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Help help I'm being 'repressed! https://youtube.com/watch?v=l8ukak8P2vY
What I've always found interesting about this sketch is that in a way, Dennis and Arthur believe the same thing: that if you tell a nice story about who should have power and why, that somehow magically makes you legitimate. The difference only being that Arthur thinks powerful mythical imagery is the way to go, whilst Dennis favors verbose tirades about procedural specificity and mandates from the people.
A familiar opposition to anyone familiar with the XXth century. But both are ultimately wrong (and ridiculous), which is my whole point.
It is Mao, Rand, Marx and Hoppe who are right: power comes from violence.
The reason Arthur is king and Dennis is a peasant has nothing to do with how cool either's absurd story is. It's all down to the fact that the former holds the sword and would normally lob the latter's head instead of ineffectually kicking him into being quiet. Which is why, if you remove that essential part of the process it becomes absurd.
Incidentally, if you reverse who holds the sword, you get another funny sketch about someone who thinks in mythical imagery trying to ineffectually invoke that to deal with an entirely procedural democratic system. Which is to say:
So to circle back to @quiet_NaN's point. It is much better to be a an actor playing a peasant in a Monty Python sketch than to be an actual peasant in 6th century Britain. Things are actually quite a bit better now.
As NaN so eloquently states. Repression is not a blanket catch all, nor an equally applied device. There are gradients and subtilties. To compare the USA currently to Nazi Germany or Russia or the Stasi in East Germany is farcical.
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