PukeOnABook

Camp of the Saints, 1973 One. The old professor had a rather simple thought. Given the wholly abnormal conditions, he had read, and reasoned, and even written too much—versed as he was in the workings of the mind—to dare propose anything, even to himself, but the most banal of reflections, worthy of a schoolboy’s theme. It was a lovely day, warm but not hot, with a cool spring breeze rolling gently and noiselessly over the covered terrace outside the house. His was one of the last houses up toward the crest of the hill, perched on the rocky slope like an outpost guarding the old brown-hued village that stood out above the landscape, towering over it all, as far as the tourist resort down below; as far as the sumptuous boulevard along the water, with its green palms, tips barely visible, and its fine white homes; as far as the sea itself, calm and blue, the rich man’s sea, now suddenly stripped of all the opulent veneer that usually overspread its surface—the chrome-covered yachts, the muscle-bulging skiers, the gold-skinned girls, the fat bellies lining the decks of sailboats, large but discreet— and now, stretching over that empty sea, aground some fifty yards out, the incredible fleet from the other side of the globe, the rusty, creaking fleet that the old professor had been eyeing since morning. The stench had faded away at last, the terrible stench of latrines, that had heralded the fleet’s arrival, like thunder before a storm. The old man took his eye from the spyglass, moved back from the tripod. The amazing invasion had loomed up so close that it already seemed to be swarming over the hill and into his house. He rubbed his weary eye, looked toward the door. It was a door of solid oak, like some deathless mass, jointed with fortress hinges. The ancestral name was carved in somber wood, and the year that one of the old man’s forebears, in uninterrupted line, had completed the house: 1673. The door opened out on the terrace from the large main room that served as his library, parlor, and study, all in one. There was no other door in the house. The terrace, in fact, ran right to the road, down five little steps, with nothing like a gate to close them off, open to any and every passerby who felt like walking up and saying hello, the way they did so often in the village. Each day, from dawn to dusk, that door stood open. And on this particular evening, as the sun was beginning to sink down to its daily demise, it was open as well—a fact that seemed to strike the old man for the very first time. It was then that he had this fleeting thought, whose utter banality brought a kind of rapturous smile to his lips: “I wonder,” he said to himself, “if, under the circumstances, the proverb is right, and if a door really has to be open or shut …” Then he took up his watch again, eye to glass, to make the most of the sun’s last, low-skimming rays, as they lit the unlikely sight one more time before dark. How many of them were there, out on those grounded wrecks? If the figures could be believed—the horrendous figures that each terse news bulletin had announced through the day, one after another—then the decks and holds must be piled high with layer on layer of human bodies, clustered in heaps around smokestacks and gangways, with the dead underneath supporting the living, like one of those columns of ants on the march, teeming with life on top, exposed to view, and below, a kind of ant-paved path, with millions of trampled cadavers. The old professor—Calgues by name—aimed his glass at one of the ships still lit by the sun, then patiently focused the lens until the image was as sharp as he could make it, like a scientist over his microscope, peering in to find his culture swarming with the microbes that he knew all the time must be there. The ship was a steamer, a good sixty years old. Her five stacks, straight up, like pipes, showed how very old she was. Four of them were lopped off at different levels, by time, by rust, by lack of care, by chance—in short, by gradual decay. She had run aground just off the beach, and lay there, listing at some ten degrees. Like all the ships in this phantom fleet, there wasn’t a light to be seen on her once it was dark, not even a glimmer. Everything must have gone dead—boilers, generators, everything, all at once—as she ran to meet her self-imposed disaster. Perhaps there had been just fuel enough for this one and only voyage. Or perhaps there was no one on board anymore who felt the need to take care of such things—or of anything else—now that the exodus had finally led to the gates of the newfound paradise. Old Monsieur Calguès took careful note of all he saw, of each and every detail, unaware of the slightest emotion within him. Except, that is, for his interest; a prodigious interest in this vanguard of an antiworld bent on coming in the flesh to knock, at long last, at the gates of abundance. He pressed his eye to the glass, and the first things he saw were arms. As best he could tell, his range of vision described a circle on deck ten yards or so in diameter. Then he started to count. Calm and unhurried. But it was like trying to count all the trees in the forest, those arms raised high in the air, waving and shaking together, all outstretched toward the nearby shore. Scraggy branches, brown and black, quickened by a breath of hope. All bare, those fleshless Gandhi-arms. And they rose up out of scraps of cloth, white cloth that must have been tunics once, and togas, and pilgrims’ saris. The professor reached two hundred, then stopped. He had counted as far as he could within the bounds of the circle. Then he did some rapid calculation. Given the length and breadth of the deck, it was likely that more than thirty such circles could be laid out side by side, and that between every pair of tangent circumferences there would be two spaces, more or less triangular in shape, opposite one another, vertex to vertex, each with an area roughly equal to one-third of a circle, which would give a total of 30 plus 10 equals 40 circles, 40 times 200 arms equals 8,000 arms. Or four thousand bodies! On this one deck alone! Now, assuming that they might be several layers thick, or at least no less thick on each of the decks—and between decks and below-decks too—then the figure, astounding enough as it was, would have to be multiplied by eight. Or thirty thousand creatures on a single ship! Not to mention the dead, floating here and there around the hull, trailing their white rags over the water, corpses that the living had been throwing overboard since morning. A curious act, all in all, and one not inspired by reasons of hygiene, to be sure. Otherwise, why wait for the end of the voyage? But Monsieur Calgues felt certain he had hit on the one explanation. He believed in God. He believed in all the rest: eternal life, redemption, heavenly mercy, hope and faith. He believed as well, with firm conviction, that the corpses thrown out on the shores of France had reached their paradise too to waft their way through it, unconstrained, forevermore. Even more blessed than the living themselves, who, throwing them into the sea, had offered their dead, then and there, the gift of salvation, joy, and all eternity. Such an act was called love. At least that was how the old professor understood it. And so night settled in, but not until daylight had glimmered its last red rays once more on the grounded fleet. There were better than a hundred ships in all, each one caked with rust, unfit for the sea, and each one proof of the miracle that had somehow guided them, safe and sound, from the other side of the earth. All but one, that is, wrecked off the coast of Ceylon. They had lined up in almost mannerly fashion, one after the other, stuck in the sand or in among the rocks, bows upraised in one final yearning thrust toward shore. And all around, thousands of floating, white-clad corpses, that daylight’s last waves were beginning to wash aground, laying them gently down on the beach, then rolling back to sea to look for more. A hundred ships! The old professor felt a shudder well up within him, that quiver of exaltation and humility combined, the feeling we sometimes get when we turn our minds, hard as we can, to notions of the infinite and the eternal. On this Easter Sunday evening, eight hundred thousand living beings, and thousands of dead ones, were making their peaceful assault on the Western World. Tomorrow it would all be over. And now, rising up from the coast to the hills, to the village, to the house and its terrace, a gentle chanting, yet so very strong for all its gentleness, like a kind of singsong, droned by a chorus of eight hundred thousand voices. Long, long ago, the Crusaders had sung as they circled Jerusalem, on the eve of their last attack. And Jericho’s walls had crumbled without a fight when the trumpets sounded for the seventh time. Perhaps when all was silent, when the chanting was finally stilled, the chosen people too would feel the force of divine displeasure. … There were other sounds as well. The roar of hundreds of trucks. Since morning, the army had taken up positions on the Mediterranean beaches. But there in the darkness there was nothing beyond the terrace but sky and stars. It was cool in the house when the professor went inside, but he left the door open all the same. Can a door protect a world that has lived too long? Even a marvel of workmanship, three hundred years old, and one carved out of such utterly respectable Western oak? … There was no electricity. Obviously, the technicians from the power plants along the coast had fled north too, with all the others, the petrified mob, turning tail and running off without a word, so as not to have to look, not see a thing, which meant they wouldn’t have to understand, or even try. The professor lit the oil lamps that he always kept on hand in case the lights went out. He threw one of the matches into the fireplace. The kindling, carefully arranged, flashed up with a roar, crackled, and spread its light and warmth over the room. Then he turned on his transistor, tuned all day long to the national chain. Gone now the pop and the jazz, the crooning ladies and the vapid babblers, the black saxophonists, the gurus, the smug stars of stage and screen, the experts on health and love and sex. All gone from the airwaves, all suddenly judged indecent, as if the threatened West were concerned with the last acoustic image it presented of itself. Nothing but Mozart, the same on every station. Eine kleine Nachtmusik, no less. And the old professor had a kindly thought for the program director, there in his studio in Paris. He couldn’t possibly see or know, and yet he had understood. For those eight hundred thousand singsong voices that he couldn’t even hear, he had found, instinctively, the most fitting reply. What was there in the world more Western than Mozart, more civilized, more perfect? No eight hundred thousand voices could drone their chant to Mozart’s notes. Mozart had never written to stir the masses, but to touch the heart of each single human being, in his private self. What a lovely symbol, really! The Western World summed up in its ultimate truth … An announcer’s voice roused the old professor from his musings: “The President of the Republic has been meeting all day at the Élysée Palace with government leaders. Also present, in view of the gravity of the situation, are the chiefs of staff of the three branches of the armed forces, as well as the heads of the local and state police, the prefects of the departments of Var and Alpes-Maritimes, and, in a strictly advisory capacity, His Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, the papal nuncio, and most of the Western ambassadors currently stationed in the capital. At present the meeting is still in progress. A government spokesman, however, has just announced that this evening, at about midnight, the President of the Republic will go on the air with an address of utmost importance to the nation. According to reports reaching us from the south, all still seems quiet on board the ships of the refugee fleet. A communiqué from army headquarters confirms that two divisions have been deployed along the coast in the face … in the face of …” (The announcer hesitated. And who could blame him? Just what should one call that numberless, miserable mass? The enemy? The horde? The invasion? The Third World on the march?) “… in the face of this unprecedented incursion (There! Not too bad at all!) “… and that three divisions of reinforcements are heading south at this moment, despite considerable difficulty of movement. In another communiqué, issued not more than five minutes ago, army chief of staff Colonel Dragasès has reported that troops under his command have begun setting fire to some twenty immense wooden piles along the shore, in order to … (Another hesitation. The announcer seemed to gasp. The old professor even thought he heard him mutter “My God!”) “… in order to burn the thousands of dead bodies thrown overboard from all the ships …” And that was all. A moment later, with hardly a break, Mozart was back, replacing those three divisions hurtling southward, and the score of funeral pyres that must have begun to crackle by now in the crisp air down by the coast. The West doesn’t like to burn its dead. It tucks away its cremation urns, hides them out in the hinterlands of its cemeteries. The Seine, the Rhine, the Loire, the Rhône, the Thames are no Ganges or Indus. Not even the Guadalquivir and the Tiber. Their shores never stank with the stench of roasting corpses. Yes, they have flowed with blood, their waters have run red, and many a peasant has crossed himself as he used his pitchfork to push aside the human carcasses floating downstream. But in Western times, on their bridges and banks, people danced and drank their wine and beer, men tickled the fresh, young laughing lasses, and everyone laughed at the wretch on the rack, laughed in his face, and the wretch on the gallows, tongue dangling, and the wretch on the block, neck severed—because, indeed, the Western World, staid as it was, knew how to laugh as well as cry—and then, as their belfreys called them to prayer, they would all go partake of their fleshly god, secure in the knowledge that their dead were there, protecting them, safe as could be, laid out in rows beneath their timeless slabs and crosses, in graveyards nestled against the hills, since burning, after all, was only for devilish fiends, or wizards, or poor souls with the plague. … The professor stepped out on the terrace. Down below, the shoreline was lit with a score of reddish glows, ringed round with billows of smoke. He opened his binoculars and trained them on the highest of the piles, flaming neatly along like a wooden tower, loaded with corpses from bottom to top. The soldiers had stacked it with care, first a layer of wood, then a layer of flesh, and so on all the way up. At least some trace of respect for death seemed to show in its tidy construction. Then all at once, down it crashed, still burning, nothing now but a loathsome mass, like a heap of smoking rubble along the public way. And no one troubled to build the nice neat tower again. Bulldozers rolled up, driven by men in diving suits, then other machines fitted with great jointed claws and shovels, pushing the bodies together into soft, slimy mounds, scooping a load in the air and pouring it onto the fire, as arms and legs and heads, and even whole cadavers overflowed around them and fell to the ground. It was then that the professor saw the first soldier turn and run, calling to mind yet another cliché, arms and legs flapping like a puppet on a string, in perfect pantomime of unbridled panic. The young man had dropped the corpse he was dragging. He had wildly thrown down his helmet and mask, ripped off his safety gloves. Then, hands clutched to temples, he dashed off, zigzag, like a terrified jackrabbit, into the ring of darkness beyond the burning pile. Five minutes more, and ten other soldiers had done the same. The professor closed his binoculars. He understood. That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest—none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action. The real men of heart would be toiling that night, and nobody else. Just a moment before, as the nice young man was running away, old Calguès had turned his glasses briefly on a figure that looked like some uniformed giant, standing at the foot of the burning pile, legs spread, and hurling up each corpse passed over to him, one by one, with a powerful, rhythmic fling, like a stoker of yesteryear deep belowdecks, feeding his boiler with shovelfuls of coal. Perhaps he too was pained at the sight, but if so, his pain didn’t leave much room for pity. In fact, he probably didn’t think of it at all, convinced that now, finally, the human race no longer formed one great fraternal whole—as the popes, philosophers, intellects, politicos, and priests of the West had been claiming for much too long. Unless, that is, the old professor, watching “the stoker” and his calm resolve—the one he called “the stoker” was really Colonel Dragasès, the chief of staff, up front to set his men an example—was simply ascribing to him his own ideas. … That night, love too was not of one mind. Man never has really loved humanity all of a piece— all its races, its peoples, its religions—but only those creatures he feels are his kin, a part of his clan, no matter how vast. As far as the rest are concerned, he forces himself, and lets the world force him. And then, when he does, when the damage is done, he himself falls apart. In this curious war taking shape, those who loved themselves best were the ones who would triumph. How many would they be, next morning, still joyously standing their ground on the beach, as the hideous army slipped down by the thousands, down into the water, for the onslaught by the living, in the wake of their dead? Joyously! That was what mattered the most. A moment before, as he watched “the stoker,” the professor had thought he could see him move his lips, wide open, as if he were singing. Yes, by God, singing! If even just the two of them could stand there and sing, perhaps they could wake up the rest from their deathly sleep. … But no other sound came rising from the shore, no sound but the soft, foreboding chant welling up out of eight hundred thousand throats. “Pretty cool, man, huh!” exclaimed a voice in the shadows. Two. Noiselessly, the young man had come up the five little steps from the road and onto the terrace. Feet bare, hair long and dirty, flowered tunic, Hindu collar, Afghan vest. “I’ve just been down there,” he said. “Fantastic! I’ve been waiting five years for something like this!” “Are you alone?” “So far. Except for the ones who were already here. But there’s lots more on the way. They’re all coming down. And walking, too. All the pigs are pulling out and heading north! I didn’t see a single car in this direction! Man, they’re going to be bushed, but this is too good to miss. Going to smoke, and shoot dope, and walk all the way. Make it down here on their feet, not on their butts. ” “Did you get a close look down there?” “Real close. Only not for long. I got smashed a couple of times. Some soldier, with his gun. Like I was trash. But I saw a bunch of other soldiers crying. It’s great! I’m telling you, tomorrow this country’s going to be something else. You won’t know it. It’s going to be born all over. ” “Did you see the people on the boats?” “You bet I did!” “And you think you’re anything like them? Look, your skin is white. You’re a Christian, I imagine. You speak our language, you have our accent. You probably even have family hereabouts, don’t you?” “So what! My real family’s all the people coming off those boats. Here I am with a million of my brothers, and sisters, and fathers, and mothers. And wives if I want them. I’ll sleep with the first one that lets me, and I’ll give her a baby. A nice dark baby. And after a while I’ll melt into the crowd. ” “Yes, you’ll disappear. You’ll be lost in that mass. They won’t even know you exist. ” “Good! That’s just what I’m after. I’m sick of being a tool of the middle class, and I’m sick of making tools of people just like me, if that’s what you mean by existing. My parents took off this morning. And my two sisters with them. Afraid of getting raped, all of a sudden. They went and dressed up like everyone else. These real square clothes, I mean. Things they haven’t put on in years, like neat little skirts, and blouses with buttons. So scared, you wouldn’t know them. Well, they won’t get away. Nobody’s going to get away. Let them try to save their ass. They’re finished, all of them. Man, you should have seen it! My father, with his arms full of shoes from his store, piling them into his nice little truck. And my mother, bawling her head off, figuring out which ones to take, picking out the expensive ones and leaving the rest. And my sisters, already up front, huddling together and staring at me, scared to death, like maybe I was the first one in line to rape them. And meanwhile I’m laughing and having myself a ball, like when my old man pulls down the grille in front of the store and sticks the key in his pocket. ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘a lot of good that’s going to do! I can open your door myself without a key. And I will, tomorrow. And you know what they’ll do with your goddamn shoes? They’ll probably use them to piss in. Or maybe they’ll eat them. Because they all go barefoot!’ Then he gave me a look, and he spit on me. So I spit back and got him in the eye with a big one. And that’s how we said good-bye. ” “And what brings you here? Why this village? Why my house?” “I’m looting, that’s why. I sponged off society while it was alive, so now that it’s dead, I’m going to pick its bones. It’s a change. I like it. Because everything’s dead. Except for the army, and you, and a few of my friends, there’s no one around for miles. So I’m looting, man. But don’t worry, I’m not hungry. I’ve already stuffed myself. And anyway, I don’t need much. Besides, everything’s mine now. And tomorrow I’m going to stand here and let them have it all. I’m like a king, man, and I’m going to give away my kingdom. Today’s Easter, right? Well, this is the last time your Christ’s going to rise. And it won’t do you any good this time, either, just like all the rest. ” “I’m afraid I don’t follow “There’s a million Christs on those boats out there. And first thing in the morning they’re all going to rise. The million of them. So your Christ, all by himself … Well, he’s had it, see?” “Do you believe in God?” “Of course not!” “And those million Christs? Is that your own idea?” “No, but I thought it was kind of cool. For padre talk, I mean. I got it from this priest. One of those worker types from the wrong side of town. I ran into him an hour ago. I was on my way up here, and he was running like crazy down the hill. Not in rags or anything, but kind of weird. He kept stopping and lifting his arms in the air, like the ones down there, and he’d yell out: ‘Thank you, God! Thank you!’ And then he’d take off again, down to the beach. They say there’s more on the way. ” “More what?” “More priests, just like him … Say listen, man, I’m getting tired of you. I didn’t come here to talk. Besides, you’re just a ghost. How come you’re still around?” “I want to hear what you have to say. ” “You mean my bullshit interests you?” “Immensely. “Then I’ll tell you something: you’re through. Dried up. You keep thinking and talking, but there’s no more time for that. It’s over. So beat it!” “Oh? I daresay …” “Listen. You and this house, you’re both the same. You look like you’ve both been around here for a thousand years. ” “Since 1673, to be exact,” the old gentleman answered, smiling for the first time. “Three centuries, father to son. And always so sure of yourselves, so damn sure of everything. Man, that’s sick!” “Quite true. But I find your concern a trifle surprising. Perhaps you’re still one of us after all. Perhaps just a little?” “Shut up before you make me puke! Maybe you’ve got a pretty house. So what? And maybe you’re not a bad old guy. Smart, and refined, and everything just right. But smug, man, so sure of your place. So sure that you fit right in. With everything around you. Like this village of yours, with its twenty generations of ancestors just like you. Twenty generations without a conscience, without a heart. What a family tree! And now here you are, the last, perfect branch. Because you are, you’re perfect. And that’s why I hate you. That’s why I’m going to bring them here, tomorrow. The grubbiest ones in the bunch. Here, to your house. You’re nothing to them, you and all you stand for. Your world doesn’t mean a thing. They won’t even try to understand it. They’ll be tired, man. Tired and cold. And they’ll build a fire with your big wooden door. And they’ll crap all over your terrace, and wipe their hands on your shelves full of books. And they’ll spit out your wine, and eat with their fingers from all that nice pewter hanging inside on your wall. Then they’ll squat on their heels and watch your easy cha4rs go up in smoke. And they’ll use your fancy bedsheets to pretty themselves up in. All your things will lose their meaning. Your meaning, man. What’s beautiful won’t be, what’s useful they’ll laugh at, what’s useless they won’t even bother with. Nothing’s going to be worth a thing. Except maybe a piece of string on the floor. And they’ll fight over it, and tear the whole damn place apart. … Yes, it’s going to be tremendous! So go on, beat it. Fuck off!” “One moment, if I may. You told me there was no more time for thinking and talking, yet you seem to be doing a good deal of both. ” “I’m not thinking, man. I’m just telling you where I stand on things I thought of long ago. I’m through thinking. So fuck off, you hear me?” “One last question. When they go smashing everything to bits, they won’t know any better. But why you?” “Why? Because I’ve learned to hate all this. Because the conscience of the world makes me hate all this, that’s why. Now fuck off! You’re beginning to get on my ass!” “If you insist. There’s really no point in staying. You’re not making very much sense. I’m sure you have an excellent brain, but I do think it’s been a trifle muddled. Someone has done a fine job. Well now, I’ll be on my way. Just let me get my hat. ” The old gentleman stepped inside. He came out a moment later with a shotgun. “What’s that for?” the young man asked. “Why, I’m going to kill you, of course! My world won’t live past morning, more than likely, and I fully intend to enjoy its final moments. And enjoy them I shall, more than you can possibly imagine! I’m going to live myself a second life. Tonight, right here. And I think it should be even better than the first. Of course, since all of my kind have left, I intend to live it alone. ” “And me?” “You? Why, you’re not my kind. We couldn’t be more unlike. Surely I don’t want to ruin this one last night, this quintessential night, with someone like you. Oh no, I’m going to kill you. ” “You can’t. You won’t know how. I bet you’ve never killed anyone. ” “Precisely. I’ve always led a rather quiet life. A professor of literature who loved his work, that’s all. No war ever called me to serve, and, frankly, the spectacle of pointless butchery makes me ill. I wouldn’t have made a very good soldier, I’m afraid. Still, had I been with Actius, once upon a time, I think I would have reveled in killing my share of Hun. And with the likes of Charles Martel, and Godfrey of Bouillon, and Baldwin the Leper, I’m sure I would have shown a certain zeal in poking my blade through Arab flesh. I might have fallen before Byzantium, fighting by Constantine Dragasès’s side. But God, what a horde of Turks I would have cut down before I gasped my last! Besides, when a man is convinced of his cause, he doesn’t die quite so easily! See, there I am, springing back to life in the ranks of the Teutons, hacking the Slav to shreds. And there, leaving Rhodes with Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and his peerless little band, my white cloak blazoned with the cross, my sword dripping blood. Then sailing with Don Juan of Austria, off to even the score at Lepanto. Ah, what a splendid slaughter! … But soon there’s nothing left for me to do. A few trifling skirmishes now and again, none of them too well thought of these days. Like the War Between the States, when my side is defeated and I join the Ku Klux Klan to murder myself some blacks. A nasty business, I admit. Not quite so bad with Kitchener, though, skewering the Mahdi’s Moslem fanatics, spilling their guts. … But the rest is all current events, a sad little joke. Most of it has already slipped my mind. Perhaps I’ve done my bit, killing a pinch of Oriental at the Berlin gates. A dash of Vietcong here, of Mau Mau there. A touch of Algerian rebel to boot. At worst, some leftist or other, finished off in a police van, or some vicious Black Panther. Yes, it’s all become so terribly ugly. No fanfares anymore, no flags, no hosannas … Oh well, you’ll have to excuse an old professor’s pedantic prattle. But you see, I too have stopped thinking and just want to tell you where I stand. You’re right, I’ve never killed a soul. Much less any of the types I’ve just conjured up, all of them standing here before me, at last, in your flesh, all rolled into one. But now I’m going to live those battles over, all at once, those battles that I feel so much a part of, deep in my soul, and I’m going to act them out, right here, all by myself, with one single shot. Like this!” The young man collapsed in a graceful glide along the railing where he had been leaning, and wound up in a squat, arms hanging by his sides, in a position that seemed quite natural for him. The red spot over his left breast spread out a little, but the blood stopped quickly. It was a nice, tidy death. As his eyes closed beneath the professor’s gentle thumb and finger, they didn’t even look surprised. No flags, no fanfares. Just a victory Western style, as complete as it was absurd and useless. And, utterly at peace with himself—more exquisitely at peace than he remembered ever being—old Monsieur Calgues turned his back on the corpse and went inside. Three. Now, all at once, with his mind at ease, the professor’s stomach began to feel great pangs of hunger. And suddenly he remembered other ravenous flashes, especially those colossal appetites that man falls prey to after nights of well-requited love. Those distant passions were nothing but vague sensations now, recalled without regret. But the meals that had followed in their wake— improvised meals for two, consumed on this very spot—still stood out in his memory, sharp and clear. Great, flat slices of country bread, dark-smoked ham from up the mountain, dried goat cheese from the village, olives from the terraced groves, apricots from the garden, steeped in sunlight, and that wine from the rocky slopes, just a little too tart. It was all still there in the house, all right within reach: the bread, in the cupboard with the cross carved into its lid; the olives, in a stoneware pot; the ham, hanging from the beams in the kitchen; the wine and cheese, outside, under the stairs, like rows of books lined up on dimly lit shelves. … In no time at all it was set out, spread over the massive table. For a moment the cork in the bottle held fast. When it finally let go, with a sharp little pop, the familiar sound filled the room with a kind of sensual joy. And it occurred to the old professor that once again, tonight, he was celebrating an act of love. He poured himself some wine, one hearty glass for his thirst, then one for his pleasure, smacking his lips with a touch of ostentation at the obvious excess. He cut up the ham into fine, thin slices, arranged them neatly on a pewter plate, put out a few olives, laid the cheese on a bed of grape leaves and the fruit on a large, flat basket. Then he sat down before his supper and smiled a contented smile. He was in love. And like any successful suitor, he found himself face to face now with the one he loved, alone. Yet tonight that one was no woman, no living creature at all, but a myriad kindred images formed into a kind of projection of his own inner being. Like that silver fork, for example, with the well-worn prongs, and some maternal ancestor’s initials, now rubbed almost smooth. A curious object, really, when you think that the Western World invented it for propriety’s sake, though a third of the human race still grubs up its food with its fingers. And the crystal, always set out in a row of four, so utterly useless. Well, why not? Why do without glasses, like boors Why stop setting them out, simply because the Brazilian backwood was dying of thirst, or because India was gulping down typhus with every swallow of muck from its dried-up wells? Let the cuckold come pound at the door with their threats of revenge. There’s no sharing in love. The rest of the world can go hang. They don’t even exist. So what if those thousands were all on the march, cuckolded out of the pleasures of life? All the better! … And so, the professor set out the four glasses, lined them up in a row. Then he moved the lamp a little to give more light, and they sparkled like stars. Further over, a rustic chest, huge and immovable. Three centuries, father to son, as the young man said, and so sure of it all. And in that chest such an endless store of tablecloths and napkins, of pillow slips and sheets, of dustcloths and fine linen, product of another age, linen that would last forever, in great thick piles, so tightly packed on the outside alone that he never had to use the other household treasures hidden behind them, all lavender-scented, that his mother, or hers, had stacked away so very long ago, never parting with a stitch for their poor until it was worn out and decently patched, but with lots of good use in it yet, convinced— dear, prudent souls that they were—that unbridled charity is, after all, a sin against oneself. Then, after a while, there were too many poor. Altogether too many. Folk you didn’t even know. Not even from here. Just nameless people. Swarming all over. And so terribly clever! Spreading through cities, and houses, and homes. Worming their way by the thousands, in thousands of foolproof ways. Through the slits in your mailboxes, begging for help, with their frightful pictures bursting from envelopes day after day, claiming their due in the name of some organization or other. Slithering in. Through newspapers, radio, churches, through this faction or that, until they were all around you, wherever you looked. Whole countries full, bristling with poignant appeals, pleas that seemed more like threats, and not begging now for linen, but for checks to their account. And in time it got worse. Soon you saw them on television, hordes of them, churning up, dying by the thousands, and nameless butchery became a feature, a continuous show, with its masters of ceremonies and its full-time hucksters. The poor had overrun the earth. Self-reproach was the order of the day; happiness, a sign of decadence. Any pleasure? Beneath discussion. Even in Monsieur Calgues’s own village, if you did try to give some good linen away, they would just think you were being condescending. No, charity couldn’t allay your guilt. It could only make you feel meaner and more ashamed. And so, on that day he remembered so well, the professor had shut up his cupboards and chests, his cellar and larder, closed them once and for all to the outside world. The very same day that the last pope had sold out the Vatican. Treasures, library, paintings, frescoes, tiara, furniture, statues—yes, the pontiff had sold it all, as Christendom cheered, and the most high-strung among them, caught up in the contagion, had wondered if they shouldn’t go do likewise, and turn into paupers as well. Useless heroics in the eternal scheme of things. He had thrown it all into a bottomless pit: it didn’t take care of so much as the rural budget of Pakistan for a single year! Morally, he had only proved how rich he really was, like some maharaja dispossessed by official decree. The Third World was quick to throw it up to him, and in no time at all he had fallen from grace. From that moment on, His Holiness had rattled around in a shabby, deserted palace, stripped to the walls by his own design. And he died, at length, in his empty chambers, in a plain iron bed, between a kitchen table and three wicker chairs, like any simple priest from the outskirts of town. Too bad, no crucifixion on demand before an assembled throng. The new pope had been elected at about the time Monsieur Calgues retired. One man, wistfully taking his place on the Vatican’s throne of straw. The other one, back in his village to stay, with only one thought: to enjoy to the fullest his earthly possessions, here in the setting that suited him best … So thank God for the tender ham, and the fragrant bread, and the lightly chilled wine! And let’s drink to the bygone world, and to those who can still feel at home in it all! While the old man sat there, eating and drinking, savoring swallow after swallow, he set his eyes wandering over the spacious room. A time-consuming task, since his glance stopped to linger on everything it touched, and since every confrontation was a new act of love. Now and then his eyes would fill with tears, but they were tears of joy. Each object in this house proclaimed the dignity of those who had lived here—their discretion, their propriety, their reserve, their taste for those solid traditions that one generation can pass on to the next, so long as it still takes pride in itself. And the old man’s soul was in everything, too. In the fine old bindings, the rustic benches, the Virgin carved in wood, the big cane chairs, the hexagonal tiles, the beams in the ceiling, the ivory crucifix with its sprig of dried boxwood, and a hundred other things as well … It’s man’s things that really define him, far more than the play of ideas; which is why the Western World had come to lose its self-respect, and why it was clogging the highways at that very moment, fleeing north in droves, no doubt vaguely aware that it was already doomed, done in by its over-secretion, as it were, of ugly monstrosities no longer worth defending. Could that, perhaps, have been one explanation? … At eleven o’clock that night an announcer on the national chain read a new communiqué: “Government sources note with some dismay the mass exodus of population currently under way throughout the south. While they view this movement with concern, they do not feel justified in advising against it, given the unprecedented nature of the situation. Army and police have been put on maximum alert to help maintain order, and to see to it that the migration does not interfere with the flow of essential military materiel en route from the north. A state of emergency has been declared in the four departments bordering the coast, under the command of the undersecretary, Monsieur Jean Perret, personal representative of the President of the Republic. The army will make every effort to protect all property left behind, insofar as its other duties permit. Government sources confirm that the President of the Republic will address the nation at midnight, tonight, with a message of grave concern …” And again, that was all. In a world long exposed to verbal frenzy, such terseness was most impressive. “Do windbags always die without a word?” the professor mused. Then he picked out a book, poured himself a drink, lit up his pipe, and waited for midnight … Four. It was a curious night for New York, more calm and peaceful than the city had been in well over thirty years. Central Park stood deserted, drained of its thousands of Cams on the prowl. Little girls could have gone there to play, pert towheads, soft and pink in tiny skirts, delighted that, finally, they could romp through its grass. The black and Puerto Rican ghettos were quiet as churches … Doctor Norman Hailer had opened his windows. He was listening to the city, but there wasn’t a sound. It was that time of night when he would always hear the dreadful notes of what he called the “infernal symphony” rising up from the street below: the cries for help; the click-clack of running heels; the frantic screams; the gunshots, one by one, or in bursts; the wail of police cars; the savage, less-than-human howls; the whimpering children; the vicious laughter; the shatter of glass; the horns of distress as some Cadillac, sleek and air-conditioned, would stop for a light and find itself buried in a sea of black silhouettes, brandishing picks; and then the shouts of no! no! no!, those desperate shouts shrieked into the darkness and suddenly stilled, snuffed out by a knife, a razor, a chain, by a club full of spikes, by a pounding fist, or fingers, or phallus … It had been that way for thirty years. Statistics in sound, and each year louder than the one before. That is, until those last few days, when the graph had taken a sudden plunge, down to an unheard-of zero on the night in question. Thirty years for Doctor Norman Haller! Frustrating years, through no fault of his own. As consulting sociologist to the city of New York, he had seen it coming, predicted it to the letter. The proof was there, in his lucid reports, ignored one and all. There was really no solution. Black would be black, and white would be white. There was no changing either, except by a total mix, a blend into tan. They were enemies on sight, and their hatred and scorn only grew as they came to know each other better. Now they both felt the same utter loathing. … And so the consulting sociologist would give his opinion and pocket his money. The city had paid him a handsome price for his monumental study of social upheaval, with its forecast of ultimate doom. “No hope, Doctor Hailer?” “No hope, Mr. Mayor. Unless you kill them all, that is, because you’ll never change them. How about that?” “Good God, man, hardly! Let’s just wait and see what happens, and try to do the best we can … Plush as could be, that suite of Doctor Norman Hailer’s, on the twenty-sixth floor of Central Park’s most elegant apartment building. Protected from the jungle, cut off from the outside world, with its dozen armed guards in the lobby, electronic sensors in every corner, invisible rays, and alarms, and attack dogs. And the garage, like a kind of hermetic chamber. Drawbridge between life and death, between love and hate. Ivory tower, moon base, bunker de luxe. At quite a price. Thousands and thousands of dollars for a few hundred pages, written for the city of New York by the pen of America’s most eminent consulting sociologist. Doctor Norman Haller had built himself a perfect world in the eye of the cyclone, and through that eye he could watch the storm that would sweep it all away. … Whiskey, crushed ice, soft music Go on, darling, go put on that nice expensive little thing you call a dress A telephone call. The mayor of New York. “Don’t tell me, Jack, let me guess. You’re sitting there, all dressed up. You in your tux, Betty in a gown. Almost takes your breath away, she looks so good. Never better … On your third drink, I’d say … Fancy glasses … Just the two of you, nice and cozy … No special reason … Spur of the moment … Right?” “Exactly! But how on earth. “Look. The old familiar jungle shuts up tight. The white man gets scared. What else can he do? One last fling for his white prestige. One final tribute to his useless millions, to his precious position above it all! So here’s to you, Jack! Hear the tinkle? Hear the ice in my glass? My most expensive crystal. Scotch at a hundred bucks a throw! And my wife’s eyes … Never been greener! … So green, I’m going to jump in and drown . “Listen, Norman. It’s all up to the French now, right? Do you really think they can kill off a million poor, defenseless bastards, just like that? I don’t. And frankly, I hope they can’t tell you something else. The ghettos here in the city don’t think so either. Or in L A, or Chicago … They may be caged like wildcats, but believe me, they’re quiet as lambs. Calm as can be. They just sit at their radios and listen to the news. That is, when they’re not in their churches, singing up a storm and praying like crazy for those goddamn ships … Ever been swept off your feet by a herd of stampeding lambs? No, I tell you, Norman, the Third World’s turned into a bunch of lambs, that’s all. ” “And the wolf is tired of being a wolf, is that what you’re saying? Well, do like me, Jack. Have yourself another drink, and run your fingers up and down your wife’s white skin, nice and slow, like something very precious. And wait …” Five. If any logic at all can be found in the way a popular myth gets its start, then we have to go back to Calcutta, to the Consulate General of Belgium, to look for the beginnings of the one we can call, for the moment, “the myth of the newfound paradise. ” A shabby little consulate, set up in an old colonial villa on the edge of the diplomatic quarter, waking one morning to find a silent throng milling around outside its doors. At daybreak the Sikh guard had chained the front gate shut. From time to time he would point the barrel of his antique rifle between the bars, to urge back the ones who had pushed their way up front. But since he was a decent sort, and since there was really no threat to himself or the gate he was guarding, he would tell them now and again, nicely as he could: “Look, maybe in a little while you can have some rice. But then you’ll have to go. It’s no use standing around. See the announcement? It’s signed by the Consul himself. ” “What does it say?” the crowd would yell, since none of them could read. “Tell us … Read it out loud …” As a matter of fact, it was hard to make out much of anything now on the notice posted on the gate, smudged as it was with the prints of the thousand hands that had pawed it over, never quite believing the bad news it proclaimed. But the guard knew the text by heart. He had had to recite it now for a week, day in day out, and he droned it through, word for word, from beginning to end: “Pursuant to the royal decree of such-and-such date, the government of Belgium has decided to terminate until further notice all adoption procedures presently under way. Henceforth no new requests for adoption will be accepted. Similarly, no Belgian entry visas will be granted for those children currently being processed for departure, even in those cases where a legal adoption and dates the present decree. ” A long moan ran through the crowd. Judging by its length and volume, and by the fact that it welled up out of the silence each time it seemed about to die, the Sikh guard—a master at gauging mass distress—guessed that their number had doubled, at least, since the day before. “Come on, now. Move back!” he shouted, shaking his gun. “Let’s all quiet down! You’ll get your rice, then you’ll have to go back where you came from. And you’d better stay there from now on, too. You heard the announcement. ” Up front, a woman stepped out of the crowd and started to speak. All the rest stopped to listen, as if she were speaking for each and every one. She was holding a child in her outstretched arms, a little boy, maybe two years old, thrusting his face so close to the gate that it made him cross his big, gaping eyes. “Look at my son,” she cried. “Isn’t he pretty? Isn’t he solid and strong for his age, with his plump little thighs, and his arms, and his nice straight legs? … See? Look at his mouth. See how white and even his teeth are? … And his face. Not a scab, not a fly. And his eyes, never any pus, wide open all the time … And his hair. You could grab it and pull it, and he wouldn’t lose a one. … Look between his legs, see how clean it all is? Even his little bottom … And his belly, nice and flat, not swollen like some babies his age … I could show you what comes out when he goes, and you wouldn’t see a worm, not even a speck of blood. No, he’s a good, healthy child. Like the papers said he had to be. Because we fed him the best, we fattened him up just for that. From the day he was born. We saw how pretty he was, and we made up our minds we would send him. So he could grow up there, and be rich, and happy … And we fed him more and more, just like the clinic told us. … Then his sisters died. The two of them. They were older than he was, but such sickly little things, and he was so hungry, and prettier every day. He could eat enough for three, God bless him! … And now you’re trying to tell me that we fattened him up for nothing, that his poor father slaved in the rice-fields and worked himself to death, all for nothing, and that I’m going to have him on my hands for good, and keep him, and feed him? … No, it’s my turn to eat! And I’m hungry, you hear? Yes, it’s my turn now, because he’s big and strong. … And besides, he’s not mine now, he’s not even mine. He’s got a new family, halfway around the world, and they’re waiting to take him and give him their name. See? It says so on this medal they sent us. The one around his neck. See? I’m not lying! He’s theirs now. Take him, he’s theirs. I’m through. They promised. I did what they told me, and now … No, now I’m too tired …” A hundred women pushed forward, each one with a child in her outstretched arms. And they cried out things like: “He’s theirs now, he’s theirs!,” or “They promised to take him Pretty babies, mostly, all looking as if they had fed themselves plump on the flesh of their mothers. Poor haggard souls, those mothers, drained dry, as if the umbilical cords were still intact. And the crowd howled, “Take them, take them! They’re theirs now! Take them!,” while hundreds of others pressed forward behind the ones up front, with armfuls of babes by the hundreds, and hundreds of bigger ones too, all ripe for adoption, pushing them up to the brink, to take the giant leap to paradise. The Belgian decree, far from stemming the human flood, had increased it tenfold. When man has nothing left, he looks askance at certainty. Experience has taught that it’s not meant for him. As likelihood fades, myth looms up in its place. The dimmer the chance, the brighter the hope. And so, there they were, thousands of wretched creatures, hoping, crowding against the consulate gates, like the piles of fruit a crafty merchant heaps on his stand, afraid it might spoil: the best ones up front, all shiny and tempting; the next best right behind, still in plain sight, and not too bad if you don’t look too close; then the ones barely visible, the damaged ones, starting to rot, all wormy inside, or turned so you can’t see the mold. … Milling about, way back in the crowd, the women with the monsters, the horrors that no one would take off their hands. And they moaned and groaned louder than all the rest, since their hope knew no bounds. Turned back, pushed aside, driven off day after day, they had come to believe that a paradise so well protected was worth besieging for the rest of their lives, if need be. Before, when the gate was open and the beautiful children had gone streaming through, occasionally one of these mothers would manage to slip her monster in line. Which was something, at least. A step toward salvation. Even though the Sikh would always hold up his rifle and bar the Consul’s door. They had come close, and that was enough to nurture their hope, enough to make it spring to life with extravagant visions of milk and honey flowing untapped into rivers thick with fish, whose waters washed fields fairly bursting with crops, far as the eye could see, growing wild for the taking, where little monster children could ,roll about to their hearts’ content. … The simpler the folk, the stronger the myth. Soon everyone heard their babble, believed their fantasies, and dreamed the same wild dreams of life in the West. The problem is that, in famine-racked Calcutta, “everyone” means quite a few. Could that be one explanation? … Way back, behind the backmost women in the crowd, a giant of a man stood stripped to the waist, holding something over his head and waving it like a flag. Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh. At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet. The monster’s eyes were alive, and they stared straight ahead, high over the crowd, frozen forward in a relentless gaze—except, that is, when his pariah father would wave him bodily back and forth. It was just that lidless gaze that flashed through the bars of the gate and caught the eye of the Consul himself, staring in spellbound horror. He had stepped outside for a look at the crowd, to see what was going on. But it wasn’t the crowd he saw. And all at once he closed his eyes and began to shout: “No rice! No visas! No anything! You won’t get another thing, do you hear? Now get out! Get out! Every one of you! Out!” As he turned to rush off, a sharp little stone hit him square on the forehead and left a gash. The monster’s eyes lit up. The quiver that ran through his frame was his way of thanking his father. And that was all. No other act of violence. Yet suddenly the keeper of the milk and honey, stumbling back to his consulate, head in hands, struck the crowd as a rather weak defender of the sacred portals of the Western World. So weak, in fact, that if only they could wait, sooner or later he was bound to drop the keys. Could that be one explanation? … The Sikh took aim. The hint was enough. They all squatted down on their haunches, hushed and still, like waters ebbing before the flood. Six. “You and your pity!” the Consul shouted. “Your damned, obnoxious, detestable pity! Call it what you please: world brotherhood, charity, conscience … I take one look at you, each and every one of you, and all I see is contempt for yourselves and all you stand for. Do you know what it means? Can’t you see where it’s leading? You’ve got to be crazy. Crazy or desperate. You’ve got to be out of your minds just to sit back and let it all happen, little by little. All because of your pity. Your insipid, insufferable pity!” The Consul was sitting behind his desk, a bandage on his forehead. Across from him, some ten or so figures sat rooted to wooden chairs, like apostles carved in stone on a church façade. Each of the statues had the same white skin, the same gaunt face, the same simple dress—long duck pants or shorts, half-sleeve khaki shirt, open sandals—and most of all the same deep, unsettling gaze that shines in the eyes of prophets, philanthropists, seers, fanatics, criminal geniuses, martyrs—weird and wondrous folk of every stripe—those split-personality creatures who feel out of place in the flesh they were born with. One was a bishop, but unless you already knew, it was quite impossible to tell him apart from the missionary doctor or the starry-eyed layman by his side. Just as impossible to single out the atheist philosopher and the renegade Catholic writer, convert to Buddhism, both spiritual leaders of the little band … They all just sat there without a word. “The trouble is,” the Consul continued, “you’ve gone too far! And on purpose! Because you’re so convinced it’s the right thing to do. Have you any idea how many children from the Ganges here have been shipped off to Belgium? Not to mention the rest of Europe, and those other sane countries that closed their borders off before we did! Forty thousand, that’s how many! Forty thousand in five years! And all of you, so sure you could count on our people. Playing on their sentiments, their sympathy. Perverting their minds with vague feelings of self-reproach, to twist their Christian charity to your own bizarre ends. Weighing our good, solid burghers down with a sense of shame and guilt. … Forty thousand! Why, there weren’t even that many French in Canada back in the seventeen-hundreds. … And in two-faced times like these, you can bet the government won’t admit what’s really behind that racist decree. … Yes, racist, that’s what I called it. You loathe the word, don’t you? You’ve gone and worked up a race problem out of whole cloth, right in the heart of the white world, just to destroy it. That’s what you’re after. You want to destroy our world, our whole way of life. There’s not one of you proud of his skin, and all that it stands for …” “Not proud, or aware of it, either,” one of the statues corrected. “That’s the price we have to pay for the brotherhood of man. We’re happy to pay it. ” “Yes, well, we’ve gone beyond that now,” said the Consul. “Adoption isn’t the issue anymore, discontinued or otherwise. I’ve been on the phone with my colleagues in all the Western consulates. They tell me it’s just the same. Great crowds outside, milling around, quiet, as if they’re waiting for something to happen. And mind you, none of the others have decrees on their gates. Besides, look at the English. Their visas were like hens’ teeth, but that hasn’t kept ten thousand people from squatting in the gardens outside their consulate. It’s the same all over the city. Wherever a Western flag is flying, there’s a crowd out there, waiting. Just waiting. And that’s not all. I’ve just heard that back in the hinterlands whole villages are swarming out onto the roads to Calcutta. ” “Very true,” said another of the statues, his face trimmed with long blond whiskers. “They’re the villages we’ve been working with, mainly. ” “Well, if you know them, what on earth do they want? What are they waiting for?” “Frankly, we’re not quite sure. ” “Do you have an idea?” “Perhaps. ” The bearded statue’s lips broke out in a curious smile. Was it the bishop? The renegade writer? “You mean you had the nerve the Consul began, leaving his question and thought in the air. “No! I don’t believe it! You wouldn’t go that far!” “Quite so,” said a third statue—the bishop this time, in the flesh—“I wouldn’t have gone that far myself. “Are you saying you’ve lost control?” “I’m afraid we have. But it doesn’t matter. Most of us are glad to go along. You’re right. There is something brewing, and it’s going to be tremendous. The crowds can feel it, even if they have no notion what it’s all about. Myself, I have one explanation. Instead of the piecemeal adoptions that these poor folk have hoped for and lived for, perhaps now they’re hoping and living for something much bigger, something wild and impossible, like a kind of adoption en masse. In a country like this that’s all it would take to push a movement beyond the point of no return. ” “Nice work, Your Grace,” the Consul retorted, simply. “A lovely job for a bishop of the Roman Catholic Church! Mercenary, hireling to the pagans, all of a sudden! What is this, the Crusades in reverse? Judas leaping up on Peter the Hermit’s nag, and crying, ‘Down with Jerusalem!’? … Well, you chose a good time. There’s no shortage of poor. There are millions and millions! The year isn’t three months old, and already half of this province alone is starving. And the government won’t do a thing. They’ve had it. Whatever happens now, they’re going to wash their hands. That’s what every consul in the city heard this morning. And what have you all been doing in the meantime? You’ve been ‘bearing witness. ’ Isn’t that what you call it? Bearing witness to what? To your faith? Your religion? To your Christian civilization? Oh no, none of that! Bearing witness against yourselves, like the anti-Western cynics you’ve all become. Do you think the poor devils that flock to your side aren’t any the wiser? Nonsense! They see right through you. For them, white skin means weak convictions. They know how weak yours are, they know you’ve given in. You can thank yourselves for that. The one thing your struggle for their souls has left them is the knowledge that the West—your West—is rich. To them, you’re the symbols of abundance. By your presence alone, they see that it does exist somewhere, and they see that your conscience hurts you for keeping it all to yourselves. You can dress up in rags and pretend to be poor, eat handfuls of curry to your hearts’ content. You can spread your acolytes far and wide, let them live like the peasants and dispense their wise advice. … It’s no use, they’ll always envy you, no matter how you try. You knew I’m right. After all your help—all the seeds, and drugs, and technology— they found it so much simpler just to say, ‘Here’s my son, here’s my daughter. Take them. Take me. Take us all to your country. ’ And the idea caught on. You thought it was fine. You encouraged it, organized it. But now it’s too big, now it’s out of your hands. It’s a flood. A deluge. And it’s out of control … Well, thank God we still have an ocean between us!” “Yes, an ocean. We do have an ocean,” a fourth statue observed, lost in reflection at the obvious thought. “You know,” the Consul went on, “there’s a very old word that describes the kind of men you are. It’s ‘traitor. ’ That’s all, you’re nothing new. There have been all kinds. We’ve had bishop traitors, knight traitors, general traitors, statesman traitors, scholar traitors, and just plain traitors. It’s a species the West abounds in, and it seems to get richer and richer the smaller it grows. Funny, you would think it should be the other way around. But the mind decays, the spirit warps. And the traitors keep coming. Since that day in 1522, the twelfth of October, when that noble knight Andrea d’Amaral, your patron saint, threw open the gates of Rhodes to the Turks … Well, that’s how it is, and no one can change it. I can’t, I’m sure. But I can tell you this: I may be wrong about your results, but I find your actions beneath contempt. Gentlemen, your passports will not be renewed. That’s the one official way I can still show you how I feel. And my Western colleagues are doing the same with any of their nationals involved. ” One of the statues stood up. The one who had mused about the ocean. He was, in fact, the atheist philosopher, known in the West by the name of Ballan. “Passports, countries, religions, ideals, races, borders, oceans …” Ballan shouted. “What bloody rubbish!” And he left the room without another word. “At any rate,” the Consul said, “I suppose I should thank you for hearing me out. I imagine I’ve seen the last of you all. That’s probably why you’ve been so patient. I’m nothing now as far as you’re concerned. Just a relic, a dying breed …” “Not quite,” replied the bishop. “We’ll both be relics tog

