Pipes Richard Quotes

Proud men are the devil’s pipes, and flatterers the musicians to blow these pipes.

I seen but little of this world, Except my corner of it; The city never drew me, For I knew I could not love it. What I loved best was watching The garden getting ripe And a pouch of sweet tobacco And my old cob pipe. What I loved best was a harvest moon Before a frosty morn And lamplight in the barn lot And them long, straight rows of corn. I was plain and country; That's where it starts and ends, But nobody loved her family more, Or treasured more her friends. I loved the changing seasons, And looking for life's reasons, And honey in the comb, and home.

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled “Theses on the Constituent Assembly.” It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, “a death sentence on the Assembly.

kneeling over the age of sixty-five is a pipe dream, so she sits on the step above instead. Elizabeth kneels. Is there nothing she can’t do?

Natural selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution; it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

Mr. Gruffydd turned to my father, and he blew the note on the reed pipe. Ivor raised his finger, and from top of the Hill down to bottom men and women hummed softly to have the proper key, with sopranos going up to find the octave, and altos climbing, and tenors making silver and contraltos and baritones resting in comfort and basso down on the octave below, and the sound they all made was a life-time of loveliness, so solid, so warm, so deep, and yet so delicate. It will be no surprise to me if the flowers of the gardens of heaven are made from such sound. And O, to smell a smell as good to the nose as that sound sounds to the ear. But even heaven could not be so beautiful, or we would all be drunk with beauty day and night, and no work done anywhere, and nobody to blame. Drunk with beauty. There is lovely.

Judged in terms of its own aspirations, the Communist regime was a monumental failure; it succeeded in one thing only - staying in power. But since for Bolsheviks power was not an end in itself but means to en end, its mere retention does not qualify the experiment as a success. The Bolsheviks made no secret of their aims: toppling everywhere regimes based on private property and replacing them with a worldwide union of socialist societies. They succeeded nowhere outside the boundaries of what had been the Russian Empire in spreading their regime until the end of World War II, when the Red Army stepped into the vacuum created in Eastern Europe by the surrender of Germany, the Chinese Communists seized control of their country from the Japanese, and Communist dictatorships, aided by Moscow, established themselves in a number of recently emancipated colonial areas.

The Bolsheviks did not intend to sit back and wait for these revolutions to unfold. As the revolutionary vanguard, they hoped to facilitate the coming turmoil through propaganda, subterfuge, and even warfare.61 In the spring of 1919 they had set up the Communist International, popularly known as the Comintern, a body officially dedicated to the overthrow of capitalist regimes according to a Leninist blueprint, as outlined in books such as What Is to Be Done? (Lenin’s furious denunciation of social democracy and left-wing pluralism, published in 1902).62 In practice, as Richard Pipes has written, the Comintern constituted a “declaration of war on all the existing governments.”63

The umbrella assertion made by Team B—and the most inflammatory—was that the previous National Intelligence Estimates “substantially misperceived the motivations behind Soviet strategic programs, and thereby tended consistently to underestimate their intensity, scope, and implicit threat.” Soviet military leaders weren’t simply trying to defend their territory and their people; they were readying a First Strike option, and the US intelligence community had missed it. What led to this “grave and dangerous flaw” in threat assessment, according to Team B, was an overreliance on hard technical facts, and a lamentable tendency to downplay “the large body of soft data.” This “soft” data, the ideological leader of Team B, Richard Pipes, would later say, included “his deep knowledge of the Russian soul.

I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

Because totalitarian rule strives for the impossible and wants to place at its disposal the personality of man and destiny, it can be realized only in a fragmentary manner. It lies in its being that its goal can never be attained and made total but must remain a tendency, a claim to rule. . . . Totalitarian rule is not a thoroughly rationalized apparatus, that works with equal effectiveness in all its parts. This is something it would well like to be and in some places it may perhaps approach this ideal, but seen as a whole, its claim to power is realizable only in a diffuse manner, with very different intensities at various times in various realms of life; at the same time, totalitarian and non-totalitarian features are always commingled. But this is precisely why the consequences of the totalitarian claim to power are so dangerous and oppressive, because they are so hazy, so incalculable, and so difficult to demonstrate. . . . This contortion follows from the unfulfillable aspiration to power: it characterizes life under such a regime and makes it so exceedingly difficult for all outsiders to grasp.

By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary". What mattered to him was German identity politics.

