But the fact is that the long absence of war delays all procedures.
There is always a whole queue of honorary veterans at the central churchyard. People were used to burying their traditional elite. Funerals change funerals. There are monuments on the main square of the country. Thieves and crooks have already settled comfortably among the crowd to gawk now.
The season of the «long world» also greatly influences local evolution. A long peace softens the morals of Zerefs. Cunning people, cowards, crooks, and people from the Diaspora enjoy silence and funerals almost daily marches. The season of peace gives such an opportunity to penetrate all spheres because Zerefs lose their vigilance, stop watching, and do not look too closely. Requirements are reduced. The season of the long peace is undoubtedly perfect for cunning and weak people. When those most difficult times come after the good ones, people like to remember them: when they had the kindest ruler (for example, Soviet people remember General Secretary Brezhnev – the most empty and incompetent puppet), after him came frankly vague. A conservative world must end in war, but no one during this time asks themselves questions: how did these problematic times come? At this time, too many «twins» are born to go to war in the future (because boys are born warriors here, they must go to war. But till there is no such war).
Now I explain: all the cunning crooks, hypocrites, thieves – the elite of liberal reformers just got into all spheres because of the lazy gaze of dying old men and the grave mood inside the funeral procession. «Good times breed weak people.» Good times have many traits. But the most important feature of officials of good times is their beauty – kindness. The leaders may be bland, but the ruling nomenclature is selected by outwardly pleasant, sympathetic Komsomol members, singers, cosmonauts, and central television announcers. The ancient Greeks, Plato’s contemporaries, were just betting on physical perfection, the beauty of the body before ancient Greece lost. With decaying socialism, they relied only on the face, on the artists. In good times, all the artists are beautiful (in bad times, all the characters, on the contrary, are ugly and resemble freaks). No one looked closely at these artists because there were good times – these are the times of artists and hypocrites – weak people, future traitors, philistines, defectors but the population was fine. There was no one to envy. Conservative people begin to envy and interfere with each other when order is violated, including the traditional funeral procession. The reformers who come to the twins to wean them off, keeping the queue, don’t come just like that. In order for worms to appear, the soil must be dewatered.
In the Ottoman Empire in 1809, Mahmud 2 – the Turkish Peter 1 – ascended to the throne. In this pair, Russia was the first to carry out reforms. Turkish soldiers lost to Russia in 1806 – 1829. Precisely because elite old reactionaries and clerics surrounded Mahmoud 2. However, the vizier Alemdar Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar helped him ascend to the throne. Without Bayraktar, Mahmoud would not have succeeded at all.
But the liberal reforms of Mahmud 2 by the name of Tanzimat – were just a copy of Peter’s reforms. The Mahmud 2 dressed the whole yard in European clothes. The main reforms concerned the rearmament of the army. Mahmud abolished the janissaries, abolished the sipahia – the Turkish oprichnina – the old land system for military service – and replaced it with private property (ciftlik).
Yes, conservatives are going for reforms, primarily for military ones. Civil reforms are secondary to them. This applies to everyone without exception. It is before the turmoil that the «beautiful» civilian population begins to listen to the military because, by this time, all civilians are hypocrites, crooks, thieves, or potential crooks; thieves are the very products of a long peace.
The reforms that the most energetic people are trying to carry out are designed to replace the real war, while it has not yet taken place, with military mobilization. Therefore, all the Young Turks reformers, Egyptian «free officers», and Iraqi, Libyan, and South American black colonels are all products of liberal military reformism. All monarchs were reformers, including Turkish Selim 3, Mahmoud 2, Libyan Idris 1, and even the father of the last Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi. They trained only the military for capture or the protection of their satrapies. But the war had to occur for the people to have Mustafa Kemal, Lenin, or Hitler.
Yes, war has an ugly face. But it is the war that the crowds are preparing, hundreds of pretty handsome men who are admired by millions of inhabitants of the «good season». In a peaceful period of time, Zelots, and strong figures like Mustafa Kemal cannot break through to the top in any way because mass ignorance, jealousy, therefore fear, and envy allow people to enjoy good rulers. In turn, not good rulers think not about honor but about memory, not about huge mazars and pyramids that will remind good times when it was they who ruled.
Chapter 5
Now everything is bought and sold
Since Modern times, the very method of developing new territories has changed. After the usual robber seizure of new territories, the conquistadors, pirates, (and even nomads) were always followed by unarmed people. They would have carried weapons, but they were forbidden to carry weapons. These unarmed people have done no less, and maybe more, for the development of new lands. Even when they became «citizens» after the revolutions, they would have used weapons, but they mastered a different weapon. I don’t mean religious missionaries. Go to any market where, without any violence, by mutual consent, that is, completely voluntarily, you will give your money for nothing. Any mini market «resident» will visually show how all the new invaders acted before him.
So, all modern states were created based on a strategic treaty. This is not an elite contract because, before, everything was kept in balance by the aristocracy. The bourgeoisie, and we are talking about them when we mention the unarmed diplomats who seized this world – modern states have taken shape at the expense of world trade. The alliance was made up of small people, completely small and insignificant from a position of strength; they are also small bourgeois – there have always been a lot of them, and now they are the main planetary contingent. Without the strategic partnership of the «petty nobodies», not a single seizure of Indians, Africans, Asians, and other savage territories in the opinion of these racists and chauvinists would have taken place. Asia is still trying to establish strategic alliances with the market nobodies. Still, nothing is working for the modern Asian elites (With the exception, perhaps, of Japan. But democracy for Japan is the path to destruction because it was through democracy that Japan lost the samurai spirit). All these elites, falling into bondage with the 7th-8th generation of bourgeois nobodies, begin to declare «commitment to democratic choice.» Of course, it is possible to convict these elites of their plebeianism because many former Soviet Asian elites took place thanks to socialist revolutions (which were not invented by Asians at all. Socialism has raised the social bottom to a height. The children of the «working people» who «amazingly» turned out to be ungrateful because they all abandoned socialism; that is, they betrayed socialism when they achieved power and money.
Chapter 6
Kazakh Bolivar
Why is there a discrepancy between Asians and democracy?
The word bourgeoisie in Asia is entirely inappropriate in the common sense of usage, as this word is used worldwide because the bourgeoisie got its name in London and Paris, and not in Nanjing or Dhaka. No one has ever thought about equality in a strictly class environment, especially