Welcome to the Dalek Channel. Thank you for watching. Here are a few thoughts on a Work of Karl Popper. Technically, the title of this work is “Open Society and its enemies”. It has been said an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound. A philosopher is often someone who states in a thousand pages what a normal person can write in one. At its core, Science is about prediction, and also acceptance. The Universe and the active components within it are what they are. Popper begins by stating that the historicist approach, that great people, classes, states, technologies or leaders or forces cannot be used to make predictions or yield results. To understand these historicist ideas, Popper then presents the ideas of Plato, Socrates, Pericles and Hegel and Marx. He writes that: “It is widely believed that a truly scientific or philosophical attitude towards politics, and a deeper understanding of social life in general, must be based upon a contemplation and interpretation of human history.” “An historical sketch undertaken with this aim can, at the same time, serve to analyze the variety of ideas which have gradually accumulated around the central historicist doctrine—the doctrine that history is controlled by specific historical or evolutionary laws whose discovery would enable us to prophesy the destiny of man.” And also, another lengthy quote, that: “In the case of racialism, this is thought of as a kind of natural law; the biological superiority of the blood of the chosen race explains the course of history, past, present, and future; it is nothing but the struggle of races for mastery. In the case of Marx’s philosophy of history, the law is economic; all history has to be interpreted as a struggle of classes for economic supremacy. The historicist character of these two movements makes our investigation topical. We shall return to them in later parts of this book. Each of them goes back directly to the philosophy of Hegel. We must, therefore, deal with that philosophy as well. And since Hegel in the main follows certain ancient philosophers, it will be necessary to discuss the theories of Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle, before returning to the more modern forms of historicism.” “I shall contrast historicism, as we find it in Plato, with a diametrically opposite approach, also to be found in Plato, which may be called the attitude of social engineering.” “The social engineer does not ask any questions about historical tendencies or the destiny of man. He believes that man is the master of his own destiny and that, in accordance with our aims, we can influence or change the history of man just as we have changed the face of the earth. He does not believe that these ends are imposed upon us by our historical background or by the trends of history, but rather that they are chosen, or even created, by ourselves, just as we create new thoughts or new works of art or new houses or new machinery. As opposed to the historicist who believes that intelligent political action is possible only if the future course of history is first determined, the social engineer believes that a scientific basis of politics would be a very different thing; it would consist of the factual information necessary for the construction or alteration of social institutions, in accordance with our wishes and aims. Such a science would have to tell us what steps we must take if we wish, for instance, to avoid depressions, or else to produce depressions; or if we wish to make the distribution of wealth more even, or less even. In other words, the social engineer conceives as the scientific basis of politics something like a social technology (Plato, as we shall see, compares it with the scientific background of medicine), as opposed to the historicist who understands it as a science of immutable historical tendencies.” Or in effect the social engineer can alter themselves and society to be whatever it wants; to requote: “HE DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT THESE ENDS ARE IMPOSED UPON US BY OUR HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OR BY THE TRENDS OF HISTORY, BUT RATHER THAT THEY ARE CHOSEN, OR EVEN CREATED, BY OURSELVES, JUST AS WE CREATE NEW THOUGHTS OR NEW WORKS OF ART OR NEW HOUSES OR NEW MACHINERY”. There are no gingerbread men, we choose our fate like gods. “The social engineer and technologist, on the other hand, will hardly take much interest in the origin of institutions, or in the original intentions of their founders (although there is no reason why he should not recognize the fact that ‘only a minority of social institutions are consciously designed, while the vast majority have just “grown”, as the un- designed results of human actions’). Rather, he will put his problem like this. If such and such are our aims, is this institution well designed and organized to serve them?” “Speaking more generally, we can say that the engineer or the technologist approaches institutions rationally as means that serve certain ends, and that as a technologist he judges them wholly according to their appropriateness, efficiency, simplicity, etc.” In other words, all institutions can be broken down, most only fell together by accident and were not planned, and therefore have no scientific justification. The assumption here is that planning can occur, and that a democratic system will selflessly vote and decide upon what is practical. This is naturally anti-conservative. Popper admits that: “My attitude towards historicism is one of frank hostility, based upon the conviction that historicism is futile, and worse than that.” Of course this is all futile, since he does not believe that these ends are imposed upon us by our historical background or by the trends of history, but rather that they are chosen, or even created, by ourselves, and then apparently he contradicts himself in: “But on this idealist foundation Plato constructs an astonishingly realistic theory of society, capable of explaining the main trends in the historical development of the Greek city-states as well as the social and political forces at work in his own day.” So an astonishingly realistic theory of society, capable of explaining the main trends in the historical development of these entities has been developed. From my own feeble understanding, he appears to be admitting thee existence of trends, and also denouncing that these trends are useful or important. Somewhat useless excursions and dead ends litter the book. For example: “In full accordance with this general theory is Plato’s story, in the Timaeus, of the origin of species. According to this story, man, the highest of animals, is generated by the gods; the other species originate from him by a process of corruption and degeneration. First, certain men—the cowards and villains—degenerate into women. Those who are lacking wisdom degenerate step by step into the lower animals. Birds, we hear, came into being through the transformation of harmless but too easy-going people who would trust their senses too much; ‘land animals came from men who had no interest in philosophy’; and fishes, including shell-fish, ‘degenerated from the most foolish, stupid, and … unworthy’ of all men.” Herein we can score some easy points. “We see that Plato aimed at setting out a system of historical periods, governed by a law of evolution; in other words, he aimed at a historicist theory of society. This attempt was revived by Rousseau, and was made fashionable by Comte and Mill, and by Hegel and Marx.” Some more harsh words of the Platoists: “Democrats are described as profligate and niggardly, as insolent, lawless, and shameless, as fierce and as terrible beasts of prey, as gratifying every whim, as living solely for pleasure, and for unnecessary and unclean desires. (‘They fill their bellies like the beasts’, was Heraclitus’ way of putting it.) They are accused of calling ‘reverence a folly …; temperance they call cowardice …; moderation and orderly expenditure they call meanness and boorishness’, etc.” “Before proceeding to this description, I wish to express my belief that personal superiority, whether racial or intellectual or moral or educational, can never establish a claim to political prerogatives, even if such superiority could be ascertained. Most people in civilized countries nowadays admit racial superiority to be a myth; but even if it were an established fact, it should not create special political rights, though it might create special moral responsibilities for the superior persons. Analogous demands should be made of those who are intellectually and morally and educationally superior; and I cannot help feeling that the opposite claims of certain intellectualists and moralists only show how little successful their education has been, since it failed to make them aware of their own limitations, and of their Pharisaism.” No personal superiority can establish a claim of political perogatives. On Plato, and Platos’s theory of the fall of man, can civilizations: “For racial degeneration explains the origin of disunion in the ruling class, and with it, the origin of all historical development. The internal disunion of human nature, the schism of the soul, leads to the schism of the ruling class. And as with Heraclitus, war, class war, is the father and promoter of all change, and of the history of man, which is nothing but the history of the breakdown of society. We see that Plato’s idealist historicism ultimately rests not upon a spiritual, but upon a biological basis; it rests upon a kind of meta-biology of the race of nature and convention of men. Plato was not only a naturalist who proffered a biological theory of the state, he was also the first to proffer a biological and racial theory of social dynamics, of political history.” “Plato succeeded in giving an astonishingly true, though of course somewhat idealized, reconstruction of an early Greek tribal and collectivist society similar to that of Sparta. He applied these historicist principles to the story of the Decline and Fall of the Greek city-states, and especially to a criticism of democracy, which he described as effeminate and degenerate.” For popper of course, there are no historical forces. The social engineer after all DOES NOT BELIEVE THAT THESE ENDS ARE IMPOSED UPON US BY OUR HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OR BY THE TRENDS OF HISTORY, BUT RATHER THAT THEY ARE CHOSEN, OR EVEN CREATED, BY OURSELVES”. Plato, unlike the social engineer, “conceived these declining societies as some kind of organism, and the decline as a process similar to ageing. And he believed that the decline is well deserved, in the sense that moral decay, a fall and decline of the soul, goes hand in hand with that of the social body.” Essentially, claims Popper, the entire responsibility and power for the formulation of society is ours, and ours alone. We are free to create it in any form, since the historicists, ethicist, and religious and all other ideas are mere choices. “All these ethical theories attempt to find somebody, or perhaps some argument, to take the burden from us. But we cannot shirk this responsibility. Whatever authority we may accept, it is we who accept it. We only deceive ourselves if we do not realize this simple point.” Popper summarizes his goal for the state as: “We should rather put our question in this way: What do we demand from a state? What do we propose to consider as the legitimate aim of state activity? And in order to find out what our fundamental political demands are, we may ask: Why do we prefer living in a well-ordered state to living without a state, i.e. in anarchy? This way of asking our question is a rational one. It is a question which a technologist must try to answer before he can proceed to the construction or reconstruction of any political institution. For only if he knows what he wants can he decide whether a certain institution is or is not well adapted to its function. Now if we ask our question in this way, the reply of the humanitarian will be: What I demand from the state is protection; not only for myself, but for others too. I demand protection for my own freedom and for other people’s. I do not wish to live at the mercy of anybody who has the larger fists or the bigger guns. In other words, I wish to be protected against aggression from other men. I want the difference between aggression and defence to be recognized, and defence to be supported by the organized power of the state. (The defence is one of a status quo, and the principle proposed amounts to this—that the status quo should not be changed by violent means, but only according to law, by compromise or arbitration, except where there is no legal procedure for its revision.) I am perfectly ready to see my own freedom of action somewhat curtailed by the state, provided I can obtain protection of that freedom which remains, since I know that some limitations of my freedom are necessary; for instance, I must give up my ‘freedom’ to attack, if I want the state to support defence against any attack. But I demand that the fundamental purpose of the state should not be lost sight of; I mean, the protection of that freedom which does not harm other citizens.” The big comfy pillow of the state will defend the individual, restricting freedoms equally. Popper talks of his piecemeal social engineering: “The piecemeal engineer will, accordingly, adopt the method of searching for, and fighting against, the greatest and most urgent evils of society, rather than searching for, and fighting for, its greatest ultimate good.” “Blueprints for piecemeal engineering are comparatively simple. They are blueprints for single institutions, for health and unemployed insurance, for instance, or arbitration courts, or anti-depression budgeting, or educational reform. If they go wrong, the damage is not very great, and a re-adjustment not very difficult. They are less risky, and for this very reason less controversial.” “It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy.” “But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” “They assume that political power is, essentially, sovereign. If this assumption is made, then, indeed, the question ‘Who is to be the sovereign?’ is the only important question left.” Or, how shall arbitrary power be restrained? “But we must never forget that excellent leaders cannot be produced by rational methods, but only by luck. “ “What I criticize under the name Utopian engineering recommends the reconstruction of society as a whole, i.e. very sweeping changes whose practical consequences are hard to calculate, owing to our limited experiences. It claims to plan rationally for the whole of society, although we do not possess anything like the factual knowledge which would be necessary to make good such an ambitiousclaim. We cannot possess such knowledge since we have insufficient practical experience in this kind of planning, and knowledge of facts must be based upon experience. At present, the sociological knowledge necessary for large-scale engineering is simply non-existent.” Interestingly, in a time of absolute monarchs, the USA was created, almost as a utopian dream as a republic. And since then almost all autocracies have withered. Again we must ask, would a piecemeal social engineer still be at work redefining indentured servitude instead of abolishing slavery? “Utopian”, which is the opposite of his piecemeal, seems like a poorly defined word. “The institution which according to Plato has to look after the future leaders can be described as the educational department of the state. It is, from a purely political point of view, by far the most important institution within Plato’s society. It holds the keys to power. For this reason alone it should be clear that at least the higher grades of education are to be directly controlled by the rulers.” Interesting parallels can be drawn with existing higher education. “Men believed God to rule the world. This belief limited their responsibility. The new belief that they had to rule it themselves created for many a well-nigh intolerable burden of responsibility. All this has to be admitted. But I do not doubt that the Middle Ages were, even from the point of view of Christianity, not better ruled than our Western democracies.” When you use the word “But” you are contradicting yourself. This authoritarianism limited responsibility and the net result was not an improvement in government, and its removal lead to neuroticism. Wonderful. No lack of mud is being thrown around at Hegel and the others. “Hegel, installed from above, by the powers that be, as the certified Great Philosopher, was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan, who reached the pinnacle of audacity in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense. This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and readily accepted as such by all fools, who thus joined into as perfect a chorus of admiration as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption of a whole generation.” “It is even considered by many to be the basic postulate of political ethics, especially since Wilson’s well-meant but less well-considered principle of national self-determination. The explanation is that Wilson, who was a sincere democrat… He fell a victim to his upbringing in the metaphysical political theories of Plato and of Hegel, and to the nationalist movement based upon them.” As for the Saint Wilson, the idea that crippling the states of Europe by producing ineffectual nations on their doorstep set against each other from naiveté is absurd. Furthermore, Popper argues:” The principle of the national state is not only inapplicable but it has never been clearly conceived. It is a myth. It is an irrational, a romantic and Utopian dream, a dream of naturalism and of tribal collectivism.” “Yet this method of penetrating dividing and confusing the humanitarian camp and of building up a largely unwitting and therefore doubly effective intellectual fifth column achieved its greatest success only after Hegelianism had established itself as the basis of a truly humanitarian movement: of Marxism, so far the purest, the most developed and the most dangerous form of historicism.” Reductionism is on full display as: “Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of substance. This last remark of Mill’s exhibits one of the most praiseworthy aspects of psychologism, namely, its sane opposition to collectivism and holism, its refusal to be impressed by Rousseau’s or Hegel’s romanticism—by a general will or a national spirit, or perhaps, by a group mind. Psychologism is, I believe, correct only in so far as it insists upon what may be called ‘methodological individualism’ as opposed to ‘methodological collectivism’; it rightly insists that the ‘behaviour’ and the ‘actions’ of collectives, such as states or social groups, must be reduced to the behaviour and to the actions of human individuals.“ “But the secret of intellectual excellence is the spirit of criticism; it is intellectual independence. And this leads to difficulties which must prove insurmountable for any kind of authoritarianism. The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. For he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. Never can an authority admit that the intellectually courageous, i.e. those who dare to defy his authority, may be the most valuable type.” “I mean not only the perhaps more humorous than scandalous fact that such clowns are taken seriously, and that they are made the objects of a kind of worship, of solemn although often boring studies (and of examination papers to match).” “I have tried to show the identity of Hegelian historicism with the philosophy of modern totalitarianism. This identity is seldom clearly enough realized. Hegelian historicism has become the language of wide circles of intellectuals, even of candid ‘anti-fascists’ and ‘leftists’. “ “And people who sincerely believe that they know how to make heaven on earth are most likely to adopt the conspiracy theory, and to get involved in a counter-conspiracy against non-existing conspirators. For the only explanation of their failure to produce their heaven is the evil intention of the Devil, who has a vested interest in hell.” “Conspiracies occur, it must be admitted. But the striking fact which, in spite of their occurrence, disproves the conspiracy theory is that few of these conspiracies are ultimately successful. Conspirators rarely consummate their conspiracy.” Again, few examples are given, why bother? Popper can simply state things because he’s so clever. He goes on to write: “We see here clearly that not all consequences of our actions are intended consequences; and accordingly, that the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.” In other words, because there are consequences and these can’t be understood, no conspiracies are successful. What about opportunism? Was the housing market credit default swap event of the years two thousand and eight to nine unexpected? The elder Moltke put it that” No plan survives contact with the enemy”. War still occurs though. It all seems a little niave: “Once we have achieved formal freedom, we can control vote-buying in every form. There are laws to limit the expenditure on electioneering, and it rests entirely with us to see that much more stringent laws of this kind are introduced. The legal system can be made a powerful instrument for its own protection. In addition, we can influence public opinion, and insist upon a much more rigid moral code in political matters. All this we can do;” “It is even conceivable that there is no solution; that the acquisition of new economic powers by a state—whose powers, as compared to those of its citizens, are always dangerously great—will make it irresistible. So far, we have shown neither that freedom can be preserved, nor how it can be preserved.” “In an open society, many members strive to rise socially, and to take the places of other members. This may lead, for example, to such an important social phenomenon as class struggle. We cannot find anything like class struggle in an organism. The cells or tissues of an organism, which are sometimes said to correspond to the members of a state, may perhaps compete for food; but there is no inherent tendency on the part of the legs to become the brain, or of other members of the body to become the belly. Since there is nothing in the organism to correspond to one of the most important characteristics of the open society, competition for status among its members, the so-called organic theory of the state is based on a false analogy.” “These, Socrates insisted, are the things that matter. And what he criticized in democracy and democratic statesmen was their inadequate realization of these things. He criticized them rightly for their lack of intellectual honesty, and for their obsession with power-politics. With his emphasis upon the human side of the political problem, he could not take much interest in institutional reform. It was the immediate, the personal aspect of the open society in which he was interested.” It seems, for a statement such as Socrates was interested in the personal aspects of the open society, and in fact: “Socrates was, fundamentally, the champion of the open society,” that the open society has been defined by actions of other people, and not clearly as an individual entity, or through its actions. This does not seem to be entirely honest. Of course, according to Popper, there is no alternative, or “TINA” as politicians like to call it: “But if we wish to remain human, then there is only one way, the way into the open society. We must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure, using what reason we may have to plan as well as we can for both security and freedom.” “What we need is not holism. It is piecemeal social engineering.” “This leads us to the more important second point, to the irrationalism which is inherent in radicalism. In all matters, we can only learn by trial and error, by making mistakes and improvements; we can never rely on inspiration, although inspirations may be most valuable as long as they can be checked by experience. Accordingly, it is not reasonable to assume that a complete aestheticism, perfectionism, utopianism reconstruction of our social world would lead at once to a workable system. Rather we should expect that, owing to lack of experience, many mistakes would be made which could be eliminated only by a long and laborious process of small adjustments; in other words, by that rational method of piecemeal engineering whose application we advocate.” Analysis is a wonderful thing. Throwing away the context of culture, language, geopolitics and religion is not. When we maximize a function, we try to satisfy a constraint. And the nature of the constraint, whether linear programming simplexes, or simulated annealing is used will determine the outcome. Who is going to decide? Why, the catechism for the technocrat. A natural question can be raised: is the abolition of slavery a piecemeal engineering method? Or is it radical restructuring? “I am not in all cases and under all circumstances against a violent revolution. I believe with some medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers who taught the admissibility of tyrannicide that there may indeed, under a tyranny, be no other possibility, and that a violent revolution may be justified. In other words, the use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and it should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which makes reforms without violence possible.” Piecemeal indeed, unless it isn’t. Popper isn’t a mathematician, and he seems to sometimes border on insanity: “Now it is easy to see that this principle of an uncritical rationalism is inconsistent; for since it cannot, in its turn, be supported by argument or by experience, it implies that it should itself be discarded. (It is analogous to the paradox of the liar, i.e. to a sentence which asserts its own falsity.) Uncritical rationalism is therefore logically untenable; and since a purely logical argument can show this, uncritical rationalism can be defeated by its own chosen weapon, argument. This criticism may be generalized. Since all argument must proceed from assumptions, it is plainly impossible to demand that all assumptions should be based on argument. The demand raised by many philosophers that we should start with no assumption whatever and never assume anything about ‘sufficient reason’, and even the weaker demand that we should start with a very small set of assumptions (‘categories’), are both in this form inconsistent. For they themselves rest upon the truly colossal assumption that it is possible to start without, or with only a few assumptions, and still to obtain results that are worth-while.” It is axiomatic that in mathematics one starts with axioms and a schema and creates theorems, and for an account of this, Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher Bach is an example. Yes, it is a truly colossal assumption that we can start with a few assumptions and obtain worthwhile results. Physicists, Chemists and Engineers use this reasoning every day. It’s like a roller-coaster. A roller coaster through Plato and Socrates and Hegel and Marx. But it’s a roller coaster where you push your car through the mud and the rain, the end up with: “Is there a meaning in history? I do not wish to enter here into the problem of the meaning of ‘meaning’; I take it for granted that most people know with sufficient clarity what they mean when they speak of the ‘meaning of history’ or of the ‘meaning or purpose of life’. And in this sense, in the sense in which the question of the meaning of history is asked, I answer: History has no meaning.” To what extent are the states in context of any environment? To what extent are the needs of the state directly incompatible with the individual? To what extent can any tinkering get out of hand? How is the scale of piecemeal defined? A sort of rule of thumb. Ignored is how all of these items interact with each other, and Poppers’ only way out is to suggest s “piecemeal social engineering”, which he spends very little space defining and justifying. In fact the majority of the work is long investigations of a few western thinkers and the slinging of mud. Popper is probably capable of writing something better that this book. The book is hardly meant as an educational text. The effect of the likes of Machiavelli or an independent and corrupt press are ignored. As are the ideas of other cultures. This is, a thoroughly western viewpoint. Much of the time is spent on flights into the words of Greeks, Hegel and Marx. It can be said that we use the ideas of the past, even unconsciously, though no well develop frame-work is presented. “There is no alternative” and we can do it” are not realistic plans, and with the perambulations into ancient philosophy taken away, it is basically on the level of “Rich dad poor dad”. A few ides here and there, not thought out in any great detail. That we often use out dated ideas and in appropriate metaphors and analogies is effectively axiomatic. However, the excursion into long lost worlds is hardly appropriate. We do not exhume Sumerian tablets when we learn home brewing because the world Alcohol derives from the Babylonian, we do not exalt nineteenth century physics textbooks and we do not limit ourselves to the viewpoints of the past. Overall, its score is two and a half out of five. It doesn’t rise above any randomly selected book, and yes, there are alternatives.

