Failed Regime Quotes

Regimes may fall and fail, but I do not

No longer do African regimes have to spend vast sums maintaining land lines and telephone exchanges, exposed to the perils of looting or climate damage. A few mobile-phone beacons, powered by solar batteries, cost a fraction of the old, fixed system. And the cash earned by mobile-phone systems is much easier to control. Gone are the days of relying on a failing mail system to send bills to users of landline systems to chase up payment for calls already made. Top-up cards have to be paid for in advance. Mobile-phone networks are among the most cash-rich and fast-growing businesses in today’s Africa. It is no wonder that the sons, nieces and confidants of Africa’s dictators vie for ownership of mobile-phone companies.

At watershed moments of upheaval and transformation, we anticipate with terror the absence of the familiar parts of life and of ourselves that are being washed away by the current of change. But we fail to envision the unfamiliar gladness and gratifications the new tide would bring, the unfathomed presences, for our imaginations are bounded by our experience. The unknown awakens in us a reptilian dread that plays out with the same ferocity on scales personal, societal, and civilizational, whether triggered by a new life-chapter or a new political regime or a new world order.

The “noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the “ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people—the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within the society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots. Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all foreseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road. Shine, perishing republic.

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

All of this highlights several important ideas. First, growth under authoritarian, extractive political institutions in China, though likely to continue for a while yet, will not translate into sustained growth, supported by truly inclusive economic institutions and creative destruction. Second, contrary to the claims of modernization theory, we should not count on authoritarian growth leading to democracy or inclusive political institutions. China, Russia, and several other authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fact, probably before there is any desire among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition forcing them to do so. Third, authoritarian growth is neither desirable nor viable in the long run, and thus should not receive the endorsement of the international community as a template for nations in Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, even if it is a path that many nations will choose precisely because it is sometimes consistent with the interests of the economic and political elites dominating them. Y

My dragon slayer workout regime had failed miserably, but the upside was that I experienced a lot of pain, as any good dragon slayer would.

So many regimes have done these things badly. So unpleasantly, so wastefully! If you fail, you will fail all women. As Eve did. Now I will leave you to your collective deliberations.

More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren´t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) that to allow, an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity.

The bulk of online privacy policies are a great example of a failed disclosure regime. They revolve around the fiction that consumers can and will bargain for privacy, or “opt out” of deals or jobs they deem too privacy invasive.

Mussolini and Horthy to different degrees feared Hitler and were suspicious of German military power, but by building their regimes on the basis of post-war injustices, there was an unstoppable logic to their falling into the Nazi orbit.

Political experts had difficulty anticipating the USSR’s collapse, Tetlock found, because a prediction that not only forecast the regime’s demise but also understood the reasons for it required different strands of argument to be woven together. There was nothing inherently contradictory about these ideas, but they tended to emanate from people on different sides of the political spectrum,11 and scholars firmly entrenched in one ideological camp were unlikely to have embraced them both.

The recent history of Russia, featuring failed socialism followed by colossal thievery and mafia rule, shows what happens upon the collapse of a sustained and determined effort to eradicate a basic social principle founded on natural human tendencies.

American regulators tend to set up elaborate monitoring regimes, but then are unable to (or fail to) impose meaningful fines for clear wrongdoing. Such regulation appears to be little more than a full employment program for compliance officers and attorneys.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

To evoke another great phrase of the American revolutionary heritage — widely though inconclusively attributed to Thomas Jefferson — the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Such a phrase is merely trite, however, unless we consider its deeper implications. For the French revolutionaries, as for so many regimes that have succeeded them across the world up to the present day, the call for vigilance against enemies, both external and internal, was the first step on the road to the loss of liberty, and lives. Of far more significance, and the true and tragic lesson of the epic descent into The Terror, is the summons to vigilance against ourselves — that we should not assume that we are righteous, and our enemies evil; that we can see clearly, and to others are blinded by malice or folly; that we can abrogate the fragile rights of others in the name of our own certainty and all will be well regardless. If we do not honor the message of human rights born in the revolutions of 1776 and 1786, as the French in their case most certainly failed to do, we too are on the road to The Terror.

An artful combination of propaganda flattered the mass, exploited its antipolitical sentiments, warned it of dangerous enemies foreign and domestic, and applied forms of intimidation to create a climate of fear and an insecure populace, one receptive to being led. The same citizenry, which democracy had created, proceeded to vote into power and then support movements openly pledged to destroy democracy and constitutionalism. Thus a democracy may fail and give way to antidemocracy that, in turn, supplies a populace—and a “democratic” postulate—congenial to a totalitarian regime.

When they foolishly destroyed Saddam Hussein and his entire regime in the pursuit of nonexistent WMDs and ties with al-Qaeda, they literally opened the gates of hell, leaving Iraq as a lawless failed state where both recent and ancient religious and tribal animosities were given unlimited violent vent. WHY

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

Authoritarian high-modernist states in the grip of a self-evident (and usually half-baked) social theory have done irreparable damage to human communities and individual livelihoods. The danger was compounded when leaders came to believe, as Mao said, that the people were a “blank piece of paper” on which the new regime could write.

From the perspective of the radicals, the habitus basis of human existence is, as a whole, no more than a spiritually worthless puppet theatre into which a free ego-soul must be implanted after the fact, and through the greatest effort. If this fails, one experiences an effect in most people that is familiar from many athletes and models: they make a promising visual impression - but if one knocks, no one is at home. According to these doctrines, the adept can only rid themselves of their baggage by subjecting their life to a rigorous practice regime by which they can de-automize their behaviour in all important dimensions. At the same time, they must re-automatize their newly acquired behaviour so that what they want to be or represent becomes second nature.

But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep. She can’t be pushed, or coughed up, or beaten into submission by a brutal and unmerciful regime. She needs light, and breath, and space and then, maybe, if the mood takes her, she’ll unfurl her wings and let her colors run into the atmosphere. And this energy, this wild, fun, unpredictable magic that I’d played with so happily as a child, that had flowed through me like it was my very life force up until this point; I didn’t understand it anymore. Creativity was this swirling wild mysterious language, but now I lived in a colorless angular world that promised me a certainty I valued above all else. And where before, I was just scribbling, writing, moving for the mere joy of it, now I tried to commodify my creativity. I tried to squeeze it out and make it do something worthwhile, be special, be important, be good. I could no longer see the point of art if it wasn’t good. But that’s the tricky thing about art, it’s never strictly good or bad, it’s just expression, or excretion. It couldn’t be measure by scales or charts, or contained in small manageable segments in the day. It was always, by its very nature, so imperfect. And the imperfections drove me mad. The anxiety and frustration with my creative endeavors turned into an actual fear of blank pages and pallets of paint. There was too much potential and too much room to fail so day by day, I chose perfection over creativity. I chose no more creativity, and no more mistakes. There are things that eating disorders takes from you that are more important, much greater and more profound a loss, and much much more difficult to recover and restore completely than body fat. And that reckless urge to create, just for the pure, senseless joy of it, would become the one I missed the most.

