Was Alexander the Great in reality a Mafia Don?

I was listening a short time ago to the fine podcast by Dan Carlin with the name "Hardcore History" where Dan told in his extremely passionate way how the Macedonian royal household resembled a Mafia family at the time of the death of Alexander the Great.
The idea did just hit me there and then; the resemblance was so great because they really were a Mafia family living off of a protection racket. They extorted taxes and customs from the population in exchange for protecting them from the other Mafia families who did earn their upkeep in the similar vein by protecting their people from them.


Mosaica.jpg



The crude fact of life is that the birth of modern system of state could just lay in the simple extortion business that was developed after the invention of such weapons of war that made it possible to subdue those who did not have access to this kind of weapons.

It is now very difficult to understand, but the first states had very little to do with the actual business of government, as there was precious little to govern over. The unified legal system was of course one of the accomplishments of the first states, but there certainly was a tribal system of metering justice in place even before the birth of first states, as societies cannot function without one.


The villages and even cities of that time were quite capable of running their own affairs without the universal kings and as there were no national level systems like highways to upkeep there was very little that would really need a larger structure of the state.
There is a real possibility that the first states were born out of the will of the rulers to earn their upkeep without working in the fields and not of the needs of the ruled at all.


I boldly claim that the formation of first state-like structures was a response to two processes. The first was the invention of more efficient weapons that could be used to subdue unarmed population and the second was the realization of those who had those weapons that they did not need to toil for their bread anymore, as they could use those weapons also to force other people to do it for them.



This process was of course started by the first group that used their weapons to attack other villages to steal their food or other goods. They ultimately forced others to arm themselves to resist their robbery. This process created a new kind of warrior-class that soon could turn their weapons on their fellow citizens to force them to keep this new warrior-class supplied, even at times when there was no outside threats.
The outside threat was of course essential factor in this process, but the important thing was also making the majority population to believe that they would much worse off supplying an outside group than paying for the upkeep of the local Mafia.



The shamanic and ritualistic tribal early versions of religions were soon developed to help create a all new level of group solidarity. In later stage they were developed even further to create systems of thought and belief that would exclude totally all humans not sharing the same belief-system.
This thing is of course driven to ultimate finesse in Judaism, that is basically a extremely fine-tuned system for creating group cohesion and systematic exclusion of others.
The first empires were not national states at all, as we see them now . Borders did move quite freely from year to year, as the balance of power between different Mafia families shifted in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East.



In the end the ordinary people just paid their protection money to whom just happened to be there to collect it and their lives were not particularly affected by the shifts of power.
Of course the endless wars between the state-Mafia families did bring suffering, pillaging and rape on the time of war, but after the war not much was changed if the current masters were replaced with a set of new ones.
So for example Alexander the Great really was not fighting to bring Greek culture to new nations, but to have the territorial rights for his family to collect the tax revenues from a maximal area. He was able to subdue the vast areas he conquered also because the population was in the end quite indifferent to who was the ruling Family in their area.
The vast mercenary armies on the pay of the Persian protection racket just vanished, when the militarily more efficient and killing machine of the Macedonians defeated them in a couple of key battles.



There really was no hard feelings afterwards, as this was business as usual and the defeated just had a new Don who to serve in future.
On the other hand there was the other kind of state formation; the city states. They were of course often at the root of many empires, when a new ruling class took over a city and used its resources to start their empires.
On the other hand there were city-states that did stay city-states, ruled by the local merchants and craftsmen. They very often embarked on quite different trajectory than the military empires, as these merchant states got their wealth from peace, not war, even if they could engage in bloody rivalries with competing merchant states.



The Greek city states like Athens and Phoenician city-states are of course the basic models of this development. The military Mafia-style empires could however often collect such resources that they could subdue also the city-states and so also the Macedonian Dons did start their success in the racket by subduing the Greek successful merchant states one by one.
These city-states are however form the basis on which the modern democratic societies are build, and not the Mafia-style empires of the warrior kings. City-states were formed when enough people had common interest in pooling their resources when they saw that the together they could build and upkeep things that separately they could not.



