Archive for the ‘RESISTANCE IS USELESS!’ Category
Mission Accomplished
During the Cold War, the peoples of the East were wretchedly groaning under the yoke of the Communist Party, instead of, as they ought to have been, wretchedly groaning under the yoke of Western corporations. In the Yeltsin era, however, Western goals were finally achieved. It was a fair exchange: Western companies invested in the [...]
Come back Gosplan, all is forgiven
How could we ever have seen fit to assert that the Soviet Union was economically backwards, when in fact it was devoted for decades to something that Western countries have only recently learned to espouse – namely running both productive enterprises and government administration by means of elaborately quantified managerial performance criteria? The [...]
It couldn’t happen here
The man who led the Chernobyl clean-up operation told me that the disaster was the single biggest cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Let us hope that we never have occasion to discover whether a similar-scale disaster in the West would have a corresponding effect on political structures. There is no reason to [...]
A history of our times in one paragraph
In the beginning was 19th-century laissez-faire capitalism. And the people flocked to the industrial cities to feed the maw of the factories, and were wretched, and listened to revolutionaries and anarchists. The less wise among their rulers said, ‘Let us crush this stiff-necked people by force of arms’. But the wiser rulers said, ‘No, let [...]
A metatactic
Our lords and masters keep telling us that ‘the economy’ (being their name for their own income and assets) is not a zero-sum game; that is, we should not think that everything they get is something of which we are deprived. That is because they are in fact playing a zero-sum game with us; everything [...]
Evil dictators and cultural heritage
The American invaders were pleased to show us Saddam’s many opulent palaces. But when more fortunate Evil Dictators have been dead and buried a couple of centuries, their immense and overwrought palaces become National Heritage, and those same Americans pay to visit them.
A review of a book about dictators’ homes describes how much they resemble [...]
Back to the citadel
There has been some comment about both the fortified ‘Green Zone’ that the Americans have created in Baghdad and the temporary ‘wall of steel’ erected in Sydney for a summit conference. I do not, however, recall anyone observing that this is merely a return to a pattern so antique and universal that we take it [...]
‘Purpresturists Out!’
I came across an obscure word the other day – ‘purpresture’. It is a medieval term, to be found in Richard fitz Nigel’s handbook to the Exchequer, and signifies encroachments on the royal demesne. Or as we would say now, when politicians sell state assets to their cronies at knockdown prices. Hey, now we have [...]
Sumptuary legislation
It may come as a surprise to anyone who came of age in the Eighties or in the Noughties, but there was once an institution called ‘sumptuary legislation’. This forbade conspicuous consumption, out of a concern for the social order. That is to say, back then even rich people realised that provocation of the poor [...]
The tragedy of ignorance of the commons
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is a misnomer; overexploitation is a feature only of unregulated commons, which until recently – at least on land – was a contradiction in terms. Historically, commons were minutely regulated by elaborate systems of custom and negotiation, and many of these systems continue to work well. For example, as demonstrated [...]