Nationalism and socialism as actually lived and applied in the 20th century are the same thing (and in the 18th and 19th century, nationalism was often a force for classical liberalism!). It’s all a kind of reactionary tribalism (another “ism” which becomes poisonous quickly as you up the dosage). When you nationalize an industry, you socialize it. When you socialize an industry you nationalize it. Yes, international socialism rejected this formulation. And that’s why international socialism failed! People wanted to be Germans or Russians or Italians and they wanted to be socialists. Even the Soviet Union embraced national-socialism (socialism in one country) because that 'workers of the world unite' crap wouldn't fly. After Stalin, no Communist or socialist regime failed to exploit nationalism to one extent or another.

It wasn't that she romanticized the past or believed that things had been better long ago. She had been poor even in the Dominican Republic, but something had flourished from within which had enabled her to greet each day rathe rthan cringe from it in dread. With bare feet planted on familiar ground, she had trusted her perceptions. Yet assaulted by unfamiliar and surrounded by hard concrete and looming buildings, she had become as vulnerable as even the Trujillo regime had failed to make her feel.

Syria, the March 2011 arrest and torture of fifteen schoolboys who had sprayed anti-government graffiti on city walls set off major protests against the Alawite Shiite–dominated regime of President Bashar al-Assad in many of the country’s predominantly Sunni communities. After tear gas, water cannons, beatings, and mass arrests failed to quell the demonstrations, Assad’s security forces went on to launch full-scale military operations across several cities, complete with live fire, tanks, and house-to-house searches.

In the mid-1980s, Congress authorized the creation of the US Sentencing Commission to examine prison terms and codify norms to correct the arbitrary punishments meted out by unaccountable judges. First, in 1989 the commission’s guidelines for individuals went into effect, establishing a point system for how many years of prison a convicted criminal might get, based on the seriousness of the misconduct and a person’s criminal history. In 1991, amid public and congressional outrage that sentences for white-collar criminals were too light and fines and sanctions for corporations too lenient, the Sentencing Commission expanded the concept to cover organizations. It formalized the Sporkin-era regime of offering leniency in exchange for cooperation and reform. The new rules delineated factors that could earn a culprit mercy. In levying a fine, the court should consider, the sentencing guidelines said, “any collateral consequences of conviction.” 1 “Collateral consequences” was, and remains, an ill-defined concept. How worried should the government be if a punishment causes a company to go out of business? Should regulators worry about the cashiering of innocent employees? What about customers, suppliers, or competitors? Should they fret about financial crises? From this rather innocuous mention, the little notion of collateral consequences would blossom into the great strangling vine that came to be known after the financial crisis of 2008 by its shorthand: “too big to jail.” Prosecutors and regulators were crippled by the idea that the government could not criminally sanction some companies—particularly giant banks—for fear that they would collapse, causing serious problems for financial markets or the economy.

In the coming decades, it is likely that we will see more Internet-like revolutions, in which technology steals a march on politics. Artificial intelligence and biotechnology might soon overhaul our societies and economies – and our bodies and minds too – but they are hardly a blip on our political radar. Our current democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don’t understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics loses control of events, and fails to provide us with meaningful visions for the future. That doesn’t mean we will go back to twentieth-century-style dictatorships. Authoritarian regimes seem to be equally overwhelmed by the pace of technological development and the speed and volume of the data flow. In the twentieth century, dictators had grand visions for the future. Communists and fascists alike sought to completely destroy the old world and build a new world in its place. Whatever you think about Lenin, Hitler or Mao, you cannot accuse them of lacking vision. Today it seems that leaders have a chance to pursue even grander visions. While communists and Nazis tried to create a new society and a new human with the help of steam engines and typewriters, today’s prophets could rely on biotechnology and super-computers.

As I listed to Walter, I slowly begin to accept that my knowledge will have limits, that I'll never know exactly what Willi thought, what he saw or heard, what he decided to do or not to do, what he could have done and failed to do, and why whether actively involved or not, by joining the Nazi Party, Willi had inevitably contributed to furthering the cause of a murderous regime. Would it make a difference in my life if I had found proof that Willi had never worn his uniform, that his wife had, in fact, been dispossessed of her milk business by the Nazis, that he hid his Jewish employer in a shed, or that he himself was half or quarter Jewish? Or would it be easier to navigate my shame if I had been able to prove his guilt, if I had learned that he had been a Nazi through and through, without the shadow of a doubt?

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Why did this unique process start in England and why in the seventeenth century? Why did England develop pluralistic political institutions and break away from extractive institutions? As we have seen, the political developments leading up to the Glorious Revolution were shaped by several interlinked processes. Central was the political conflict between absolutism and its opponents. The outcome of this conflict not only put a stop to the attempts to create a renewed and stronger absolutism in England, but also empowered those wishing to fundamentally change the institutions of society. The opponents of absolutism did not simply attempt to build a different type of absolutism. This was not simply the House of Lancaster defeating the House of York in the War of the Roses. Instead, the Glorious Revolution involved the emergence of a new regime based on constitutional rule and pluralism. This

From the dawn of Spain’s venture into the New World until the end of its colonial regime, Spanish America was gripped by an almost innate need to process, categorize, and label human differences in an effort to manage its vast empire.1 Whether it was conquistadors seeking to establish grades of difference between themselves and native rulers, or simple artisans striving to distinguish themselves from their peers, people paid careful attention to what others looked like, how they lived, what they wore, and how they behaved. Over time, rules were created to contain transgressions. The wearing of costumes and masks outside of sanctioned events and holidays was soundly discouraged, lest disguises lead to crimes, immorality, and mistaken identities.2 People who lived as others could be labeled criminals, and those who moved across color boundaries to enjoy privileges not associated with their caste did so at their own peril.3 When legislation failed to control behavior, social pressure impelled obedience and conformity.

Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, the United States has pursued a policy of containment in various forms, essentially relying on political coercion and economic pressure to press Iran in the right direction. The failure of this policy is routinely documented by the U.S. State Department, which insists on issuing reports denouncing Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorism and warning that its nuclear program is rapidly advancing toward weapons capability. The American diplomats fail to appreciate how, after twenty-seven years of sanctions and containment, Iran's misbehavior has not changed in any measurable manner. Even more curious, the failed policy of containment enjoys a widespread bipartisan consensus, as governments as different as the Clinton and Bush administrations have largely adhered to its parameters. Although at times the Bush White House has indulged in calls for regime change, its essential policy still reflects the containment consensus. In Washington policy circles evidently nothing succeeds like failure.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property.

The father of communism, Karl Marx, famously predicted the “withering away of the state” once the proletarian revolution had achieved power and abolished private property. Left-wing revolutionaries from the nineteeth-century anarchists on thought it sufficient to destroy old power structures without giving serious thought to what would take their place. This tradition continues up through the present, with the suggestion by antiglobalization authors like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that economic injustice could be abolished by undermining the sovereignty of states and replacing it with a networked “multitude.”17 Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously. This in turn led a generation of democracy activists in Eastern Europe to envision their own form of statelessness, where a mobilized civil society would take the place of traditional political parties and centralized governments. 18 These activists were subsequently disillusioned by the realization that their societies could not be governed without institutions, and when they encountered the messy compromises required to build them. In the decades since the fall of communism, Eastern Europe is democratic, but it is not thereby necessarily happy with its politics or politicians.19 The fantasy of statelessness

It is quite unfathomable why the EU leadership fails to anticipate these potentially catastrophic possibilities, and fails to respond to popular concerns with more moderate immigration policies. One possible explanation for these perverse policies that has been put forward by highly regarded scholars, such as Samuel Huntington, is that the current leadership of the EU is composed of left-wing authoritarians who are enemies of the Western liberal tradition. According to Huntington, “Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European... "and opposes its civilization. The official repression of dissent and pursuance of unpopular policies by undemocratic means suggests that such ideologues wish to turn the EU into a centrally controlled empire similar to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then their current policies make a good deal of sense, in that they flood the continent with people who have lived under autocratic regimes and never lived in democratic republics. Such people may well be willing to tolerate repressive regimes provided they can maintain a moderate standard of living and their own traditional religious practices. As Hunnngton points out, imperial regimes often promote ethnic conflict among their minority citizens to strengthen the power of the central authority, with the not unrealistic claim that a powerful central authority is essential to maintain civil order. But if that is the case, then Europe will be transformed into an authoritarian and illiberal multiethnic empire, undemocratic, economically crippled and culturally retrograde. Is it any wonder that so many see Europe as committing suicide and its end coming "not with a bang, but a whimper?