This is not an endorsement, and we will leave it at that. Chapter One. September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words. I cannot sleep, so I will try writing down some of the thoughts which are flying through my head. It is not safe to talk here. The walls are quite thin, and the neighbors might wonder at a late-night conference. Besides, George and Katherine are already asleep. Only Henry and I are still awake, and he's just staring at the ceiling. I am really uptight. l am so jittery I can barely sit still. And I'm exhausted. I've been up since 5:30 this morning, when George phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it's after midnight now. I've been keyed up and on the move all day. But at the same time I'm exhilarated. We have finally acted! How long we will be able to continue defying the System, no one knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Gun Raids two years ago. What a blow that was to us! And how it shamed us! All that brave talk by patriots, "The government will never take my guns away," and then nothing but meek submission when it happened. On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that there were still so many of us who had guns then, nearly 18 months after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the government wasn't able to act more harshly against us after the Gun Raids. I'll never forget that terrible day: November 9, 1989. They knocked on my door at five in the morning. I was completely unsuspecting as I got up to see who it was. I opened the door, and four Negroes came pushing into the apartment before I could stop them. One was carrying a baseball bat, and two had long kitchen knives thrust into their belts. The one with the bat shoved me back into a corner and stood guard over me with his bat raised in a threatening position while the other three began ransacking my apartment. My first thought was that they were robbers. Robberies of this sort had become all too common since the Cohen Act, with groups of Blacks forcing their way into White homes to rob and rape, knowing that even if their victims had guns they probably would not dare use them. Then the one who was guarding me flashed some kind of card and informed me that he and his accomplices were "special deputies" for the Northern Virginia Human Relations Council. They were searching for firearms, he said. I couldn't believe it. It just couldn't be happening. Then I saw that they were wearing strips of green cloth tied around their left arms. As they dumped the contents of drawers on the floor and pulled luggage from the closet, they were ignoring things that robbers wouldn't have passed up: my brand-new electric razor, a valuable gold pocket watch, a milk bottle full of dimes. They were looking for firearms! Right after the Cohen Act was passed, all of us in the Organization had cached our guns and ammunition where they weren't likely to be found. Those in my unit had carefully greased our weapons, sealed them in an oil drum, and spent all of one tedious weekend burying the drum in an eight-foot-deep pit 200 miles away in the woods of western Pennsylvania. But I had kept one gun out of the cache. I had hidden my .357 magnum revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition inside the door frame between the kitchen and the living room. By pulling out two loosened nails and removing one board from the door frame I could get to my revolver in about two minutes flat if I ever needed it. I had timed myself. But a police search would never uncover it. And these inexperienced Blacks couldn't find it in a million years. After the three who were conducting the search had looked in all the obvious places, they began slitting open my mattress and the sofa cushions. I protested vigorously at this and briefly considered trying to put up a fight. About that time there was a commotion out in the hallway. Another group of searchers had found a rifle hidden under a bed in the apartment of the young couple down the hall. They had both been handcuffed and were being forcibly escorted toward the stairs. Both were clad only in their underwear, and the young woman was complaining loudly about the fact that her baby was being left alone in the apartment. Another man walked into my apartment. He was a Caucasian, though with an unusually dark complexion. He also wore a green armband, and he carried an attach_ case and a clipboard. The Blacks greeted him deferentially and reported the negative result of their search: "No guns here, Mr. Tepper." Tepper ran his finger down the list of names and apartment numbers on his clipboard until he came to mine. He frowned. "This is a bad one," he said. "He has a racist record. Been cited by the Council twice. And he owned eight firearms which were never turned in." Tepper opened his attach_ case and took out a small, black object about the size of a pack of cigarettes which was attached by a long cord to an electronic instrument in the case. He began moving the black object in long sweeps back and forth over the walls, while the attach_ case emitted a dull, rumbling noise. The rumble rose in pitch as the gadget approached the light switch, but Tepper convinced himself that the change was caused by the metal junction box and conduit buried in the wall. He continued his methodical sweep. As he swept over the left side of the kitchen door frame the rumble jumped to a piercing shriek. Tepper grunted excitedly, and one of the Negroes went out and came back a few seconds later with a sledge hammer and a pry bar. It took the Negro substantially less than two minutes after that to find my gun. I was handcuffed without further ado and led outside. Altogether, four of us were arrested in my apartment building. In addition to the couple down the hall, there was an elderly man from the fourth floor. They hadn't found a firearm in his apartment, but they had found four shotgun shells on his closet shelf. Ammunition was also illegal. Mr Tepper and some of his "deputies" had more searches to carry out, but three large Blacks with baseball bats and knives were left to guard us in front of the apartment building. The four of us were forced to sit on the cold sidewalk, in various states of undress, for more than an hour until a police van finally came for us. As other residents of the apartment building left for work, they eyed us curiously. We were all shivering, and the young woman from down the hall was weeping uncontrollably. One man stopped to ask what it was all about. One of our guards brusquely explained that we were all under arrest for possessing illegal weapons. The man stared at us and shook his head disapprovingly. Then the Black pointed to me and said: "And that one's a racist." Still shaking his head, the man moved on. Herb Jones, who used to belong to the Organization and was one of the most outspoken of the "they'll-never-get-my-gun" people before the Cohen Act, walked by quickly with his eyes averted. His apartment had been searched too, but Herb was clean. He had been practically the first man in town to turn his guns over to the police after the passage of the Cohen Act made him liable to ten years imprisonment in a Federal penitentiary if he kept them. That was the penalty the four of us on the sidewalk were facing. It didn't work out that way, though. The reason it didn't is that the raids which were carried out all over the country that day netted a lot more fish than the System had counted on: more than 800,000 persons were arrested. At first the news media tried hard to work up enough public sentiment against us so that the arrests would stick. The fact that there weren't enough jail cells in the country to hold us all could be remedied by herding us into barbed-wire enclosures outdoors until new prison facilities could be readied, the newspapers suggested. In freezing weather! I still remember the Washington Post headline the next day: "Fascist-Racist Conspiracy Smashed, Illegal Weapons Seized." But not even the brainwashed American public could fully accept the idea that nearly a million of their fellow citizens had been engaged in a secret, armed conspiracy. As more and more details of the raids leaked out, public restlessness grew. One of the details which bothered people was that the raiders had, for the most part, exempted Black neighborhoods from the searches. The explanation given at first for this was that since "racists" were the ones primarily suspected of harboring firearms, there was relatively little need to search Black homes. The peculiar logic of this explanation broke down when it turned out that a number of persons who could hardly be considered either "racists" or "fascists" had been caught up in the raids. Among them were two prominent liberal newspaper columnists who had earlier been in the forefront of the antigun crusade, four Negro Congressmen (they lived in White neighborhoods), and an embarrassingly large number of government officials. The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled primarily from firearms sales records which all gun dealers had been required to keep. If a person had turned a gun in to the police after the Cohen Act was passed, his name was marked off the list. If he hadn't it stayed on, and he was raided on November 9-unless he lived in a Black neighborhood. In addition, certain categories of people were raided whether they had ever purchased a firearm from a dealer or not. All the members of the Organization were raided. The government's list of suspects was so large that a number of "responsible" civilian groups were deputized to assist in the raids. l guess the planners in the System thought that most of the people on their list had either sold their guns privately before the Cohen Act, or had disposed of them in some other way. Probably they were expecting only about a quarter as many people to be arrested as actually were. Anyway, the whole thing soon became so embarrassing and so unwieldy that most of the arrestees were turned loose again within a week. The group I was with-some 600 of us-was held for three days in a high school gymnasium in Alexandria before being released. During those three days we were fed only four times, and we got virtually no sleep. But the police did get mug shots, fingerprints, and personal data from everyone. When we were released we were told that we were still technically under arrest and could expect to be picked up again for prosecution at any time. The media kept yelling for prosecutions for awhile, but the issue was gradually allowed to die. Actually, the System had bungled the affair rather badly. For a few days we were all more frightened and glad to be free than anything else. A lot of people in the Organization dropped out right then and there. They didn't want to take any more chances. Others stayed in but used the Gun Raids as an excuse for inactivity. Now that the patriotic element in the population had been disarmed, they argued, we were all at the mercy of the System and had to be much more careful. They wanted us to cease all public recruiting activities and "go underground." As it turned out, what they really had in mind was for the Organization to restrict itself henceforth to "safe" activities, such activities to consist principally in complaining-better yet, whispering-to one another about how bad things were. The more militant members, on the other hand, were for digging up our weapons caches and unleashing a program of terror against the System immediately, carrying out executions of Federal judges, newspaper editors, legislators, and other System figures. The time was ripe for such action, they felt, because in the wake of the Gun Raids we could win public sympathy for such a campaign against tyranny. It is hard to say now whether the militants were right. Personally, I think they were wrong-although I counted myself as one of them at the time. We could certainly have killed a number of the creatures responsible for America's ills, but I believe we would have lost in the long run. For one thing, the Organization just wasn't well disciplined enough for waging terror against the System. There were too many cowards and blabbermouths among us. Informers, fools, weaklings, and irresponsible jerks would have been our undoing. For a second thing, I am sure now that we were overoptimistic in our judgment of the mood of the public. What we mistook as general resentment against the System's abrogation of civil rights during the Gun Raids was more a passing wave of uneasiness resulting from all the commotion involved in the mass arrests. As soon as the public had been reassured by the media that they were in no danger, that the government was cracking down only on the "racists, fascists, and other anti-social elements" who had kept illegal weapons, most relaxed again and went back to their TV and funny papers. As we began to realize this, we were more discouraged than ever. We had based all our plans-in fact, the whole rationale of the Organization-on the assumption that Americans were inherently opposed to tyranny, and that when the System became oppressive enough they could be led to overthrow it. We had badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could be manipulated by the mass media. As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to accept any outrage. Despite the continuing inflation and the gradually declining standard of living, most Americans are still able to keep their bellies full today, and we must simply face the fact that that's the only thing which counts with most of them. Discouraged and uncertain as we were, though, we began laying new plans for the future. First, we decided to maintain our program of public recruiting. In fact, we intensified it and deliberately made our propaganda as provocative as possible. The purpose was not only to attract new members with a militant disposition, but at the same time to purge the Organization of the fainthearts and hobbyists-the "talkers." We also tightened up on discipline. Anyone who missed a scheduled meeting twice in a row was expelled. Anyone who failed to carry out a work assignment was expelled. Anyone who violated our rule against loose talk about Organizational matters was expelled. We had made up our minds to have an Organization that would be ready the next time the System provided an opportunity to strike. The shame of our failure to act, indeed, our inability to act, in 1989 tormented us and drove us without mercy. It was probably the single most important factor in steeling our wills to whip the Organization into fighting trim, despite all obstacles. Another thing that helped-at least, with me-was the constant threat of rearrest and prosecution. Even if I had wanted to give it all up and join the TV-and-funnies crowd, I couldn't. I could make no plans for a "normal," civilian future, never knowing when I might be prosecuted under the Cohen Act. (The Constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial, of course, has been "reinterpreted" by the courts until it means no more than our Constitutional guarantee of the right to keep and bear arms.) So I, and I know this also applies to George and Katherine and Henry, threw myself without reservation into work for the Organization and made only plans for the future of the Organization. My private life had ceased to matter. Whether the Organization actually is ready, I guess we'll find out soon enough. So far, so good, though. Our plan for avoiding another mass roundup, like 1989, seems to have worked. Early last year we began putting a number of new members, unknown to the political police, into police agencies and various quasi-official organizations, such as the human relations councils. They served as our early-warning network and otherwise kept us generally informed of the System's plans against us. We were surprised at the ease with which we were able to set up and operate this network. We never would have gotten away with it back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover. It is ironic that while the Organization has always warned the public against the dangers of racial integration of our police, this has now turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us. The "equal opportunity" boys have really done a wonderful wrecking job on the FBI and other investigative agencies, and their efficiency is way down as a result. Still, we'd better not get over-confident or careless. Omigod! It's 4:00 AM. Got to get some sleep!

Welcome to the Dalek Channel, where we love you for your mind. Today we are pleased to present a precis of William Gates book, “How to prevent the next pandemic.” ========================= This is not a criticism or an endorsement, merely an attempt at an abbreviation. ========================= Infectious diseases—both the kind that turn into pandemics and the kind that don’t—are something of an obsession for me. Unlike the subjects of my previous books, software and climate change, deadly infectious diseases are not generally something that people want to think about. (COVID-19 is the exception that proves the rule.) I’ve had to learn to temper my enthusiasm for talking about AIDS treatments and a malaria vaccine at parties. My passion for the subject goes back twenty-five years, to January 1997, when Melinda and I read an article inThe New York Timesby Nicholas Kristof.Nick reported that diarrhea was killing 3.1 million people every year, almost all of them children. We were shocked. Three million kids a year! How could that many children be dying from something that was, as far as we knew, little more than an uncomfortable inconvenience? When you start reading up on infectious diseases, it isn’t long before you come to the subject of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. The definitions for these terms are less strict than you may think. A good rule of thumb is that an outbreak is when a disease spikes in a local area, an epidemic is when an outbreak spreads more broadly within a country or region, and a pandemic is when an epidemic goes global, affecting more than one continent. And some diseases don’t come and go, but stay consistently in a specific location—those are known asendemicdiseases. Malaria, for instance, is endemic to many equatorial regions. If COVID-19 never goes away completely, it’ll be classified as an endemic disease. In other words, the problem was not that there was some system in place that didn’t work well enough. The problem was that there was hardly any system at all. In 2015, I published a paper inThe New England Journal of Medicine,pointing out how unprepared the world was and laying out what it would take to get ready. I adapted the warning for a TED talk called “The Next Epidemic? We’re Not Ready,” complete with an animation showing 30 million people dying from a flu as infectious as the 1918 one. I wanted to be alarming to make sure the world got ready—I pointed out that there would be trillions of dollars of economic losses and massive disruption. This TED talk has been viewed 43 million times, but 95 percent of those views have come since the COVID pandemic started. In March 2020, I had my first call with Anthony Fauci, the head of the infectious diseases institute of the National Institutes of Health. I’m lucky to have known Tony for years (long before he wason the cover of pop-culture magazines), and I wanted to hear what he was thinking about all this—especially the potential for various vaccines and treatments that were being developed. Years ago, the eminent epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant coined a memorable phrase: “Outbreaks are inevitable, but pandemics are optional.” I know this sounds odd, but my favorite website is a treasure trove of data that tracks diseases and health problems all over the world. It’s called the Global Burden of Disease,and the level of detail it contains is astonishing. (The 2019 version tracked 286 causes of death and 369 types of diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories.) If you’re interested in how long people live, what makes them sick, and how these things change over time, this site is the best source. I can spend hours at a time looking at the data. What you really look for in a measure of success is a number that captures the overall impact of the disease. People who die of heart attacks because the hospital is too overwhelmed by COVID patients to treat them ought to be counted just as much as people who die of the disease itself. There’s a measure that does exactly that: It’s called excess mortality, and it includes people who die because of the disease’s ripple effect as well as those who die directly from COVID. Another example: The data suggests that cross-border trucking was responsible for a fair amount of spread from one country toanother. So which places managed it well? The White House’s response in 2020 was disastrous. The president and his senior aides downplayed the pandemic and gave the public terrible advice. Incredibly, federal agencies refused to share data with one another. It certainly didn’t help that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is a political appointee subject to political pressure, and some of the CDC’s public guidance was clearly influenced by politics. Another relatively new approach is to go looking for signals in the environment. Many pathogens, including poliovirus and coronaviruses, show up in human feces, so you can detect them in the sewage system. Workers take samples of wastewater from treatment plants or open sewers and bring them to a lab, where they’re checked for these viruses. Creating a PCR test for a new pathogen is a pretty easy task once you’ve sequenced its genome.Because you already know what its genes look like, you can create the special substances, dye, and other necessary products very quickly—which is why researchers were able to establish PCR tests for COVID just twelve days after the first genome sequences were published. The one I’m most enthusiastic about comes from the British company LumiraDx, which is developing machines that test for multiple diseases and are so easy to operate that they don’t have to be limited to laboratories—they can be used in pharmacies, schools, and other settings. In March 2020, the flu study group teamed up with the public health agency in King County, where Seattle is located, to create the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, or SCAN. The pioneering system they had set up for gathering and processing flu samples and informing people of their results would be put to a new use: testing as many people for COVID as they could, mapping the results, and adding to the world’s collection of genetic sequencing for this brand-new pathogen. There are some innovations coming in genomic sequencing equipment that will help a lot. For example, Oxford Nanopore, a spinoff from Oxford University, has developed a portable genesequencer that eliminates the need for a full laboratory. It does require an online computer with a powerful processor, but some researchers from Australia and Sri Lanka are working on solving that problem too: They created an app that allows the information from the sequencer to be processed offline, on a standard-issue smartphone. To get an idea of what modelers do when they’re trying to predict pandemic patterns, think about forecasting the weather. Meteorologists have models that are pretty good at predicting whether it will rain tonight or tomorrow morning. It was computer modeling that showed, early on, that even if only 0.2 percent of the population got infected with COVID, hospitals would be overflowing with patients in no time. One step is to invest in all the elements of a robust health system that make it possible to detect and report diseases, as well as treat them. Another step is to expand on efforts to understand the causes of death in adults and children alike. Third, we need to know the enemy we’re up against. So governments and funders should back innovative ways to test mass numbers of people in a short time—especially high-volume, low-cost tests designed to work in low- and middle-income countries. Finally, we need to invest in the promise of computer modeling. I’m confused about what to do when I meet someone these days. Should we bump fists, shake hands, or just smile and wave? Depending on the nature of our relationship, I might want a combined handshake-and-hug, particularly if we haven’t seen each other for months. In her bookOn Immunity,Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. Part of the problem is that it’s quite difficult to assess the impact of many of these measures—which are broadly called “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” or NPIs—in a controlled environment. “If it looks like you’re overreacting, you’re probably doing the right thing.” That’s a quote from Tony Fauci, and I agree. One study found that if Sweden’s neighbors had followed its lead instead of locking down stringently, Denmark would have had three times as many deaths as it did during the first wave, and Norway nine times as many as it did.Another study estimated that NPIs in six large countries, including the United States, prevented nearly half a billion COVID infections in the first few months of 2020 alone. Also, not all overreactions—or apparent overreactions—are created equal. Closing borders, for example, did slow the spread of COVID in some regions. But border closures are a hammer that needs to be wielded very carefully. By cutting off trade and tourism, they can crater a country’s economy so badly that the cure becomes worse than the disease. This is particularly true if, as is often the case, the border controls come too late. The pandemic also exposed one of the biggest myths about remote education—that it could ever replace classroom work for kids in the early grades. I’m a big fan of online learning, but I have always thought of it as a supplement to, not a substitute for, the work that young students and teachers do together in person. On the other hand, it is clear to me that locking down assisted living homes for older people was the right thing to do. It saved a lot of lives because the virus is so much deadlier for the elderly—and I say this knowing how deeply painful and lonely these lockdowns were for all the residents who were confined to their rooms, and for their loved ones. It was heartbreaking to hear stories about families who had to say goodbye to a dying parent or grandparent through a closed window or over the phone. What this all means is that there is no single ideal mix of NPIs that works equally well everywhere. Context matters, and protective measures need to be tailored for the places where they’ll be used. But there was not a bad flu season that year. In fact, there was hardly any flu season at all. Between the flu seasons of 2019–20 and 2020–21, cases dropped 99 percent. As of late 2021, one particular type of flu known as B/Yamagata had not been detected anywhere in the world since April 2020. Other respiratory viruses also dropped dramatically. Contact tracing works best in countries that excel at testing and processing data—among them, South Korea and Vietnam. But both of those countries did things that wouldn’t fly in the United States. Under a law changed after the 2014 outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, the South Korean government used data from credit cards, mobile phones, and surveillance cameras to trace the movements of infected people and identify other people they had come in contact with. It published this information online, though it had to restrict some of the data after regional governments gave out too many details about people’s movements.According to the journalNature,one man “was wrongly accused of having an affair with his sister-in-law because their overlapping maps revealed they dined together at a restaurant.” But contact tracing will often be an important part of stopping the spread of a disease, which is why we have to figure out how to build trust between public health agencies and the public so that more people will share their contacts. Whenever you talk, laugh, cough, sing, or simply breathe out,you exhale. These globs are grouped into two categories by size: The larger ones are known as droplets, and the smaller ones are called aerosols. The dividing line between them is typically 5 micrometers, which is roughly the size of the average bacterium. Anything bigger than that is a droplet, and anything smaller is an aerosol. Droplets, being on the larger side, typically contain more virus than an aerosol, which makes them a better mechanism for transmission. On the other hand, because they’re relatively heavy, they don’t make it more than a few feet from your mouth or nose before falling to the ground. The surface that a droplet lands on becomes what’s called a fomite, and how long the fomite is able to transmit the virus depends on several factors, including the type of pathogen and whether you sneezed or coughed it out (in which case it’s more protected because it’s covered in your mucus.In fact, even if someone does happen to touch a fomite, the chances that the person will get infected are less than 1 in 10,000. In the meantime, the six-foot rule is a good one to follow, unless it’s very difficult to maintain, such as in a classroom. People need clear, easily remembered guidelines. For many people who were following the research—people in the United States, at least—the argument in favor of masks was settled by an incident involving two hairstylists at a salon in Springfield, Missouri. Both stylists developed symptoms and tested positive for COVID in May 2020. Their records indicated that they had exposed 139 clients. But everyone had masked up during the haircuts, and not a single client developed symptoms. As a public health expert told me over dinner one night, “If everyone would just wear masks,How to Prevent the Next Pandemicwould be a very short book.” In March 2020, I went to an in-person meeting while I was feeling under the weather. Because the CDC hadn’t recommended masks yet, I didn’t wear one. Luckily, I later found out that I’d had the flu and not COVID, but I feel bad that I was there with respiratory symptoms without taking a measure that might have reduced the chance of spread. Early on, rumors and misinformation about COVID seemed to be spreading faster than the disease itself. Some of themare legitimate medical interventions: Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria, lupus, and other diseases, and ivermectin is a standard treatment for various parasitic diseases in people and other animals. Obviously, just because a drug treats one condition doesn’t mean it will work on COVID, but it’s not irrational to hope that it might. Doctors began prescribing hydroxychloroquine off-label—that is, for something other than its approved purpose—almost from Day 1. As far as treating COVID goes, the drug was a dead end. Dexamethasone was a significant success: It was effective, easy to deliver, cheaper than any of the alternatives, and widely available even in many developing countries. Merck and its partners developed a new antiviral called molnupiravir, which could be taken orally and was shown to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death for people at high risk. In fact, the drug worked well enough that the clinical trial was stopped early. Soon the study of a second oral antiviral, Paxlovid (made by Pfizer), was also stopped because the drug worked so well. It’s a mistake to think of vaccines as the star of the show and therapeutics as the opening act you would just as soon skip. A recurring theme of this book is that we don’t have to choose between preventing pandemics and improving global health more broadly—they reinforce each other. In a process known as high-throughput screening, robotic machines can run hundreds of experiments at a time, mixing compounds and proteins and then using various methods to measure the reaction. Regardless of the method involved, once a promising compound is identified, the scientific teams will analyze it to determine whether it’s worth further exploration. Once they’ve found a promising candidate in the exploratory phase, they will spend a year or two in the preclinical phase, studying whether the candidate is safe at effective doses and whether it actually triggers the expected response in animals. If all goes well in the preclinical phase, we’ll move into the riskiest and most expensive part of the process: clinical trials in humans. Now, this is how it works in nonpandemic times. In the emergency that COVID was, it needed to happen much, much faster. One of the few trials that was handled well was the RECOVERY trial in the U.K., which looked at a number of drugs, including dexamethasone:It was ready to go within six weeks and included 40,000 participants at 185 sites. Of course, the generic-drug business has downsides. As they headed for low prices and their profit margins narrowed, a few generic producers haven’t maintained the quality of their products the way they should have. But those are the outliers, and it’s hard to overstate the positive impact of low-cost, high-quality, high-volume generic manufacturers. The fact that scientists were able to create multiple successful COVID vaccines is itself unusual in the history of disease. The fact that they did it in roughly a year is miraculous. It took scientists only one year to create safe and effective vaccines for the virus. The first trial for an HIV vaccine began in 1987, and we still don’t have one that’s licensed. Before COVID, the land speed record for developing a vaccine was four years. Getting a vaccine out of the lab and into recipients takes four steps—developing it, getting it approved, manufacturing it at high volumes, and delivering it. In fact, the dozens of complex experiments that a company has to develop in order to ensure consistency contribute significantly to the ultimate cost of a dose. Unfortunately, several promising COVID vaccines have been seriously delayed because of such matters—this is not an area where it’s okay to cut corners. Today’s COVID vaccines teach your immune system to attack part of the spike protein on the surface of one specific coronavirus. But researchers are now working on vaccines that would target shapes that show up onallcoronaviruses, including COVID and its cousins, and would even be likely to appear on ones that evolve in the future. It is hard to overstate the impact that mRNA vaccines have had on COVID. In many places, they account for virtually all of the COVID vaccinations. As of late 2021, more than 83 percent of vaccinated people in the European Union had received a vaccine made by either Pfizer or Moderna, both of which use mRNA. In the U.S., 96 percent had.Japan usedonlymRNA vaccines. Before COVID, the only licensed viral-vectored vaccines were for Ebola, and those took five years to be approved. Every vaccine that got emergency approval by the WHO was tested for safety in thousands of people around the world. In fact, because COVID vaccines have been given to so many people and their safety records tracked so closely, scientists now have extensive safety data on the various ones on the market—even in groups like pregnant women, who are usually not prioritized in clinical trials for vaccines because of the potential side effects for the babies they’re carrying. Remember that many drugs are made using chemical processes that are well defined and measurable, but many vaccines don’t work that way. Manufacturing them often involves living organisms—anything from bacteria to chicken eggs. This is why we have generic drugs but not generic vaccines. And if they were cheap and long-lasting enough—a few pennies for a dose that lasts thirty days or more—it might make sense to use them to block seasonal respiratory infections. Every schoolchild could get a dose at the beginning of each month. You could even set up sniffing stations where people would stop by every few weeks for another dose. Because we can’t assume we’ll be so lucky next time—and because there are phenomenal opportunities for saving lives beyond the threat of pandemics—the world should be pursuing an ambitious agenda to make vaccines even better. I see six areas that should be priorities for funding and research: Universal vaccines.One and done, Total protection, No more ice chests, So easy, anyone can give it, Expanded manufacturing. For example, the United Kingdom ran an exercise called Winter Willow in 2007 and another, Cygnus, in 2016, both focused on flu outbreaks.Cygnus in particular highlighted problems with the government’s readiness and produced a series of classified recommendations that went unheeded—and which caused a scandal whenThe Guardianrevealed them during the first year of the COVID pandemic. For as long as I’ve been learning about pandemic preparedness and prevention, I’ve been amazed that there isn’t an ongoing series of full-scale exercises designed to test the world’s ability to detect and respond to an outbreak. The United States had a similar experience in 2019, when the government ran Crimson Contagion, a series of exercises designed to answer one question: Was the country ready to respond to an outbreak of a novel flu virus? The scope of Crimson Contagion’s functional exercise was enormous. It involved 19 federal departments and agencies, 12 states, 15 tribal nations and pueblos, 74 local health departments, 87 hospitals, and more than 100 groups from the private sector. The GERM team’s most important role will be to distill the findings from exercises and other measures of preparedness, record the recommendations that come out of them—ways to strengthen supply chains, better methods for coordinating across governments, agreements to improve the distribution of medicines and other supplies—and then try to keep the pressure on world leaders to translate these findings into action. A good model of a simulation is a full-scale exercise developed by Vietnam in August 2018, designed to see how well the system identified a potentially worrisome pathogen. The exercise didn’t go off flawlessly—the organizers noticed a number of gaps in the process—but it would be surprising if it had been flawless. The point is that the gaps were identified and, most important, fixed. But there is another, even more unsettling scenario that disease exercises must account for—a pathogen that’s intentionally deployed with the goal of killing or maiming huge numbers of people. In other words, bioterrorism. A new pathogen could be designed that is highly communicable and lethal but doesn’t cause symptoms right away. On the whole, the world’s response to COVID has been exceptional. In December 2019, no one had heard of the disease. Within eighteen months, multiple vaccines had been developed, proven safe and effective, and delivered to more than 3 billion people, or nearly 40 percent of the earth’s population. Humans have never responded faster or more effectively to a global disease. We accomplished in a year and a half something that normally takes half a decade or more. During the past decade, malaria killed 4 million children in sub-Saharan Africa but fewer than 100 people in the United States. To keep it simple, you can think of it as 20-10-5. In 1960, 20 percent of the world’s children died. In 1990, it was 10 percent. Today it’s less than 5 percent. The drop in family size has led to a remarkable phenomenon: The world recently passed what Hans called “peak child”—that is, the number of children under five hit its maximum and is going down. The benefit?As the United Nations Population Fund explains on its website, “Smaller numbers of children per household generally lead to larger investments per child, more freedom forwomen to enter the formal workforce, and more household savings for old age. When this happens, the national economic payoff can be substantial.” Building up a strong immunization program was a fantastic investment for India long before COVID came along, and when thevirus did arrive, the investment paid off again. Countries that had recently been running large polio campaigns—as both Pakistan and India had done—had another advantage: their national and regional emergency operations centers. If you strengthen health systems, for example, you can expect to see improvements in malaria, child mortality, maternal health, and so on. Based on what they know about the disease and its variants, many scientists now believe that by the summer of 2022 the world will be moving out of the acute phase of the pandemic. The number of deaths will be going down globally, thanks to the protection conferred by vaccines and by the natural immunity you get once you’ve had the virus. With any luck, we will move to dealing with COVID as an endemic disease, the way we deal with seasonal flu. We should not assume that the next pandemic threat will look exactly like COVID. It may not be so much worse for the elderly than it is for young people, or it may also spread by lingering on surfaces or through human feces. It may be more infectious, passing more easily from one person to another. Or it may be deadlier. Worst of all, it could be both deadlierandmore infectious. I see four priorities for a global plan to eradicate respiratory diseases and prevent pandemics. 1. Make and deliver better tools. 2. Build the GERM team. 3. Improve disease surveillance. 4. Strengthen health systems. My own view is that the evidence is very strong that it jumped from an animal to a human and did not, as some people have argued, come from a research laboratory. I know some well-informed people who don’t think the evidence for this view is as solid as I do. In addition, the world’s disparate disease surveillance systems need to be integrated so that public health officials can rapidly detect emerging and circulating respiratory viruses no matter where they emerge. Each country needs a pandemic prevention czar with the mandate to establish a plan and then execute it to contain an outbreak. That person’s authority needs to include establishing rules for procuring and distributing essential supplies, as well as having access to data and modeling. The GERM team should play this role internationally. If the world can manage to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, as I think it can, the energy research supported by the U.S. and its peers will be one reason why. More funding is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Another key contribution will be to ease the path to approval for products without sacrificing safety. The WHO is the only organization that can strengthen the requirements for governments to be more open about potential outbreaks within their borders. Member countries of the WHO can also hold one another accountable for doing so—while recognizing that there are incentives to do just the opposite. When I started telling friends that I was working on a book about pandemics, I could see that they were a little surprised. Many of them had been nice enough to read the book on climate change I published in 2021, and although they were too polite to say it, they were clearly thinking, “How many more of these books are you going to write where you’re telling us about some big problem and aplan to solve it? We have to do climate. Now we’re doing pandemics and health. What else is there?” Climate change and pandemics—including the possibility of an attack by bioterrorists—are the most likely existential threats for humans. Get vaccinated when you can. And avoid the misinformation and disinformation that flood social media: Get your information regarding public health practices from reliable sources, such as the WHO, the CDC in the United States, and its equivalent in other countries.