The lives of the great majority of Russians are uncommonly personal, which makes them excellent friends and poor citizens.

I hope watching the Bradys depresses them as much as being trapped here in Creation’s shit pipe depresses me.

while avoiding any legal issues, the case of Matrix Churchill and the enormous pipes sent to Iraq, supposedly to be put together to form a giant gun.

There was a stove pipe on top of the box, but there were no bullet holes in the pipe. I was amazed. Almost all the camp stoves we had seen in Idaho had been full of bullet holes. I guess it’s only reasonable that people, when they get the chance, would want to shoot some old stove sitting in the woods.” Excerpt From Trout Fishing in America

Marxism, the theoretical foundation of Communism, carried within it the seeds of its own destruction, such as Marx and Engels had wrongly attributed to capitalism. It rested on a faulty philosophy of history as well as an unrealistic psychological doctrine.

It’s funny that I’m the one talking about helping Bert,” Victor said, “and not the other way around. I told you my grandfather came to America from Europe for a better life. My uncle died fighting communists in Poland. My dad worked for twenty-five years in an auto plant. He carried a lunch-pail every day. My mom worked part time at the five and ten. Bert’s uncles are big shots in various industries, his dad gives money to the art institute uptown. They’ve had money and position for generations. Bert wants to throw all that out and if he gets his way, no one else will ever have a chance. I used to think that the left....” Victor’s fingers trembled. Without paying attention to what he was doing, he put a spoonful of mashed potatoes into the ash tray with his pipe. “Why does he bother you?” Juliet asked. “You know his dreams will never come to pass. So does he.” She touched his hand. “It’s still warm. Let’s go outside. I’d like to look at the moon.” They walked to Lake Otrobe. The glow from a distant steel mill reddened the southern sky. “Industry,” Victor said admiringly. “Creating wealth.” He began to sputter again on the way back when they passed the apartment building where Bert lived. They looked up at a lighted window. A dark figure with his back to the street sat in a gray armchair, still, his head down. “He’s fallen asleep reading,” Victor mumbled. “Engels no doubt or Lenin or one of those other thieves.

Современность дала нам прекрасное средство заставить людей идти за нами: нужно убедить их, что, исполнив наш замысел, они поступят как деятельные, критичные, независимые и свободолюбивые существа; поступив же иначе, останутся пассивными и зависимыми. Каким же бараном нужно быть, чтобы безнадёжно запутаться в этой сети." Кеннет Миноуг Интеллектуальная безответственность и нравственная трусость социалистического большинства создавали психологическую и идеологическую ситуацию, в которой большевистское меньшинство с успехом росло и множилось. Но самым выдающимся, величайшим преимуществом большевиков перед соперниками было их абсолютное безразличие к судьбе России. Консерваторы, либералы и социалисты по-своему пытались сохранить Россию как единое государство вопреки тем частным, общественным и локальным, высвобожденным революцией центробежным силам, которые раздирали страну на части. Они призывали солдат соблюдать дисциплину, крестьян – терпеливо дожидаться земельной реформы, рабочих – не покидать производство, национальные меньшинства – отложить борьбу за самоуправление. Лозунги эти не вызывали симпатии, так как отсутствие в стране развитого чувства государственности и народности поощряло центробежные силы и приводило к преобладанию частных интересов над интересами целого. Как отмечает Крэйн Бринтон в книге "Анатомия революции", в революционной ситуации рядовых граждан обычно быстро утомляет политика, и они уступают поле деятельности экстремистам, влияние которых растёт прямо пропорционально разочарованию и потере интереса к политике у широкой общественности.

