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Home Front: Culture Wars |
The American Nomenklatura |
2011-01-28 |
Hat tip Instapundit This week, as President Obama has been busy consolidating his alleged pivot to the center, I've been reading Joshua Berman of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. His 2008 book Created Equal contrasts the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the Torah, with the legal order that predominated in the rest of the Near East at the time. Berman writes: "The new order articulated in [the Pentateuch] stands in contrast to a primary socioeconomic structure prevalent ... throughout ... the ancient Near East: the divide between the dominant tribute-imposing class and the dominated tribute-bearing class... These two groups, the exploiters and the exploited, are opposite sides of the same coin. The dominant tribute-imposing class consists, in short, of the political elite...This class includes not only the nobility but all who benefited by association with it: administrators, military and religious retainers, merchants, and landowners who directly or indirectly benefited from state power. What all of these have in common is that they all participated in the extraction of produce, or surplus, from the dominated tribute-bearing class: agrarian and pastoral producers, slaves, unskilled workers ... Their production was drawn as surplus in the form of taxation, slave labor, rent, or debt service..." ...Reading about dominant tribute-imposing tribes and their exploitation of dominated tribute-bearing classes by means of debt, tax and mandated labor, seemed strangely similar to modern times. It seems that Washington is not as far removed from Ur, Nineveh, Cairo or Babylon as we would hope. It seems also that our emerging system of central control is not what its advocates claim: It is not new; it is ancient. It is not post-modern; it is pre-Torah. |
Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
#4 Means this revolution business will not stop for quite a while. Pray the roots planted bear fruit this time. |
Posted by: newc 2011-01-28 23:39 |
#3 Good article. |
Posted by: secret master 2011-01-28 19:18 |
#2 See also, e.g., - Chicago, municipal government of - crony capitalism - General Motors, bailout of - kleptocracy - patrimonialism - Tammany Hall - utopian socialism - Youngstown, Ohio |
Posted by: Mike 2011-01-28 16:49 |
#1 Nomenklatura is one name for it. I think there's a slightly more accurate name: Mandarinate. |
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain 2011-01-28 14:03 |