The introduction to Norman Spinrads:Other Americas, Published in 1988. OTHER AMERICAS. An Introduction to the Volume. I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN fascinated—some might say obsessed—as a writer with the possible future destinies of America, and not just because I'm an American. Indeed much of the rest of the world shares this obsession, for America is not quite like other nations. Nor has it ever been regarded as such by the other peoples of the world. Military might and economic dominance are obviously part of this worldwide fascination with America. The United States is still the most militarily powerful nation on Earth, with a network of fleets and bases that encompasses much of the globe. The American economy is so dominant even in its current travails that Arabs are constrained to price the oil they sell to the Europeans and Japanese in dollars and the world catches a financial cold when America sneezes. But there's much more to it than that. The rest of the world has a complex and ambivalent emotional relationship with America that no other nation evokes, including its close military rival, the Soviet Union, and its close economic rival, Japan. The United States is hated by the peoples of Latin America whom it thoroughly dominates, economically, politically, and militarily, and yet these same peoples gobble up its popular culture like cotton candy and dream of some other America of the heart's desire that will rescue them from poverty and domestic tyranny. The French are forever complaining about "Anglophone cultural imperialism" and periodically attempt to purge their language of "Franglais," even as their best filmmakers seek to make Hollywood movies in English, their young people dance to American rock and roll, and their trendsetters emulate their own concept of American chic. Our number-one economic competitor, Japan, plays baseball, is developing a weird fascination for American football, has its own Disneyland, and is becoming addicted to American-style junk food. At the height of the Vietnam War, when America was the international villain throughout the Third World, a cargo-cult tribe in New Guinea still attempted to purchase Lyndon Johnson to come and be their president. Even our archenemies, the Russians, crave nothing so much as to be accepted as fraternal equals by the people of the United States. Why should this be so? The Soviet Union is almost our military equal. Japan is in some ways already our economic superior. Sweden, Switzerland, and Germany now have higher standards of living. From whence the magic of America? In part, no doubt, the answer is the English language. As the dollar is the closest thing this planet has to a world currency, so is English the closest thing there is to a world language. It is the first language of perhaps four hundred million people, and while more people may have grown up speaking the various dialects of Chinese, English is the second language of untold hundreds of millions more throughout the world. English is the language that binds together multilingual societies in India, in much of Africa, in the Philippines. It is spoken by more people than not in Scandinavia and the Netherlands. It is studied by every schoolchild in Japan and the Soviet Union. English is the international language of aviation. A French pilot landing on a German airfield communicates with the tower in English. Indeed an Arab pilot landing on an Arab airfield will also communicate with the controllers in English. English is the language of international commerce. English has long since supplanted French or German as the language of international science. But English can't be the whole answer, for Britain also speaks English, and it was the British, not the Americans, who spread English far and wide in Africa, who made it the, ah, lingua franca of India, and yet the peoples of the world do not really see English as the language of Great Britain. They relate to it emotionally as the language of America. Show business probably has a lot to do with that. English is also, of course, the international language of show business, the American market is by far the dominant English language market, and so American film, television, radio, and music have long since come to quite dominate international media. And not only economically but in terms of iconography and imagery. There is no jungle so remote that American rock and roll cannot be picked up on a transistor radio. American film and TV stars are instantly recognizable almost anywhere on earth as are such purely American archetypes as the cowboy, the hardboiled private eye, the vigilante avenger and Superman. Dallas, Miami Vice, and even old I Love Lucy reruns inundate the airwaves in scores of countries, and, I kid you not, a famous book-length Marxist treatise in Spanish explores the imperialistic political significance of the mythic substructure of the adventures of Donald Duck. But even the universality of American show business is not the whole answer. There is still something more. A something, that, in the end, is what I believe brought me to write the short novels in this book, as well as such novels as Bug Jack Barron, The Mind Came, The Men in the Jungle, Songs from the Stan, and Link Heroes, all of which are, in their diverse ways, American science fiction and America as science fiction. For America—not as a geographic entity or conventional nation state but as a concept-has from its birth been a dream of the future, a kind of real world science fictional speculation, for the peoples of the Earth. America was, after all, "discovered" in 1492 as if it were a virgin alien planet. And colonized by people from all over the world, much as people all over the world now dream of colonizing the Moon or Mars. And became an independent nation as the embodiment of a radical utopian concept—namely that the populace could and should choose its own rulers as public servants rather than accept the divine right of kings. Two hundred years later, it is difficult to realize just how radical, how speculative, how science-fictional a concept this really was at the time. Almost all of the world was ruled by hereditary monarchs, and had been, time out of mind. Greece had had democratic city-states of a kind, but they were really oligarchies, as was the Republic of Rome. Even Plato's science-fiction Republic was ruled by philosopher-kings. That the right to govern might be something deriving from the consent of the generality of the governed and not from divine inherited right or even from a grant from some national elite, that there might be a human-given law superior to even the will of the chief executive, was something new under this sun, and quite arguably the most radical break with all of previous history ever to occur on Planet Earth. Out of it ultimately flowed the French Revolution and the Latin American republics and the revolutions of 1848 and the Russian Revolution and in a very real sense all the non-monarchical governments that now form an overwhelming majority of the United Nations. This, I believe, is in large part the genesis of the rest of the world's peculiar emotional relationship with America, a relationship not so much with a geographic entity as with a utopian vision made manifest in the real world, with America as a concept, with America as a kind of science fiction. The American Revolution was a conceptual breakthrough that transformed the world, that altered forever the ideal concept of the relationship between government and governed, individual and body politic, legitimacy and the nature of the state. This is the true meaning of the so-called -American Dream"—the revolutionary concept that the people have a right to choose their own form of government and select their own governors by some form of democratic process, that legitimate rulers are those who are subordinate to the will of the people as expressed through law and electoral processes. It is this American Dream that the peoples of the world have spent the last two hundred years trying to achieve and maintain for themselves. Absolute monarchy is now all but extinct and even constitutional monarchy is now a relatively uncommon form of government. Alas, the Dream has been betrayed over and over again. The First French Republic became a Napoleonic Empire. Most of the revolutions of 1848 were eventually crushed. Latin American and African republics have degenerated into military dictatorships. The Russian Revolution degenerated into a bureaucratic tyranny. The Iranian Revolution gave birth to a grim theocracy. But the Dream itself has never died. And, phoenixlike, its manifestations have risen again and again out of the ashes of defeat all over the world. For somewhere out there across the sea, there has always been an America of the spirit, the original democratic dream, a constitutional democracy that has somehow managed to keep the faith for two hundred unbroken years. And a second homeland across the sea of time which the peoples of the world can rightly claim as in somr sense their own, for America was settled by the sons and daughters of most of the nations of the Earth. No other nation on the face of the Earth has as many family connections to the rest of the world, no other nation was built by Englishmen and Scots, Frenchmen and Spaniards, Irish and Africans, Chinese and Germans, Poles and Italians, Russians and Jews, Japanese and Scandinavians, and certainly in no other nation of the Earth has such a diversity of former nationalities maintained their ethnic identities. In the second half of the twentieth century, with its waves of refugees, its easy air travel, its European Common Market, its transnational corporations, its interlocked worldwide economy, this aspect of America has gained a new resonance. For America, in a very real sense, is the model of the future transnational world. A world with porous international borders or no borders at all. A world in which ethnic groups from many origins intermingle in the same territory. A world that is halfway here already. Can such multinational societies reach stability and flourish? Or will they degenerate into endless unresolvable ethnic strife of the sort we see in Northern Ireland and the lands that were Palestine and Lebanon and so many of the nations of Africa? Will the ethnic state be replaced by a higher transnational identity or will national states degenerate into the chaos of tiny tribalisms? There is only one nation on this planet where an ethnic diversity exists that mirrors the interpenetrating ethnic diversity of such a future transnational world. The Soviet Union, India, and Nigeria may be thoroughly multinational states, but their nationalities are geographically distributed. Only America, all of whose territory was colonized by peoples from all over the world, is a truly mature transnational state, with an ethnic heterogeneity in all fifty states. In this sense, too, America is the experimental laboratory, the living science-fiction story, of the transnational future world. And this is why the peoples of the world are fascinated by more than American foreign policy. This is why the peoples of the world pay such close attention to internal events in the United States. If American democracy and culture survive and flourish, there is hope for a stable transnational future. If America destroys itself from within, that future will look grim indeed. On some level, the peoples of the world look at America, and for better or worse, they see their future selves. Then too, the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain, reached its full flowering in the United States, at least in terms of the accelerating pace of scientific breakthroughs and technological development. Consider just how many of the technologies that make the modern world what it is were invented or first developed in America. The telegraph. The telephone. The Gatling gun, ancestor to the machine gun. Interchangeable parts for complex machinery. The assembly line. The airplane. The transistor. The semiconductor. Computers. Nuclear fission. The atomic bomb. The hydrogen bomb. The broadcast satellite and worldwide live television. The electric guitar. Talking pictures. The synthesizer. And of course the ultimate symbol of America as science fiction, Project Apollo. It was 1969, the Vietnam War was at its height, and I was living in London when America landed the first men on the Moon. It was a period in which anti-Americanism was quite strong in Europe. The United States, which had rescued Western European civilization from the Nazi darkness, which had rebuilt its shattered economy via the Marshall Plan, which had stood against Soviet expansionism in Greece and Berlin, which had long been seen as the champion of the democratic West, was now engaged in an ugly, evil, purposeless, and seemingly endless war against a small Third World country. Like it or not, agree with it or not, that was the European perception of Amerika at a time when even many Americans were spelling it with a k. And then the Eagle landed. And Western Europe partied through the night. People in London congratulated Americans on the street. There was more enthusiasm in Europe for the American Moon Landing than there was in the United States. For that one brief shining moment, a precious something that had seemed lost had come back to light up the world. What was that something? I was twelve in 1952, and I remember watching television coverage of the American army of occupation leaving Japan. In 1945, before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, it was generally assumed that the United States would be constrained to invade Japan, that millions would die, that the Japanese would fight the hated Americans to the death in defense of the Home Islands. Then came Hiroshima. And the surrender on the Battleship Missouri. And the MacArthur Shogunate. And a democratic constitu-tion imposed upon the defeated Japanese by the United States. A mere seven years after Hiroshima, a peace treaty was signed with Japan, and the American army of occupation was withdrawn. And when the occupying American army paraded through the Japanese cities on its way to the troop ships, something happened that had never happened before in the history of the world and that has not happened since. A conquered people turned out to watch an occupying army leave their homeland. They did not jeer. They did not watch in stony silence. They tossed flowers. Thousands upon thousands of little paper American flags waved in their hands. Many people wept openly. In 1945, an army of hated Americans had come to occupy a defeated enemy nation. Seven years later, the people of Japan lined their streets to bid a fond farewell to their American friends. I knew then as a boy as I know now as a man that no greater victory has ever been won in the history of the world. That was what America once was. That was the America of the world's heart's desire. That was the America that reappeared for a brief moment out of the darkness when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Alas, that moment was long ago, all too brief, and has long since passed. The Vietnam War ground on for years afterward, and ended with an America defeated and dishonored. The other America that its sons and daughters had been building, the other America that had forced an end to the war and given the nation a new kind of liberty, the other America that had released a new burst of creativity, that had fought for the rights of blacks and women and the maverick American spirit, was systematically crushed by the power structure in the name of American tradition itself, inflicting a spiritual, cultural, political, creative, and economic wound on the nation so profound that nearly twenty years later we are only beginning to understand the terrible cost. An American president attempted a coup de main against the Constitution, failing only by the margin of a piece of tape across a door lock, and for the first time in history, the world watched an American president driven from office in disgrace. And the world watched in numb disbelief as another American president allowed fifty-four American hostages to be held in Tehran for over a year in a pathetic demonstration of powerlessness, as the Ayatollah Khomeini broke the Carter presidency and elected Ronald Reagan, a former straight man to a chimpanzee, president of the United States. And now the proud space program that put men on the Moon lies in utter ruins, destroyed not so much by the Challenger tragedy as by military co-option and a fatigue of the spirit. America is engaging in nineteenth-century style interventionism in Central America even as it self-righteously condemns the Russians for doing the very same thing in Afghanistan. The American economy groans under an enormous trade deficit and a crushing military budget and a national debt that has been tripled in less than eight years. The American labor movement has been broken, the American standard of living is in decline, the broad middle class that was the backbone of American democracy is in the process of being proletarianized, the family farmer is an endangered species, and as a result the American spirit itself has become mean and crabbed. The social fascist right is in the ascendancy and liberty is under siege to the point where small pressure groups are able to remove books from libraries and magazines from racks, a Supreme Court nominee must withdraw because he once smoked a few joints, and the best and the brightest of the American scientific and technological community are constrained to piss into bottles to prove their purity. Not so coincidentally, American politicians of both major parties are generally perceived as intellectually bankrupt mountebanks, corporate executives as self-serving thieves, workers as goldbricking drunks and drug addicts, and American science, technology, and manufacturing are all losing their cutting edge. America is now mistrusted, hated, feared. and psychoanalyzed all over the world, and, perhaps out of desperate longing, the peoples of Western Europe are looking eastward now, toward the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev. for a new light in a darkening world. For America has lost its way and the world knows it, even if many Americans as yet do not. The American Dream is in eclipse, and the erstwhile light of the world now casts a baleful shadow in many corners of the globe. And yet ... And yet America is still a nation of enormous diversity, still, for better or worse, the best model of the future that this world has, and still, for that reason, a kind of science-fiction story in real time. whose final outcome, the shape of whose future, is still, and perhaps always will be, in doubt. For if science fiction itself teaches us anything at all, it is thatthere is no such thing as the future. We make our futures collectively, all of us, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment, decision by decision, and those who do not ponder the possible futures will most certainly be condemned to inhabit the future they nevertheless cannot avoid making. So here are four possible futures that we may or may not be making, as Americans, and as citizens of the Planet Earth. And if none of them are quite what our hearts might desire, if none of them are visions of other Americas we would wish to inhabit, they are not intended as such, but as cautionary tales. In historical terms, they are would-be self-canceling prophecies pointing down roads to other Americas none of us would wish to see, in the hope that they will remain forever paths not taken. And in human terms, I believe, they are not, in the end, stories of terminal despair. It is possible for life to go on even on the meanest streets of a decaying America. It is possible for the world to be saved by the very mountebanks and airheads who have put it in such mortal danger. It is possible for the American Dream to survive and inspire after the fall of America itself. It is even possible for an American to be true to that Dream as an exile on a foreign shore. History passes. The human heart goes on. La vie continue. Thus be it ever. We never promised the world a rose garden. Or did we?

Welcome to the Dalek Channel This is a Precis of "How to be an Anti Racist" by Ibram X Kendi. This is not an endorsement or a criticsm, merely an abreviation. “What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.” “We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.” “This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.” “A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.” “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” “A racist is someone who is supporting a racist policy by their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” “To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of this history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” “Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.” “To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.” “What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.” “Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America.” “Linnaeus positionedHomo sapiens europaeusat the top of the racial hierarchy, making up the most superior character traits.” “The root problem—from Prince Henry to President Trump—has always been the self-interest of racist power. Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest—the primitive accumulation of capital in the case of royal Portugal and subsequent slave traders—has been behind racist policies. Powerful and brilliant intellectuals in the tradition of Gomes de Zurara then produced racist ideas to justify the racist policies of their era, to redirect the blame for their era’s racial inequities away from those policies and onto people.” “BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST:One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.“ “An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals.” “Scholars call what I saw a “microaggression,” a term coined by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in nineteen seventy. Pierce employed the term to describe the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash on Black people wherever we go, day after day.” “I do not use “microaggression” anymore. What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.” “When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there ismore genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.” “Assimilationists believe in the post-racial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away. They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist power’s final solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist. Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.” “ETHNIC ANTIRACISM:A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between racialized ethnic groups and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized ethnic groups.” “Africans involved in the slave trade did not believe they were selling their own people—they were usually selling people as different to them as the Europeans waiting on the coast. Ordinary people in West Africa—like ordinary people in Western Europe—identified themselves in ethnic terms during the life of the slave trade.” “West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African Americans as “lazy, unambitious, uneducated, unfriendly, welfare-dependent, and lacking in family values,” Mary C Waters found in her 1999 interview-rich study of West Indian attitudes.African Americans tended to categorize West Indians as “selfish, lacking in race awareness, being lackeys of whites, and [having] a sense of inflated superiority.”” ““We should have more people from places like Norway,” Trump told lawmakers in 2018. There were already enough people of color like me, apparently.” “When Ghanaian immigrants to the United States join with White Americans and say African Americans are lazy, they are recycling the racist ideas of White Americans about African Americans. This is ethnic racism.” “To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences. To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world. To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy.” “BODILY ANTIRACIST:One who is humanizing, deracializing, and individualizing nonviolent and violent behavior.“ “This is the living legacy of racist power, constructing the Black race biologically and ethnically and presenting the Black body to the world first and foremost as a “beast,” to use Gomes de Zurara’s term, as violently dangerous, as the dark embodiment of evil.Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers.” “Antiracists say Black people, like all people, need more higher-paying jobs within their reach, especially Black youngsters, who have consistently hadthe highest rates of unemployment of any demographic group, topping 50 percent in the mid-nineties. There is no such thing as a dangerous racial group.” “CULTURAL ANTIRACIST:One who is rejecting cultural standards and equalizing cultural differences among racial groups.“ “Some Americans despised my E-bonics in 1996. In that year the Oakland school board recognized Black people like me as bilingual, and in an act of cultural antiracism recognized “the legitimacy and richness” of E-bonics as a language. They resolved to use E-bonics with students “to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.” The reaction was fierce.“ “To be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference. Segregationists say racial groups cannot reach their superior cultural standard.” ““If blacks can close the civilization gap, the race problem in this country is likely to become insignificant,” Dinesh D’Souza once reasoned. “Civilization” is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism. IHATED WHATthey called civilization, represented most immediately by school. I loved what they considered dysfunctional—African American culture, which defined my life outside school.” “When we refer to a group as Black or White or another racial identity—Black Southerners as opposed to Southerners—we are racializing that group. When we racialize any group and then render that group’s culture inferior, we are articulating cultural racism.” “To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.” “BEHAVIORAL ANTIRACIST:One who is making racial group behavior fictional and individual behavior real.” “It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race.” “One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black people.” “Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities.” “The same behavioral racism drove many of the Trump voters whom these same “not racist” progressives vociferously opposed in the 2016 election.” “To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. Black behavior is as fictitious as Black genes. “ “The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers.” “What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different from—and not inferior to—the intellect of a high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments?” “COLOR ANTIRACISM:A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between Light people and Dark people, supported by antiracist ideas about Light and Dark people.” “Colorism is a collection of racist policies that cause inequities between Light people and Dark people, and these inequities are substantiated by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.” “Colorist ideas are also assimilationist ideas, encouraging assimilation into—or transformation into something close to—the White body. To be an antiracist is to focus on color lines as much as racial lines, knowing that color lines are especially harmful for Dark people. When the gains of a multicolored race disproportionately flow to Light people and the losses disproportionately flow to Dark people, inequities between the races mirror inequities within the races.” “To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups. To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.” “Some White people have their own skin-care “addiction” to reach a post-racial ideal: tanning. In 2016,the United States elected the “orange man,” as NeNe Leakes calls Trump, who reportedly uses atanning bed every morning.” “The racial inequity could not be explained by income or educational levels or bad ballot design, according to a New York Times statistical analysis. That left one explanation, one that at first I could not readily admit: racism. A total of 179,855 ballots were invalidated by Florida election officials in a race ultimately won by 537 votes.” “But my attention remained focused on all those Whites who’d railroaded the election of 2000 in Florida. All those White policemen intimidating voters, White poll officials turning away voters, White state officials purging voters, White lawyers and judges defending the voter suppression. All those White politicians echoing Gore’s call to, “for the sake ofour unity as a people and the strength of our democracy,” concede the election to Bush.” “Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example.” “To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest ofus.” “Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.”” “POWERLESS DEFENSE:The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power.” “Black minds were awakened to the ongoing reality of racism by the series of televised police killings and flimsy exonerations that followed the Obama election, the movement for Black Lives, and the eventual racist ascendancy of Donald Trump.” “ITHOUGHT ONLYWhite people could be racist and that Black people could not be racist, because Black people did not have power. I thought Latinx, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Natives could not be racist, because they did not have power. I had no sense of the reactionary history of this construction, of its racist bearing.” “Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. It erases the small amount of Black power and expands the already expansive reach of White power.” “Racist ideas are constantly produced to cage the power of people to resist. Racist ideas make Black people believe White people have all the power, elevating them to gods. And so Black segregationists lash out at these all-powerful gods as fallen devils, as I did in college, while Black assimilationists worship their all-powerful White angels, strive to become them, to curry their favor, reproducing their racist ideas and defending their racist policies.” “When we stop denying the duality of racist and antiracist, we can take an accurate accounting of the racial ideas and policies we support. For the better part of my life I held both racist and antiracist ideas, supported both racist and antiracist policies; I’ve been antiracist one moment, racist in many more moments. To say Black people can’t be racist is to say all Black people are being antiracist at all times. My own story tells me that is not true. History agrees.” “I started to see for the first time that it was a battle between racists and antiracists. Ending one confusion started another: what to do with my life.” “ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST:One who is opposing racial capitalism.” “When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black poor people, the policy exploits at the intersection of elitist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racism. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism. To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.” “But if the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.” “Racist Black elites thought about low-income Blacks the way racist non-Black people thought about Black people. We thought we had more than higher incomes. We thought we were higher people.” The inequities wrought by racism and capitalism are not restricted to the United States.Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades has enriched foreign investors and a handful of Africans, while the number of people living in extreme poverty is growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism.” “The top 1 percent now own around half of the world’s wealth, up from 42.5 percent at the height of the Great Recession in 2008. The world’s 3.5 billion poorest adults, comprising 70 percent of the world’s working-age population, own 2.7 percent of global wealth.” “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.” “SPACE ANTIRACISM:A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.” “The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen. But they aspire to move into upscale White neighborhoods, home to white-collar criminals and “banksters,” as Thom Hartmann calls them, who might steal your life savings.” “Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don’t similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings.” “Riley had pulled out the familiar weapon safeguarding space racism and menacing Black spaces: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces.The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gapproduces a giving gap.” “The integrationist strategy—the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces—is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven’t yet stopped fighting them. After enduring slavery’s violence, Frazier and his brethren had enough. They desired to separate, not from Whites but from White racism. Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks.” “Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught byan 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school.Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.” “Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups.” “GENDER ANTI-RACISM:A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-genders and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-genders.” “The White man’s sexual jealousy of the Black man was the key. For too many Black men, the Black Power movement that emerged after the Moynihan report became a struggle against White men for Black power over Black women.” “The increasing percentage of Black babies born into single-parent households was not due to single Black mothers having more children but tomarried Black women having fewer children over the course of the twentieth century.” “The Combahee River Collective Statement embodied queer liberation, feminism, and antiracism, like perhaps no other public statement in American history. They did not want Black women to be viewed as inferior or superior to any other group. “To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.” “To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.” “Gender racism is behind the thinking that when one defends White male abusers like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh one is defending White people; when one defends Black male abusers like Bill Cosby and R Kelly one is defending Black people.” “White women get away with murder and Black men spend years in prisons for wrongful convictions. Afterthe imprisonment of Black men dropped 24 percent between 2000 and 2015, Black men were still nearly six times more likely than White men, twenty-five times more likely than Black women, and fifty times more likely than White women to be incarcerated.” “Intersectional Black identities are subjected to what Crenshaw described as the intersection of racism and other forms of bigotry, such as ethnocentrism, colorism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. My journey to being an antiracist first recognized the intersectionality of my ethnic racism, and then my bodily racism, and then my cultural racism, and then my color racism, and then my class racism, and, when I entered graduate school, my gender racism and queer racism.” “QUEER ANTIRACISM:A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-sexualities and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-sexualities.” “Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex than White gay men. They are less likely to use drugs like poppers or crystal methamphetamine during sex, which heighten the risk of HIV infections.” “. The averageU.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years. The racial violence they face, the transphobia they face as they seek to live freely, is unfathomable. I started learning about their freedom fightfrom the personal stories of transgender activist Janet Mock. But I opened up to their fight on that day I opened to saving my friendship with Weckea.” “. To be queer antiracist is to serve as an ally to transgender people, to intersex people, to women, to the non-gender-conforming, to homosexuals, to their intersections, meaning listening, learning, and being led by their equalizing ideas, by their equalizing policy campaigns, by their power struggle for equal opportunity. To be queer antiracist is to see that policies protecting Black transgender women are as critically important as policies protecting the political ascendancy of queer White males.” “No one seemed to incite them more than “patriarchal women”—really, patriarchal White women standing behind racist White patriarchs.” “Racial history does not repeat harmlessly. Instead, its devastation multiplies when generation after generation repeats the same failed strategies and solutions and ideologies, rather than burying past failures in the caskets of past generations.” “As early as 1946, top State Department official Dean Acheson warned the Truman administration that the “existence of discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our relations” with decolonizing Asian and African and Latin American nations. The Truman administration repeatedly briefed the U.S. Supreme Court on these adverse effects during desegregation cases in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as historian Mary L. Dudziak documents. Not to mention the racist abuse African diplomats faced in the United States. In 1963, Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned Congress during the consideration of the Civil Rights Act that “in waging this world struggle we are seriously handicapped by racial or religious discrimination.” Seventy-eight percent of White Americans agreed in a Harris Poll.” “The failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self-blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism. What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result?” “Antiracists can be as doctrinaire in their view of racism as racists can be in their view of not-racism. How can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are closed-minded and unwilling to change? I ignored my own hypocrisy, as people customarily do when it means giving up what they hold dear.” “But this framing of White people versus Black people doesnottake into account that all White people do not benefit equally from racism. For instance, it doesn’t take into account how rich Whites benefit more from racist policies than White poor and middle-income people. It does not take into account that Black people are not harmed equally by racism or that some Black individuals exploit racism to boost their own wealth and power.” “. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning. The conviction that racist policymakers can be overtaken, and racist policies can be changed, and the racist minds of their victims can be changed, is disputed only by those invested in preserving racist policymakers, policies, and habits of thinking.” “Racist ideas fooled me nearly my whole life. I refused to allow them to continue making a fool out of me, a chump out of me, a slave out of me.” “Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.”

Version 0. This text has been prepared with the intent of creating an audio book. In preparing this text, almost all of the images and figures have been removed. When the inclusion of an image is essential to the text, as opposed to incidental, the image is described as figuratively as possible. The removal of the visual component also extends to capitalization and italicization of words. In this case the substitution of emphasis has be included. As the original also contains many logical and mathematical sentences, these have been expanded upon and explained as much as possible, to try and make the book more accessible to those who do have the educational background of Doctor Hofstadter, and also in an attempt to explain some of the more complex items. Quoting from the text: Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not? And: To suggest ways of reconciling the software of mind with the hardware of brain is a main goal of this book. It is a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll It can be said that the value of an item is measured in what will be exchanged for it. In terms of a text, the value and complexity might be judged by what you is read in the background while taking breaks from it. In my own experience, I interrupted reading this work several times, while completing, amongst others, the King James Bible, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravities’ rainbow, A criminal history of mankind, the Lensman series, and several other less memorable works and also translating a text of geopolitics from Russian and a three volume German encyclopedia. To explain many of the mathematics, I have had to add additional sentences. Perhaps the god over djinn of Hofstadter is a jealous god, and I have profaned the sacred texts, and will be condemned to execute recursion forever; In which case I suggest the reader GO TO line One.

Godel Escher Bach Hofstader Chapters 11-16 This text has been prepared with the intent of creating an audio book. In preparing this text, almost all of the images and figures have been removed. When the inclusion of an image is essential to the text, as opposed to incidental, the image is described as figuratively as possible. The removal of the visual component also extends to capitalization and italicization of words. In this case the substitution of emphasis has be included. As the original also contains many logical and mathematical sentences, these have been expanded upon and explained as much as possible, to try and make the book more accessible to those who do have the educational background of Doctor Hofstadter, and also in an attempt to explain some of the more complex items. Quoting from the text: Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not? And: To suggest ways of reconciling the software of mind with the hardware of brain is a main goal of this book. It is a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll It can be said that the value of an item is measured in what will be exchanged for it. In terms of a text, the value and complexity might be judged by what you is read in the background while taking breaks from it. In my own experience, I interrupted reading this work several times, while completing, amongst others, the King James Bible, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravities’ rainbow, A criminal history of mankind, the Lensman series, and several other less memorable works and also translating a text of geopolitics from Russian and a three volume German encyclopedia. To explain many of the mathematics, I have had to add additional sentences. Perhaps the god over djinn of Hofstadter is a jealous god, and I have profaned the sacred texts, and will be condemned to execute recursion forever; In which case I suggest the reader GO TO line One.

Godel Escher Bach Hofstader Chapter 6-10 This text has been prepared with the intent of creating an audio book. In preparing this text, almost all of the images and figures have been removed. When the inclusion of an image is essential to the text, as opposed to incidental, the image is described as figuratively as possible. The removal of the visual component also extends to capitalization and italicization of words. In this case the substitution of emphasis has be included. As the original also contains many logical and mathematical sentences, these have been expanded upon and explained as much as possible, to try and make the book more accessible to those who do have the educational background of Doctor Hofstadter, and also in an attempt to explain some of the more complex items. Quoting from the text: Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not? And: To suggest ways of reconciling the software of mind with the hardware of brain is a main goal of this book. It is a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll It can be said that the value of an item is measured in what will be exchanged for it. In terms of a text, the value and complexity might be judged by what you is read in the background while taking breaks from it. In my own experience, I interrupted reading this work several times, while completing, amongst others, the King James Bible, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravities’ rainbow, A criminal history of mankind, the Lensman series, and several other less memorable works and also translating a text of geopolitics from Russian and a three volume German encyclopedia. To explain many of the mathematics, I have had to add additional sentences. Perhaps the god over djinn of Hofstadter is a jealous god, and I have profaned the sacred texts, and will be condemned to execute recursion forever; In which case I suggest the reader GO TO line One.

Chapters 1-5 Godel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Braid Douglas Hofstader This text has been prepared with the intent of creating an audio book. In preparing this text, almost all of the images and figures have been removed. When the inclusion of an image is essential to the text, as opposed to incidental, the image is described as figuratively as possible. The removal of the visual component also extends to capitalization and italicization of words. In this case the substitution of emphasis has be included. As the original also contains many logical and mathematical sentences, these have been expanded upon and explained as much as possible, to try and make the book more accessible to those who do have the educational background of Doctor Hofstadter, and also in an attempt to explain some of the more complex items. Quoting from the text: Do words and thoughts follow formal rules, or do they not? And: To suggest ways of reconciling the software of mind with the hardware of brain is a main goal of this book. It is a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll It can be said that the value of an item is measured in what will be exchanged for it. In terms of a text, the value and complexity might be judged by what you is read in the background while taking breaks from it. In my own experience, I interrupted reading this work several times, while completing, amongst others, the King James Bible, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravities’ rainbow, A criminal history of mankind, the Lensman series, and several other less memorable works and also translating a text of geopolitics from Russian and a three volume German encyclopedia. To explain many of the mathematics, I have had to add additional sentences. Perhaps the god over djinn of Hofstadter is a jealous god, and I have profaned the sacred texts, and will be condemned to execute recursion forever; In which case I suggest the reader GO TO line One.

Klus Schwab is the Founder and Executive Chairman of the Wold Economic Forum. His Book, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a little thin and directionless. You get your money's worth in that this rendition is free. Read by Eve of the Daleks.