Два пути России": Бенкендорф ответил страшной фразой: "Закон пишется для подданных, а не для государства". Это означает, что законы – средство управления, а не средство защиты людей от правительства. Из истории России мы знаем, что народ этой страны легко прощал своим руководителям что угодно – и массовые казни, и нищету, и лагеря, и другие ужасы. Что угодно, кроме проигранной войны. После каждой проигранной войны – Крымской, Японской и так далее – народ поднимался против своего правительства. Как это часто случалось в российской истории, где важнейшие нововведения производились беспорядочно и становились нормой не по закону, а по прецеденту, никакого указа, ставящего вотчинное землевладение в зависимость от несения службы, никогда не было издано. Правило установилось обычаем. Русские не могли быть уверены, что правительственные чиновники не отберут у них любой ценный предмет и не запретят торговать каким-либо товаром, объявив его государственной монополией. Флетчер следующим образом описывал тревоги, владевшие, как он заметил, российскими купцами: «Чрезвычайные притеснения, которым подвержены бедные простолюдины, лишают их вовсе бодрости заниматься своими промыслами, ибо чем кто из них зажиточнее, тем в большей находится опасности не только лишиться своего имущества, но и самой жизни. Если же у него и есть какая собственность, то старается он скрыть ее, сколько может, иногда отдавая в монастырь, а иногда зарывая в землю и в лесу, как обыкновенно делают при нашествии неприятельском. Развитие земельной собственности в России происходило, как можно заметить, в направлении, противоположном тому, в каком оно шло в остальной Европе. Во времена, когда Западная Европа знала главным образом условное владение землей в форме фьефа, Россия была знакома только с полной земельной собственностью (в духе западноевропейского аллода). К тому времени, когда в Западной Европе условное держание уступило место полной собственности, в России владения, существовавшие на началах аллода, превратились в царские фьефы, а их прежние собственники – в главных держателей от властителя. Никакое другое, отдельно взятое обстоятельство из тех, что воздействовали на ход российской истории, не дает лучшего объяснения, почему политическое и экономическое развитие страны уклонилось от пути, которым следовала остальная Европа. Политическая свобода и гражданские права появились в России в 1905–1906 годах не как естественное развитие народной власти, осуществляемой посредством собственности и права, а как отчаянная попытка монархии предотвратить грозившую революцию. Когда же десятилетие спустя революция все-таки разразилась, все свободы и права, вместе с собственностью, унеслись и растаяли в голубой дымке, потому что не имели в стране сколько-нибудь прочных оснований. Опыт России показывает, что свобода не может быть учреждена законодательным актом, она должна вырасти постепенно, в тесном содружестве с собственностью и правом. Ибо если склонность к присвоению заложена в природу человека, то уважение к чужой собственности – и свободе – в его природе отсутствует.

used to call their moveable gathering . “Come to the Covenant, you’re welcome, brother.” I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know how important this is in their terms, but if I’m asked to go, I’ll go. Quite honestly you couldn’t see a thing, the place would be covered in smoke. They used to smoke the chalice, a coconut with a huge earthenware jar on top and about half a pound of weed in it and a rubber pipe coming out the end. It was a question of who could smoke more than anybody else. The daring chaps would fill the coconut with white rum like a hubbly bubbly and smoke it through the rum. You set the earthenware container ablaze, bursting into flames with clouds of smoke. “Fire burn, Jah wonderful!” Who was I to defy local custom? OK, I’ll try and hang in here. This is powerful weed. Funnily enough, I never flaked out. That’s why I think I impressed them. I was a smoker for quite a few years before that, but never that amount. It was just like a dare, in a way. You know, watch whitey fall to the floor. And I was telling myself, not gonna go to the floor, not gonna go to the floor.

The theory and practice of socialism, and its offshoot, communism, postulate that all the existing ways of humanity are irrational and that it is the mission of those in the know to make out of them something radically different: mankind’s entire past is but a long detour on the road to its true destiny.

Death, Richard Aurelius tells us, smiles at us all. Every burning pipe is a writer's insolent smile back.

Better move aside, Shell. You're right where the oil should come out. Not connected to a line, so we'll just let her flow a bit." I moved aside. He freed the valve, then turned it by hand. At first it was just a trickle, then it gushed. Ed spun the valve and stepped back with a whoop, and on his face was the expression of a man looking on something he loves. "Baby, baby," he yelled, "there she goes." Oil, thick and black, spurted from the pipe like black blood from a cut artery. It streamed from the Christmas tree and spread on the ground, running in a thick river away from us down a shallow furrow in the earth. And a queer feeling gripped me. I knew, then, that until this moment I hadn't really believed it. I'd just sort of gone on faith to here, but now I could see it, touch it, smell it. Oil. Oil, growling up from deep in the earth, pushed by Nature's gases, and for one brief moment of brighter awareness I could see it, refined, split, joining in new chemical compounds — in cars, generators, lamps, diesels; driving engines and smoothing bearings; in hundreds of products with thousands of uses, from farming to photography, plastics, medicines . . . And there all the time for the man with faith enough and strength enough to find it and seize it.

From the day the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, there have been dozens of attempts made in every part of the world to install societies based on Communist principles. Moscow generously supported them with money, weapons and guidance. Virtually all failed.