Towards the end of the last century the pursuit of Utopia entered the political mainstream. In future only one kind of regime would be legitimate: American-style democratic capitalism – the final form of human government, as it was termed in the fleeting and now forgotten mood of hubris that followed the Soviet collapse. Led by the United States, western governments committed themselves to installing democracy throughout the world – an impossible dream that in many countries could only produce chaos. At the same time they launched a ‘war against terror’ that failed to distinguish between new threats and the normal conflicts of history. The Right was possessed by fantasies, and like the utopian visions of the last century – but far more quickly – its grandiose projects have crumbled into dust. In the twentieth century it seemed utopian movements could come to power only in dictatorial regimes. Yet after 9/ 11 utopian thinking came to shape foreign policy in the world’s pre-eminent democracy. In many ways the Bush administration behaved like a revolutionary regime. It was prepared to engage in pre-emptive attacks on sovereign states in order to achieve its goals, while at the same time it has been ready to erode long-established American freedoms. It established a concentration camp in Guantánamo whose inmates are beyond the reach of normal legal protection, denied the protection of habeas corpus to terrorist suspects, set up an apparatus of surveillance to monitor the population and authorized American officials to practise what in any other country would be defined as torture. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, Britain suffered, in a more limited way, a similar transformation.

[Magyar] had an intense dislike for terms like 'illiberal,' which focused on traits the regimes did not possess--like free media or fair elections. This he likened to trying to describe an elephant by saying that the elephant cannot fly or cannot swim--it says nothing about what the elephant actually is. Nor did he like the term 'hybrid regime,' which to him seemed like an imitation of a definition, since it failed to define what the regime was ostensibly a hybrid of. Magyar developed his own concept: the 'post-communist mafia state.' Both halves of the designation were significant: 'post-communist' because "the conditions preceding the democratic big bang have a decisive role in the formation of the system. Namely that it came about on the foundations of a communist dictatorship, as a product of the debris left by its decay." (quoting Balint Magyar) The ruling elites of post-communist states most often hail from the old nomenklatura, be it Party or secret service. But to Magyar this was not the countries' most important common feature: what mattered most was that some of these old groups evolved into structures centered around a single man who led them in wielding power. Consolidating power and resources was relatively simple because these countries had just recently had Party monopoly on power and a state monopoly on property. ... A mafia state, in Magyar's definition, was different from other states ruled by one person surrounded by a small elite. In a mafia state, the small powerful group was structured just like a family. The center of the family is the patriarch, who does not govern: "he disposes--of positions, wealth, statuses, persons." The system works like a caricature of the Communist distribution economy. The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power. The family-like structure is strictly hierarchical, and membership in it can be obtained only through birth or adoption. In Putin's case, his inner circle consisted of men with whom he grew up in the streets and judo clubs of Leningrad, the next circle included men with whom he had worked with in the KGB/FSB, and the next circle was made up of men who had worked in the St. Petersburg administration with him. Very rarely, he 'adopted' someone into the family as he did with Kholmanskikh, the head of the assembly shop, who was elevated from obscurity to a sort of third-cousin-hood. One cannot leave the family voluntarily: one can only be kicked out, disowned and disinherited. Violence and ideology, the pillars of the totalitarian state, became, in the hands of the mafia state, mere instruments. The post-communist mafia state, in Magyar's words, is an "ideology-applying regime" (while a totalitarian regime is 'ideology-driven'). A crackdown required both force and ideology. While the instruments of force---the riot police, the interior troops, and even the street-washing machines---were within arm's reach, ready to be used, ideology was less apparently available. Up until spring 2012, Putin's ideological repertoire had consisted of the word 'stability,' a lament for the loss of the Soviet empire, a steady but barely articulated restoration of the Soviet aesthetic and the myth of the Great Patriotic War, and general statements about the United States and NATO, which had cheated Russia and threatened it now. All these components had been employed during the 'preventative counter-revolution,' when the country, and especially its youth, was called upon to battle the American-inspired orange menace, which threatened stability. Putin employed the same set of images when he first responded to the protests in December. But Dugin was now arguing that this was not enough. At the end of December, Dugin published an article in which he predicted the fall of Putin if he continued to ignore the importance of ideas and history.

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names. The advance of this anticulture takes two primary forms. Anticulture is the consequence of a regime of standardizing law replacing widely observed informal norms that come to be discarded as forms of oppression; and it is the simultaneous consequence of a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place. These two visages of the liberal anticulture thus free us from other specific people and embedded relationships, replacing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberating us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual autonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and generalized financial indebtedness. In the effort to secure the radical autonomy of individuals, liberal law and the liberal market replace actual culture with an encompassing anticulture. This anticulture is the arena of our liberty—yet increasingly, it is rightly perceived as the locus of our bondage and even a threat to our continued existence. The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism’s waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are thralls to the very sources of our liberation—pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism—supposedly the source of our liberation—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.

Lenin, therefore, begins from the firm and definite principle that the State dies as soon as the socialization of the means of production is achieved and the exploiting class has consequently been suppressed. Yet, in the same pamphlet, he ends by justifying the preservation, even after the socialization of the means of production and, without any predictable end, of the dictatorship of a revolutionary faction over the rest of the people. The pamphlet, which makes continual reference to the experiences of the Commune, flatly contradicts the contemporary federalist and anti-authoritarian ideas that produced the Commune; and it is equally opposed to the optimistic forecasts of Marx and Engels. The reason for this is clear; Lenin had not forgotten that the Commune failed. As for the means of such a surprising demonstration, they were even more simple: with each new difficulty encountered by the revolution, the State as described by Marx is endowed with a supplementary prerogative. Ten pages farther on, without any kind of transition, Lenin in effect affirms that power is necessary to crush the resistance of the exploiters "and also to direct the great mass of the population, peasantry, lower middle classes, and semi-proletariat, in the management of the socialist economy." The shift here is undeniable; the provisional State of Marx and Engels is charged with a new mission, which risks prolonging its life indefinitely. Already we can perceive the contradiction of the Stalinist regime in conflict with its official philosophy. Either this regime has realized the classless socialist society, and the maintenance of a formidable apparatus of repression is not justified in Marxist terms, or it has not realized the classless society and has therefore proved that Marxist doctrine is erroneous and, in particular, that the socialization of the means of production does not mean the disappearance of classes. Confronted with its official doctrine, the regime is forced to choose: the doctrine is false, or the regime has betrayed it. In fact, together with Nechaiev and Tkachev, it is Lassalle, the inventor of State socialism, whom Lenin has caused to triumph in Russia, to the detriment of Marx. From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship; in other words, between justice and expediency.