George Soros, In his own words. ======== Introduction: ======== Introduction I believe we are living in a revolutionary moment. As a result, practically anything is possible and fallibility reigns supreme. I’ve had a lot of experience with revolutionary moments. They play an important role in my conceptual framework, where I distinguish between far-from-equilibrium and near-equilibrium situations. They also played an important role in my life and in the life of my foundation. My experience with revolutionary moments started when Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in 1944. I was not yet fourteen years old. By some measures, it started even earlier, when I used to join my father in the swimming pool after school and he would regale me with tales of his adventures in Siberia during the Russian Revolution of 1917. If I add my father’s reminiscences to my own experiences, I can claim to have a memory going back a hundred years. Nineteen forty-four was the formative year in my life. One particular incident stands out in my mind. Adolf Eichmann’s first act was to set up the Jewish Council, and as a schoolboy, I was sent there to act as a runner (Jewish children were forbidden to attend school). My first assignment was to deliver mimeographed notices to what turned out to be a list of lawyers whose names started with “A” and “B” to report to the Rabbinical Seminary with a change of clothes and food for twenty-four hours. Before delivering the notices, I went home to show them to my father, who was also a lawyer. He told me to deliver the messages but warn the recipients that if they reported, they would be deported. One lawyer told me that he had always been a law-abiding citizen and that they couldn’t do him any harm. When I reported this to my father, he explained to me that in abnormal times the normal rules don’t apply and people obey them at their peril. That became our mantra, and with his guidance all of us survived. He also helped many other people. That is what made 1944 a positive experience for me. As regards the life of my Open Society Foundations, revolutionary moments were always important. I would mention the collapse of the Soviet system in the 1980s, which was the first time the foundation played a decisive role, and our role in Europe today, where we are trying to prevent the European Union from following the example of the Soviet Union. In spite of the intellectual and emotional preparation, we are not exempt from the fallibility that rules supreme during revolutionary moments. We can react to events, but we cannot predict them. That means that we cannot have a firm strategy unless we call flexibility a strategy. I call it a tactic, and I endorse it. It allows us to study and prepare for various scenarios. In order to find something firm, we can rely only on our values and convictions. And that is what we are doing. This book is entitledIn Defense of Open Society, yet when I set up my foundation in 1979, it was not to defend open society but to promote it. For the next twenty-five years, repressive regimes like the Soviet Union were collapsing and open societies like the European Union were emerging. The trend turned negative only after the global financial crisis of 2008. The nadir was reached in 2016 with Brexit in Europe and the election of President Trump in the United States. I was an active participant in these events, and I had plenty to say about them. Now I see some early signs that the tide is turning again. This book is a selection of my recent writings. It is divided into six chapters. The first chapter deals with the unprecedented dangers that confront open societies today. As the founder of the Open Society Foundations, I regard this as my primary concern today. The chapter contains two speeches I gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2018 and 2019. The 2018 speech deals with the dangers posed by social media platforms. In the 2019 speech, I warned the world of an even greater threat presented by the instruments of control that machine learning and artificial intelligence can put in the hands of repressive regimes. I focused on the Xi Jinping regime in China, which is the most advanced in these areas. I feel obliged to present the two speeches separately because my own thinking underwent a radical change during the intervening year. I started formulating my conceptual framework as a student at the London School of Economics under the influence of my mentor, the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, and I continued developing it over the course of my life. My philosophy has guided me both in making money and in spending it on making the world a better place—but it is not about money; it is about the complicated relationship between thinking and reality. I have decided to postpone the explanation of my philosophy until the last chapter because the best account is my article in theJournal of Economic Methodologyin 2014. It was addressed to a specialized audience and it is therefore rather heavy going. I was afraid that I would lose many readers if I inflicted it on them early on. I hope somebody will write an explanation that is more accessible to the general public, but I am both too old and too busy to do it myself. I did, however, try to make it more accessible by revising and abridging theJournal of Economic Methodologyarticle for this book. I’ve devoted the second chapter to what I callmy political philanthropy. I wrote my first essay on the subject in 2012, where I posed the questions: How could someone who is admittedly selfish and self-centered create a selfless foundation whose goal is to make the world a better place? And how can he pursue that goal even if the results don’t satisfy him? I answered the questions very honestly. I have updated that essay for this book not only to reflect my current views but also because both the external situation and my foundation’s structure and activities are very different today from what they were in 2012. Reflecting the changed conditions, some of my views have also changed. The external situation has greatly deteriorated. As I explain inan unprecedented danger has emerged in recent years. The rapid development of artificial intelligence and machine learning has produced instruments of social control that give repressive regimes an innate advantage over open societies. For dictatorships, they provide useful tools; for open societies, they pose a mortal danger. Our main task today is to find ways to counteract this built-in disadvantage. In 2012, my foundation was still in an expansionary stage, although the external situation was deteriorating. I was still active in the financial markets, and my fund was making a lot of money. This put us in an unusual position, as if we were exempt from the law of gravity. Those days are over. I have retired from the financial markets, and financial repression has made it much more difficult for all fund managers to make money. At the same time, the demand for our support has greatly increased, and our supply of funds has not been able to keep up with it. Consequently, the law of gravity is catching up with us with exceptional force. In considering the various problems confronting my foundations, I must mention another issue that I and my foundations need to deal with: aging. It is a continuous process, so it was also present in 2012, and I discussed it at length in my essay. But another seven years have passed since then. The first president of the foundation, Aryeh Neier, retired in 2012, and it fell to the new leadership headed by Patrick Gaspard, former US ambassador to South Africa, to thoroughly reorganize the foundation. They are making good progress. Although I am in my ninetieth year, I am reluctant to retire because I feel I still have something to contribute, and as the founder, I can be faster and more entrepreneurial than the governing board that will succeed me. But I have less energy and endurance than I used to have. I have delegated many duties to my son Alex, who is also part of the new leadership. The most dramatic positive change that has occurred in my foundation is the rising importance of the Central European University (CEU). I established it in 1991, but I hardly mentioned it in my 2012 essay. Since then, it has emerged as the foremost defender of academic freedom; it has also qualified as one of the one hundred best universities in the social sciences in the world. We have ambitious plans for its future. I consider this so important that I devote a whole chapter to it (). When I was actively engaged in the financial markets, I wrote a lot on the subject. Contrary to the prevailing equilibrium theory based on the theory of rational expectations, I consider financial markets inherently unstable. My first book,The Alchemy of Finance, was published in 1987. Since then, it has become compulsory reading in business schools, but it was studiously ignored by academic economists until the crash of 2008. They dismissed it as the conceit of a successful hedge fund manager who imagines himself to be a philosopher. This judgment was so unanimous that I could not ignore it. I came to consider myself a failed philosopher. I even gave a lecture entitled “A Failed Philosopher Tries Again” in 1995. All this changed after the crash of 2008. Economists could not ignore their failure to predict it. I had the pleasure of hearing the then governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, publicly acknowledge that my theory of the financial markets deserves consideration. The change of attitude among academic economists was even more gratifying. There was a widespread recognition that the prevailing paradigm had failed, and a willingness to rethink the basic assumptions emerged. This led me to become a sponsor of the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), whose mission is to break the monopoly that the efficient market hypothesis and rational expectations theory enjoyed in academic and official circles. I convoked a group of distinguished economists, including several Nobel Prize winners, and they responded enthusiastically. A board was formed under the chairmanship of Anatole Kaletsky. My friend and former colleague Rob Johnson became the president of INET and provides inspired leadership. INET is flourishing, but only because I am not on its governing board. I see a potential conflict between being the founder and a financial supporter of INET and the proponent of a particular theory of market dislocations. I wrote a lot of articles in the aftermath of the crash. I passionately disagreed with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s plan to bail out the banks by using a public fund called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to take toxic assets off their balance sheets. I argued that it would be much more effective to inject the $700 billion provided by TARP into the balance sheet of the banks as equity. It would have gone a long way to resolve the financial crisis. I worked closely with the Democratic leadership in Congress to modify the TARP Act so as to allow the money to be used for recapitalizing the banks through the purchase of equity interests. That is what the UK government has done: it nationalized failing banks and eventually recovered most of the money it had invested. But my friend Larry Summers, who succeeded Hank Paulson, rejected it out of hand because, according to him, nationalizing banks amounted to socialism and would never be accepted in America. I had many other ideas I had hoped to put into practice when Barack Obama became president, including a fundamental reform of the mortgage system, but none of them were adopted. Some of the material written on this subject, one as recently as 2018, constituteof the book. The crash of 2008 led directly to the euro crisis of 2011. That got me interested in the deficiencies of the euro, and that led me to study the structural weaknesses of the European Union. My interest continued to grow as more and more deficiencies became apparent. My recent articles on this subject make up. As mentioned before,is devoted to the revised and abridgedJournal of Economic Methodologyarticle. ================== Chapter One: ================== CHAPTER 1 The Unprecedented Dangers Facing Open Societies “IT Platforms and Xi Jinping’s Social Credit System” PART 1 Remarks delivered at the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2018 THE CURRENT MOMENT IN HISTORY It has become something of an annual Davos tradition for me to give an overview of the current state of the world. This time I want to focus on a few issues that are foremost on my mind. I find the current moment in history rather painful. Open societies are in crisis, and various forms of dictatorships and mafia states, exemplified by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, are on the rise. In the United States, President Donald Trump would like to establish a mafia state, but he can’t because the Constitution, other institutions, and a vibrant civil society won’t allow it. Whether we like it or not, my foundations, most of our grantees, and myself personally are fighting an uphill battle protecting the democratic achievements of the past. My foundations used to focus on the so-called developing world, but now that the open society is also endangered in the United States and Europe, we are spending more than half our budget closer to home because what is happening here is having a negative impact on the whole world. But protecting the democratic achievements of the past is not enough; we must also safeguard the values of open society so that they will better withstand future onslaughts. Open society will always have its enemies, and each generation has to reaffirm its commitment to open society for it to survive. The best defense is a well-prepared counterattack. The enemies of open society feel victorious, and this induces them to push their repressive efforts too far, generates resentment, and offers opportunities to push back. That is what is happening in places like Hungary today. THE SURVIVAL OF OUR CIVILIZATION IS AT STAKE I used to define the goals of my foundations as “defending open societies from their enemies, making governments accountable and fostering a critical mode of thinking.” But the situation has deteriorated. Not only the survival of open society but also the survival of our entire civilization is at stake. The rise of leaders such as Kim Jong-un in North Korea and Donald Trump in the United States have much to do with this. Both seem willing to risk a nuclear war in order to keep themselves in power. But the root cause goes even deeper. Mankind’s ability to harness the forces of nature, both for constructive and destructive purposes, continues to grow while our ability to govern ourselves properly fluctuates, and it is now at a low ebb. The threat of nuclear war is so horrendous that we are inclined to ignore it. But it is real. Indeed, the United States is set on a course toward nuclear war by refusing to accept that North Korea has become a nuclear power. This creates a strong incentive for North Korea to develop its nuclear capacity with all possible speed, which in turn may induce the United States to use its nuclear superiority preemptively—in effect to start a nuclear war in order to prevent nuclear war, an obviously self-contradictory strategy. The fact bears repeating that North Korea has become a nuclear power and there is no military action that can prevent what has already happened. The only sensible strategy is to accept reality, however unpleasant it is, and to come to terms with North Korea as a nuclear power. This requires the United States to cooperate with all the interested parties, China foremost among them. Beijing holds most of the levers of power against North Korea but is reluctant to use them. If China came down on Pyongyang too hard, the regime could collapse, and China would be flooded by North Korean refugees. What is more, Beijing is reluctant to do any favors for the United States, South Korea, or Japan—against each of which it harbors a variety of grudges. Achieving cooperation will require extensive negotiations, but once it is attained, the alliance would be able to confront North Korea with both carrots and sticks. The sticks could be used to force North Korea to enter into good-faith negotiations and the carrots to reward it for verifiably suspending further development of nuclear weapons. The sooner a so-called freeze-for-freeze agreement can be reached, the more successful the policy will be. Success can be measured by the amount of time it would take for North Korea to make its nuclear arsenal fully operational. I’d like to draw your attention to two seminal reports just published by Crisis Group on the prospects of nuclear war in North Korea. The other major threat to the survival of our civilization is climate change, which is also a growing cause of forced migration. I have dealt with the problems of migration at great length elsewhere, but I must emphasize how severe and intractable those problems are. I don’t want to go into details on climate change either, because it is well known what needs to be done. We have the scientific knowledge; it is the political will that is missing, particularly in the Trump administration. Clearly, I consider the Trump administration a danger to the world. But I regard it as a purely temporary phenomenon that will disappear in 2020, or even sooner. I give President Trump credit for motivating his core supporters brilliantly, but for every core supporter, he has created a greater number of core opponents who are equally strongly motivated. That is why I expect a Democratic landslide in 2018. My personal goal in the United States is to help reestablish a functioning two-party system. This will require not only a landslide in 2018 but also a Democratic Party that will aim at nonpartisan redistricting, the appointment of well-qualified judges, a properly conducted census, and other measures that a functioning two-party system requires. THE DANGERS POSED BY SOCIAL MEDIA GIANTS I want to spend the bulk of my remaining time on another global problem: the rise and monopolistic behavior of the giant IT platform companies. These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown into ever-more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation and have caused a variety of problems, of which we are only now beginning to become aware. Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment. This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections. The distinguishing features of internet platform companies is that they are networks and that they enjoy rising marginal returns, which accounts for their phenomenal growth. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable. It took Facebook eight and a half years to reach a billion users and half that time to reach the second billion. At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than three years. Facebook and Google effectively control over half of all internet advertising revenue. To maintain their dominance, they need to expand their networks and increase their share of users’ attention. Currently they do this by providing users with a convenient platform. The more time users spend on the platform, the more valuable they become to the companies. Content providers also contribute to the profitability of social media companies because they cannot avoid using the platforms and have to accept whatever terms they are offered. The exceptional profitability of these companies is largely a function of their avoiding responsibility for—and avoiding paying for—the content on their platforms. They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access. The business model of social media companies is based on advertising. Their true customers are the advertisers. But gradually a new business model is emerging, one based not only on advertising but also on selling products and services directly to users. They exploit the data they control, bundle the services they offer, and use discriminatory pricing to keep for themselves more of the benefits that otherwise they would have to share with consumers. This enhances their profitability even further—but the bundling of services and discriminatory pricing undermine the efficiency of the market economy. Social media companies deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it toward their own commercial purposes. They deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide. This can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents. There is a similarity between internet platforms and gambling companies. Casinos have developed techniques to hook gamblers to the point where they gamble away all their money, even money they don’t have. Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age. Not just distraction or addiction—social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy. The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called “the freedom of mind.” There is a possibility that once it is lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger looms not only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential elections. But there is an even more alarming prospect on the horizon. There could be an alliance between authoritarian states and these large, data-rich IT monopolies that would bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance. This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even George Orwell could have imagined. The countries in which such unholy marriages are likely to occur first are Russia and China. The Chinese IT companies in particular are fully equal to the American ones. They also enjoy the full support and protection of the Xi Jinping regime. The government of China is strong enough to protect its national champions, at least within its borders. US-based IT monopolies are already tempted to compromise themselves in order to gain entrance to these vast and fast-growing markets. The dictatorial leaders in these countries may be only too happy to collaborate with them because they want to improve their methods of control over their own populations and expand their power and influence in the United States and the rest of the world. The owners of the platform giants consider themselves the masters of the universe, but in fact they are slaves to preserving their dominant position. It is only a matter of time before the global dominance of the US IT monopolies is broken. Davos is a good place to announce that their days are numbered. Regulation and taxation will be their undoing, and EU Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager will be their nemesis. There is also a growing recognition of a connection between the dominance of the platform monopolies and the rising level of inequality. The concentration of share ownership in the hands of a few private individuals plays some role, but the peculiar position occupied by the IT giants is even more important. They have achieved monopoly power, but at the same time they are also competing against each other. They are big enough to swallow start-ups that could develop into competitors, but only the giants have the resources to invade each other’s territory. They are poised to dominate the new growth areas that artificial intelligence is opening up, like driverless cars. The impact of innovations on unemployment depends on government policies. The European Union and particularly the Nordic countries are much more farsighted in their social policies than the United States. They protect the workers, not the jobs. They are willing to pay for retraining or retiring displaced workers. This gives workers in Nordic countries a greater sense of security and makes them more supportive of technological innovations than workers in the United States. The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace, and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them. In the United States, the regulators are not strong enough to stand up against internet monopolies’ political influence. The European Union is better situated because it doesn’t have any platform giants of its own. The European Union uses a different definition of monopoly power from the United States. US law enforcement focuses primarily on monopolies created by acquisitions, whereas EU law prohibits the abuse of monopoly power irrespective of how it is achieved. Europe has much stronger privacy and data protection laws than America. Moreover, US law has adopted a strange doctrine first proposed by Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork: it measures harm as an increase in the price paid by customers for services received—and that is almost impossible to prove when most services are provided for free. This leaves out of consideration the valuable data that platform companies collect from their users. Commissioner Vestager is the champion of the European approach. It took the EU seven years to build a case against Google, but as a result of her success, the process has been greatly accelerated. Due to her proselytizing, the European approach has begun to affect attitudes in the United States as well. THE RISE OF NATIONALISM I have mentioned some of the most pressing and important problems confronting us today. In conclusion, let me point out that we are living in a revolutionary period. All of our established institutions are in a state of flux, and in these circumstances both fallibility and reflexivity are operating at full force. I lived through similar conditions in my life, most recently some thirty years ago. That is when I set up my network of foundations in the former Soviet empire. The main difference between the two periods is that thirty years ago the dominant creed was international governance and cooperation. The European Union was the rising power, and the Soviet Union the declining one. Today, however, the motivating force is nationalism. Russia is resurgent, and the European Union is in danger of abandoning its values. As you will recall, the previous experience didn’t turn out well for the Soviet Union. The Soviet empire collapsed, and Russia has become a mafia state that has adopted a nationalist ideology. My foundations did quite well: the more advanced members of the Soviet empire joined the European Union. Now our aim is to help save the European Union in order to radically reinvent it. The EU used to enjoy the enthusiastic support of the people of my generation, but that changed after the financial crisis of 2008. The EU lost its way because it was governed by outdated treaties and a mistaken belief in austerity policies. What had been a voluntary association of equal states was converted into a relationship between creditors and debtors, where the debtors couldn’t meet their obligations and the creditors set the conditions that the debtors had to meet. That association was neither voluntary nor equal. As a consequence, a large proportion of the current generation has come to regard the European Union as its enemy. One important country, Britain, is in the process of leaving the EU, and at least two countries, Poland and Hungary, are ruled by governments that are adamantly opposed to the values on which the European Union is based. They are in acute conflict with various European institutions, and those institutions are trying to discipline them. In several other countries anti-European parties are on the rise. In Austria, an anti-European party is in the governing coalition, and the fate of Italy will be decided by the elections in March. How can we prevent the European Union from abandoning its values? We need to reform it at every level: at the level of the Union itself, at the level of the member states, and at the level of the electorate. We are in a revolutionary period; everything is subject to change. The decisions made now will determine the shape of the future. At the Union level, the main question is: What to do about the euro? Should every member state be required to eventually adopt the euro, or should the current situation be allowed to continue indefinitely? The Maastricht Treaty prescribed the first alternative, but the euro has developed some defects that the Maastricht Treaty didn’t foresee and still await resolution. Should the problems of the euro be allowed to endanger the future of the European Union? I would strongly argue against it. The fact is that the countries that don’t qualify are eager to join, but those that do qualify have decided against it, with the exception of Bulgaria. In addition, I would like to see Britain remain a member of the EU or eventually rejoin it, and that couldn’t happen if it meant adopting the euro. The choice confronting the EU could be better formulated as one between a multispeed and a multitrack approach. In a multispeed approach, member states have to agree in advance on the ultimate outcome; in a multitrack approach, member states are free to form coalitions of the willing to pursue particular goals on which they agree. The multitrack approach is obviously more flexible, but the European bureaucracy favored the multispeed approach. That is an important contributor to the rigidity of the EU’s structure. At the level of the member states, their political parties are largely outdated. The old distinction between left and right is overshadowed by being either pro- or anti-European. This manifests itself differently in different countries. In Germany, the Siamese twin arrangement between the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) has been rendered unsustainable by the results of the recent elections. There is another party, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), that is further to the right than the CSU in Bavaria. This has forced the CSU to move further to the right in anticipation of next year’s local elections in Bavaria, so that the gap between the CSU and the CDU has become too great. This has rendered the German party system largely dysfunctional until the CDU and CSU break up. In Britain, the Conservatives are clearly the party of the right and Labour the party of the left, but each party is internally divided in its attitude toward Brexit. This complicates the Brexit negotiations immensely and makes it extremely difficult for Britain as a country to decide and modify its position toward Europe. Other European countries can be expected to undergo similar realignments, with the exception of France, which has already undergone its internal revolution. At the level of the electorate, the top-down initiative started by a small group of visionaries led by Jean Monnet carried the process of integration a long way, but it has lost its momentum. Now we need a combination of the top-down approach of the European authorities with the bottom-up initiatives started by an engaged electorate. Fortunately, there are many such bottom-up initiatives; it remains to be seen how the authorities will respond to them. So far President Emmanuel Macron has shown himself most responsive. He campaigned for the French presidency on a pro-European platform, and his current strategy focuses on the elections for the European Parliament in 2019—and that requires engaging the electorate. While I have analyzed Europe in greater detail, from a historical perspective, what happens in Asia is ultimately much more important. China is the rising power. There were many fervent believers in the open society in China who were sent to be re-educated in rural areas during Mao’s Revolution. Those who survived returned to occupy positions of power in the government. So the future direction of China used to be open-ended, but no more. The promoters of open society have reached retirement age, and Xi Jinping, who has more in common with Putin than with the so-called West, has begun to establish a new system of party patronage. I’m afraid that the outlook for the next twenty years is rather bleak. Nevertheless, it is important to embed China in institutions of global governance. This may help to avoid a world war that would destroy our entire civilization. That leaves the local battlegrounds in Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. My foundations are actively engaged in all of them. We are particularly focused on Africa, where would-be dictators in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have perpetrated electoral fraud on an unprecedented scale and citizens are literally risking their lives to resist the slide into dictatorship. Our goal is to empower local people to deal with their own problems, assist the disadvantaged, and reduce human suffering to the greatest extent possible. This will leave us plenty to do well beyond my lifetime.

Read by Eve of the Daleks, "A Life in Full" is a series of biographical essays on George Soros. This is not an endorsement or a criticism. Quotes from the Text The Rockefeller Foundation had a modest legacy commitment to a group of civil rights organizations, and the Ford Foundation funded human rights and racial justice organizations. Yet neither foundation possessed what is needed most to advance radical change in a democracy: a living donor prepared to spend millions on public persuasion in the context of elections and ballot measures. Over the years, Soros would play an important role in the rise of a new generation of political talent, from Barack Obama and Stacey Abrams to a host of progressive prosecutors around the country who are transforming criminal justice policy by rethinking the “tough on crime” approach that has been the predominant mind-set since the 1970s. Central to this effort was Catalist, a data warehouse for voter information. The science and practice of using various kinds of data to predict voter behavior was developing substantially in these years, following the advances made by George W. Bush’s top political adviser Karl Rove, who identified niche audiences—like NASCAR fans or Cracker Barrel customers—that correlated heavily with conservative political sympathies. Progressives were eager to catch up and avoid squandering their ad spending or door knocking on voters who would never vote for a Democrat. Catalist was set up as a nonprofit organization separate from the Democratic Party, as a movement resource and utility that would be available only for civic engagement efforts. It is increasingly hard to find the leader of a criminal justice reform effort working today at the state or federal level who has not been the beneficiary of a Soros Justice Fellowship. Soros and Open Society were at times the leading funder of the movement to ban stop-and-frisk policing, and have underwritten much of the considerable progress in rolling back the death penalty, which had long seemed intractable, by shifting the focus of reform to questions of innocence and error. Yet Soros’s political philosophy is focused on the idea that revolutions are never the answer to the problems of the world, and that the only way to improve the human condition is by piecemeal social engineering, one of Popper’s core concepts. The concept of a “fertile fallacy” is central to Soros’s conceptual and practical worldview; he deploys psychological explanation to account for human behavior. “We are capable of acquiring knowledge,” Soros writes, “but we can never have enough knowledge to allow us to base all our decisions on knowledge. It follows that if a piece of knowledge has proved useful, we are liable to overexploit it to areas where it no longer applies, so that it becomes a fallacy.” Likely better than anyone else, Soros realizes that we fall victim not to our failures but to our successes. In the far right media bubble, Soros became the dark symbol of both international capitalism and international socialism. In Eastern Europe the “war on Soros” has become a rallying cry meant to persuade Eastern European societies that any form of internationalism is antithetical to national cultural traditions. While the illiberals acknowledge that funds from Brussels are useful and should not be rejected, they argue that Eastern Europeans must resist the idea of the European Union as a political community. ===========

