the little State property as there was, the lord of the manor as a rule had absolute power of life and death upon the serfs, parish priests, shopkeepers, and tradesmen. Persecutions of Jews, witches, and heretics was as brutal as ever. The medieval manor had as brutal tyranny as the Third Reich or the Soviet Union in more recent times.
It is not clear whether the jus primae noctis applied on the medieval manor, but in view of the life-and-death power of feudal lords, its existence would make perverse sense. If being burned at the stake, being broken on the wheel, or being impaled in an iron maiden for refusing to be cuckolded was a prospect for insisting on getting one's wife as a virgin and ensuring that your first child if a son would really be yours in a world in which primogeniture was the norm... then that's what absolute power of a medieval lord could do, at least in legend and theory.
Considering that Bolshevism ended up as serfdom in all but name, in the name of the State (but in fact the Communist Party), the analogy between the feudal manor and a collective farm isn't far off.
It is not clear whether the jus primae noctis applied on the medieval manor, but in view of the life-and-death power of feudal lords, its existence would make perverse sense. If being burned at the stake, being broken on the wheel, or being impaled in an iron maiden for refusing to be cuckolded was a prospect for insisting on getting one's wife as a virgin and ensuring that your first child if a son would really be yours in a world in which primogeniture was the norm... then that's what absolute power of a medieval lord could do, at least in legend and theory.
Considering that Bolshevism ended up as serfdom in all but name, in the name of the State (but in fact the Communist Party), the analogy between the feudal manor and a collective farm isn't far off.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.