advance US global interests. This memo, from policy aide Brian Hook to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, explicitly reminds Tillerson to make sure to treat allies and adversaries differently when it comes to expressing human rights concerns.1 As Hook explains to Tillerson: In the case of US allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Philippines, the Administration is fully justified in emphasizing good relations for a variety of important reasons, including counter-terrorism, and in honestly facing up to the difficult tradeoffs with regard to human rights. It is not as though human rights practices will be improved if anti-American radicals take power in those countries. Moreover, this would be a severe blow to our vital interests. We saw what a disaster Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood turned out to be in power. After eight years of Obama, the US is right to bolster US allies rather than badger or abandon them. One useful guideline for a realistic and successful foreign policy is that allies should be treated differently—and better—than adversaries. Otherwise, we end up with more adversaries, and fewer allies. The classic dilemma of balancing ideals and interests is with regard to America’s allies. In relation to our competitors, there is far less of a dilemma. We do not look to bolster America’s adversaries overseas; we look to pressure, compete with, and outmaneuver them. For this reason, we should consider human rights as an important issue in regard to US relations with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. And this is not only because of moral concern for practices inside those countries. It is also because pressing those regimes on human rights is one way to impose costs, apply counter-pressure, and regain the initiative from them strategically. Meanwhile, Hook criticizes the foreign policy of Jimmy Carter which he sees as an outlier amongst US presidents in the postwar era: President Carter upended Cold War policies by criticizing and even undermining governments, especially in cases such as Nicaragua and Iran. The results were unfortunate for American interests, as for the citizens of those countries. Carter’s badgering of American allies unintentionally strengthened anti-American radicals in both Iran and Nicaragua. As Jeanne Kirkpatrick wrote in 1979 criticizing Carter’s foreign policy, “Hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture, tradition, and social structures not only fail to produce the desired outcomes; if they are undertaken at a time when the traditional regime is under attack, they actually facilitate the job of the insurgents.

No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force. Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists. Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms.” This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza. Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms,” is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international” work.

Exploitation: early entrants make use of the wealth of opportunity in their environment to multiply. Most fail, not least because they are poorly-connected individuals facing a dangerous world on their own, but some may eventually build a system with potential and connectedness. This is known as the r phase: r has for many years been used as a label for the rate of growth of the population of an ecology (example of phase: young trees).2 2. Conservation: the system persists in its mature form, with the benefit of a complex structure of connections, strong enough now to resist challenges for a long time, but with the weakness that the connections themselves introduce an element of rigidity, slowing down its reactions and reducing its inventiveness. This is the K phase, where the ecology reaches its carrying capacity (example: mature trees).3 In due course, however, the tight connections themselves become a decisive problem, which can only be resolved by . . . The back loop (moving from bottom-right to top-left in the diagram): 3. . . . release: at this point, the cost and complication of maintaining the large scale—providing the resources the system needs, and disposing of its waste—becomes too great. The space and flexibility for local responsiveness had become scarce, the system itself so tightly connected that it locked: a target for predators without and within, against which it found it harder and harder to defend itself. But now the stresses join up, and the system collapses (example: dying trees). This is the omega (Ω) phase, as suggested by Holling and Gunderson, and it is placed by them in its ecological context: The tightly bound accumulation of biomass and nutrients becomes increasingly fragile (overconnected, in systems terms) until it is suddenly released by agents such as forest fires, droughts, insect pests, or intense pulses of grazing.4 4. Reorganisation: the remains of a system after collapse are unpromising material on which to start afresh, and yet they are an opportunity for a different kind of system to enjoy a brief flowering—decomposing the wood of a former forest, recycling the carbon after a fire, restoring the land with forgiving grass, clearing away the assumptions and grandeur of the previous regime. Reorganisation becomes a busy system in its own right (example: rotting trees). This is the alpha (α) phase.5 In this phase, there is a persistent process of disconnecting, with the former subsidiary parts of the system being broken up. But our diagram is drawn on a graph of potential (increasing from bottom to top) and connectedness (increasing from left to right), which allows us to note a curious aspect of this back loop: the defining relationship of the fore loop—where more potential is correlated with more connectedness—is reversed. In the back loop (even) less connectedness goes with more potential. How can this be?

People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities.

Lee believes, as do the vast majority of South Koreans, that North Koreans are not so stupid that they fail to see the likelihood of mutually assured destruction if war breaks out. “They know if they start conflict, they will be eliminated right away. That would mean the end of their regime. But they also know the world is very weak in the face of someone who doesn’t play by the rules. They know they can get a good deal no matter what.” By

In the early 1970s the regime dropped a very clear official hint that a close relative would become Kim Il-sung’s successor. The 1970 edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminologies had included this critical definition: Hereditary succession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies whereby certain positions or riches may be legally inherited. Originally a product of slave societies, it was later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule. The definition failed to appear in the 1972 edition of the dictionary.

The Iraqi regime has used diplomacy as a ploy to gain time and advantage. It has uniformly defied Security Council resolutions demanding full disarmament. Over the years, U.N. weapon inspectors have been threatened by Iraqi officials, electronically bugged, and systematically deceived. Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraqi regime have failed again and again -- because we are not dealing with peaceful men. Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. This regime had already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq's neighbors and against Iraq's people. The regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda. The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.

studies show that the world's climate has been unusually stable for the past 10,000 years- exactly the lifetime of agriculture and civilization....Steady warming will be bad enough, but the worst outcome would be a sudden overturning of the Earth's climactic balance - back to it's old regime of sweats and chills. If that happens, crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilization will come to a catastrophic end.

There are natural reasons for vicious circle. Extractive political institutions lead to extractive economic institutions, which enrich a few at the expense of many. Those who benefit from extractive institutions thus have the resources to build their (private) armies and mercenaries, to buy their judges, and to rig their elections in order to remain in power. They also have every interest in defending the system. Therefore, extractive economic institutions create the platform for extractive political institutions to persist. Power is valuable in regimes with extractive political institutions, because power is unchecked and brings economic riches. Under extractive political institutions, there is little check against the exercise of power, however distorted and sociopathic it may become.

The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is to transform their extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. The vicious circle means that this is not easy. But it is not impossible, and the iron law of oligarchy is not inevitable. Either some preexisting inclusive elements in institutions, or the presence of broad coalitions leading the fight against the existing regime, or just the contingent nature of history, can break vicious circles.

where the thug in red silks failed was in understanding that thresholds existed, and to cross them – with ever greater acts of brutality, with paranoia and fear an ever-rising fever – was to see the illusion shattered. At some point, no matter how repressive the regime, the citizenry will come to comprehend the vast power in their hands. The destitute, the Indebted, the beleaguered middle classes; in short, the myriad victims. Control was sleight of hand trickery, and against a hundred thousand defiant citizens, it stood no real chance. All at once, the game was up.