In another minute, we were seated in the low-ceilinged living room, furnished and decorated in a style I had not seen or even suspected before. Nothing in sight matched anything else—wicker chair, bamboo settee, chair and table of dark heavy wood ... paintings and masks and a couple of tapestries on the walls ... idols and figurines, a wooden spear straight as a long arrow next to a shield that could have been made from elephant hide ... an old flintlock and a modern high-powered scope-equipped rifle leaning aslant in one corner ... a hammered brass water pipe... Jumble of shapes, kaleidoscope of colors, but it all seemed to take on a kind of harmonious clutter after I looked at it for a while.

I argued with him, but not much—it was his house—and that’s where we left it. In another minute, we were seated in the low-ceilinged living room, furnished and decorated in a style I had not seen or even suspected before. Nothing in sight matched anything else—wicker chair, bamboo settee, chair and table of dark heavy wood ... paintings and masks and a couple of tapestries on the walls ... idols and figurines, a wooden spear straight as a long arrow next to a shield that could have been made from elephant hide ... an old flintlock and a modern high-powered scope-equipped rifle leaning aslant in one corner ... a hammered brass water pipe... Jumble of shapes, kaleidoscope of colors, but it all seemed to take on a kind of harmonious clutter after I looked at it for a while.

But I’ll say this much, I drilled through rock and laid pipe in mud and busted my back working off the cathead for a solid month more than thirty years ago to get my first dry hole and go broke, not for the

one old man, who was called the Bacon-wallah, was always an early arrival under the large tree. He had three natives with him who carried his stuff and worked under his supervision; they seemed to be in mortal dread of him, as were all the other natives who stood at the Ration Stand. He was a shrivelled-up old chap about five feet six in height and when I first met him I could not tell whether he was a white man, a half-caste or a native. But it turned out he was white. He smoked a native pipe called a hookah or hubble-bubble: it held about an ounce of tobacco and he would sit on his haunches like a native while he was smoking it. It was common to see half-a-dozen natives in a circle, smoking and gossiping; they sat on their haunches with one hubble-bubble between them, from which each man took a few whiffs before passing it on to the next man. They smoked all kinds of stuff, including charcoal and live coke, but the old Bacon-wallah smoked our tobacco, which was very cheap. At this time there were no duties on tobacco and cigarettes, and best plug-tobacco only cost one rupee a pound. I became very friendly with the old chap, who was an old British soldier who had served under the East India Company, or John Company as he called it. He was not sure of his correct age, but thought he was knocking a hole into ninety. He once asked me when I had joined the Army. I replied, that it was the year Queen Victoria died. He smiled and said that he had enlisted in 1837, the year Queen Victoria was crowned. After twelve months’ service at home he had been sent to India and had been nineteen years in the country when the Mutiny broke out. He had taken an active part in the fighting around Meerut and I was always interested in his yarns of the Mutiny.

Come to the Covenant, you’re welcome, brother.” I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know how important this is in their terms, but if I’m asked to go, I’ll go. Quite honestly you couldn’t see a thing, the place would be covered in smoke. They used to smoke the chalice, a coconut with a huge earthenware jar on top and about half a pound of weed in it and a rubber pipe coming out the end. It was a question of who could smoke more than anybody else. The daring chaps would fill the coconut with white rum like a hubbly bubbly and smoke it through the rum. You set the earthenware container ablaze, bursting into flames with clouds of smoke. “Fire burn, Jah wonderful!” Who was I to defy local custom?

Bribing was a subtle and even gracious art. It was considered in better taste to bribe indirectly. For example, one could offer a generous donation to a 'charitable' cause, chaired by the official's wife; or sell him a piece of property at a fraction of its actual value; or buy something from him (e.g. a painting) for a sum far in excess of its value.

Newcomen’s engine borrowed the best features of its predecessors and incorporated new features of its own. It borrowed Huygens’s cylinder and piston but followed Papin in substituting steam for gunpowder. It borrowed from Savery the idea of condensing steam to make a vacuum. The Newcomen engine, however, unlike Papin’s or Savery’s, heated water to steam in a large, separate boiler, then piped the steam through a flap valve up to an open-ended cylinder mounted overhead. Instead of using steam pressure to push up the piston, as Papin had, Newcomen hung the piston from a massive wooden rocking beam so that the weight of the beam as it rocked pulled up the piston to open the cylinder between cycles.

