OBRA MAESTRA

Dennis is not crazy. He's saner than most of us. He is, in fact, one of my heroes! Long live Monty Python!!

Old Woman! Man! Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there? I'm 37 What? I'm 37, I'm not old...

1 minute in, I was thinking the whole video is a farse and the whole idea of asking if "in the mid evil times they had anarcho-Syndicalist communities?" is just crazy 10 minutes later, fascinated by history.

Interesting --This has to be one of my favourite scenes of Monty Python. It seems lifted by the world's laziest dialogue writer from the essay of some student forced to take medievil history - one who just so earnestly wanted to study modern and contemporary radical politics. It isn't that this couldn't have existed and nobody would insist like an anarchist that peasants talk smarter than you'd think. But fervent academic-political tracts in this sort of rhetoric language are this very specific modern thing that academia thinks gets at everything about everything so well. It's made to work that way, for the academic political junkies willing to understand it. But nobody whose feet touch earth can think talk and live in this hyper-abstracted, super-sweeping, super-specific language. If it actually does anything it's by first being put back into accessible language and interpreted for a given non-abstract situation. Many a student has written a darn good essay in this style and yet found themselves rolling their eyes at the obsessive wordiness of the jargon wondering if it really does help anybody think better. At such times we hear this rambling peasant over our shoulders "Help,help --I'mbeing opprressed!"

Politics aside ... the filth was lovely.

Terry Jones may have studied history but he is no historian. He tries to see history through a lens of disdain for western civilization. To explain the crusades, he focuses on such ephemera like the superstitious fools who followed a goose to go to the Holy Land. It may be accurate but it's such an isolated incident, to focus on it tells us more of his own beliefs then it does of the history; thus, he is no historian. It's like trying to understand World War II by focusing on Mad Jack Churchill bringing a longbow into combat.

😊love it- analysis makes sense + the pythons are well- grounded w history

He says ‘anarcho-cynicalist’ and its the ‘constitutional peasant scetch’. Scetch - British English spelling

Maybe not in England, but did exist in medieval Swiss cantons/communes/city states.

I always saw Dennis as one of the Diggers. a medieval group of farmers, who wanted to usurp the royal land for the purpose of growing food. Yet another side note, the name Diggers, was used by a social collective from early 1960's San Francisco, that promoted a free society, preceeding the Hippy movement. Eric Idle's long hair at the time of filming The Holy Grail, was certainly evidential of this mind set. He and Robert Plant, had the same hair stylist ! My brain hurts !

I understand some communities in Greece used sortition. Ireland was never considered part of Britain, right?

An "anarcho-syndicalist commune" is a fancy way of describing communism on a micro level.

i thought it took place in 787AD

How do you know he is a king then? He hasn’t got shit all over him…

No media, completely possible. Still uncontacted people in the Amazon today.

(from Life of Brian): JUDITH: I do feel, Reg, that any Anti-Imperialist group like ours must reflect such a divergence of interests within its power-base. REG: Agreed. Francis? FRANCIS: Yeah. I think Judith's point of view is very valid, Reg, provided the Movement never forgets that it is the inalienable right of every man-- STAN: Or woman. FRANCIS: Or woman... to rid himself-- STAN: Or herself. FRANCIS: Or herself. REG: Agreed. FRANCIS: Thank you, brother. STAN: Or sister. FRANCIS: Or sister. Where was I? REG: I think you'd finished. FRANCIS: Oh. Right. REG: Furthermore, it is the birthright of every man-- STAN: Or woman. REG: Why don't you shut up about women, Stan. You're putting us off. STAN: Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Reg. FRANCIS: Why are you always on about women, Stan? STAN: I want to be one. REG: What? STAN: I want to be a woman. From now on, I want you all to call me 'Loretta'. REG: What?! LORETTA: It's my right as a man. JUDITH: Well, why do you want to be Loretta, Stan? LORETTA: I want to have babies. REG: You want to have babies?! LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them. REG: But... you can't have babies. LORETTA: Don't you oppress me. REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?! LORETTA: crying JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies. FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry. REG: What's the point? FRANCIS: What? REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?! FRANCIS: It is symbolic of our struggle against oppression. REG: Symbolic of his struggle against reality.

My household is an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

There is one thing missing here, and that is the expressed way they govern: "anarcho-syndicalist commune." What is that exactly: Well, anarcho-syndicalism is a union-oriented version of anarchism, where the unions take over the means of production and operates them for the benefit of the whole society. Anarcho-syndicalism usually work in a dual form, decisionmaking is divided between the communes and the unions. The commune decide about all the local affairs, and where everyone has a vote, while the unions run the various companies, and where only the workers in said companies have a vote about how said company is run. This is quite weird actually, because historically where farmers have oriented towards anarchism, they usually preferred anarcho-collectivism or anarcho-communism, as they are not focused on the workers and industry, but the local commune. Anarcho-syndicalism was much more popular in the cities, where the class-oriented workers were. These ideologies are not fundamentally opposed to one another, but they have been a lot of mutual criticism and infighting. So one can assume that this Monty Python commune had a relative large amount of companies or industry, and this is why this version of anarchism became most popular. We don't see it, but still. At least Dennis is apparently a union member (going on about class), and maybe he is just there volunteering to gather filth. The "taking turns as the executive officer of the week" is very unusual, but I guess it's possible, as the commune and unions are free to decide what form of democracy they prefer. Most often direct democracy about most matters are preferred. Of course, this is not the point at all, but the scene is there just for showing that the whole "the king rules all" is not the default and is actually a terrible system of government. And I appreciate the scene in its entirety for that.