Colonial regimes, particularly late colonial regimes, have often been sites of extensive experiments in social engineering.34 An ideology of “welfare colonialism” combined with the authoritarian power inherent in colonial rule have encouraged ambitious schemes to remake native societies. If one were required to pinpoint the “birth” of twentieth-century high modernism, specifying a particular time, place, and individual—in what is admittedly a rather arbitrary exercise, given high modernism’s many intellectual wellsprings—a strong case can be made for German mobilization during World War I and the figure most closely associated with it, Walther Rathenau. German economic mobilization was the technocratic wonder of the war. That Germany kept its armies in the field and adequately supplied long after most observers had predicted its collapse was largely due to Rathenau’s planning.35 An industrial engineer and head of the great electrical firm A.E.G (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft), which had been founded by his father, Rathenau was placed in charge of the Office of War Raw Materials (Kriegsrohstoffabteilung).36 He realized that the planned rationing of raw materials and transport was the key to sustaining the war effort. Inventing a planned economy step by step, as it were, Germany achieved feats—in industrial production, munitions and armament supply, transportation and traffic control, price controls, and civilian rationing—that had never before been attempted.

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential: 1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so that they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of trouble. 2. Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their natural environment. 3. Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations. 4. Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easy manipulated and dominated that scattered individuals. 5. Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority. 6. Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test for loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order. 7. Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines and interstate autobahns. 8. Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts and improve the national parks into national parking lots.

civilizations come and go, and democracy above all others has been the rarest and by far the most fragile type of governance. And, when democracies fail, as they all have, they are replaced by dictatorial regimes where genocide and mass murder soon follow.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is typical of dictatorships old and new. It does not try to censor everything. The regime understands that the total control of communism failed because it suppressed too much. On a personal level, the men at the top in the Kremlin do not want to go back to a time when the bribes they received were worth little because the luxuries of capitalism were on the other side of an iron curtain.

The native Korean Communist movement emerged in the early 1920s, and Marxism was much in vogue among the Korean intellectuals of the colonial era. Nonetheless, due to the harshness of the Japanese colonial regime, a majority of the prominent Korean Communists in 1945 operated outside the country.

Just as the book was going to print a new leadership has begun to emerge in North Korea. As one might expect, the emergence of this new leadership has been accompanied by expectations and hopes for a better future for North Korea. As we will see, however, the country’s past gives little ground for optimism, but it is not impossible that the plump and jolly-looking young new Kim may well seek to break with the past and reform the country. He is still surrounded by the advisers and senior lieutenants of his father, but he might not agree with the logic of their survival strategy. There is a distinct possibility that he will attempt to improve the situation. Such attempts might even succeed, but it is also possible that the old guard is right, and that tampering with the system will aggravate the situation and lead to an uncontrollable implosion of the regime—a nightmarish scenario for North Korea’s many neighbors.

Free culture advocates have it right that excessive copyright regulation can inhibit creativity, and the current copyright regime is in urgent need of reform. But “free” is not the answer: too many creative endeavors fail due to lack of investment;

The government in North Korea is a communist dictatorship opposed to private property and markets. But it is difficult to control black markets, and black markets make transactions in cash. Of course quite a bit of foreign exchange is involved, particularly Chinese currency, but many transactions use won. The currency reform was designed to punish people who used these markets and, more specifically, to make sure that they did not become too wealthy or powerful enough to threaten the regime. Keeping them poor was safer. Black markets are not the whole story. People in North Korea also keep their savings in wons because there are few banks in Korea, and they are all owned by the government. In effect, the government used the currency reform to expropriate much of people’s savings. Though the government says it regards markets as bad, the North Korean elite rather like what markets can produce for them.

The consequence of all this absolutist control of the economy was predictable: the Chinese economy was stagnant throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while other economies were industrializing. By the time Mao set up his communist regime in 1949, China had become one of the poorest countries in the world. T

The first stacked dolls better known as Russian Nesting Dolls, matryoshka dolls or Babushka Dolls, were first made in 1890 by Vasily Zvyozdochkin. Much of the artistry is in the painting of the usual 5 dolls, although the world record is 51 dolls. Each doll, which when opened reveals a smaller doll of the same type inside ending with the smallest innermost doll, which is considered the baby doll and is carved from a single piece of wood. Frequently these dolls are of a woman, dressed in a full length traditional Russian peasant dress called a sarafan. When I served with the Military Intelligence Corps of the U.S.Army, the concept of onion skins was a similar metaphor used to denote that we were always encouraged to look beyond the obvious. That it was essential to delve deeper into a subject, so as to arrive at the essence of the situation or matter. This is the same principle I employed in writing my award winning book, The Exciting Story of Cuba. Although it can be considered a history book, it is actually a book comprised of many stories or vignettes that when woven together give the reader a view into the inner workings of the Island Nation, just 90 miles south of Key West. The early 1950’s are an example of this. At that time President Batista was hailed a champion of business interests and considered this a direct endorsement of his régime. Sugar prices remained high during this period and Cuba enjoyed some of its best years agriculturally. For those at the top of the ladder, the Cuban economy flourished! However, it was during this same period that the people lower on the economic ladder struggled. A populist movement was started, resulting in a number of rebel bands to challenge the entrenched regime, including the followers of autocrats such as Fidel and Raul Castro. Castro’s M 26 7 militia had a reputation of indiscriminately placing bombs, one of which blew a young woman to pieces in the once-grand theater, “Teatro America.” A farmer, who failed to cooperate with Batista’s army, was locked into his home with his wife and his daughter, which was then set on fire killing them all. What had been a corrupt but peaceful government, quickly turned into a war zone. Despite of Batista’s constitutional abuses and his alliance with the Mafia, the years under his régime were still the most prosperous ones in Cuba’s history. Of course most of the money went to those at the top of the economic ladder and on the lower end of the scale a house maid was lucky to make $25 to $30 a month.

The premise of this book is that this crucial political institution – institutionalized intergovernmental cooperation – is facing a period of crisis, which we term gridlock. Global governance has certainly never been easy, but it currently faces a new set of challenges. In this chapter we identify four mechanisms that have rendered multilateral cooperation increasingly difficult, four routes or pathways to gridlock. First, the diffusion of power from what used to be known as the industrialized world to the emerging economies has increased the number of actors who must agree – and the diversity of interests that must be accommodated – in order to achieve meaningful cooperation. Second, the institutional legacy of the postwar period has “locked in” policy-making processes that have now grown dysfunctional. Third, the easier items on the cooperation agenda have already been dealt with; yet deeper interdependence creates a need for more sophisticated, complex, and powerful institutions, which are harder to create. Fourth, a proliferation of institutions has led to fragmented “regime complexes” (Raustiala and Victor 2004) that can impede effective cooperation instead of facilitating it.

The logic of why the powerful would not necessarily want to set up the economic institutions that promote economic success extends easily to the choice of political institutions. In an absolutist regime, some elites can wield power to set up economic institutions they prefer. Would they be interested in changing political institutions to make them more pluralistic? In general not, since this would only dilute their political power, making it more difficult, maybe impossible, for them to structure economic institutions to further their own interests. Here again we see a ready source of conflict. The people who suffer from the extractive economic institutions cannot hope for absolutist rulers to voluntarily change political institutions and redistribute power in society. The only way to change these political institutions is to force the elite to create more pluralistic institutions.

Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born.

Saddam Hussein was a CIA operative whom the American spy agency deployed in 1959 to kill the ruler of Iraq, Abdul Karim Kassem. When that assassination attempt failed, Saddam entered a CIA protection program in Egypt until his Baath Party, also supported by the CIA, seized power in 1963. At least 5,000 Iraqis, most of them student activists, were executed immediately by the Baathist regime. And so our Iraq War began.