As read by Eve of the Daleks Not an endorsement, Tables and figures removed. ============ Sample Text ============ Chapter 1 The New Era in World Politics INTRODUCTION: FLAGS AND CULTURAL IDENTITY On January 3, 1992 a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down. After this was pointed out to the Russian hosts, they quickly and quietly corrected the error during the first intermission. The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples' identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. Upside-down flags were a sign of the transition, but more and more the flags are flying high and true, and Russians and other peoples are mobilizing and marching behind these and other symbols of their new cultural identities. On April 18, 1994 two thousand people rallied in Sarajevo waving the flags of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. By flying those banners, instead of U.N., NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not-so-real friends. On October 16, 1994 in Los Angeles 70,000 people marched beneath "a sea of Mexican flags" protesting Proposition 187, a referendum measure which would deny many state benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. Why are they "walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding that this country give them a free education?" observers asked. "They should be waving the American flag." Two weeks later more protestors did march down the street carrying an American flag —upside down. These flag displays ensured victory for Proposition 187, which was approved by 59 percent of California voters. In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people. People are discovering new but often old identities and marching under new but often old flags which lead to wars with new but often old enemies. One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin's novel, Dead Lagoon: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven." The unfortunate truth in these old truths cannot be ignored by statesmen and scholars. For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world's major civilizations. The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world. The five parts of this book elaborate corollaries to this main proposition. Part One: For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multi-civilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies. Part Two: The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures. Part Three: A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization. Part Four: The West's universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate "kin-country rallying," the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars. Part Five: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non- Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multi-civilizational character of global politics. A MULTIPOLAR, MULTICIVILIZATIONAL WORLD. In the post-Cold War world, for the first time in history, global politics has become multipolar and multi-civilizational. During most of human existence, contacts between civilizations were intermittent or nonexistent. Then, with the beginning of the modern era, about A.D. 1500, global politics assumed two dimensions. For over four hundred years, the nation states of the West — Britain, France, Spain, Austria, Prussia, Germany, the United States, and others — constituted a multipolar international system within Western civilization and interacted, competed, and fought wars with each other. At the same time, Western nations also expanded, conquered, colonized, or decisively influenced every other civilization. During the Cold War global politics became bipolar and the world was divided into three parts. A group of mostly wealthy and democratic societies, led by the United States, was engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military competition with a group of somewhat poorer communist societies associated with and led by the Soviet Union. Much of this conflict occurred in the Third World outside these two camps, composed of countries which often were poor, lacked political stability, were recently independent, and claimed to be nonaligned. In the late 1980s the communist world collapsed, and the Cold War international system became history. In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against. Nation states remain the principal actors in world affairs. Their behavior is shaped as in the past by the pursuit of power and wealth, but it is also shaped by cultural preferences, commonalities, and differences. The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War but rather the world's seven or eight major civilizations. Non-Western societies, particularly in East Asia, are developing their economic wealth and creating the basis for enhanced military power and political influence. As their power and self-confidence increase, non-Western societies increasingly assert their own cultural values and reject those "imposed" on them by the West. The "international system of the twenty-first century," Henry Kissinger has noted, ". . . will contain at least six major powers —the United States, Europe, China, Japan, Russia, and probably India —as well as a multiplicity of medium-sized and smaller countries." Kissinger's six major powers belong to five very different civilizations, and in addition there are important Islamic states whose strategic locations, large populations, and or oil resources make them influential in world affairs. In this new world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilizations. The rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations. In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups, but between peoples belonging to different cultural entities. Tribal wars and ethnic conflicts will occur within civilizations. Violence between states and groups from different civilizations, however, carries with it the potential for escalation as other states and groups from these civilizations rally to the support of their "kin countries." The bloody clash of clans in Somalia poses no threat of broader conflict. The bloody clash of tribes in Rwanda has consequences for Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi but not much further. The bloody clashes of civilizations in Bosnia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Kashmir could become bigger wars. In the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Libya provided funds and arms to the Bosnians, not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship. "Cultural conflicts," Vaclav Havel has observed, "are increasing and are more dangerous today than at any time in history," and Jacques Delors agreed that "future conflicts will be sparked by cultural factors rather than economics or ideology." And the most dangerous cultural conflicts are those along the fault lines between civilizations. In the post-Cold War world, culture is both a divisive and a unifying force. People separated by ideology but united by culture come together, as the two Germanys did and as the two Koreas and the several Chinas are beginning to. Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others. Countries with cultural affinities cooperate economically and politically. International organizations based on states with cultural commonality, such as the European Union, are far more successful than those that attempt to transcend cultures. For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other. The philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life differ significantly among civilizations. The revitalization of religion throughout much of the world is reinforcing these cultural differences. Cultures can change, and the nature of their impact on politics and economics can vary from one period to another. Yet the major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world. Developments in the postcommunist societies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are shaped by their civilizational identities. Those with Western Christian heritages are making progress toward economic development and democratic politics; the prospects for economic and political development in the Orthodox countries are uncertain; the prospects in the Muslim republics are bleak. The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post-Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations. In sum, the post-Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multi-civilizational. OTHER WORLDS? Maps and Paradigms. This picture of post-Cold War world politics shaped by cultural factors and involving interactions among states and groups from different civilizations is highly simplified. It omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. Yet if we are to think seriously about the world, and act effectively in it, some sort of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm, is necessary. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, as William James said, only "a bloomin' buzzin' confusion." Intellectual and scientific advance, Thomas Kuhn showed in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, consists of the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by a new paradigm, which does account for those facts in a more satisfactory fashion. "To be accepted as a paradigm," Kuhn wrote, "a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted." "Finding one's way through unfamiliar terrain," John Lewis Gaddis also wisely observed, "generally requires a map of some sort. Cartography, like cognition itself, is a necessary simplification that allows us to see where we are, and where we may be going." The Cold War image of superpower competition was, as he points out, such a model, articulated first by Harry Truman, as "an exercise in geopolitical cartography that depicted the international landscape in terms everyone could understand, and so doing prepared the way for the sophisticated strategy of containment that was soon to follow." World views and causal theories are indispensable guides to international politics. For forty years students and practitioners of international relations thought and acted in terms of the highly simplified but very useful Cold War paradigm of world affairs. This paradigm could not account for everything that went on in world politics. There were many anomalies, to use Kuhn's term, and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split. Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more important phenomena than any of its rivals, it was an essential starting point for thinking about international affairs, it came to be almost universally accepted, and it shaped thinking about world politics for two generations. Simplified paradigms or maps are indispensable for human thought and action. On the one hand, we may explicitly formulate theories or models and consciously use them to guide our behavior. Alternatively, we may deny the need for such guides and assume that we will act only in terms of specific "objective" facts, dealing with each case "on its merits." If we assume this, however, we delude ourselves. For in the back of our minds are hidden assumptions, biases, and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality, what facts we look at, and how we judge their importance and merits. We need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to: 1. Order and generalize about reality; 2. Understand causal relationships among phenomena; 3. Anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments; 4. Distinguish what is important from what is unimportant; and 5. Show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals. Every model or map is an abstraction and will be more useful for some purposes than for others. A road map shows us how to drive from A to B, but will not be very useful if we are piloting a plane, in which case we will want a map highlighting airfields, radio beacons, flight paths, and topography. With no map, however, we will be lost. The more detailed a map is the more fully it will reflect reality. An extremely detailed map, however, will not be useful for many purposes. If we wish to get from one big city to another on a major expressway, we do not need and may find confusing a map which includes much information unrelated to automotive transportation and in which the major highways are lost in a complex mass of secondary roads. A map, on the other hand, which had only one expressway on it would eliminate much reality and limit our ability to find alternative routes if the expressway were blocked by a major accident. In short, we need a map that both portrays reality and simplifies reality in a way that best serves our purposes. Several maps or paradigms of world politics were advanced at the end of the Cold War. One World: Euphoria and Harmony. One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world. The most widely discussed formulation of this model was the "end of history" thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. A parallel line of argument based not on the end of the Cold War but on long-term economic and social trends producing a "universal civilization" is discussed in chapter 3. "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, " . . . the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." To be sure, he said, some conflicts may happen in places in the Third World, but the global conflict is over, and not just in Europe. " It is precisely in the non-European world" that the big changes have occurred, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. The war of ideas is at an end. Believers in Marxist-Leninism may still exist "in places like Managua, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, Massachusetts," but overall liberal democracy has triumphed. The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring. The expectation of harmony was widely shared. Political and intellectual leaders elaborated similar views. The Berlin wall had come down, communist regimes had collapsed, the United Nations was to assume a new importance, the former Cold War rivals would engage in "partnership" and a "grand bargain," peacekeeping and peacemaking would be the order of the day. The President of the world's leading country proclaimed the "new world order"; the president of, arguably, the world's leading university vetoed appointment of a professor of security studies because the need had disappeared: "Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more." The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not. Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the twentieth century's other major conflicts. World War I was the "war to end wars" and to make the world safe for democracy. World War II, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, would "end the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed." Instead we will have "a universal organization" of "peace-loving Nations" and the beginnings of a "permanent structure of peace." World War I, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. World War II produced a Cold War that was truly global. The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and "ethnic cleansing," the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the "diplomacy of smiles" and "policy of yes" in Russia's relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China. In the five years after the Berlin wall came down, the word "genocide" was heard far more often than in any five years of the Cold War. The one harmonious world paradigm is clearly far too divorced from reality to be a useful guide to the post-Cold War world. Two Worlds: Us and Them. While one-world expectations appear at the end of major conflicts, the tendency to think in terms of two worlds recurs throughout human history. People are always tempted to divide people into us and them, the in-group and the other, our civilization and those barbarians. Scholars have analyzed the world in terms of the Orient and the Occident, North and South, center and periphery. Muslims have traditionally divided the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, the abode of peace and the abode of war. This distinction was reflected, and in a sense reversed, at the end of the Cold War by American scholars who divided the world into "zones of peace" and "zones of turmoil." The former included the West and Japan with about 15 percent of the world's population, the latter everyone else. Depending upon how the parts are defined, a two-part world picture may in some measure correspond with reality. The most common division, which appears under various names, is between rich, modern and developed countries and poor, traditional, undeveloped or developing countries. Historically correlating with this economic division is the cultural division between West and East, where the emphasis is less on differences in economic well-being and more on differences in underlying philosophy, values, and way of life. Each of these images reflects some elements of reality yet also suffers limitations. Rich modern countries share characteristics which differentiate them from poor traditional countries, which also share characteristics. Differences in wealth may lead to conflicts between societies, but the evidence suggests that this happens primarily when rich and more powerful societies attempt to conquer and colonize poor and more traditional societies. The West did this for four hundred years, and then some of the colonies rebelled and waged wars of liberation against the colonial powers, who may well have lost the will to empire. In the current world, decolonization has occurred and colonial wars of liberation have been replaced by conflicts among the liberated peoples. At a more general level, conflicts between rich and poor are unlikely because, except in special circumstances, the poor countries lack the political unity, economic power, and military capability to challenge the rich countries. Economic development in Asia and Latin America is blurring the simple dichotomy of haves and have-nots. Rich states may fight trade wars with each other; poor states may fight violent wars with each other; but an international class war between the poor South and the wealthy North is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world. The cultural bifurcation of the world division is still less useful. At some level, the West is an entity. What, however, do non-Western societies have in common other than the fact that they are non-Western? Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and African civilizations share little in terms of religion, social structure, institutions, and prevailing values. The unity of the non-West and the East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West. These myths suffer the defects of the Orientalism which Edward Said appropriately criticized for promoting "the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, 'us') and the strange (the Orient, the East, 'them')" and for assuming the inherent superiority of the former to the latter. During the Cold War the world was, in considerable measure, polarized along an ideological spectrum. There is, however, no single cultural spectrum. The polarization of "East" and "West" culturally is in part another consequence of the universal but unfortunate practice of calling European civilization Western civilization. Instead of "East and West," it is more appropriate to speak of "the West and the rest," which at least implies the existence of many non-Wests. The world is too complex to be usefully envisioned for most purposes as simply divided economically between North and South or culturally between East and West. 184 States, More or Less. A third map of the post-Cold War world derives from what is often called the "realist" theory of international relations. According to this theory states are the primary, indeed, the only important actors in world affairs, the relation among states is one of anarchy, and hence to insure their survival and security, states invariably attempt to maximize their power. If one state sees another state increasing its power and thereby becoming a potential threat, it attempts to protect its own security by strengthening its power and or by allying itself with other states. The interests and actions of the more or less 184 states of the post-Cold War world can be predicted from these assumptions. This "realist" picture of the world is a highly useful starting point for analyzing international affairs and explains much state behavior. States are and will remain the dominant entities in world affairs. They maintain armies, conduct diplomacy, negotiate treaties, fight wars, control international organizations, influence and in considerable measure shape production and commerce. The governments of states give priority to insuring the external security of their states (although they often may give higher priority to insuring their security as a government against internal threats). Overall this statist paradigm does provide a more realistic picture of and guide to global politics than the one- or two-world paradigms. It also, however, suffers severe limitations. It assumes all states perceive their interests in the same way and act in the same way. Its simple assumption that power is all is a starting point for understanding state behavior but does not get one very far. States define their interests in terms of power but also in terms of much else besides. States often, of course, attempt to balance power, but if that is all they did, Western European countries would have coalesced with the Soviet Union against the United States in the late 1940s. States respond primarily to perceived threats, and the Western European states then saw a political, ideological, and military threat from the East. They saw their interests in a way which would not have been predicted by classic realist theory. Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests. The interests of states are also shaped not only by their domestic values and institutions but by international norms and institutions. Above and beyond their primal concern with security, different types of states define their interests in different ways. States with similar cultures and institutions will see common interest. Democratic states have commonalities with other democratic states and hence do not fight each other. Canada does not have to ally with another power to deter invasion by the United States. At a basic level the assumptions of the statist paradigm have been true throughout history. They thus do not help us to understand how global politics after the Cold War will differ from global politics during and before the Cold War. Yet clearly there are differences, and states pursue their interests differently from one historical period to another. In the post-Cold War world, states increasingly define their interests in civilizational terms. They cooperate with and ally themselves with states with similar or common culture and are more often in conflict with countries of different culture. States define threats in terms of the intentions of other states, and those intentions and how they are perceived are powerfully shaped by cultural considerations. Publics and statesmen are less likely to see threats emerging from people they feel they understand and can trust because of shared language, religion, values, institutions, and culture. They are much more likely to see threats coming from states whose societies have different cultures and hence which they do not understand and feel they cannot trust. Now that a Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union no longer poses a threat to the Free World and the United States no longer poses a countering threat to the communist world, countries in both worlds increasingly see threats coming from societies which are culturally different. While states remain the primary actors in world affairs, they also are suffering losses in sovereignty, functions, and power. International institutions now assert the right to judge and to constrain what states do in their own territory. In some cases, most notably in Europe, international institutions have assumed important functions previously performed by states, and powerful international bureaucracies have been created which operate directly on individual citizens. Globally there has been a trend for state governments to lose power also through devolution to substate, regional, provincial, and local political entities. In many states, including those in the developed world, regional movements exist promoting substantial autonomy or secession. State governments have in considerable measure lost the ability to control the flow of money in and out of their country and are having increasing difficulty controlling the flows of ideas, technology, goods, and people. State borders, in short, have become increasingly permeable. All these developments have led many to see the gradual end of the hard, "billiard ball" state, which purportedly has been the norm since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, and the emergence of a varied, complex, multilayered international order more closely resembling that of medieval times. Sheer Chaos. The weakening of states and the appearance of "failed states" contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm stresses: the breakdown of governmental authority; the breakup of states; the intensification of tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict; the emergence of international criminal mafias; refugees multiplying into the tens of millions; the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; the spread of terrorism; the prevalence of massacres and ethnic cleansing. This picture of a world in chaos was convincingly set forth and summed up in the titles of two penetrating works published in 1993: Out of Control by Zbignew Brzezinski and Pandaemonium by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Like the states paradigm, the chaos paradigm is close to reality. It provides a graphic and accurate picture of much of what is going on in the world, and unlike the states paradigm, it highlights the significant changes in world politics that have occurred with the end of the Cold War. As of early 1993, for instance, an estimated 48 ethnic wars were occurring throughout the world, and 164 "territorial-ethnic claims and conflicts concerning borders" existed in the former Soviet Union, of which 30 had involved some form of armed conflict. Yet it suffers even more than the states paradigm in being too close to reality. The world may be chaos but it is not totally without order. An image of universal and undifferentiated anarchy provides few clues for understanding the world, for ordering events and evaluating their importance, for predicting trends in the anarchy, for distinguishing among types of chaos and their possibly different causes and consequences, and for developing guidelines for governmental policy makers. COMPARING WORLDS: REALISM, PARSIMONY, AND PREDICTIONS Each of these four paradigms offers a somewhat different combination of realism and parsimony. Each also has its deficiencies and limitations. Conceivably these could be countered by combining paradigms, and positing, for instance, that the world is engaged in simultaneous processes of fragmentation and integration. Both trends indeed exist, and a more complex model will more closely approximate reality than a simpler one. Yet this sacrifices parsimony for realism and, if pursued very far, leads to the rejection of all paradigms or theories. In addition, by embracing two simultaneous opposing trends, the fragmentation-integration model fails to set forth under what circumstances one trend will prevail and under what circumstances the other will. The challenge is to develop a paradigm that accounts for more crucial events and provides a better understanding of trends than other paradigms at a similar level of intellectual abstraction. These four paradigms are also incompatible with each other. The world cannot be both one and fundamentally divided between East and West or North and South. Nor can the nation state be the base rock of international affairs if it is fragmenting and torn by proliferating civil strife. The world is either one, or two, or 184 states, or potentially an almost infinite number of tribes, ethnic groups, and nationalities. Viewing the world in terms of seven or eight civilizations avoids many of these difficulties. It does not sacrifice reality to parsimony as do the one- and two-world paradigms; yet it also does not sacrifice parsimony to reality as the statist and chaos paradigms do. It provides an easily grasped and intelligible framework for understanding the world, distinguishing what is important from what is unimportant among the multiplying conflicts, predicting future developments, and providing guidelines for policy makers. It also builds on and incorporates elements of the other paradigms. It is more compatible with them than they are with each other. A civilizational approach, for instance, holds that: • The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness. • The world is in some sense two, but the central distinction is between the West as the hitherto dominant civilization and all the others, which, however, have little if anything in common among them. The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many. • Nation states are and will remain the most important actors in world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors. • The world is indeed anarchical, rife with tribal and nationality conflicts, but the conflicts that pose the greatest dangers for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations. A civilizational paradigm thus sets forth a relatively simple but not too simple map for understanding what is going on in the world as the twentieth century ends. No paradigm, however, is good forever. The Cold War model of world politics was useful and relevant for forty years but became obsolete in the late 1980s, and at some point the civilizational paradigm will suffer a similar fate. For the contemporary period, however, it provides a useful guide for distinguishing what is more important from what is less important. Slightly less than half of the forty-eight ethnic conflicts in the world in early 1993, for example, were between groups from different civilizations. The civilizational perspective would lead the U.N. Secretary-General and the U.S. Secretary of State to concentrate their peacemaking efforts on these conflicts which have much greater potential than others to escalate into broader wars. Paradigms also generate predictions, and a crucial test of a paradigm's validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms. A statist paradigm, for instance, leads John Mearsheimer to predict that "the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do." A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the "realist" concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearsheimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian- Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearsheimer's statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine's having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine. Many important developments after the end of the Cold War were compatible with the civilizational paradigm and could have been predicted from it. These include: the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia; the wars going on in their former territories; the rise of religious fundamentalism throughout the world; the struggles within Russia, Turkey, and Mexico over their identity; the intensity of the trade conflicts between the United States and Japan; the resistance of Islamic states to Western pressure on Iraq and Libya; the efforts of Islamic and Confucian states to acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; China's continuing role as an "outsider" great power; the consolidation of new democratic regimes in some countries and not in others; and the developing arms competition in East Asia. The relevance of the civilizational paradigm to the emerging world is illustrated by the events fitting that paradigm which occurred during a six-month period in 1993: • The continuation and intensification of the fighting among Croats, Muslims, and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia; • The failure of the West to provide meaningful support to the Bosnian Muslims or to denounce Croat atrocities in the same way Serb atrocities were denounced; • The unwillingness of Russia to join other U.N. Security Council members in getting the Serbs in Croatia to make peace with the Croatian government, and the offer of Iran and other Muslim nations to provide 18,000 troops to protect Bosnian Muslims; • The intensification of the war between Armenians and Azeris, Turkish and Iranian demands that the Armenians surrender their conquests, the deployment of Turkish troops to and Iranian troops across the Azerbaijan border, and Russia's warning that the Iranian action contributes to "escalation of the conflict" and "pushes it to dangerous limits of internationalization"; • The continued fighting in central Asia between Russian troops and mujahedeen guerrillas; • The confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, led by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing "cultural relativism," and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting "Western universalism"; • The refocusing in parallel fashion of Russian and NATO military planners on "the threat from the South"; • The voting, apparently almost entirely along civilizational lines, that gave the 2000 Olympics to Sydney rather than Beijing; • The sale of missile components from China to Pakistan, the resulting imposition of U.S. sanctions against China, and the confrontation between China and the United States over the alleged shipment of nuclear technology to Iran; • The breaking of the moratorium and the testing of a nuclear weapon by China, despite vigorous U.S. protests, and North Korea's refusal to participate further in talks on its own nuclear weapons program; • The revelation that the U.S. State Department was following a "dual containment" policy directed at both Iran and Iraq; • The announcement by the U.S. Defense Department of a new strategy of preparing for two "major regional conflicts," one against North Korea, the other against Iran or Iraq; • The call by Iran's president for alliances with China and India so that "we can have the last word on international events"; • The new German legislation drastically curtailing the admission of refugees; • The agreement between Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk on the disposition of the Black Sea fleet and other issues; • The bombing of Baghdad by the United States, its virtually unanimous support by Western governments, and its condemnation by almost all Muslim governments as another example of the West's "double standard"; • The United States' listing Sudan as a terrorist state and indicting Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and his followers for conspiring "to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States"; • The improved prospects for the eventual admission of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia into NATO; • The 1993 Russian presidential election which demonstrated that Russia was indeed a "torn" country with its population and elites uncertain whether they should join or challenge the West. A comparable list of events demonstrating the relevance of the civilization paradigm could be compiled for almost any other six-month period in the early 1990s. In the early years of the Cold War, the Canadian statesman Lester Pearson presciently pointed to the resurgence and vitality of non-Western societies. "It would be absurd," he warned, "to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms." Pointing out that international relations "for several centuries" had been the relations among the states of Europe, he argued that "the most far-reaching problems arise no longer between nations within a single civilization but between civilizations themselves." The prolonged bipolarity of the Cold War delayed the developments which Pearson saw coming. The end of the Cold War released the cultural and civilizational forces which he identified in the 1950s, and a wide range of scholars and observers have recognized and highlighted the new role of these factors in global politics. "As far as anyone interested in the contemporary world is concerned," Fernand Braudel has sagely warned, "and even more so with regard to anyone wishing to act within it, it 'pays' to know how to make out, on a map of the world, which civilizations exist today, to be able to define their borders, their centers and peripheries, their provinces and the air one breathes there, the general and particular 'forms' existing and associating within them. Otherwise, what catastrophic blunders of perspective could ensue!"

Welcome to the Dalek Channel, thank you for watching. A summary of the 4th political theory, as read by Eve of the Daleks. Today we are pleased to present a short precis of the fourth political theory by Alexander Dugin. ======================== This is not an endorsement, merely an attempt at a faithful abbreviation ======================== When the notions of Right and Left have become politically meaningless, in the West as much as everywhere else in the world; when liberals and libertarians agree on the essentials; when the three grand political theories of the Twentieth century — capitalism, Communism and fascism — have ultimately proven incapable of governing peoples peaceably, what is left to do? According to Alexander Dugin, a teacher of sociology and geopolitics at the renowned Lermontov University of Moscow, and one of the most influential intellectuals in Russia, only one, radical solution remains: to devise a different approach, a Fourth Political Theory. According to Dugin, the primary target must be Western postmodernism: we must wage war upon this thalassocratic Empire — a morbid blend of the society of the spectacle and consumer culture — and its plan for ultimate world domination. In today’s world, politics appears to be a thing of the past, at least as we used to know it. Liberalism persistently fought against those of its political enemies which had offered alternative systems; that is, conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and Communism, and finally, by the end of the Twentieth century, had defeated them all. The three main ideologies of the Twentieth century were liberalism, Communism and fascism Liberalism had been an ideology from the start. It was not as dogmatic as Marxism, but was no less philosophical, graceful, and refined. The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any membership. Having triumphed, liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity — into postliberalism. The Fourth Political Theory will not simply be handed to us without any effort. It may or may not emerge. The prerequisite for its appearance is dissent. The Fourth Political Theory cannot be the continuation of either the second political theory or the third. The end of fascism, much like the end of Communism, was not just an accidental misunderstanding, but the expression of a rather lucid historical logic. The Fourth Political Theory is a ‘crusade’ against postmodernity, the post-industrial society, liberal thought realised in practice, and globalisation, as well as its logistical and technological bases. The second and third political theories are unacceptable as starting points for resisting liberalism, particularly because of the way in which they understood themselves, what they appealed to, and how they operated. Tradition religion, hierarchy, and family and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. If modernism is exhausted in postmodernity then the period of direct theomachy comes to an end along with it. Following the logic of postliberalism, this will likely lead to the creation of a new global pseudo-religion, based on scraps of disparate syncretic cults, rampant chaotic ecumenism, and tolerance. Thus, the Fourth Political Theory may easily turn toward everything that preceded modernity in order to draw its inspiration. If we reject the idea of progress that is inherent in modernity, which as we have seen, has ended, then all that is ancient gains value and credibility for us simply by virtue of the fact that it is ancient. The old alternatives to liberalism — Communism and fascism — were overcome by history and discarded, each in its own way, and have demonstrated their ineffectiveness and incompetence. Therefore, the search for an alternative to liberalism must look somewhere else. The area to be searched is designated as the domain of the Fourth Political Theory. What the Fourth Political Theory is, in terms of what it opposes, is now clear. It is neither fascism, nor Communism, nor liberalism. In each of the three ideologies there is a clearly defined historical subject. In liberal ideology, the historical subject is the individual. The historical subject of the second political theory is class. Exploited classes are the core of the Communists’ dramatic vision of history And, finally, the subject of the third political theory is either the State, as in Italian Fascism or race, as in German National Socialism. The definition of a historical subject is the fundamental basis for political ideology in general, and defines its structure. Therefore, in this matter, the Fourth Political Theory may act in the most radical way by rejecting all of these constructions as candidates for a historical subject. The historical subject is neither an individual, nor class, nor the state, nor race. This is the anthropological and the historical axiom of the Fourth Political Theory. Undoubtedly racist is the idea of unipolar globalisation. It is based on the idea that the history and values of Western, and especially American, society are equivalent to universal laws, and artificially tries to construct a global society based on what are actually local and historically specific values. First and foremost, the Communist theories regarding historical materialism and the notion of unidirectional progress are inapplicable to our purposes. Materialist reductionism and economic determinism comprise the most repulsive aspect of Marxism. Marxism is often correct when it describes its enemy, especially the bourgeoisie. However, its own attempts to understand itself lead to failure. It eventually collapsed even in those places where it had triumphed. In the end, European revolutionary Communists turned into petty-bourgeois clowns, entertaining the bored and jaded democratic public. Liberalism as a whole rests on the individual as its most basic component. It is these individuals, collectively but in isolation from one another, that are taken as the whole The neuroses and fears located at the pathogenic core of liberal philosophy are clearly seen in The Open Society and its Enemies, a classic of neo-liberalism by Karl Popper. Freedom is the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory, since it coincides with its centre and its dynamic, energetic core. The freedom of an individual is a prison. In order to attain true freedom, we must go beyond the limits of the individual. This is the flip side of liberalism: at its core, it is totalitarian and intolerant of differences, and most especially opposed to the realisation of a great will. It is only prepared to tolerate small people; it protects not so much the rights of man, but, rather, the rights of a small man. Unlike other political theories, the Fourth Political Theory does not want to lie, soothe, or seduce. It summons us to live dangerously, to think riskily, to liberate and to release all those things that cannot be driven back inside. The Fourth Political Theory trusts the fate of Being, and entrusts fate to Being. The idea of modernisation is based on the idea of progress. An animalistic form of aggression is embedded in the liberal idea of progress, which is regarded as the main trajectory of social development. If we understand modernisation like liberal democrats, then that means that we are invited to join in this terrible struggle for survival at its greatest intensity, and to become just like them, trying to grab a place at the trough of globalisation. In Communism, the idea of unidirectional progress is also present. Once again, we see Darwinism in Marxism, including the full acceptance of evolutionary ideas and its belief in the miraculous power of scientific progress and technological improvement. In one way or another, all three ideologies originate from the same trend: the idea of growth, development, progress, evolution, and of the constant, cumulative improvement of society. All the processes which accumulate only one particular thing, or emphasise only one particular trait, result in death. Monotonic processes do not exist in any biological species, from cells to the most complex organisms. In our society today we see an unprecedented level of technological progress along with unbelievable moral degradation. The Fourth Political Theory must take a step toward the formulation of a coherent critique of the monotonic process. Three political theories have been produced from the ideology of modernity. The Fourth Political Theory is an unmodern theory. The Fourth Political Theory is not an invitation to a return to traditional society; i.e., it is not conservatism in the conventional sense. The New World Order as a concept was popularised at a concrete historical moment — namely, when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s. The US is now undergoing a test of its global imperial rule and has to deal with many challenges, some of them quite new and original. This US-centric global geopolitical arrangement can be described on several different levels: Historically: The USA considers itself to be the logical conclusion and peak of Western civilisation. The peak of the political thought of modernity was the victory of liberalism over the alternative political doctrines of modernity. Ideologically: There is a tendency for the US to increasingly link ideology and politics in their relations with the periphery. Economically: The US economy is challenged by Chinese growth, energy security and scarcity, crippling debt and budget deficits. The vision of a single open and, by necessity, largely homogenous society encompassing the Earth is so fantastic and utopian that it is much easier to imagine the total chaos of Hobbes’ war of all against all. There are secondary and tertiary actors that are inevitable losers in the case of the success of the American strategies. The first category is composed by the more or less successful nation-states that are not happy to lose their independence to a supranational exterior authority. The second category of actors who reject the transition consists of sub-national groups, movements, and organisations that oppose American dominance of the structures of the global geopolitical arrangement for ideological, religious, and/or cultural reasons. The paradox is that in the process of globalisation, which aims to universalise and make uniform all particularities and collective identities on the basis of a purely individual identity, such sub-national actors easily become transnational — the same religions and ideologies often being present in different nations and across state borders. The pole of a unipolar world is nothing other than the United States and Europe, as a purely geopolitical organisation, and specifically the idea of maximal freedom. Incidentally, emerging from that same liberal thesis which contends that man is free, it follows that he is always free to say ‘no’, to say this to whomever he will. This, in fact, constitutes the dangerous moment of the philosophy of freedom, which under the aegis of absolute freedom begins to remove the freedom to say ‘no’ to freedom itself. There is, nevertheless, the ontological possibility of saying ‘no’. And from this begins conservatism. The first approach is so-called traditionalism. Conservatism could well be traditionalism. There is also fundamental conservatism in our society. The Islamic project is fundamental conservatism. In fundamental conservatism, the renunciation of modernity has a perfectly rational and systematic form. There is a second type of conservatism, which we have called status-quo or liberal conservatism. Liberal conservatives are distinguished by the following qualitative structural characteristics: agreement with the general trends of modernity, but disagreement with its more avant-garde manifestations, which seem excessively dangerous and unhealthy. There exists yet a third kind of conservatism. The peak of degeneration, from the point of view of Conservative Revolutionaries, is modernity. Conservative Revolutionaries want not only to slow time down, like the liberal conservatives, or to return to the past like traditionalists, but to pull out from the structure of the world the roots of evil, to abolish time as a destructive quality of reality, and in so doing fulfilling some kind of secret, parallel, non-evident intention of the Deity itself. The term civilisation received wide circulation in the epoch of the rapid development of the theory of progress. Faith in the progressive development of history, in the universality of the human path according to a common logic of development from savagery to civilisation, was the distinguishing feature of the Nineteenth century. The main characteristic of civilisation is often thought to be an inclusive universality; that is, the theoretical openness of the civilisational code for those who would like to join it from without. Big and developed collectives of people, united in a civilisation, in essence simply repeat, on a different level, the archetypes of the behaviour and moral systems of savages. Opposition to globalism, which announces itself ever more loudly on all levels and in all corners of the planet, has not yet formed into a concrete system of views. National governments, as a rule, do not have enough of a scope to throw down a challenge to the highly developed technological might of the West. After Carl Schmitt, it is customary in political science to call analogical projects of integration large spaces. The creation of a European Union shows that the embodiment of the large space in practice, the transition from a government to a supra-governmental establishment. Huntington separates out the following. Western, Chinese, Japanese Islamic Indian Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African civilisations. Despite the deep and sure observations of its own best intellectuals, many representatives of the political establishment of the USA continue as before to use the term civilisation in a singular sense, understanding by it American civilisation. From the position of today’s historical experience, one can identify three foundational directions in Leftist political philosophy, The Old Left, Left Nationalists and the New Left. The adherents of this persuasion almost always relate only with distrust to other anti-liberal theories, and are typically closed to dialogue and are degenerating into a sect.’ National Communists themselves reckon themselves as being simply Communists and Orthodox Marxists, strictly following the teachings of the Communist classics. The phrase Leftist project more than anything today fits the New Left or postmodernists. The New Leftists doubt the structure of reason, they contest the basis of our conception of reality, disrobe positive science as a mystification and dictatorship of the academic circles and sharply criticise the concept of man as a totalitarian abstraction. Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy and ideology, embodying in itself the most important force-lines of the modern age and of the epoch of modernity: The understanding of the individual as the measure of all things; Belief in the sacred character of private property; The assertion of the equality of opportunity as the moral law of society; Belief in the ‘contractual’ basis of all sociopolitical institutions, including governmental; The abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who lay claim to ‘the common truth’; The separation of powers and the making of social systems of control over any government institution whatsoever; The creation of a civil society without races, peoples and religions in place of traditional governments; The dominance of market relations over other forms of politics (the thesis: ‘economics is fate’); Certainty that the historical path of Western peoples and countries is a universal model of development and progress for the entire world, which must, in an imperative order, be taken as the standard and pattern. Liberals go rather far, repudiating practically all sociopolitical institutions, right up to the family and sexual differentiation. In extreme cases, liberals support not only the freedom of abortions, but even the freedom from sexual differentiation. Exactly on the strength of the fact that the USSR lost and fell apart, it became obvious that historical right was on the side of the liberals. In this situation the USA, as the citadel of world liberalism, took on a new quality. From this time on, it became not only one of two superpowers, but the single planetary hero, suddenly pulling away from its rivals. After defeating its rivals, liberalism brought back a monopoly on ideological thinking; it became the sole ideology, not allowing any other alongside itself. The usual phenomenon now is the loss of identity, and already not simply only national or cultural identity, but even sexual, and soon enough even human identity. Liberalism is an absolute evil; not only in its factual embodiment, but also in its fundamental theoretical presuppositions. Consciousness of time is necessary to hide the present, which is the traumatic experience of the self-referential nature of pure consciousness. Without self-referential consciousness, there can be no time. When we understand history and its logic well, we can easily guess what will follow, what is going to happen, and which note should come next. The histories of different societies are different. The future is being made now. It is doubtful that one society is capable of comprehending another society at the same level as it is comprehended by its own members. The attempt to abdicate this history in favour of pure universalism and in favour of meta-culture and meta-language is doomed. Globalisation is equivalent to the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. They are semantically linked. Different societies have different histories. That means different futures. What man is, is derived not from himself as an individual, but from politics. It is politics, being the dispositive of violence and legitimate power, that defines the man. At this stage we are able to single out completely new symptoms of the type of man constituted by the politics of postmodernity: depolitisation, autonomisation, microscopisation, and sub- and transhumanisation. In the end, all forms of vertical symmetry the orientation of a top to bottom hierarchy are subject to destruction, and everything becomes horizontal. The entirety of the Twentieth century was filled with political soldiers killing each other for their beliefs. The liberals’ fears, taking the form of fascists, is a complete parody. The late Communists were already pseudo-political soldiers. At least our liberals, who are not really liberals at all, demonstrate this: give them some money, and they will declare anything and everything. The adherents of the Fourth Political Theory are in need of a plan. What is Fourth Political Practice? It is contemplation. What is the manifestation of the Fourth Political Practice? It is a principle to be revealed. It is acceptable to consider ‘a gender’ in sociological terms, in other words, gender as a socially-constructed phenomenon. This is in contrast to the anatomical ‘sex’ inherent in biological terms. Liberal feminism, or the aspiration to give women freedom, means to identify a woman as a man and thus equalise them socio-politically, that is, represent a woman as a man socially. The current world is unipolar, with the global West as its centre and with the United States as its core. When there is only one power which decides who is right and who is wrong, and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship. If we free socialism from its materialist, atheistic and modernist features, and if we reject the racist and narrow nationalist aspects of the Third Way doctrines, we arrive at a completely new kind of political ideology. We call it the Fourth Political Theory, or 4PT, the first being liberalism, that we essentially challenge; the second being the classical form of Communism; and the third being National Socialism and fascism. But there are some who think otherwise. Who are aligned against such a project? Those who want to impose uniformity, the one (American) way of life, One World. And their methods are force, temptation, and persuasion. They are against multipolarity. So they are against us. ============= https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15785079-the-fourth-political-theory

