Word: feudality
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India's modern military tradition begins, somewhat ironically, after the mid-nineteenth century British conquest of the subcontinent. Before the Imperial era the various Indian nations maintained essentially feudal, personal armies. Each prince, oligarch king, or head of state led armed forces with personal allegiance to, and often clan relationships with, the leader. The "officers" were almost always members of the ruling family or clan...
Witnesses testified that a Japanese crime cartel called the Yakuza has moved into the U.S. with drug smuggling, gunrunning, gambling and pornography. The members operate under a brutal and feudal discipline and often tattoo their bodies from shoulders to thighs using needles that penetrate a quarter-inch, teaching initiates to withstand pain. One Japanese businessman claimed that four high-stakes casinos are run by the Yakuza in Manhattan in cooperation with the Mafia...
According to Buscetta, the Mafia structure resembles a pyramid, whose base is composed of cosche, families or clans whose territorial and operational boundaries are strictly defined but whose chiefs bear little resemblance to the almost feudal Mafiosi depicted in The Godfather. In a startling statement, Buscetta disclosed that the capifamiglia, or family bosses, are elected and sometimes even fired by a vote of family members. He asserted that few such men were oldtime "men of honor," the occasionally benevolent criminals who were fully initiated into the codes and rituals of the Mafia. Only 8% to 10%, he said, met these...
...Sicily's tortured history. Scholars disagree on whether the term came from maehfil, meaning union in the language of the 9th century Arab conquerors of Sicily, or from the Tuscan word maffia, signifying poverty or misery. But there is little doubt that centuries of foreign occupation and feudal oppression turned Sicily into a unique breeding ground for organized crime...
...precursors of the modern Mafia were the compagnie d'armi, small private armies that feudal overlords employed to enforce their authority. In the absence of law courts, these armies dispensed a hideous kind of primitive justice. Peasants who found a corpse with a hand chopped off knew that a petty thief had been punished. A body with severed genitals stuffed in his mouth meant that the dead man had "offended" the wife of a compagnie member. A missing tongue signified that someone had violated the code of omerta, or silence...