Support for this view came from the most unexpected quarters. In a book published in 1966, Senator James W. Fulbright argued that America had become involved in the fighting in Vietnam because we had come to regard “communism as a kind of absolute evil, as a totally pernicious doctrine which deprives the people subjected to it of freedom, dignity, happiness, and the hope of ever acquiring them.… This view of communism as an evil philosophy is a distorting prism through which we see projections of our own minds rather than what is actually there.” Little more than ten years before the mass exodus of the boat people who were desperately seeking to escape their Communist liberators, Fulbright suggested that “some countries are probably better off under communist rule than they were under preceding regimes; … some people may even want to live under communism.”10

Yes, countries such as Syria and Egypt are poor, and their populations are primarily Muslim. But these countries also systemically differ in other ways that are far more important for prosperity. For one, they were all provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which heavily, and adversely, shaped the way they developed. After Ottoman rule collapsed, the Middle East was absorbed into the English and French colonial empires, which, again, stunted their possibilities. After independence, they followed much of the former colonial world by developing hierarchical, authoritarian political regimes with few of the political and economic institutions that, we will argue, are crucial for generating economic success. This development path was forged largely by the history of Ottoman and European rule. The relationship between the Islamic religion and poverty in the Middle East is largely spurious.

The hero, the historical giant, the dream, was revealed to be a mere inept leader presiding over a failing system. He trusted military commanders who proved to be incompetent and hopeless (King Hussein of Jordan once described Marshal Amer, the general commander of the Egyptian army in 1967, as ‘retarded’); the great leader rushed into a battle only to be trounced in less than a week. The Arab nationalist project lost its momentum and its appeal. No longer were Nasser's actions ‘historic’, no longer was ‘the nation moving on a generational stride towards victory’. Nasser became mortal: merely the president of a poor, third-world country that had been humiliatingly defeated in a war. For the first time ever, Egyptians rioted against Nasser; in March 1968, thousands of university students took to the streets to condemn what they saw as lenient verdicts on the military leaders ‘responsible for the 1967 setback’, and later in the same year, workers in different factories held strikes against the regime.

authoritarian regimes currently experiencing some growth are likely to reach the limits of extractive growth before they transform their political institutions in a more inclusive direction—and in fact, probably before there is any desire among the elite for such changes or any strong opposition forcing them to do so.

Their approach is often described as paranoid, but I will argue that there may be no alternative to the current North Korean policies if judged from the prospects of the regime’s survival, which is the supreme goal of North Korean policy makers. Their current survival strategy might inflict considerable suffering on ordinary people, make genuine economic growth impossible, and generate significant international security risks. However, this strategy also ensures that a small hereditary elite keeps enjoying power and (moderate) luxury. And, sadly, there is no alternative that would be acceptable to the decision makers.

Three factors greatly facilitated the emergence of more inclusive political institutions following the Glorious Revolution and the French Revolution. The first was new merchants and businessmen wishing to unleash the power of creative destruction from which they themselves would benefit; these new men were among the key members of the revolutionary coalitions and did not wish to see the development of yet another set of extractive institutions that would again prey on them. The second was the nature of the broad coalition that had formed in both cases. For example, the Glorious Revolution wasn’t a coup by a narrow group or a specific narrow interest, but a movement backed by merchants, industrialists, the gentry, and diverse political groupings. The same was largely true for the French Revolution. The third factor relates to the history of English and French political institutions. They created a background against which new, more inclusive regimes could develop. In both countries there was a tradition of parliaments and power sharing going back to the Magna Carta in England and to the Assembly of Notables in France. Moreover, both revolutions happened in the midst of a process that had already weakened the grasp of the absolutist, or aspiring absolutist, regimes. In neither case would these political institutions make it easy for a new set of rulers or a narrow group to take control of the state and usurp existing economic wealth and build unchecked and durable political power.

Many, such as the Ottoman Empire, China, and other absolutist regimes, lagged behind as they blocked or at the very least did nothing to encourage the spread of industry. Political and economic institutions shaped the response to technological innovation, creating once again the familiar pattern of interaction between existing institutions and critical junctures leading to divergence in institutions and economic outcomes. The

The Industrial Revolution created a transformative critical juncture for the whole world during the nineteenth century and beyond: those societies that allowed and incentivized their citizens to invest in new technologies could grow rapidly. But many around the world failed to do so—or explicitly chose not to do so. Nations under the grip of extractive political and economic institutions did not generate such incentives. Spain and Ethiopia provide examples where the absolutist control of political institutions and the implied extractive economic institutions choked economic incentives long before the dawn of the nineteenth century. The outcome was similar in other absolutist regimes—for example, in Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and China, though in these cases the rulers, because of fear of creative destruction, not only neglected to encourage economic progress but also took explicit steps to block the spread of industry and the introduction of new technologies that would bring industrialization. Absolutism

When you attempt to change, if you’re part of the 92%, this happens: 1. You decide to change. 2. You are scared of the change, but determined to do it. 3. You start. 4. You hit a wall. 5. You stop your new action and fail to achieve change. This almost always happens at the beginning. You don’t really know what to do; you lack skills and/or knowledge. You are destined to struggle at first. After the first failure, your doubts awaken anxiousness. You try again, you fail again. Your doubts get stronger, your resolve weakens. You lose your enthusiasm for the change, and your efforts from this point are half-hearted. Half-hearted attempts have even less likelihood of succeeding, so you fail again and your negative attitude is reinforced. The problem is that you expected significant results too soon. That’s the curse of instant gratification at work. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a visible change in your body shape two weeks after starting a new diet. If it’s a balanced diet, not some Tic-Tac hardcore regime (only two calories), you can reasonably expect to lose maybe four pounds. Two is more realistic. Let’s say three on average. Even if you are a skinny fellow like me, three pounds is just 2% of your body weight. That loss will be almost invisible. That result may not seem enough for the effort you are making. Well, it is actually a great result. If you keep that pace, you would lose 78 pounds in a year. That’s visible even on obese people. However, you’ve set your internal evaluating mechanism to expect much more in a shorter time. You had the picture of your skinny bikini or 6-pack self in your mind, but all you see in the mirror is your same old flabby self. What is more, you’ll usually take intensive action when you begin something. You’re keen! You want results! You use this initial enthusiasm to apply massive effort. A very restrictive diet! A lot of exercises! It’s no wonder that after two weeks of such hard work you decide (at least subconsciously) that it’s not worth it. Do you see what’s happening?