A Darlek Audio Book. This is not an endorsement, merely an attempt at the portrayal of the original work. Translators Note This work was published towards the end of the 20th century by Alexander Dugin. Translation is the process of transforming information from one set of symbols to the closest representation using a different set. As in translating computer code, certain approximations must be made. Unlike a deterministic bijective process, translation requires a degree of interpretation, with the goal being the maintenance of the spirit of the work. In doing some several sentences have been broken up. Also the footnotes are expressly in English, or the most rudimentary non-English and are presented in line with the text. Chapters remain, though section numbering has been removed. Several terms unique in the work, such as the term “great space” or “dry land” are left in. This Audiobook has been translated and prepared by Puke On A Plate, who, as an internet slave is a solely owned subsidiary of the Darleks. ========================================== Editorial. The history and fate of geopolitics as a science is paradoxical. On the one hand, the very concept seems to have become familiar and actively used in modern politics. Geopolitical journals and institutions are multiplying. Republished texts of the founders of this discipline are circulated and conferences, symposiums, geopolitical committees and commissions are being organized. Until now though, geopolitics has not been in the category of the conventional recognized sciences. The foundational geopolitical works of Frederick Ratzel, Rudolf Kjellen, and especially Halford Mackinder were met by the scientific community and public with hostility. Classical science, inheriting in full the critical spirit of early positivism, believed that geopolitics claims excessive generalizations, and was therefore a kind of quackery. In a sense, the sad fate of geopolitics as a science was also connected with the political side of the problem. It has been argued that the war crimes of the Third Reich invasions and deportations were largely theoretically prepared by German geopoliticians who allegedly supplied Hitler's regime a pseudoscientific base. Preeminent in this group was the German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, who at one time was quite close to the Fuhrer. However, German geopolitics at the theoretical level was essentially no different from the Anglo-Saxon geopolitics of Makinder, Mahan and Speakman, the French of Vidal de la Blash or the Russian military geography of Milyutin or Snesarev. The difference was not the specific views of Haushofer, which were completely logical and adequate in their discipline themselves, but in the methods of a number of its geopolitical provisions. Moreover, the specifics of Germany's international policy in the 1930s and 1940s and its most repulsive manifestations sharply contradicted the ideas of Haushofer himself. Instead of a continental bloc along the Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo axis, there was an attack on the USSR. Instead of an organicist understanding in the spirit of Schmitt's theory of the rights of peoples, there were the doctrines of Lebensraum, living space, vulgar nationalism and imperialism. It should also be noted that the school of Haushofer and his magazine Zeitschrift fur Geopolitik were never elements of the official Nazi systems. Like many intellectual groups, the so-called conservative revolutionaries in the Third Reich led an ambiguous existence. They were simply tolerated, and this tolerance varied depending on the momentary political conjuncture. However, the main reason for the historical oppression of geopolitics is that it too bluntly shows the underlying mechanisms of international politics that different regimes most often prefer to hide behind with vague rhetoric or abstract ideological schemes. In that sense one can draw a parallel with Marxism, at least in its purely scientific and analytical part. Marx more than convincingly reveals the mechanics of production relations and their connection with historical formations. Geopolitics exposes the historical demagoguery of foreign policy discourse and reveals the deep mechanisms affecting international, interstate and interethnic relations. But if Marxism is global revision of classical economic history, then geopolitics is a revision of the history of international relations. This last consideration explains the dual attitude of society towards geopolitical scientists. The scientific community stubbornly does not allow geopoliticians into their environment, harshly criticizing and usually not even noticing them. The authorities on the contrary, actively use geopolitical calculations to develop international strategies. This was the case for example, with one of the first geopoliticians, a genuine founding father of this discipline, Sir Halford Mackinder. His ideas were not accepted in academic circles, but he himself directly participated in the formation of English politics in the first half of the 20th century. He laid the theoretical basis of the international strategy of England, which was intercepted by the middle of the century by the United States and developed by Mackinder’s American, and more broadly, Atlanticist followers. The parallel with Marxism is in our opinion successful. The method can be borrowed and applied to different areas. Marxist analysis is equally important for representatives of Capital and for those who would fight for the liberation of Labor. Geopolitics is a representation of large states or empires and an instruction on how best to preserve territorial domination and expansion. Opponents find in it conceptual principles of the revolutionary theory of national liberation. For example, the Treaty of Versailles was the work of Mackinder's geopolitical school and it expressed the interests of the West aimed at weakening the states of Central Europe and the suppression of Germany. Mackinder's German student Karl Haushofer, utilized the same methodology and developed a directly opposite theory of European liberation, which was a complete negation of the logic of Versailles and formed the basis of the ideology of the emerging National Socialism. Recent considerations show that even without being accepted in the commonwealth of classical sciences, geopolitics is extremely effective in practice, and in its significance surpasses many conventional disciplines in some respects. Be that as it may, geopolitics as it exists today is gradually gaining official recognition and corresponding status. However this process is not at all smooth. Quite often we are faced with the replacement of the very concept of geopolitics, all more common as the use of the term becomes a common occurrence among non-professionals. The emphasis shifts from the complete global picture developed by the founding fathers into particular regional ansatzes or geo-economic schemes. At the same time, the initial postulates of geopolitical dualism, competition of strategies and civilizational differentiation are ignored, devalued, or even denied. It's hard to imagine something analogous in some other science. What would happen to classical physics and the concepts of mass, energy and acceleration, if scientists started implicitly to gradually deny the law of universal gravitation, to forget about it and then to represent Newton as a mythological figure that did not exist in reality or as a dark religious fanatic. But this, mutatis mutandis, is precisely what is happening with geopolitics today. The purpose of this book is to present essential geopolitics objectively and impartially, free of preconceived opinions, ideological sympathies and antipathies. No matter how we are related to this science, we can make a definite opinion about it only by becoming acquainted with its principles, history and methodology. ========================================== INTRODUCTION. The definition of Geopolitics. The works of numerous representatives of geopolitical schools, despite all their differences and regular contradictions add up to one big picture, which allows us to speak of the subject itself as something complete and definite. Authors and dictionaries differ among themselves in the definition of the main subject of this science and the main methodological principles. Such a discrepancy stems from historical circumstances, as well as from the closest connection of geopolitics with world politics, power issues and dominant ideologies. The synthetic nature of this discipline suggests the inclusion of many additional subjects, such as geography, history, demography, strategy, ethnography, religious studies, ecology, military affairs, the history of ideology, sociology and political science. Since these military, natural and human sciences themselves have many schools and directions, it is not possible to talk with rigor and without ambiguity in geopolitics. So what is the definition of this discipline, so vague and simultaneously expressive and impressive? Geopolitics is a worldview, and in this capacity it is better to compare it not with the sciences, but with science systems. It is equivalent to Marxism, liberalism and other systems of interpretations of society and history, highlighting a specific basic principle and important criterion and reducing the importance of the other innumerable aspects of man and nature. A clear analogy between geopolitics and Marxism was pointed out in 1943 by Karl Korsch in his book Historical views of geopolitics, where he wrote: The new materialism of geopolitics has the same critical, activist, and in the traditional sense of the word idealistic character, as the early periods of the so-called historical materialism of Marx. As Marxism today strives towards conscious control over the economic life of society, so today's Haushoferism can be defined as an attempt at political control over space. Quoted from New Essays, volume 6, 1943, page 817. Marxism and liberalism equally emphasize the economic side of the human existence, the principle of economy as destiny. It doesn't matter that these two ideologies draw opposite conclusions. Marx predicts the inevitability of the anti-capitalist revolution, while the followers of Adam Smith consider capitalism the most perfect model of society. In both the first and second cases a detailed method for interpreting the historical process, a special sociology, anthropology and political science is proposed. And despite the constant criticism of these forms of economic reductionism by alternative and marginal scientific circles, they remain the dominant social models on the basis of which people not only comprehend the past, but also create the future. By which we mean planning, designing, conceiving and conducting large-scale actions, directly affecting all of humanity. The same is true of geopolitics. But unlike economic ideologies, it is based on the thesis of geographic relief as destiny. Geography and space function in geopolitics in the same way that money and production relations do in Marxism and liberalism. All fundamental aspects of human existence are reduced to them. They serve as the basic method of interpreting the past, they act as the main factors of human existence, organizing every other aspect of existence around them. As with economic ideologies, geopolitics is based on proximity, on reductionism, the reduction of diverse manifestations of life to several parameters. But despite the inherent limitations in such theories, they have impressive ability to explain the past and utility in organizing the present and designing the future. If we continue the parallel with Marxism and classical bourgeois political economy, it can be said that like economic ideologies that affirm a special category of economic man, the homo economicus, geopolitics speaks of spatial man, predetermined by space, and its specific quality of relief and landscape. This conditionality is especially pronounced in large-scale social manifestations of a person in states, ethnic groups, cultures, and civilizations. The relation of the individual to the economy is evident in both small and large proportions. So economic determinism is understandable to both ordinary people and authorities, operating in all social categories. Perhaps for this reason, economic ideologies became so popular and carried out the mobilization function up to revolutions based on personal engagement in the ideology of many individual people. The main thesis of geopolitics is man's dependence on space, and it is seen only with some distance from the individual. For this reason and despite the prerequisites, geopolitics did not become an ideology proper, or more precisely, a mass ideology for the people. Its conclusions and methods, subjects of study and main theses are intelligible only to those social institutions that deal with large-scale problems and strategic planning, and understand global social and historical patterns. Space manifests itself in large quantities, and therefore geopolitics is intended for social groups dealing with generalized realities, countries and peoples. Geopolitics is the worldview of power and the science of power for power. Only as a person approaches the top of society does geopolitics begin to reveal its meaning and its usefulness. Until that point it is perceived as an abstraction. Geopolitics is the discipline of political elites, both current and alternative, and its whole history convincingly proves that it was dealt with exclusively by people who actively participate in the process of governing countries and nations, or are preparing for this role, or by alternative opposition ideological camps removed from power due to historical conditions. Without pretending scientific rigor, geopolitics at its own level determines what is of value and what is not. Humanities and natural sciences are involved only when they do not contradict the basic principles of geopolitical methods. Geopolitics, in a way, itself selects those sciences and those directions in science that seem useful to her, ignoring all the rest. In the modern world, it is a ruler's quick reference book, a textbook of power that provides a summary of what should be considered when making globally fateful decisions, such as making alliances, starting wars, implementing reforms, restructuring society and the introduction of large-scale economic and political sanctions. Geopolitics is the science of rule. Tellurocracy and thalassocracy The main law of geopolitics is the assertion of a fundamental dualism reflected in the geographical structure of the planet and in the historical typology of civilizations. This dualism is expressed in opposition of the land power of tellurocracy to the sea power of thalassocracy. The nature of such confrontation is exemplified in the opposition of the commercial civilizations of Carthage and Athens to the military-authoritarian civilizations of Rome and Sparta. In other terms it is a dualism between democracy and ideocracy. From the very beginning this dualism has the quality of hostility though the alternativeness of two its constituent poles, although the extent may vary from case to case. All the history of human societies is thus seen as consisting of the two elements of water, liquid and fluid and land, solid and permanent. Tellurocracy or land power is associated with the fixedness of space and stability of its qualitative orientations and characteristics. On the civilizational level, tellurocracy is embodied in thee settled way of life, the conservatism and in the strict legal standards to which large associations of people of the same kind, tribes, peoples, states and empires are organized. The firmness of land is culturally embodied in the firmness of ethics and sustainability of social traditions. Land and especially settled peoples alienate individualism and entrepreneurial spirit. They are characterized by collectivism and hierarchy. Thalasocracy, or sea power as a type of civilization is based on opposite parameters. This type is dynamic, mobile and prone to technical development. The priorities are nomadism, especially seafaring, trade, and the spirit of individual entrepreneurship. The individual is the most mobile part of the team and is elevated to the highest value, while ethical and legal standards blur and become relative and mobile. Thalasocracy quickly develops, actively evolves and easily changes external cultural features, keeping only the internal identity and the general attitude unchanged. Much of human history unfolds in a situation of limited scope. Both orientations can fall under the global dominance of tellurocracy. The earth element prevails over the entire ensemble of civilizations, and the ocean element acts only in fragments and sporadically. Dualism remains up to a certain point at geographically localized seashores, estuaries and river basins. It develops in different zones of the planet with different intensity and in different forms. The political history of the peoples of the earth demonstrates the gradual growth of the political into ever larger forms. This is how states and empires are born. This process at the geopolitical level means the strengthening of the space factor in human history. The nature of the major political entities of states and empires expresses the duality of the elements more impressively, reaching the level of more and more universal civilizational types. At a certain moment, which can be termed the ancient world, a rather stable picture emerged, reflected for example in Halford Mackinder's work. The tellurocracy zone is consistently identified with inland expanses of North-Eastern Eurasia, that in general coincide with the territories of tsarist Russia or the USSR. Thalassocracy becomes discernible in the coastal zones of the Eurasian continent, the Mediterranean area, The Atlantic Ocean and the seas washing Eurasia from the South and West. Three specific geopolitical features appear on the world map. The Inland spaces become a fixed platform, a heartland, earth of the core, the geographical axis of history, which steadily preserves the tellurocratic civilizational identity. Secondly, the Inner or continental crescent, coastal zone, or rimland represent a space of intensive cultural development. Here features of thalassocracy are obvious and they are balanced by many tellurocratic tendencies. And thirdly, the outer or insular crescent representing the uncharted lands, with which only sea communications are possible. Carthage and the commercial Phoenician civilization establish their influence on the internal crescent of Europe from the outside. This potential geopolitical picture of the relationship between thalassocracy and tellurocracy is revealed at the beginning of the Christian era, after the era of the Punic Wars. But it finally acquires meaning in the period of the formation of England as a great maritime power in the 17th and 19th centuries. The era of great geographical discoveries, which began at the end of the 15th century, led to the final formation of thalassocracy as an independent planetary formation, detached from Eurasia and its shores and completely concentrated in the Anglo-Saxon world of England, America and their colonies. The New Carthage of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and industrialism took shape, becoming unified and whole, and since that time geopolitical dualism has acquired a clearly distinguishable ideological and political form. The positional struggle of England with the continental powers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and Russia was the geopolitical content of the 18th and 19th centuries and the first half of the 20th century. Since the middle of the 20th century the USA has become the main stronghold of thalassocracy. In the cold war of 1946 to 1991, the age-old geopolitical dualism reached its maximum extent. Thalassocracy was identified with the USA, and tellurocracy with the USSR. The two global types of civilization, culture and meta-ideologies resulted in complete geopolitical contrast, which illustrated the entire geopolitical history of the opposition of the elements. At the same time, it is striking that these forms of finished geopolitical dualism at the ideological level corresponded to two equally synthetic realities, the ideology of Marxism and socialism and the ideology of liberal capitalism. In this case, we can talk about the implementation in practice of two types of reductionism. Economic reductionism was reduced to opposing the ideas of Smith and the ideas of Marx, and geopolitical to the division of all sectors of the planet into zones controlled by the thalassocracy of the New Carthage, the USA and tellurocracy of the New Rome, the USSR. The geopolitical vision of history is a model for the development of the planetary dualism to its maximum proportions. The original confrontation of Land and Sea spread all over the world. Human history is nothing but an absolute realization of this struggle. This is the most general expression of the main law of geopolitics, the law of elemental dualism of Land versus Sea. Geopolitical teleology Until the final US victory in the Cold War, geopolitical dualism developed within its initial framework. It was about acquiring the maximum spatial, strategic and power volume by thalassocracy and tellurocracy. In view of the build-up of nuclear potential by both sides, some pessimistic geopoliticians saw the outcome of this whole process as catastrophic. Having fully mastered the planet, the two powers had to either endure the confrontation outside the earth, the theory of star wars, or mutually destroy each other in nuclear Apocalypse. If it is obvious to this discipline that the nature of the main geopolitical process of history is the maximum spatial expansion of thalassocracy and tellurocracy, its outcome remains in question. Therefore, geopolitical teleology, or the comprehension of the purpose of history in geopolitical terms, comes only to the moment of globalization of dualism and stops there. Nevertheless, on a purely theoretical level, several hypothetical versions of the development of events can be singled out after which it will be possible to ascertain the victory of one of the two systems, tellurocracy or thalassocracy. The first option is that the victory of the thalassocracy completely nullifies the civilization of the tellurocracy. In this case, a homogeneous liberal-democratic order is established on the planet. Thalassocracy absolutizes its archetype and becomes the only system of organization of human life. This option has two advantages. First, it is logically consistent and can be seen as a natural completion of a general unidirectional flow of geopolitical history from complete domination of the traditional world to the complete dominance of the modern world. Secondly, this option actually occurs. The second option is that the victory of thalassocracy ends the cycle of confrontation between the two civilizations, but does not extend its model to the whole world, and simply completes the geopolitical history, canceling its problems. Just as post-industrial theories of society prove that the main contradictions of the classical political economy and Marxism will be removed from society, so some mondialist theories claim that in the world to come, the confrontation between Land and Sea will be completely removed. This is also the end of history, though the further development of events does not lend itself to such a strict analysis, as in the first option. Both of these analyzes view the defeat of tellurocracy as irreversible and accomplished fact. The other two options treat it differently. The third option is that the defeat of tellurocracy is a temporary phenomenon. Eurasia will return to its continental mission in a new form. This will take into account geopolitical factors that led to the catastrophe of the continentalist forces. The new continental block will have maritime borders in the South and in the West, becoming the Monroe doctrine for Eurasia. In this case, the world will return to bipolarity at another quality and another level. The fourth option is a development of the third. In this new confrontation tellurocracy wins. It seeks to transfer its own civilizational model for the whole planet and close the story on its chord. The whole world typologically will turn into land, and ideocracy will reign everywhere. The outcome of such ideas were anticipated in the World Revolution and the planetary domination of the Third Reich. Since in our time the role of the subjective and rational factor in the development of historical processes is greater than ever, then these four options should be considered not just as an abstract statement of the probable development of the geopolitical process, but also as active geopolitical positions that can become a guide to global action. Geopolitics cannot offer any deterministic outcome. Everything here comes down only to a set of possibilities, the implementation of which will depend on many factors that no longer fit within the framework of a purely geopolitical analysis. Rimland and the boundary zones The entire methodology of geopolitical research is based on the application of the principle of global geopolitical dualism of the Land and Sea to more local categories. When analyzing any situation, it is the planetary model that remains the main and fundamental. After highlighting the two main principles of thalassocracy and tellurocracy, the next most important principle is rimland, the coastal zone. This is the key category underlying geopolitical research. Rimland is a composite space that potentially carries the possibility of being a fragment of either thalassocracy or tellurocracy. This is the most complex and culturally rich region. The influence of the sea element, Water, provokes in the coastal zone active and dynamic development. The continental mass presses on this area, forcing reorganization. On the one hand, rimland passes into the Island and the ship. On the other hand, to the Empire and the House. Rimland is not limited however, to an intermediate and transitional environment in which counteraction of two impulses takes place. There is a very complex and independent logic influencing both thalassocracy and tellurocracy. It is not the object of history, but its active subject. The fight for rimland between thalassocracy and tellurocracy is not a rivalry for the possession of a simple strategic position. Rimland has its own destiny and its own historical will, which, however, cannot be resolved outside the basic geopolitical dualism. Rimland is largely free to choose, but not free in the structure of its choice, because there is no alternative to the thalassocratic or tellurocratic way. In connection with this quality, the inner crescent is often generally identified with the area of ​​distribution of human civilization. In the depths of the continent reigns conservatism, beyond its limits the challenge of mobile chaos. Coastal zones by their very position are faced with the need to give an answer to the problem presented by geography. Rimland is a border zone, a belt, a strip and it is also a borderline. Such a combination leads to a geopolitical definition of the frontier. Unlike borders between states, geopolitics understands this term differently, starting from the original model, in which the first boundary or archetype of all boundaries is the specific historical-geographical and cultural concept of rimland. The spatial volume of coastal zones is a consequence of looking at the mainland from the outside, on behalf of sea aliens. For the powers of the sea the coast is a strip extending inland. For the mainland itself the coast is the opposite. It is the limit, the line. The border as a line, as it is understood in international law as a rudiment of land jurisprudence, inherited by modern law from the most ancient traditions. This view is purely terrestrial. But the view of the sea, external to the mainland, sees coastal areas as potential colonies, like strips of land that can be torn off from the continental mass, turned into a base and incorporated into the strategic space. Wherein the coastal zone never becomes completely their own, they can sit if necessary on a ship and sail away to their homeland, to their island. The coast becomes a strip precisely due to the fact that it is unsafe for aliens from the sea to go deep into the interior of the continent, but only a certain distance. Since geopolitics combines both views of the space of the sea and land, then in geopolitics rimland is understood as a special reality, as a border-strip, and its qualitative volume depends on what momentum dominates in this sector, the land or the sea. The giant and quite navigable ocean coasts of India and China are lines, bands of minimum volume. The respective cultures are terrestrial in orientation, and the value of the coastlines tends to be zero, to become simply the end of the mainland. In Europe and especially in the Mediterranean coastal zones are broad bands extending far inland. Their volume is maximum. But in both cases, we are talking about a geopolitical border. Therefore this category is variable and depending on circumstances, it varies from strip to area. Geopolitics projects this approach onto the analysis of more particular problems related to borders. Geopolitics views the borders between states as zones of variable volume. This volume of its contraction or expansion depends on the total continental dynamics. Depending on it, these zones change shape and trajectory within given limits. The concept of a geopolitical border can include entire states. For example, the English idea of ​​a cordon sanitaire between Russia and Germany assumed the creation of a semi-colonial no man's zone that was oriented towards England and consisted of the Baltic and Eastern European states. On the contrary the continentalist policy of Russia and Germany tended to turn this zone into a line in the Brest-Litovsk, Rappalo, and the Ribbentrop-Molotov pacts. The Atlanticist thalassocrats sought to expand it as much as possible, creating an artificial padding of states. At the same time the thalassocracies of England and the USA used a double standard. The thalassocrats sought to reduce the borders of their own Islands to the line, and to expand the coastal zones of Eurasia as much as possible. The continentalist geopolitics used exactly the same principle in the opposite direction, with borders of Eurasia becoming lines and borders of America stripes. An analogy with the historical rimland as the cradle of civilization shows the utmost importance of border zones in more particular cases. Free from the need to bear the brunt of the geographical charge of history, border-zones quite often direct their energy into the cultural and intellectual spheres. The art of the geopolitical strategy is the skillful use of this geopolitical potential of the opposing sides. At the same time, it was the sea forces that mastered this to perfection, since their actions were always based on the principle of maximizing and increasing the use of colonized territories. This distinguished them from the land conquerors, who after the seizure of the territory immediately began to consider it their own, and consequently hurried to squeeze everything they could out of them. Geopolitics as destiny The laws of geopolitics are extremely convenient for the analysis of political history, diplomatic history and strategic planning. This science has many intersections with sociology, political science, ethnology, military strategy, diplomacy, history and religion. With occasional clarity it was also indirectly connected with the economy, such that some geopoliticians proposed to found a new science of geoeconomics. In any case, in some aspects of the geopolitical method a recourse to economic realities are necessary. At the moment, with the attraction of all types of sciences to synthesis, to fusion, to the creation new interscientific macrodisciplines and multidimensional models, geopolitics uncovers its importance both for purely theoretical research and for practical steps in management of complex civilizational processes from a planetary scale to the scale of individual states or blocs of states. This is the science of the future which soon will be taught not only in special institutions of higher education and academies, but also in simple schools. With the help of geopolitical analysis, it is easy to comprehend entire eras of the historical development of countries and peoples. With the expansion of information characteristic of our time the emergence and visualization of such simple reductionist methodologies is inevitable, since otherwise a person runs the risk of losing all reference points in the diverse and multidimensional chaos of a flow of heterogeneous knowledge. Geopolitics is an invaluable aid in matters of education. Its structure is such that it could become an axial discipline at a new stage in the development of education. At the same time, the role of geopolitics in the broad social sphere is becoming more and more obvious. The level of development of information and the active involvement of an ordinary person in events unfolding all over the continent, and the globalization of the media bring to the fore spatial thinking in geopolitical terms, which helps to sort peoples, states, regimes and religions according to a single simplified scale so that the meaning of even the most elementary television or radio news is at least roughly understandable. If we apply the simplest geopolitical grid of heartland, rimland or world Island to any message regarding international events, a certain clear interpretive model is immediately built, which does not require additional specialized knowledge. NATO expansion to the East with such approach means an increase in the volume of rimland in favor of thalassocracy. An agreement between Germany and France regarding the creation of special purely European armed forces means a step towards the creation of a continental tellurocratic structure. The conflict between Iraq and Kuwait illustrates the desire of the continental states to destroy the artificial thalassocratic formation that prevents direct control over the coastal zone. And finally a word about the influence of geopolitical methodology on the internal and external politics. If the geopolitical meaning of certain steps of political parties and movements, as well as power structures becomes obvious, it is easy to correlate them with the system of global interests and therefore, to decipher their far-reaching goals. For example, the integration of Russia with European countries and especially Germany is an advance for tellurocratic forces and Eurasians. From here one can automatically predict strengthening of ideocratic and socialist tendencies within these countries. Against this, a rapprochement between Moscow and Washington means submission to the thalassocratic line and with it inevitability a positional strengthening of market players. The patterns of internal geopolitics and internal political processes of separatism of peoples inside Russia, the bilateral or multilateral agreements of various administrative entities and regions between themselves can also be easily interpreted in exactly the same light. Each event in the light of geopolitics acquires a clear meaning. This geopolitical meaning cannot be regarded as the ultimo ratio of the event, but in any case, it always turns out to be eminently expressive and useful for analysis and forecasting. The absence today of any textbook on this topic has prompted us to writing and compiling this book, which is an introduction to geopolitics like a science. =========================================== PART ONE. The FOUNDING FATHERS OF GEOPOLITICS. Chapter 1. Friedrich Ratzel and States as Spatial Organisms. The Formation of the German organist school. Friedrich Ratzel, who lived from 1844 to 1904, can be considered the father of geopolitics. In his writings he used the term political geography, and his main work published in 1897, is titled Politische Geographie. Ratzel graduated from the Polytechnic University in Karlsruhe, where he took courses in geology, paleontology and zoology. He completed his education in Heidelberg, where he became a student of Professor Ernst Haeckel, who was the first to use the term ecology. Ratzel's worldview was based on evolutionism and Darwinism and colored by a pronounced interest in biology. Ratzel volunteered in the Franco Prussian war, where he received the Iron Cross for bravery. In 1876, Ratzel defended his thesis on Emigration in China, and in 1882 in Stuttgart published his fundamental work Anthropogeography, in which he formulated his main ideas: the connection of people’s evolution and demography with geographical data, and the influence of the terrain on cultural and of people’s political formation. But his most basic book was Political Geography. He became a teacher of geography in a technical Institute of Munich, and in 1886 transferred to a similar department in Leipzig. In politics, he gradually became a convinced nationalist, and in 1890 he joined the Pan-Germanist League of Karl Peters. He travelled extensively in Europe and America and added ethnological research to his scientific interests. States as living organisms. In this work, Ratzel shows that the soil is a fundamental, unchangeable axiom, around which the interests of peoples revolve. Historical movements are predetermined by soil and territory. What follows is the evolutionary conclusion that the state is a living organism, but an organism rooted in the soil. The state consists of the territorial relief and scale and their understanding of the people. Thus, the State reflects an objective geographical entity and the subjective nationwide understanding of this reality is expressed in politics. Ratzel considered a normal State to be one that most organically combines geographical, demographic and ethno-cultural parameters of the nation. He wrote that states at all stages of their development are regarded as organisms which by necessity retain their connection with their soil and must therefore be studied from a geographical point of view. As ethnography and history show, states develop on a spatial base, more and more mating and merging with it, extracting more and more energy from it. Thus, the states are spatial phenomena controlled and animated by this space; and geography should describe, compare and measure them. States fit into the series phenomena of the expansion of Life, being the highest point of these phenomena. From this organicist approach it is clear that the spatial expansion state is understood by Ratzel as a natural living process, similar to the growth of living organisms. Ratzel's organic approach is also reflected in relation to space or Raum itself. This space passes from the quantitative material category into a new quality, becoming a life sphere, living space or Lebensraum, a kind of geobioenvironment. Two other important terms follow from this. Ratzel‘s spatial meaning Raumsinn and vital energy Lebensenergie. These terms are close to each other and denote a certain special quality inherent in geographical systems and their predetermining political design in the history of peoples and states. These theses are the fundamental principles of geopolitics, in the form which it will develop somewhat later among the followers of Ratzel. Moreover, the attitude to the state as a living entity, an organism rooted in the soil, is the main idea and the axis of the geopolitical methodology. This approach is focused on the synthetic study of the entire complex of phenomena, regardless of whether they belong to the human or non-human realm. Space, like a concrete expression of nature or the environment, is seen as a continuous expansion of the inhabitant. The structure of the material itself dictates the proportions of the final work of art. In this sense, Ratzel is the direct heir to the entire school of German organic sociology, the most prominent representative of which was Ferdinand Tennis. Raum and the political organization of the soil How Ratzel saw the relationship between ethnos and space can be seen from the following fragment from his book Political Geography: The state is formed as an organism tied to a certain part of the surface land, and its characteristics develop from the characteristics of the people and the soil. The most important characteristics are size, location and boundaries, further followed by soil types along with vegetation, irrigation and finally relationships with other conglomerates of the earth's surface, preeminently with the adjacent seas and uninhabited lands, which, at first glance, do not represent a special political interest. The combination of all these characteristics constitutes a country, das land. But when they talk about our country, everything that man has created is added to this, and to earth-related memories. So initially a purely geographical concept turns into a spiritual and emotional connection between the inhabitants of the country and their history. The state is an organism not only because it articulates the life of the people on immovable ground, but because this connection is mutually reinforcing, becoming something unified and inconceivable without one of the two components. Uninhabited spaces, unable to feed the State, are an historical fallow field. Inhabited space, on the contrary, contributes to the development of the state, especially if it the space is surrounded by natural boundaries. If the people feel to be naturally on their own territory, they will constantly reproduce the same characteristics that originate in the soil and are inscribed in it. The law of expansion The attitude to the state as to a living organism implied the rejection of the concept of inviolability of borders. The state is born, grows and dies, like a living essence. Therefore, its spatial expansion and contraction are natural processes associated with its internal life cycle. In his book On the Laws of the Spatial Growth of States from 1901, Ratzel singled out seven expansion laws. One, the extent of States increases as their culture develops. Two, the spatial growth of the State is accompanied by other manifestations of its development. In the areas of ideology, production, commercial activity, powerful attractive radiation and proselytism. Three, the state expands, absorbing and absorbing the political units of smaller significance. Four, a frontier is an organ located on the periphery of a State, understood as an organism. Five, carrying out its spatial expansion, the State seeks to cover the most important regions for its development: coasts, river basins, valleys and in general all rich areas. Six, the initial impulse for expansion comes from outside, since the State is provoked to expand by a state or territory with a clearly inferior civilization. And seven, the general tendency to assimilate or absorb weaker nations pushes to an even greater increase in territories in a movement that fuels the State. It is not surprising that many critics reproached Ratzel for writing the Catechism for the imperialists. At the same time, Ratzel himself by no means sought to justify German imperialism, although he did not hide the fact that he adhered to nationalist beliefs. It was important for him to create a conceptual tool for an adequate understanding of the history of states and peoples in their relationship with space. In practice, he sought to awaken the Raumsinn or space of feeling in the leaders of Germany, for whom geographical data is most often a dry academic science were it is presented as pure abstraction. Weltmacht and the sea Ratzel was largely influenced by his acquaintance with North America, which he studied well and devoted two books to. These were the Maps of North American Cities and civilization which was published in 1874 and The United States of North America which was published from 1878 to 1880. He noticed that the sense of space among Americans was highly developed, since they were faced with the task of developing empty spaces, having significant political-geographical experience of European history. Hence, Americans meaningfully carried out what came to the Old World intuitively and gradually. So in Ratzel we are faced with the first formulations of another more important geopolitical concept, the concept of world power or Weltmacht. Ratzel noticed that large countries in their development have a tendency towards maximum geographical expansion, gradually reaching the planetary level. Consequently, sooner or later, geographical development must come to its own continental phase. Applying this principle drawn from the American experience of political and strategic unification of continental spaces to Germany, Ratzel predicted for her the fate of a continental power. He also anticipated another major topic of geopolitics, the importance of the sea for the development of civilization. In his book The Sea, the Source of the Power of Nations from 1900, he pointed to the need for every powerful nation to especially develop its naval forces, since this is required by the planetary scale of a full-fledged expansion. That which some peoples and states, for example England, Spain and Holland, carried out spontaneously, land powers, and Ratzel had in mind of course Germany, must do meaningfully. The development of the fleet was a necessary condition for approaching the status of world power. The sea and world power were already connected with Ratzel, although only with the work of later geopoliticians like Mahan, Mackinder, Haushofer and especially Schmitt did this theme acquire completeness and centrality. The works of Ratzel are the necessary basis for all geopolitical research. In a condensed form, his works contain almost all the main theses that form the basis of this science. The Swedish writer Rudolf Kjellen and the German Karl Haushofer based their concepts on Ratzel's books. His ideas influenced Vidal de la Blache in France, Mackinder in England, Mahan in America and the Eurasianists Savitsky, Gumilyov in Russia. It should be noted that Ratzel's political sympathies are not accidental. Almost all geopolitics were marked by a pronounced national feeling, regardless of whether it was clothed in the democratic Anglo-Saxon form of Mackinder and Mahan or the ideocratic form of Haushofer, Schmitt or the Eurasians. Chapter TWO. Rudolf Kjellen, Friedrich Naumann and Central Europe The definition of the new science The Swedish born Rudolf Kjellen lived from 1864 to 1922 and was the first to use the term geopolitics. Kjellen was a professor of history and political sciences at the Universities of Uppsala and Gothenburg. In addition, he actively participated in politics as a member of parliament and was characterized by a pronounced Germanophile orientation. Kjellen was not a professional geographer and considered geopolitics, the foundations of which he developed, starting from the works of Ratzel, whom he considered to be his teacher, as part of political science. Kjellen defined geopolitics with the quote: This is the science of the State as a geographical organism embodied in space. In addition to geopolitics, Kjellen proposed 4 more neologisms, which, in his opinion, were to form the main sections of political science. Ecopolitics, the study of the State as an economic force, demopolitics, the study of the dynamic impulses transmitted by the people State, an analogue of Ratzel’s term of Anthropogeography, sociopolitics, the study of the social aspect of the State, and kratopolitics the study of forms of government and power in relation to the problems of law and socio-economic factors. While all these disciplines which Kjellen developed in parallel with geopolitics did not receive wide acceptance, the term geopolitics has become firmly established itself in the most various circles. The state as a form of life and the interests of Germany In his main work, The State as a Form of Life published in 1916, Kjellen developed the postulates laid down in the work of Ratzel. Kjellen, like Ratzel, considered himself to be a follower of German organicism, which rejects the mechanistic approach to state and society. Rejection of the strict division of subjects of study into inanimate fixed objects of the background and human subjects as the actors is a distinctive feature of most geopolitics. This is this sense of the very name of Kjellen‘s main work. Kjellen developed the geopolitical principles of Ratzel in relation to a specific historical situation in contemporary Europe. He brought to its logical conclusion Ratzel's ideas about the continental state in relation to Germany. And he showed that in the context of Europe, Germany is a space that has axial dynamism and is called upon to restructure the rest of the European powers around itself. Kjellen interpreted World War I as a natural geopolitical conflict that arose between the dynamic expansion of the German axis and the opposing peripheral European and non-European states of the Entente. The difference in geopolitical dynamics of growth, downward for France and England and upward for Germany predetermined the main alignment of forces. However, from his point of view, the geopolitical identification of Germany with Europe is inevitable and inescapable, despite temporary defeat in the First World War. Kjellen secured the geopolitical maxim outlined by Ratzel, that the interests of Germany equal the interests of Europe and are opposed to the interests of the Western European powers, especially France and England. But Germany is a young state, and the Germans are a young people. This idea of young peoples, which Russians and Germans were considered to be, goes back to Dostoevsky, and was not once quoted by Kjellen. Young Germans, inspired by the Central European space should move towards a continental state on the planetary scale because of the territories controlled by the old peoples, the French and the English. At the same time, the ideological aspect of the geopolitical confrontation was considered minor by Kjellen. Towards the concept of Central Europe Although Kjellen himself was a Swede and insisted on the convergence of Swedish politics with German, his geopolitical ideas about an independent integrated meaning of the German space exactly coincide with the theory of Central Europe, or Mitteleuropa developed by Friedrich Naumann. In his book Mitteleuropa from 1915, Naumann gave a geopolitical diagnosis, identical to the concept of Rudolf Kjellen. From his point of view, in order to compete with such organized geopolitical entities like England and its colonies, the USA and Russia, the peoples inhabiting Central Europe should unite and organize a new integrated political and economic space. The axis of such a space will, of course, be the Germans. Mitteleuropa, in contrast to pure Pan-German projects, was no longer national, but purely a geopolitical concept, in which the main meaning was given not to ethnic unity, but to a common geographical destiny. Project Naumann meant the integration of Germany, Austria and the Danubian states and, in distant perspective, France. The geopolitical project was also confirmed by cultural parallels. Germany identified itself with the spiritual concept of Mittellage, or the middle position. Arndt formulated this back in 1818: God placed us in the center Europe; we the Germans are the heart of our part of the world. Through Kjellen and Naumann, Ratzel's continental ideas gradually acquired tangible features. Chapter Three. Halford Mackinder and the Geographical Axis of History. Scientist and politician Sir Halford J. Mackinder lived from 1861 to 1947 and is the brightest figure among geopolitics. Trained in geography, he taught at Oxford from 1887, until he was appointed director of the London School of Economics. From 1910 to 1922 he was a member of the House of Commons, and in the interval from 1919 to 1920 the British envoy to Southern Russia. Mackinder is known for his high position in the world of English politics, the international orientations of which he very significantly influenced, as well as the fact that he owns the most daring and revolutionary scheme for the interpretation of the political history of the world. The example of Mackinder most clearly manifests a typical paradox inherent in geopolitics as a discipline. Mackinder's ideas were not accepted by the scientific community, despite his high position not only in politics, but also in the scientific community itself. Even the fact that for almost half a century he actively and successfully participated in the creation of English strategy in international affairs on the basis of his interpretation of the political and geographical history of the world, he could not force skeptics to recognize the value and effectiveness of geopolitics as a discipline. The Geographic axis of history Mackinder's first and most striking speech was his report the Geographical Pivot of history, published in 1904 in the Geographical Journal. In it he outlined the basis of his vision of history and geography and developed it in further works. Mackinder’s text can be considered the main geopolitical text in the history of this discipline, since it not only generalizes all previous lines of development of political geography, but the basic law of this science is formulated. Mackinder argues that for the State, the most advantageous geographic position would be the middle or center position. Centrality is conceptually relative and may vary in any particular geographical context. But from a planetary point of view, at the center of the world lies the Eurasian continent, and in its center is the heart of the world or the heartland. The heartland is a concentration of the continental masses of Eurasia. This is the most favorable geographical base to control the whole world. Heartland is a key territory in a more general context within the World Island. The World Island of Mackinder includes the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe. Thus, Mackinder hierarchizes planetary space through the system of concentric circles. In the very center is the geographical axis of history or axial area or pivot area. This geopolitical concept is geographically identical to Russia. The axial reality is called the heartland, the earth of the core. Next comes the inner or marginal crescent. This is the belt coinciding with the coastal spaces of the Eurasian continent. According to Mackinder, the inner crescent is the zone of the most intense development of civilization. This is consistent with the historical hypothesis that civilization originally arose on the banks of rivers or seas, the so-called potamic theory. Note that the latter theory is an essential element of all geopolitical structures. The intersection of water and land spaces is a key factor in the history of peoples and states. This topic will be specially developed by Schmitt and Speakman, however, Mackinder was the first to derive this geopolitical formula. Next comes a more outer circle, the outer or insular crescent. This zone is entirely external, both geographically and culturally with respect to the mainland mass of the World Island. Mackinder believed that the entire course of history is determined by the following processes. From the center of the heartland to its periphery is a constant pressure of the so-called barbarians. This was especially clearly and fully reflected in the Mongol conquests. But they were preceded by the Scythians, Huns, Alans and other civilizations stemming from the geographical axis of history, from the innermost spaces of the heartland. These have, according to Mackinder, an authoritarian, hierarchical, undemocratic and non-commercial character. In the ancient world, this is embodied in a society similar to Dorian Sparta or to Ancient Rome. From the outside from the regions of the island crescent to the World Island, pressure is applied by so-called robbers of the sea or island dwellers. These are colonial expeditions stemming from a non-Eurasian center seeking to balance terrestrial impulses emanating from the interior of the continent. Civilizations of the outer crescent are characterized by a commercial character and democratic forms of politics. In ancient times, this was the distinguishing characteristic of Athens or Carthage. Between these two polar civilizational-geographic impulses there is a zone of the inner crescent, which, being dual and constantly experiencing opposing cultural influences, was the most mobile and has become, thanks to this, a place of priority in the development of civilization. According to Mackinder history geographically revolves around the continental axis. This history is most clearly felt precisely in the space of the inner crescent, while frozen archaism reigns in the heartland, and in the outer crescent there is a certain civilizational chaos. Russia's key position Mackinder himself identified his interests with those of the Anglo-Saxon insular peace, i.e. with the position of the outer crescent. In such a situation, the basis of the geopolitical orientation of the island world he saw was the maximum weakening of the heartland and the maximum possible expansion of the influence of the outer crescent on the internal crescent. Mackinder emphasized the strategic priority of the geographical axis of history in all world politics and thus formulated the most important geopolitical law in his book Democratic ideals and reality, published in1919: He who controls Eastern Europe dominates the heartland; he who dominates the heartland, dominates the World Island; one who dominates the World Island, dominates the world. At the political level, this meant recognition of the leading role of Russia in the strategic sense. In the Geographical axis of history, Mackinder wrote that: Russia occupies in the whole world as central a strategic position as Germany does in relation to Europe. It can carry out attacks in all directions and is exposed to them from all directions except the north. Full development of its railway opportunities is a matter of time. Proceeding from this, Mackinder believed that the main task of Anglo-Saxon geopolitics is to prevent the formation of a strategic continental union around the geographical axis of history, meaning Russia. Consequently, the strategy of the forces of the external crescent must be to tear off the maximum number of coastal spaces from the heartland and put them under the influence of the island civilization. The shift in the balance of power towards the pivot state of Russia, accompanied by its expansion into the peripheral spaces of Eurasia, will allow use of huge continental resources to create a powerful navy: so close to the world empire. This will be possible if Russia unites with Germany. The threat of such a development will force France to enter into an alliance with overseas powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea will become coastal bases, where flotillas of external powers will moor to disperse the forces of the axial area over all directions and prevent them from concentrating all their efforts on building a powerful navy. The most interesting thing is that Mackinder did not just build theoretical hypotheses, but actively participated in the organization of international support for the Entente white movement, which he considered an Atlanticist trend aimed at weakening the power of pro-German Eurasian Bolsheviks. He personally advised the leaders of the white cause, trying to get the maximum support from the government of England. It seemed that he prophetically foresaw not only the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, but also the Ribbentrop- Molotov Pact. In his book Democratic Ideals and Reality from 1919, he wrote: What will become of the forces of the sea if one day the great continent unites politically, to become the backbone of an invincible armada? It is not difficult to understand what exactly Mackinder put into Anglo-Saxon geopolitics, which became the geopolitics of the United States and the North Atlantic Alliance half a century later. The main tendency, by any means to prevent the very possibility of creating the Eurasian bloc, the creation of a strategic alliance between Russia and Germany, geopolitical strengthening of the heartland and its expansion. The persistent Russophobia of the West in the 20th century has not so much an ideological as a geopolitical character. Though, given Mackinder's connection between civilizational type and the geopolitical nature of certain forces, one can obtain a formula according to which geopolitical terms are easily translated into ideological terms. The Outer Crescent represents liberal democracy, the geographical axis of history is undemocratic authoritarianism and the inner crescent, is an intermediate model, a combination of both ideological systems. Mackinder participated in the preparation of the Treaty of Versailles, whose main geopolitical idea reflects the essence of Mackinder's views. This agreement was drawn up in such a way to secure for Western Europe the nature of a coastal base for naval forces of the Anglo-Saxon world. At the same time, he envisaged the creation of limitrophic states that would separate the Germans and Slavs, in every possible way preventing the conclusion between them of a continental strategic alliance, so dangerous for the island powers and, accordingly, democracy. It is very important to trace the evolution of the geographic limits of the heartland in Mackinder’s writing. In the 1904 article the Geographical axis history and in the 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality, his outlines of the heartland coincided in general terms with the borders of the Russian Empire, and later the USSR. Later in 1943 in the text The Round Planet and the Conquest of the World, he revised his previous views and withdrew from the heartland the Soviet territories of Eastern Siberia, located beyond the Yenisei. He called this sparsely populated Soviet territory Russian Lenaland after the name of the Lena River. Russian Lenaland has 9 million inhabitants, 5 of which live along the transcontinental railway from Irkutsk to Vladivostok. For the rest, less than one person lives per 8 square kilometers. The natural wealth of this land of wood and minerals, is practically untouched. The removal of the so-called Lenaland from the geographic boundaries of the heartland meant the possibility of considering this territory as an inner crescent zone, or a coastal space that could be used by the island powers to fight against the geographical axis of history. Mackinder, who was actively involved in organization of the intervention of the Entente and the white movement, apparently considered the historical precedent of Kolchak, who resisted the Eurasian center, as sufficient reason for consideration of the territories under its control as a potential coastal zones. Three geopolitical periods Mackinder divides the entire geopolitical history of the world into three stages: One, the pre-Columbian era. In it, the peoples belonging to the periphery of the World Island, the Romans, for example, live under the constant threat of conquest from the forces of the heart land. For the Romans, these were the Germans, Huns, Alans, Parthians, etc. For the medieval ecumene, the golden horde. Two, the Columbus era. During this period, representatives of the inner crescent coastal zones are sent to conquer the unknown territories of the planet, not encountering serious resistance. And three, the Post-Columbian era. Unconquered lands no longer exist. The dynamic pulsations of civilizations are doomed to collide, enticing peoples land into a universal civil war. This periodization of Mackinder with the corresponding geopolitical transformations brings us close to the latest trends in geopolitics, which we will look at in other parts of this book. Chapter Four. Alfred Mahan and Sea Power. Sea power The American Alfred Mahan lived from 1840 to 1914 and in contrast to Ratzel, Kjellen and Mackinder, was not a scientist, but a military man. He did not use the term geopolitics, but his methodology, analysis and the main conclusions exactly correspond to a purely geopolitical approach. An officer of the United States Navy, he taught from 1885 the History of the Navy at the Naval War College in New Port Rhode Island. In 1890 he published his first book that was titled Nava