Within a year or two of Lenin’s death he was clearly the party’s boss: having solidified his power, he was ready to resume the drive for Communism interrupted in 1921 by the introduction of the NEP. He had three related objectives: to build a powerful industrial base, to collectivize agriculture, and to impose on the nation complete conformity.

The Russian Language has two words for education: obrozovanie, which means "instruction," and vospitanie, which means "upbringing." The first refers to the transmission of knowledge; the second to the molding of personality. The entire Soviet regime dedicated itself to vospitanie in the sense that all the institutions of the state, whether trade unions or the Red Army, had the mission of inculcating in the citizenry the spirit of communism and creating a new type of human being - so much so that to some contemporaries Soviet Russia appeared like one gigantic school.

The Communists in December 1917 introduced a novel (for the time) divorce law that allowed either partner to terminate a marriage on grounds of incompatibility. They did not, as yet, legalize abortion, but they tolerated it and it was widely practiced. Generally carried out under unhygienic conditions by unqualified personnel, the procedure claimed numerous victims. To remedy the situation, in November 1920 the government legalized abortions performed under medical supervision. This law, authorizing abortion on demand, was also the first of its kind.

She turns and waves, and the morning of another terrible day creeps up on us like a thug with a lead pipe.

all. Then I’m on my board again, carving on a half-pipe, ollying on a quarter, grinding

… behind which the panting dog drooped like a dropped chamois. It was too hot to smoke, but he smoked his pipe anyway. The smoke wreathed a strange smile that Dorrigo later came to realise was fixed; determined to find the world cheery in spite of all the evidence life produced to the contrary.

To spur productivity, Stalin appealed to traditional capitalist methods of motivation. In 1931, he assailed the principle of “egalitarianism,” which called for workers to be paid identical wages regardless of competence, as an “ultra-left” notion. It meant, he went on to explain, that the unqualified worker had no incentive to acquire skills, while the skilled worker moved from job to job until he found one where his talents were properly rewarded; both hurt productivity. Accordingly, the new wage scale drew great distinctions between the least and the most skilled workers

Stalin first teamed up with Kamenev and Zinoviev, members of the triumvirate that had run the party during Lenin’s illness, to be rid of their common rival, Trotsky. By slander, intimidation of his supporters, and similar underhanded methods they stripped Trotsky of his posts, expelled him from the party, and then exiled him, first to Central Asia and finally, in 1929, abroad, where, in 1940, Stalin had him murdered. Stalin next turned on Kamenev and Zinoviev, whom he had removed from the Politburo. His victims’ ability to defend themselves against fabricated accusations was fatally weakened by their acceptance of the principle that “the party is always right.

These ambitious objectives provoked a crisis in the country, which was finally recovering from the turmoils of World War I, revolution, and civil war. But this did not trouble Stalin, because Communist regimes thrived on crises. Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain—total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of utopian programs to the world of reality.

But the propaganda accompanying collectivization placed emphasis on the elimination of rural “exploiters,” to divert attention from the fact that by far the most numerous victims of collectivization were ordinary peasants.

Through much of her history she was ruled by an extreme form of autocracy, under which the tsar not only enjoyed unlimited legislative, judiciary, and executive powers but literally owned the country, in that he could, at will, exploit its human and material resources—the type of regime that the German sociologist Max Weber labeled “patrimonial.” The administration of the vast empire was entrusted to a bureaucracy that, along with the armed forces and police, maintained order without being accountable to the people. Until 1905, when civil disorders compelled the tsar to grant his subjects a constitution and civil rights, Russians could be arrested and exiled without trial for merely contemplating changes in the status quo.

Life turned out to be very different from theory. But they would not admit they were wrong: whenever things did not turn out as desired, they did not compromise but instead intensified the violence. To admit to being wrong would threaten to unravel the whole theoretical foundation of their regime, since it claimed to be scientifically correct in all its parts.

It needs to be stated at this point that the ideal of a propertyless Golden Age is a myth—the fruit of longing rather than memory—because historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists concur that there never was a time or place when all productive assets were collectively owned. All living creatures, from the most primitive to the most advanced, in order to survive must enjoy assured access to food and, to secure such access, claim ownership of territory.