You can he's the king, hes not covered in 💩

Hooray for Anarcho -Syndicalism, possibly the only true form of one of the most abused words in history: "democracy".

Dennis crazy? Like a fox. He got rid of the sword wielding psychopath with no blood shed, did he not?

If they were paying taxes or feudal dues, they weren't independent communes.

“And I’m not old! I’m 37!”

They are Sovereign Serfs , obviously 🙄 bloody anarcho-syndicalists - splitters!

Ah what the world should be and will be

Dennis is my hero

Being an egalitarian of many years, I was delighted by this scene!

lol but nothing to do with the diggers is it?

6:27 Um, what?!? In the Middle Ages, the Roman Empire was solely in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the surrounding area. It was nowhere near present-day Denmark.

I was watching a documentary about Cromwell . It was also examining the viability of the Republic and other views . Of course there were the famous levellers . There was in fact a man who bought some land and set up an independent commune , not recognizing other government . apparently Cromwell was ok with this but his neighbours were not too impressed . unfortunately I can't remember the details . I believe the actual feudal system had been completely and formally dissolved by Elizabeth I . Of course land owners still had the economic wealth and used a system of contracts to bind them as labourers .

You really should have left in the voices from the scenes!

i mean I think what was funny about it is there using language that hasn't been invented yet to describe something a lot of people used to do you gotta remember traveling used to be MUCH MUCH harder so the peasants being ruled over might as well have run them selves because meeting the king is not a very likely thing unless your a head of state

The old woman makes a good point.

it's funny cos it's true.

I think you're missing the point. It's a parody of Alternative movements in the 70's, not an observation of Dark Age society.

Violence inherent in what system then?

Jabberwocky 1977 is a better representation i think of peasant life in England and in ways a better movie. Like anything that gets popular and becomes pop culture it gets repetitive to the point of hate.

This is peak youtube

That's not really anarchy. It's a different form of a democratic government, one without a centralized federal government. It would still suck balls.

900 AD isn't the middle ages.

You have a really strange definition of slapstick. It's a parody. The closest thing to slapstick in the holy grail is the dark knight scene. And youd have to be a real sadist to call cutting off someones arms and legs slapstick.

It sounds like a Terry Jones gag. He loves bending over backwards to do revisionist history.

0:24 Is that the aptly named Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-Film?!

The best anarcho-syndicalist commune I've ever read about was the Zaporizhian Sich, or more properly, the Free Lands of the Zaporizhian Host the Lower. This Cossack society from the 16th to the 18th century roughly, had no king or head of state and no organized government. In times of war, they swore loyalty to the Hetman, though this military leader could be deposed either by a vote of the adult males in the Sich or killed by a rival in ritual combat to the death. Outside of wartime, they formed an agrarian society whereby each extended family unit farmed land expropriated from either the Tatars, Turks, Russians, or sometimes other Cossacks of different hosts. They had a mutual defense agreement in case of raids from Tatary, the Turks, or the Russians. The Cossack Sich was not a nation-state, in that there was no stable central authority, and no ethnic homogeneity. Many were former serfs from Russia who escaped their manor serfdom and found freedom beyond the Dneiper. However, some were ethnic Tatars who weren't Muslim, Central Asian Turks, Mongols, and other foreign adventurers from anywhere people heard of them and wished to share their lifestyle. Consider it like the "Black Pearl", except in the form of a country of sorts, without fixed and regular boundaries, and where individual clan groups could join or leave at will. The one thing that seems to have united the Sich, and Cossacks in general back then, was devotion and service to, and rabid defense of, the Orthodox Christian faith. It eventually fell due to a Russian clean-up effort, to try to expand their colonial possessions, to place Russian nobility over the lands, and to enclose the populace in serfdom. To defend against this, the Sich allied itself with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although the lands south and east of the Dneiper were never incorporated into the kingdom, the Sich came under Polish suzerainty. Young men were drafted into the Polish army, unless they managed to escape to the hills or mountains. Once the Polish-Lithuanian government began to send Catholic missionary priests to try to convert the Cossacks as they had many of the Ruthenians on the other side of the river, the Sich revolted and expelled the Polish authorities and the Franciscans. The war weakened them to the point where they were finally pacified by the Russians, who allowed limited autonomy, but forced them to officially disband the Sich as a quasi-political entity. Those roughly two hundred years of the Zaporizhian Sich still live in the folklore of the Ukrainian people, even among non-Cossacks, as a time of virility, power, freedom, and independence.

Yagata listen to the interviewins of Ralph Ellis, who closely studied the more detailed and relevant Vulgate Cycle. However he has stayed ignorant of the fact that 2 Jesi were.

Love this video and parts must be attributed to the masterpiece of movie but the analysis is great too.

There’s some lovely filth over here.

He’s 37; he’s not old !!

Just watch the movie!