Welcome to the Dalek Channel. Today we are pleased to present a short precis of the fourth political theory by Alexander Dugin. ======================== This is not an endorsement, merely an attempt at a faithful abbreviation ======================== When the notions of Right and Left have become politically meaningless, in the West as much as everywhere else in the world; when liberals and libertarians agree on the essentials; when the three grand political theories of the Twentieth century — capitalism, Communism and fascism — have ultimately proven incapable of governing peoples peaceably, what is left to do? According to Alexander Dugin, a teacher of sociology and geopolitics at the renowned Lermontov University of Moscow, and one of the most influential intellectuals in Russia, only one, radical solution remains: to devise a different approach, a Fourth Political Theory. According to Dugin, the primary target must be Western postmodernism: we must wage war upon this thalassocratic Empire — a morbid blend of the society of the spectacle and consumer culture — and its plan for ultimate world domination. In today’s world, politics appears to be a thing of the past, at least as we used to know it. Liberalism persistently fought against those of its political enemies which had offered alternative systems; that is, conservatism, monarchism, traditionalism, fascism, socialism, and Communism, and finally, by the end of the Twentieth century, had defeated them all. The three main ideologies of the Twentieth century were liberalism, Communism and fascism Liberalism had been an ideology from the start. It was not as dogmatic as Marxism, but was no less philosophical, graceful, and refined. The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any membership. Having triumphed, liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity — into postliberalism. The Fourth Political Theory will not simply be handed to us without any effort. It may or may not emerge. The prerequisite for its appearance is dissent. The Fourth Political Theory cannot be the continuation of either the second political theory or the third. The end of fascism, much like the end of Communism, was not just an accidental misunderstanding, but the expression of a rather lucid historical logic. The Fourth Political Theory is a ‘crusade’ against postmodernity, the post-industrial society, liberal thought realised in practice, and globalisation, as well as its logistical and technological bases. The second and third political theories are unacceptable as starting points for resisting liberalism, particularly because of the way in which they understood themselves, what they appealed to, and how they operated. Tradition religion, hierarchy, and family and its values were overthrown at the dawn of modernity. If modernism is exhausted in postmodernity then the period of direct theomachy comes to an end along with it. Following the logic of postliberalism, this will likely lead to the creation of a new global pseudo-religion, based on scraps of disparate syncretic cults, rampant chaotic ecumenism, and tolerance. Thus, the Fourth Political Theory may easily turn toward everything that preceded modernity in order to draw its inspiration. If we reject the idea of progress that is inherent in modernity, which as we have seen, has ended, then all that is ancient gains value and credibility for us simply by virtue of the fact that it is ancient. The old alternatives to liberalism — Communism and fascism — were overcome by history and discarded, each in its own way, and have demonstrated their ineffectiveness and incompetence. Therefore, the search for an alternative to liberalism must look somewhere else. The area to be searched is designated as the domain of the Fourth Political Theory. What the Fourth Political Theory is, in terms of what it opposes, is now clear. It is neither fascism, nor Communism, nor liberalism. In each of the three ideologies there is a clearly defined historical subject. In liberal ideology, the historical subject is the individual. The historical subject of the second political theory is class. Exploited classes are the core of the Communists’ dramatic vision of history And, finally, the subject of the third political theory is either the State, as in Italian Fascism or race, as in German National Socialism. The definition of a historical subject is the fundamental basis for political ideology in general, and defines its structure. Therefore, in this matter, the Fourth Political Theory may act in the most radical way by rejecting all of these constructions as candidates for a historical subject. The historical subject is neither an individual, nor class, nor the state, nor race. This is the anthropological and the historical axiom of the Fourth Political Theory. Undoubtedly racist is the idea of unipolar globalisation. It is based on the idea that the history and values of Western, and especially American, society are equivalent to universal laws, and artificially tries to construct a global society based on what are actually local and historically specific values. First and foremost, the Communist theories regarding historical materialism and the notion of unidirectional progress are inapplicable to our purposes. Materialist reductionism and economic determinism comprise the most repulsive aspect of Marxism. Marxism is often correct when it describes its enemy, especially the bourgeoisie. However, its own attempts to understand itself lead to failure. It eventually collapsed even in those places where it had triumphed. In the end, European revolutionary Communists turned into petty-bourgeois clowns, entertaining the bored and jaded democratic public. Liberalism as a whole rests on the individual as its most basic component. It is these individuals, collectively but in isolation from one another, that are taken as the whole The neuroses and fears located at the pathogenic core of liberal philosophy are clearly seen in The Open Society and its Enemies, a classic of neo-liberalism by Karl Popper. Freedom is the greatest value of the Fourth Political Theory, since it coincides with its centre and its dynamic, energetic core. The freedom of an individual is a prison. In order to attain true freedom, we must go beyond the limits of the individual. This is the flip side of liberalism: at its core, it is totalitarian and intolerant of differences, and most especially opposed to the realisation of a great will. It is only prepared to tolerate small people; it protects not so much the rights of man, but, rather, the rights of a small man. Unlike other political theories, the Fourth Political Theory does not want to lie, soothe, or seduce. It summons us to live dangerously, to think riskily, to liberate and to release all those things that cannot be driven back inside. The Fourth Political Theory trusts the fate of Being, and entrusts fate to Being. The idea of modernisation is based on the idea of progress. An animalistic form of aggression is embedded in the liberal idea of progress, which is regarded as the main trajectory of social development. If we understand modernisation like liberal democrats, then that means that we are invited to join in this terrible struggle for survival at its greatest intensity, and to become just like them, trying to grab a place at the trough of globalisation. In Communism, the idea of unidirectional progress is also present. Once again, we see Darwinism in Marxism, including the full acceptance of evolutionary ideas and its belief in the miraculous power of scientific progress and technological improvement. In one way or another, all three ideologies originate from the same trend: the idea of growth, development, progress, evolution, and of the constant, cumulative improvement of society. All the processes which accumulate only one particular thing, or emphasise only one particular trait, result in death. Monotonic processes do not exist in any biological species, from cells to the most complex organisms. In our society today we see an unprecedented level of technological progress along with unbelievable moral degradation. The Fourth Political Theory must take a step toward the formulation of a coherent critique of the monotonic process. Three political theories have been produced from the ideology of modernity. The Fourth Political Theory is an unmodern theory. The Fourth Political Theory is not an invitation to a return to traditional society; i.e., it is not conservatism in the conventional sense. The New World Order as a concept was popularised at a concrete historical moment — namely, when the Cold War ended in the late 1980s. The US is now undergoing a test of its global imperial rule and has to deal with many challenges, some of them quite new and original. This US-centric global geopolitical arrangement can be described on several different levels: Historically: The USA considers itself to be the logical conclusion and peak of Western civilisation. The peak of the political thought of modernity was the victory of liberalism over the alternative political doctrines of modernity. Ideologically: There is a tendency for the US to increasingly link ideology and politics in their relations with the periphery. Economically: The US economy is challenged by Chinese growth, energy security and scarcity, crippling debt and budget deficits. The vision of a single open and, by necessity, largely homogenous society encompassing the Earth is so fantastic and utopian that it is much easier to imagine the total chaos of Hobbes’ war of all against all. There are secondary and tertiary actors that are inevitable losers in the case of the success of the American strategies. The first category is composed by the more or less successful nation-states that are not happy to lose their independence to a supranational exterior authority. The second category of actors who reject the transition consists of sub-national groups, movements, and organisations that oppose American dominance of the structures of the global geopolitical arrangement for ideological, religious, and/or cultural reasons. The paradox is that in the process of globalisation, which aims to universalise and make uniform all particularities and collective identities on the basis of a purely individual identity, such sub-national actors easily become transnational — the same religions and ideologies often being present in different nations and across state borders. The pole of a unipolar world is nothing other than the United States and Europe, as a purely geopolitical organisation, and specifically the idea of maximal freedom. Incidentally, emerging from that same liberal thesis which contends that man is free, it follows that he is always free to say ‘no’, to say this to whomever he will. This, in fact, constitutes the dangerous moment of the philosophy of freedom, which under the aegis of absolute freedom begins to remove the freedom to say ‘no’ to freedom itself. There is, nevertheless, the ontological possibility of saying ‘no’. And from this begins conservatism. The first approach is so-called traditionalism. Conservatism could well be traditionalism. There is also fundamental conservatism in our society. The Islamic project is fundamental conservatism. In fundamental conservatism, the renunciation of modernity has a perfectly rational and systematic form. There is a second type of conservatism, which we have called status-quo or liberal conservatism. Liberal conservatives are distinguished by the following qualitative structural characteristics: agreement with the general trends of modernity, but disagreement with its more avant-garde manifestations, which seem excessively dangerous and unhealthy. There exists yet a third kind of conservatism. The peak of degeneration, from the point of view of Conservative Revolutionaries, is modernity. Conservative Revolutionaries want not only to slow time down, like the liberal conservatives, or to return to the past like traditionalists, but to pull out from the structure of the world the roots of evil, to abolish time as a destructive quality of reality, and in so doing fulfilling some kind of secret, parallel, non-evident intention of the Deity itself. The term civilisation received wide circulation in the epoch of the rapid development of the theory of progress. Faith in the progressive development of history, in the universality of the human path according to a common logic of development from savagery to civilisation, was the distinguishing feature of the Nineteenth century. The main characteristic of civilisation is often thought to be an inclusive universality; that is, the theoretical openness of the civilisational code for those who would like to join it from without. Big and developed collectives of people, united in a civilisation, in essence simply repeat, on a different level, the archetypes of the behaviour and moral systems of savages. Opposition to globalism, which announces itself ever more loudly on all levels and in all corners of the planet, has not yet formed into a concrete system of views. National governments, as a rule, do not have enough of a scope to throw down a challenge to the highly developed technological might of the West. After Carl Schmitt, it is customary in political science to call analogical projects of integration large spaces. The creation of a European Union shows that the embodiment of the large space in practice, the transition from a government to a supra-governmental establishment. Huntington separates out the following. Western, Chinese, Japanese Islamic Indian Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African civilisations. Despite the deep and sure observations of its own best intellectuals, many representatives of the political establishment of the USA continue as before to use the term civilisation in a singular sense, understanding by it American civilisation. From the position of today’s historical experience, one can identify three foundational directions in Leftist political philosophy, The Old Left, Left Nationalists and the New Left. The adherents of this persuasion almost always relate only with distrust to other anti-liberal theories, and are typically closed to dialogue and are degenerating into a sect.’ National Communists themselves reckon themselves as being simply Communists and Orthodox Marxists, strictly following the teachings of the Communist classics. The phrase Leftist project more than anything today fits the New Left or postmodernists. The New Leftists doubt the structure of reason, they contest the basis of our conception of reality, disrobe positive science as a mystification and dictatorship of the academic circles and sharply criticise the concept of man as a totalitarian abstraction. Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy and ideology, embodying in itself the most important force-lines of the modern age and of the epoch of modernity: The understanding of the individual as the measure of all things; Belief in the sacred character of private property; The assertion of the equality of opportunity as the moral law of society; Belief in the ‘contractual’ basis of all sociopolitical institutions, including governmental; The abolition of any governmental, religious and social authorities who lay claim to ‘the common truth’; The separation of powers and the making of social systems of control over any government institution whatsoever; The creation of a civil society without races, peoples and religions in place of traditional governments; The dominance of market relations over other forms of politics (the thesis: ‘economics is fate’); Certainty that the historical path of Western peoples and countries is a universal model of development and progress for the entire world, which must, in an imperative order, be taken as the standard and pattern. Liberals go rather far, repudiating practically all sociopolitical institutions, right up to the family and sexual differentiation. In extreme cases, liberals support not only the freedom of abortions, but even the freedom from sexual differentiation. Exactly on the strength of the fact that the USSR lost and fell apart, it became obvious that historical right was on the side of the liberals. In this situation the USA, as the citadel of world liberalism, took on a new quality. From this time on, it became not only one of two superpowers, but the single planetary hero, suddenly pulling away from its rivals. After defeating its rivals, liberalism brought back a monopoly on ideological thinking; it became the sole ideology, not allowing any other alongside itself. The usual phenomenon now is the loss of identity, and already not simply only national or cultural identity, but even sexual, and soon enough even human identity. Liberalism is an absolute evil; not only in its factual embodiment, but also in its fundamental theoretical presuppositions. Consciousness of time is necessary to hide the present, which is the traumatic experience of the self-referential nature of pure consciousness. Without self-referential consciousness, there can be no time. When we understand history and its logic well, we can easily guess what will follow, what is going to happen, and which note should come next. The histories of different societies are different. The future is being made now. It is doubtful that one society is capable of comprehending another society at the same level as it is comprehended by its own members. The attempt to abdicate this history in favour of pure universalism and in favour of meta-culture and meta-language is doomed. Globalisation is equivalent to the end of history. Both go hand-in-hand. They are semantically linked. Different societies have different histories. That means different futures. What man is, is derived not from himself as an individual, but from politics. It is politics, being the dispositive of violence and legitimate power, that defines the man. At this stage we are able to single out completely new symptoms of the type of man constituted by the politics of postmodernity: depolitisation, autonomisation, microscopisation, and sub- and transhumanisation. In the end, all forms of vertical symmetry the orientation of a top to bottom hierarchy are subject to destruction, and everything becomes horizontal. The entirety of the Twentieth century was filled with political soldiers killing each other for their beliefs. The liberals’ fears, taking the form of fascists, is a complete parody. The late Communists were already pseudo-political soldiers. At least our liberals, who are not really liberals at all, demonstrate this: give them some money, and they will declare anything and everything. The adherents of the Fourth Political Theory are in need of a plan. What is Fourth Political Practice? It is contemplation. What is the manifestation of the Fourth Political Practice? It is a principle to be revealed. It is acceptable to consider ‘a gender’ in sociological terms, in other words, gender as a socially-constructed phenomenon. This is in contrast to the anatomical ‘sex’ inherent in biological terms. Liberal feminism, or the aspiration to give women freedom, means to identify a woman as a man and thus equalise them socio-politically, that is, represent a woman as a man socially. The current world is unipolar, with the global West as its centre and with the United States as its core. When there is only one power which decides who is right and who is wrong, and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship. If we free socialism from its materialist, atheistic and modernist features, and if we reject the racist and narrow nationalist aspects of the Third Way doctrines, we arrive at a completely new kind of political ideology. We call it the Fourth Political Theory, or 4PT, the first being liberalism, that we essentially challenge; the second being the classical form of Communism; and the third being National Socialism and fascism. But there are some who think otherwise. Who are aligned against such a project? Those who want to impose uniformity, the one (American) way of life, One World. And their methods are force, temptation, and persuasion. They are against multipolarity. So they are against us. ============= https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15785079-the-fourth-political-theory #DNN DNN #Dalek Dalek #PukeOnAPlate PukeOnAPlate #Dugin Dugin

Welcome to the Dalek Channel, Thank you for watching. Today we are pleased to present a precis of Gary Kasparov’s book "Winter is Coming" published in two thousand and fifteen. ========================= This is not an endorsement or a criticism, merely an attempt at an abridgement. ========================= In nineteen eighty seven, Gorbachev said he wanted to build Alexander Dubcek’s “socialism with a human face,” to which I responded that Frankenstein’s monster also had a human face. Communism goes against human nature and can only be sustained by totalitarian repression. Without outside assistance, or massive amounts of natural resources like oil, repression leads to economic stagnation. Then there is the moral and spiritual stagnation of a society were individual success and excellence are all but forbidden. Well before the Wall came down, it was clear to many of us on the “wrong” side of the Iron Curtain that major changes were inevitable. On March 26, nineteen eighty nine, the USSR held its first real election since its formation. Among the independent insurgents was Boris Yeltsin, who won the Moscow district overwhelmingly over Gorbachev’s candidate. Putin and other ex-Soviet autocracies view what happened in Gorbachev’s regime as a negative case study. The color revolutions associated with the pro-democracy Rose movements in Georgia in two thousand and three and Orange in the Ukraine in two thousand and four also provoke fear among the autocrats. But it is the Soviet experience that truly scarred Putin and the rest and that continues to shape their worldview and their behavior. It is much harder to maintain stoicism in the face of adversity when you find out your neighbors are doing much better than you are. Everyone has the same kind of normal human aspirations. There were plenty of myths and misunderstandings about the dissolution of the USSR. The danger of hardliners kicking out Gorbachev or the Communists coming back and beating Yeltsin was considered too great. The brief August nineteen ninety one coup by hardliners against Gorbachev, whether it was real or of Gorbachev’s own desperate orchestration, resulted in an immediate bump in American aid. Ironically, the roots of Russia’s descent back into totalitarianism can be traced to the West doing too much to respect the legacy of the USSR as a great power, not too little. This sentiment, feeling like losers, was a consequence of failing to move on from the nation that vanished under our feet. The USSR lost the Cold War, but it was a victory not just for the United States and the West, but for Russians and all Soviet citizens and everyone living behind the Iron Curtain. This left Russia and other former Soviet states vulnerable to the humiliation myth and to men like Putin eager to exploit it. Many today seem to have forgotten that the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Soviet Union were distinct events. The transformation was remarkably peaceful, with the notable exception of the execution of vile Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who had ordered his troops to fire on anti-government protestors and where an estimated eleven hundred people were killed during the violence. With enough problems already stemming from the nineteen eighty nine revolutions, NATO and the Western powers were happy to ignore the initial phases of the Yugoslav wars as internal problems. Communism is like an autoimmune disorder; it doesn’t do the killing itself, but it weakens the system so much that the victim is left helpless and unable to fight off anything else. It destroys the human spirit on an individual level, perverting the values of a successful free society. In nineteen ninety two, the US economy of 6.5 trillion was nearly double Japan’s, triple Germany’s, and thirteen times larger than China’s. Bush did speak boldly and eloquently on the importance of American leadership, however. If the United States does not lead, there will be no leadership. It is our great challenge to learn from this bloodiest century in history. If we fail to live up to our responsibilities we will one day pay the highest price once again for our neglect and shortsightedness. But Bush showed that rote support for UN policy meant more to him than saving tens of thousands of lives, and more than presenting a strong stance against aggression. By the time NATO finally intervened militarily over two years later in the first combat action in its history, an estimated 140,000 people were dead and millions of people had been displaced. Seventy-nine days after the NATO air campaign began, Serb forces withdrew from Kosovo and nearly a million people were able to return to their homes. Once again the seasons are changing and new threats have been allowed to flourish and to escape their borders. Most European nations are largely populated by the ethnic groups that have been there for centuries. Soviet propaganda was also expert in what-about-ism. What about how you Americans treated the Native Americans and the slaves? The United States is called a melting pot or a salad bowl. The Soviet Union was a very different creation, and food metaphors fall short. The total failure of the USSR to move beyond that legacy of invasion and repression in seventy long years was clearly reflected by the eagerness with which the various republics detached from the rotting head of the Kremlin as soon as they had a chance. Most people today have heard of Chechnya, and always for negative reasons. Letting Chechnya and its ultraviolent neighbors become independent was never going to appeal to Russian leaders. Dealing with a failed Russian state was bad. Dealing with a failed neighboring country was much worse. Instead of tying foreign aid and foreign policy to the immoral slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, Clinton expressed concerns, made vague remarks and called it an internal affair. Nineteen ninety-four was the year the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the UK all signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Ukraine was giving up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world under heavy pressure from Russia and the United States. There were no means of enforcement in the memo and the only promised response is to seek UN Security Council action if Ukraine should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used. The United States looked all powerful at the end of the Cold War, like the Wizard of Oz before the curtain was pulled back. By nineteen ninety nine, when Clinton finally got it right in Kosovo, the curtain had been pulled back, torn down, and burned in effigy. As convenient as it would be to put all the blame for the collapse of Russian democracy on Putin, the truth is more complicated. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, compromises on principles are the streetlights. Here is where we come to one of the most difficult concepts to explain to outsiders about the Russian rejection of democracy. So when we happily mobbed the polls in 1991 to vote for Yeltsin the first time it was as if many Russians expected the ballot boxes to operate like ATMs: put your ballot in and money will come out! And yet the lesson of 1996 is that institutions must matter more than the man. The Yeltsin campaign undermined nearly every aspect of a democratic society and it never recovered. The pro-democracy sit-in protests in Hong Kong that started in September two thousand and fourteen led to speculation about why such an Occupy-style movement has so far failed to materialize against the dictatorship of Vladimir Putin in Russia. A Tiananmen massacre in Hong Kong, transmitted around the world on millions of Chinese-made iPhones, could make Made in China into a bloody mark. Putin, on the other hand, has no use for the people of Russia, especially its young and educated people. China and Russia have similar social compacts with their dictatorial governments: economic stability in exchange for their citizens’ human rights. There were two wars in Europe in nineteen ninety nine, both sequels to wars that had concluded just a few years earlier. Kosovo also demonstrated that the United Nations in its current form was, and is, irrelevant when it comes to solving such crises. Had the Western powers been firm about Russia’s true status and used that as leverage to encourage transparency and reform, we would all be much better off today. The UN’s goal of freezing the status quo between two nuclear superpowers was obsolete. The type of evil Milosevic represented has always been difficult to understand. He was urbane, intelligent, and able to present himself to different people in ways that flattered them and made them trust him. And in both Kosovo and Chechnya, the war was part of a fight for political power in a distant capital. Eight years of so-called reforms left a small group of elites fantastically wealthy, while a huge and potentially explosive segment of Russia’s population remained impoverished. Instead of transparency and the strong medicine Russia needed, we were fed placebos and told we were going to get well soon. In August nineteen ninety one, when Boris Yeltsin’s administration took over, the majority of Russians were prepared for a partnership with the civilized world. On August 9, nineteen ninety nine, the largely unknown Putin was, to the great surprise of nearly everyone, put in charge of the Russian government. The public cheered Putin as their new gladiator and enjoyed the rough, even profane language he occasionally used when talking. We were forced to contemplate just how far Yeltsin, Putin, and their backers might go to guarantee Putin’s election on the night of September 22, when local police in the city of Ryazan interrupted what would have been the fifth apartment bombing of the month. A deep investigation and analysis of the case were turned into a devastating book by former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing Up Russia. The same Litvinenko, who had become a fierce Putin critic, was assassinated in London in two thousand and six with the rare radioactive substance polonium-210. With the apartment bombings to fan the flames of vengeance, the assault in Chechnya gained force. A decree granting Yeltsin and all his relatives freedom from prosecution was signed the same day Putin took office, revealing the real reason Yeltsin had selected him for his successor: self-preservation. Despite his faults and fall from grace while in office, Yeltsin was a true freedom fighter. The long lines of Russians who waited to view Yeltsin’s coffin and pay their respects at a Moscow cathedral demonstrated that despite his many failures people sensed the possibility for good in what he attempted. George Soros was a participant in and a witness to many of the events around the attempts to reform and rebuild the Russian economy in the post-Soviet years. In February two thousand, the famous investor penned an article in Moskovsky Novosti. With no free media, no justice system to worry about, and no competition, Putin’s preferred oligarchs were like vermin whose natural predators had been eradicated Putin restored the old Soviet anthem. The symbolism of bringing back the Soviet music was both obvious and shocking. The words change, but the song remains the same. As soon as Putin appeared on the international stage, every foreign leader and pundit was obliged to have an opinion about him. Only a rare few have the honesty to admit they were mistaken about Putin, or worse, that he fooled them. Nuisances left unattended grow into real problems. If I may take the liberty of boiling Solzhenitsyn’s prose into an aphorism, the most moral policy also turns out to be the most effective policy. Believing otherwise leads to false trade-offs that imperil liberty without enhancing our security. Any doubts about the Putin regime’s willingness to spill blood were erased in the two thousand and two hostage crisis at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow. All 40 hostage-takers were killed in the raid along with over 130 hostages: all but one of the hostages were either killed by the gas directly or indirectly by choking to death while unconscious and failing to receive medical care in time. On September 1, two thousand and four, Chechen separatists took over eleven hundred hostages at a school in North Ossetia, a Russian region of the Caucasus bordering Georgia. The final numbers are 334 dead hostages, of which 186 were children. Only three officials were ever charged over what happened at Beslan. All three were local North Ossetian police officers who were charged with negligence for failing to protect the school. Only three officials were ever charged over what happened at Beslan. All three were local North Ossetian police officers who were charged with negligence for failing to protect the school. Nothing symbolized the lack of will to stand up to Putin than the G8 Summit in St. Petersburg held July 15-17, two thousand and six. It took Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014 to finally get Russia’s G8 membership suspended. Economic engagement kept the billions coming in that Putin needed to expand his repression at home. Instead of these contacts helping to liberalize and modernize Russian business practices, the flow went the other way. Russia’s biggest export was corruption, not oil or gas. It became a perverse combination of Adam Smith and Karl Marx in which the profits were privatized and the expenses were nationalized. The Kremlin was not changing its standards; it was imposing them on the outside world. The mafia corrupts everything it touches. Bartering in human rights begins to appear acceptable. When everyone is guilty, no one is guilty, goes the logic. The central myths of engagement are that it liberalizes the unfree states and provides leverage over them if they don’t liberalize. The first has proven false. The second has failed because the free world refuses to exploit its leverage the way dictatorships are so eager to do. Tragically, it wasn’t much better outside of Russia. Heads of state had no interest in challenging Putin; that had been obvious for quite a while. As long as the money kept rolling in to buy Russia’s vast natural wealth-oil, gas, metals, timber-Putin could afford the salaries, benefits, and armies of riot police that kept people at home. In two thousand, when Putin took charge, there were no Russians on the Forbes magazine list of the world’s billionaires. In two thousand and eight there were eighty-seven, more than Germany and Japan combined, in a country where 13 percent of our citizens were under a national poverty line of 150 dollars a month. By 2008, Obama’s promises to bring the troops home, and keep them home, was only telling the American people what they wanted to hear. Mitt Romney had said Russia was without question our number one geopolitical foe. Obama ridiculed Romney for the remark, even preparing a debate zinger about how the nineteen eighties want their foreign policy back. The most powerful theme in Orwell’s book is not that of the all-seeing Big Brother, but that of the control and distortion of language, especially in the form of newspeak. Brutal totalitarianism does not begin with surveillance by a liberal democratic state. It begins with terror, it begins with violence, and it begins with the knowledge that your thoughts and words can end your career or your life. It’s a tragedy that the free world always refuses to learn from past mistakes where dictators and would-be dictators are concerned. The autocrats, in contrast, are eager students of their predecessors. At the end of February two thousand and fourteen, for the second time in six years, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops across an internationally recognized border to occupy territory. Putin once again refuted the predictions of his defenders in the West and continued his invasion of Eastern Ukraine. This fecklessness was sad and expected, but I thought it might finally come to an end on July 17 when Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was blown out of the sky over Eastern Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people aboard. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. The Western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption. Putin won’t back down or be kicked out of Ukraine until credible threats to his power create a split among his elites and advisors. The Russian military commanders, the ones in the field, are not fools. Putin is no master strategist. He’s an aggressive poker player facing weak opposition from a Western world that has become so risk averse that it would rather fold than call any bluff, no matter how good its cards are. The best reason for acting to stop Putin today is brutally simple: it will only get harder tomorrow. It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment at which we stopped looking for leadership from our leaders and started caring only about realpolitik and lesser evils. And, of course, Western complacency has enabled all its enemies, not just Putin. As with Hitler and Stalin, a man traveling to the moon is mostly remembered today as mythology. In his renowned iron curtain speech, Winston Churchill spoke about the new dangers to freedom, this time from Communism. It is almost forgotten that he also warned how the newly formed United Nations could fail. Anti-modernity is a dangerous virus, and to remove a virus a reboot or a reset is not enough. We have to build a values-based system that is robust enough to resist the virus at home, smart enough to stop it before it spreads, and bold enough to eradicate it where it grows. References: Winter is Coming Gary Kasparov 2015 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948564 ISBN 978-1-61039-645-5 (international paperback) George Soros Moskovsky Novosti Feb 2000 http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/4135.html