The word communism, coined in Paris in the 1840s, refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.*1 The ideal is one of full social equality that in its most extreme form (as in some of Plato’s writings) calls for the dissolution of the individual in the community. Inasmuch as social and economic inequalities derive primarily from inequalities of possession, its attainment requires that there be no “mine” and “thine”—in other words, no private property. This ideal has an ancient heritage, reappearing time and again in the history of Western thought from the seventh century b.c. to the present. The program dates back to the middle of the nineteenth century and is most closely associated with the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In their Communist Manifesto of 1848 Marx and Engels wrote that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Engels claimed that his friend had formulated a scientific theory that demonstrated the inevitable collapse of societies based on class distinctions. Although throughout history there had been sporadic attempts to realize the communist ideal, the first determined effort to this effect by using the full power of the state occurred in Russia between 1917 and 1991. The founder of this regime, Vladimir Lenin, saw a propertyless and egalitarian society emerging from the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would eliminate private property and pave the way for Communism.

We shall trace the history of Communism in this sequence both because it makes sense logically and because it is in this manner that it has evolved historically: first the idea, then the plan of realization, and finally the implementation. But we will concentrate on the implementation because the ideal and the program, taken by themselves, are relatively innocuous, whereas every attempt to put them into practice, especially if backed by the full power of the state, has had enormous consequences.

In the words of Morelly, the author of the influential treatise Le Code de la Nature, published in 1755: The only vice which I know in the universe is avarice; all the others, whatever name one gives them, are merely forms, degrees of it. . . . Analyze vanity, conceit, pride, ambition, deceitfulness, hypocrisy, villainy; break down the majority of our sophisticated virtues themselves, [they] all dissolve in this subtle and pernicious element, the desire to possess.

From time to time there emerged in the West voluntary communist societies. One of them was the Virginia Company in Jamestown (1607); another, New Harmony of Indiana, founded in 1825 by the British philanthropist Robert Owen. All such attempts broke down sooner or later, largely because of their inability to resolve the problem of “free riders,” members who drew a full share of the community’s harvest while doing little if any work.

Industrialization not only caused painful social dislocations but fundamentally and permanently altered relations between employers and employees. Landlords and their tenants had been neighbors and in some respects partners. Although on occasion tenants suffered mass expulsions, as during the Enclosure Acts in England, by and large the countryside was stable, especially in such countries as the United States, where the great majority of farmers owned the soil they cultivated. In industrial societies, the relationship of owner to employee turned tenuous and volatile, as the former felt free to dismiss workers whenever demand grew slack. Differences in lifestyle became more glaring as the nouveaux riches flaunted their wealth. These developments led to a growing hostility to “capitalism.” Socialism, until then an ideal with particular appeal to intellectuals, now acquired, in addition to a theoretical foundation, a social base among certain segments of the working class.

In his address at Marx’s funeral Engels described “the law of human history” his friend is said to have discovered: that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have a shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion etc; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence . . . form[s] the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas on religion of the people concerned have evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case. In short, economics is the foundation of organized life: all else is “superstructure.

Originally, there was no private property in these means: all land was held in common. But in time, the “primitive communal” order gave way to class differentiation as one group succeeded in monopolizing the vital resources and used its economic power to exploit and dominate the rest of the population by erecting political and legal institutions protecting its class interests. It also employed culture—religion, ethics, the arts and literature—to the same end. Such devices have enabled the ruling class to exploit the rest of the population.

Of course, the lower classes do not acquiesce peaceably to their exploitation; they resist, although for as long as there is private property they merely succeed in replacing one form of exploitation with another. For this reason, in the words of the Communist Manifesto, so far all the history of societies has been the history of class struggles.

More important still was the introduction of state-sponsored welfare schemes. The industrial democracies, alarmed by socialist strides in organizing labor and gaining seats in parliamentary elections, instituted social legislation in the form of unemployment and health insurance and other benefits that kept the working class from sinking into destitution.

Its official platform, the so-called Erfurt Program, adopted in 1891, contended that the interests of the “bourgeois” state and the working class were irreconcilable and that, accordingly, workers had no stake in their nation: they owed loyalty only to their class. It reaffirmed the international unity of labor and the imminence of a revolution that would crush capitalism and the bourgeoisie around the globe.

The French socialist Jean Jaurès predicted: The proletariat will come to power not through an unanticipated blow of political agitation, but by the methodical and legal organization of its own powers under democratic conditions and the universal right to vote. Our society will gradually develop towards Communism, not through the collapse of the capitalist bourgeoisie but by a gradual and inexorable strengthening of the proletariat.