This voluntary state-formation is the very basis for the modern western political thinking, where the elected rulers must rule with the explicit approval of the ruled. The budding empire-builders of today do not normally dare even to show their lineage to the Sargon The Great, the unbelievably cruel and ruthless Don of Dons of the unbelievably cruel and ruthless Assyrian empire.



More thoughts http://beinghuman.blogs.fi
 

NothingNow

Banned
That is interesting. Should All descriptions of him in fiction now mention a Thick italian Accent?
Also this should be in Non political Chat. Just saying.
 
I boldly claim that the formation of first state-like structures was a response to two processes. The first was the invention of more efficient weapons that could be used to subdue unarmed population and the second was the realization of those who had those weapons that they did not need to toil for their bread anymore, as they could use those weapons also to force other people to do it for them.

I apologize for interrupting your self-promoting diatribe, but to me this does not seem to be a "bold claim" at all. It really is common sense. Of course authority came about when one group was able to impose its will on everyone else. Animals practice this as well - it's a sort of dominant-submissive relationship. The second process, the "realization," seems to be a paraphrased version of how you describe the first process.
 
Historian Charles Tilley likens the formation of States (empires, republics etc) to a giant protection racket. He says that war made States and States made war. Taxes were collected by force, or the threat of force and used to increase the power of the tax collecting body. So yes, Al (and everyone else) is just a Mafia Don extorting protection money to maintain his power. Even today we pay tax partly because if we don't we'll be jailed and/or have our stuff confiscated by the State. In return we get services and protection.
 
I agree with the above- the fact is that up until the 16th century or so (at least in Europe) kingdoms etc. were built upon thievery and extortion. Hence anarchism.
 
Very interesting ideas. It warrants further study. Naturally protection racket is not a perfect metaphor, but it makes more sense to think in terms of family and exploitation than culture and service.

I would like to know what you mean by "state." The modern state crystallizes in Europe around the 18th century, and becomes the nation-state in the 19th. There are earlier political organizations that one can call states, but there is an immense variety between them. City-states differ from Imperial China, differ from the Basileus' protection racket. Perhaps what you're really grasping at is a theory of Empire, not State.
 
These thoughts do generalize myriads of processes, executed by even more individuals in very diverse cultural and enviromental settings. In so far, there might have been cases where this took place - and others.

Generalized thoughts of thes kind throw a special light on the thinker and his culture! This is how he sees the world and wants it to be. A person from another culture will find analogs that would point into an other direction.
 
Rather a forced argument is it not?

Some parallels are evident but what Mafia Don or organized crime syndicate actually builds infrastructure like roads, cities, markets, ports or temples? What crime syndicate fosters education like Alexander did or promotes natural philosophy or encourages local initiative particularly in the smaller cities? Do any run relief programs for the poor?

The concept is hardly a bold one as you assert. Both Gibbon and Karl Marx made similar observations as have many historians since. They, however, quite sensibly looked at the differences between organized crime and monarchy/despotism as well as superficial similarities.

Another point you made is not correct. Our concept of modern democracy did not come from the ancient city states but rather from Germanic traditions.

These traditions spread and were inculcated into society after the creation of the barbarian kingdoms when Roman authority collapsed throughout the Western Empire. Even modern states that deliberately modeled themselves on some concept or aspects of ancient political structures (like the USA or Australia) chose Republican Rome, not Greek city states. This is despite the fact that later Greek experiments in federalism had much more going for the modern nations than the polity they adapted.
 
Well, Alexander was the original at least.

(I suppose the feudal era is a better anology and if you still want a Alexander to the 1930's anology, Alexander is more one of the bank robbing gangsters of the same era since he neither established a system nor operated within a framework of (breakable) rules.)
 

Teleology

Banned
Yes, it's nothing new to see feudalism in organized crime. And I do remember some apocryphal story about Alexander having a conversation with a bandit who compares Alexander's military empire to a bandit gang.
 
Top