World inequality today exists because during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries some nations were able to take advantage of the Industrial Revolution and the technologies and methods of organization that it brought while others were unable to do so. Technological change is only one of the engines of prosperity, but it is perhaps the most critical one. The countries that did not take advantage of new technologies did not benefit from the other engines of prosperity, either. As we have shown in this and the previous chapter, this failure was due to their extractive institutions, either a consequence of the persistence of their absolutist regimes or because they lacked centralized states. But this chapter has also shown that in several instances the extractive institutions that underpinned the poverty of these nations were imposed, or at the very least further strengthened, by the very same process that fueled European growth: European commercial and colonial expansion. In fact, the profitability of European colonial empires was often built on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies around the world, or on the creation of extractive institutions essentially from the ground up, as in the Caribbean islands, where, following the almost total collapse of the native populations, Europeans imported African slaves and set up plantation systems. We

Panicking inwardly, Natalie responded with evasive answers and false optimism. She felt like the minister of information for a failing totalitarian regime. Desperate,

The solution to the economic and political failure of nations today is to transform their extractive institutions toward inclusive ones. The vicious circle means that this is not easy. But it is not impossible, and the iron law of oligarchy is not inevitable. Either some preexisting inclusive elements in institutions, or the presence of broad coalitions leading the fight against the existing regime, or just the contingent nature of history, can break vicious circles. Just like the civil war in Sierra Leone, the Glorious Revolution in 1688 was a struggle for power. But it was a struggle of a very different nature than the civil war in Sierra Leone. Conceivably some in Parliament fighting to remove James II in the wake of the Glorious Revolution imagined themselves playing the role of the new absolutist, as Oliver Cromwell did after the English Civil War. But the fact that Parliament was already powerful and made up of a broad coalition consisting of different economic interests and different points of view made the iron law of oligarchy less likely to apply in 1688. And it was helped by the fact that luck was on the side of Parliament against James II. In the next chapter, we will see other examples of countries that have managed to break the mold and transform their institutions for the better, even after a long history of extractive institutions.

how the stances towards ontology that we have dealt with here are linked to basic political positions: neo-Kantianism grounds social-democratic reformism; the early Lukács’s Hegelianism grounds his radical Leninist engagement (against the philosophical positions of Lenin himself); the ontology of dialectical materialism grounds Stalinist politics; Lukács’s late ontology of social being grounds the (utopian) hopes of a humanist reform of the really-existing Socialist regimes; negative dialectics echoes political defeat, the absence of any radical emancipatory prospect, in the developed Western countries … When we talk about ways to overcome the transcendental circle, we are talking (also) about basic political orientations.

This study will not always make for easy reading. As has already been mentioned, and will become clear in time, the depths of the Empire’s crimes were truly horrifying. They were also not always equally felt. Many planets and species suffered far more than those in the Core Worlds. Similarly, while some humans - such as the Alderaanians - lost everything to the Empire, the inherent prejudices of that regime often focused in on those who were not human. The Empire, and those who orchestrated it, often spoke with a mix of disdain and disgust about “aliens” across the galaxy. There is no hiding the fact that, as a human, I have no experience of living with this type of prejudice, which still, sadly, endures. There are, however, things that can - and should - be done to mitigate this. While it may be necessary to sometimes quote the words of the Galactic Empire regarding the targets of its violence, there is no need to replicate their mindsets and use of language outside of this. The term “non-human” is problematic in its own ways but in the absence of a better one it is infinitely more acceptable than the pejorative “alien” that the Empire was so fond of using. Furthermore, where possible, I have attempted to highlight the experiences, writings, and voices of those who actually suffered under the Empire’s prejudices and genocides. We should not follow the Empire’s lead when it comes to silencing the victims of its many crimes. These are not perfect solutions and I accept the knowledge that they may fall short of what is both expected and required by those across the galaxy who lost both loved ones and worlds to Imperial aggression. They have a right to criticize failings of my own making, and I apologize to them for any of my own shortcomings. I can imagine that there will be those within the field of history and elsewhere who will find a declaration of my own potential blind spots to be unnecessary, but to them I say simply, this is an integral part of being a historian. As I recognize and analyze the relevant sources for this study I must too recognize and analyze myself. The survivors of the Battle of Crait have become fond of saying, in moments of sorrow and loss, that “no one’s ever really gone.” It seems to bring them solace and I respect that. But I do not feel it. I have immersed myself in the existing records and writings and sources that relate to the Galactic Empire. And all I feel is the absence of lives that it brought. The multitudes who suffered and died. The further into this dark history I have gone the more horrified and haunted I have become. That is why this study now exists and why it is so important that you read it.

A person who sets goals is a hopeful person, whereas a person whom fails to achieve their goals might despair. Why do both hope and despair fill my inner world? Who cannot despair when inducted into a world filled with cruelty? Who cannot despair when serving as the serf in a seigneur’s regime that bestows legal and economic power, financial rewards, social status, and related societal prizes upon feudal lords who exhibit the ravenous instinct for power and accumulation of wealth? Who cannot despair when stranded alone with their personal thoughts, unable to imagine a better earthly life, and flooded with uncertainty of a redemptive afterlife? Why would not any person despair his or her failure to etch a mindset that serves to alleviate their present-day suffering?

A government that is democratizing is weak compared to the regime before it—politically, institutionally, and militarily. Unlike autocrats, leaders in an anocracy are often not powerful enough or ruthless enough to quell dissent and ensure loyalty. The government is also frequently disorganized and riddled with internal divisions, struggling to deliver basic services or even security. Opposition leaders, or even those within a president’s own party, may challenge or resist the pace of reform, while new leaders must quickly earn the trust of citizens, fellow politicians, or army generals. In the chaos of transition, these leaders often fail.

These accommodating conservatives misunderstand the nature of liberty in the American regime by failing to recognize the distinction between liberty and license so important to the Founders’ conception of republican government. p. 189

Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people. It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long. This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension. But it’s wrong to think of these changes one-dimensionally—as a power grab, or an overthrow of an old regime. That kind of thinking is zero-sum, destined to fail, and not how inclusion actually works.

Children of Babylon Early Marxists and Communists understood that to gain the hearts of a generation, seeds must be planted during childhood and early youth. The family of my Jewish-Israeli tour guide, Gideon Shor, originally lived in the Soviet Union. Gideon told me that prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution, Russia was a strong Christian nation. Communism needed to defeat the ideas of Christianity. His grandparents remember attending a public school where there were numerous Christian children. When the time came for lunch, the teacher asked the children to pray to God for food to appear. When they did, no food appeared. They were then asked to pray to “Father Stalin.” Those who did were amazed to see a cart of food, fruits, nuts, and candy roll through the classroom door. This was repeated daily, brainwashing the children into believing that Stalin and the Communist regime were the sole providers of their food. The youth living today are accepting radical ideologies that have totally failed. Multitudes who migrated to America from former Communist and Socialist nations are against both systems as they witnessed first-hand the oppression, government control, loss of freedoms, and hatred toward religion. Personal poverty, oppression, and a basic, simple life eventually rule in the majority of Socialist-Communist countries.

Thus, as I have said, in innumerable cases today’s family owes its existence merely to a force of inertia, conventions, practical convenience, and weakness of character in a regime of mediocrity and compromises. Nor can one expect external measures to bring about a change. I must repeat that familial unity could only remain firm when determined by a suprapersonal way of thinking, so as to leave mere individual matters on a secondary level. Then the marriage could even lack "happiness," the "needs of the soul" could be unsatisfied, and yet the unity would persist. In the individualistic climate of present society no higher reason demands that familial unity should persist even when the man or the woman "does not agree," and sentiment or sex leads them to new choices. Therefore, the increase of so-called failed marriages and related divorces and separations is natural in contemporary society. It is also absurd to think of any efficacy in restraining measures, since the basis of the whole is by now a change of an existential order. After this evaluation, it would almost be superfluous to specify what can be the behavior of the differentiated man today. In principle, he cannot value marriage, family, or procreation as I have just described them. All that can only be alien to him; he can recognize nothing significant to merit his attention. (Later I will return to the problem of the sexes in itself, not from the social perspective.) The contaminations in marriage between sacred and profane and its bourgeois conformism are evident to him, even in the case of religious, indissoluble, Catholic marriage. This indissolubility that is supposed to safeguard the family in the Catholic area is by now little more than a facade. In fact, the indissoluble unions are often profoundly corrupted and loosened, and in that area petty morality is not concerned in the least that the marriage is actually indissoluble; it is important only to act as if it were such. That men and women, once duly married, do more or less whatever they want, that they feign, betray, or simply put up with each other, that they remain together for simple convenience, reducing the family to what I have already described, is of little importance there. Morality is saved: One can believe that the family remains the fundamental unit of society so long as one condemns divorce and accepts that social sanction or authorization—as if it had any right—for any sexually based cohabitation that corresponds to marriage. What is more, even if we are not speaking of the "indissoluble" Catholic rite of marriage, but of a society that permits divorce, the hypocrisy persists: one worships at the altar of social conformism even when men and women separate and remarry repeatedly for the most frivolous and ridiculous motives, as typically happens in the United States, so that marriage ends up being little more than a puritanical veneer for a regime of high prostitution or legalized free love.