National loyalties overcame class loyalties, a fact not lost on ambitious demagogues like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who would rise to power after the war on platforms that fused socialism and nationalism.

As Fidel Castro, the leader of Communist Cuba, would explain with a frankness that his Russian mentors preferred to avoid: “The revolution needs the enemy. . . . The revolution needs for its development its antithesis, which is the counterrevolution.”9 And if enemies were lacking, they had to be fabricated.

Thus the Bolsheviks who five years earlier in a noisy campaign of blasphemy and ridicule exposed as sham the relics of Orthodox saints, created a holy relic of their own. Unlike the church's saints, whose remains were revealed to be nothing but rags and bones, their god, as befitted the age of science, was composed of alcohol, glycerin, and formalin.

When the so-called masses are discontented, they are inspired by specific grievances that are capable of being satisfied within the existing system. Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing can change unless everything changes.

As we learned in the 2012 election campaign, it’s also embedded in the minds and mouths of our politicians. Remember that spate of crazy pro-rape things Republican men said last summer and fall, starting with Todd Akin’s notorious claim that a woman has ways of preventing pregnancy in cases of rape, a statement he made in order to deny women control over their own bodies (in the form of access to abortion after rape). After that, of course, Senate candidate Richard Mourdock claimed that rape pregnancies were “a gift from God,” and soon after another Republican politician piped up to defend Akin’s comment. Happily the five publicly pro-rape Republicans in the 2012 campaign all lost their election bids.

In 1854, during the Crimean War, Chaadaev wrote these words: Talking about Russia one always imagines that one is talking about a country like the others; in reality, this is not so at all. Russia is a whole separate world, submissive to the will, caprice, fantasy of a single man, whether his name be Peter or Ivan, no matter - in all instances the common element is the embodiment of arbitrariness. Contrary to all the laws of the human community, Russia moves only in direction of her own enslavement and the enslavement of all the neighbouring peoples. For this reason it would be in the interest not only of other peoples but also in that of her own that she be compelled to take a new path.

Drake, or Uncle Billy, or both of them, decided they should drive a pipe—a well casing, it came to be called—down through the sand and clay to bedrock. Drake located two lengths of cast-iron pipe each about nine feet long. Using a windlass to crank a battering ram, they rammed down the first pipe, but the second crushed the upper end of the first, after which Smith drew up a pattern for a thicker-walled pipe and Drake had it cast in ten-foot lengths. (“I could not have suited myself better,” Drake would praise Uncle Billy, “if I could have had a man made to order.

Thomas Edison had to invent much more than the electric light. As do all innovators of new technologies, he faced the larger problem of developing and deploying the infrastructure required to support his inventions. Behind the steam engine, a network of mines and distribution systems supplied coal for its operation. Local generating plants and networks of underground pipes sustained gas lighting. When Edison planned his direct-current system of electric lighting, not wanting to run wires as thick as a man’s leg, he envisioned neighborhood-scale generating stations—steam engines turning direct-current generators—modeling his system on the gas-lighting system and even running his wiring, like gas, in pipes underground.

Chin now joined chai (tea) and shchi (cabbage soup) to form a triad around which revolved a great deal of Russian life.

The elaborate and rather flexible political police system established in Russia in the early 1880s was unique in at least two respects. Before the First World War no other country in the world had two kinds of police, one to protect the state and another to protect its citizens. Only a country with a deeply rooted patrimonial mentality could have devised such a dualism. Secondly, unlike other countries, where the police served as an arm of the law and was required to turn over all arrested persons to the judiciary, in imperial Russia and there alone police organs were exempt from this obligation.

Shipbuilding stalled postwar—the Great Depression came early to the shipbuilding industry—but welding advanced, finding a major new application in pipeline construction. In 1925 the Magnolia Petroleum Company of Galveston, Texas, rebuilt a leaky two-hundred-mile bolted natural-gas pipeline with acetylene lap-welded pipe. After five more years of development—other companies followed Magnolia—electric welding replaced acetylene, eliminating overlapping, using less pipe, and cutting welding time in half. Alloy steels were also important to pipeline improvement, as were improved ditching machines and gas compressors. By 1931, pipeline workers were laying the first thousand-mile natural-gas pipeline from the Texas Panhandle to Chicago.

Why I, in this weak piping time of piece, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to see my shadow in the sun And descant on my own deformity