People who fail in the neoliberal achievement-society see themselves as responsible for their lot and feel shame instead of questioning society or the system. Herein lies the particular intelligence defining the neoliberal regime: no resistance to the system can emerge in the first place. In contrast, when allo-exploitation prevails, the exploited are still able to show solidarity and unite against those who exploit them. Such is the logic on which Marx’s idea of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is based. However, this vision presupposes that relations of repression and domination hold. Now, under the neoliberal regime of auto-exploitation, people are turning their aggression against themselves. This auto-aggressivity means that the exploited are not inclined to revolution so much as depression.

Historically, all international monetary regimes have required the most powerful of their members to take on the role of hegemon (primus inter pares) to lend stability to the system. Being the hegemon is associated with a set of privileges, for which the hegemon should compensate its partners/subordinates by absorbing more than its share of the costs of providing general stability. The problem arises when the hegemon evades this “benevolent” responsibility and the burdens associated with it. Germany did not want to accept them; it thought that each country should assume its own responsibility and pay the costs of its own rescue. It was all the same very proactive in enforcing austerity measures and imposing structural reforms on the debtors.

Every nation has a narrative—a story composed of historical interpretations, deletions, and fabrications that engender beliefs and traditions. And every national narrative has a “bad guy,” a scapegoat to take the blame for group and national failings, a bad guy against whom to unite the whole, to serve as a symbol of what the nation is not—thereby defining what the nation is. The antiwhites are products of this narrative, and the bad guy is my people, our people, the White race and our biospiritual expression: Western Civilization. Our most vulnerable members—our children—are the narrative’s primary victims. The Regime can never permit us to escape the role as the bad guy. It’s too important to the narrative. The narrative explains, defines, frames, and predicts the world as seen through the Regime’s self-serving lens. It also unites the diverse peoples that live in our countries. Without a common enemy at whom to direct unifying anger, an enemy who “oppresses” and “exploits” them, they would turn on one another—as has already begun in many areas where we are too few to blame. This Antiwhite Narrative cannot be altered, and it will not end well for us and our children. Either we jump off the pages of the narrative that stigmatizes us as the bad guy, the scapegoat, or we follow that story to its grisly conclusion. Our alternative is the pen and the blank page on which to write our own story, a story where we are not demonized for embracing our dignity, identity, and inheritance, where we are not vilified and discriminated against, where we can practice our culture, civilization, and religions the way we want to practice them, without being made to feel guilty for our preferences and history—a story where we are the good guys, the heroes, and where we have a future that is bright and safe for our children.

In the context of the Cold War, the outlook of a power vacuum in the centre of Europe presented a serious danger that Soviet communism could fill it. A subjugated, humiliated Germany living a regime of economic hardship could provide a breeding ground conducive to anti-Western feelings and facilitate the penetration of communism. For the United States, now undisputed leader in the Western Hemisphere, the Cold War Soviet threat decidedly tipped the balance in favour of allowing room for a German recovery.

You and your kind disgust me. Such self-centered, murdering, hate-filled thugs, nothing more than the capitalist meat puppets of a failed fascist regime.

America’s global agenda is transformative and generally supportive of regime change. The country’s foreign-policy-makers are not just rule-makers. They are missionary proselytizers for the American model, or at least they have been so through much of the country’s history

As Montesquieu pointed out long ago, democracy is the most demanding regime, given its demands for civic virtue. The cultivation of virtue requires the thick presence of virtue-forming and virtue-supporting institutions, but these are precisely the institutions and practices that liberalism aims to hollow and eviscerate in the name of individual liberty.

Perón, Chávez, and dozens of other strongmen in Latin America are just another facet of the iron law of oligarchy, and as the name suggests, the roots of this iron law lies in the underlying elite-controlled regimes.

In this, the first of his many political speeches, he speaks to them of the practices they have inherited from their ancestors and of their own situation. According to Cyrus, they are now in a position to avoid their ancestors’ mistake of failing to put those worthy practices to any use: 'I have observed that our forefathers were no worse than we are: they too persevered in practicing what are held to be deeds of virtue. But what good thing they acquired through being men of this sort, either for the Persian commonwealth or themselves, this I am no longer able to see.' Cyrus tacitly treats the preservation of the Persian regime and the Persian way of life as worthless. The good things he has in mind are precisely those which Persia does not provide: 'much wealth, much happiness, and great honors' for oneself and one’s country. […] Xenophon has no need to indicate here the reaction of the peers who heard this speech: the whole rest of the book is the indication. The peers, with perhaps an occasional exception, acquiesced not only in Cyrus’ rearming of the commoners but in his many other steps, and they did so despite the grave political consequences of each step by itself and all of them taken together. The reason is not that they were so foolish as to have no awareness of those consequences. It is to be found in the effect on them of Cyrus’ speech. Their hearts, and therefore also their minds, were no longer set on a return home, to their ancestral way of life, but on partaking of the great prospects Cyrus’ words had opened their eyes to.

the iron law of oligarchy, the overthrow of a regime presiding over extractive institutions heralds the arrival of a new set of masters to exploit the same set of pernicious extractive institutions. The logic of this type of vicious circle is also simple to understand in hindsight: extractive political institutions create few constraints on the exercise of power, so there are essentially no institutions to restrain the use and abuse of power by those overthrowing previous dictators and assuming control of the state; and extractive economic institutions imply that there are great profits and wealth to be made merely by controlling power, expropriating the assets of others, and setting up monopolies.

In the wake of the attack against him, Fulgencio Batista began demanding public demonstrations of loyalty from anyone who depended on government largesse or favors—public employees, landowners, pro-Batista union leaders, businessmen, and bankers. Workers who failed to take part in scheduled demonstrations could be fired. A succession of industrial leaders, fearful of alienating the regime, called on Batista to offer their sympathy and pledge their allegiance.

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail.

the idea of invading Iraq was first urged on him after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, he could not fail to recognize it as a way to have his revenge, complete the job his father had begun, and redeem his family’s honor.

Big organizations like to follow perfectionist regimes like Six Sigma and Total Quality Management, entire systems devoted to eliminating error from the conference room or the assembly line, but it’s no accident that one of the mantras of the Web startup world is fail faster. It’s not that mistakes are the goal—they’re still mistakes, after all, which is why you want to get through them quickly. But those mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation.