Perhaps

Perhaps these thoughts of ours

will never find an audience

Perhaps the mistaken road

will end in a mistake

Perhaps the lamps we light one at a time

will be blown out, one at a time

Perhaps the candles of our lives will gutter out

without lighting a fire to warm us.

Perhaps when all the tears have been shed

the earth will be more ertile

Perhaps when we sing praises to the sun

the sun will praise us in return

Perhaps these heavy burdens

will strengthen our philosophy

Perhaps when we weep for those in misery

we must be silent about miseries of our own.

Perhaps

Because of our irresistible sense of mission

We have no choice.

Shu Ting

(Από το βιβλίο «The Shield of Achilles»)

Door to Door Emperor

«Frederick William I did indeed, it seems, walk into private houses and inspect the family dinner, and cane idlers when he happened to meet them on the street, and did fly into inexplicable rages as well as fits of depression. But he also first introduced universal conscription into military service, while exempting the bourgeois taxpayers, taking care to send peasant soldiers back to their farms at harvest time, and nurturing a textile industry with state purchases. By the time of his death in 1740, Prussia had a highly efficient bureaucracy, large financial reserves, and the fourth largest army in Europe (although the state ranked only tenth in territory and thirteenth in population)».

The Shield of Achilles

Mummies

«Possibly the idea of the mummy was spontaneous, even accidental, but the transformation of the leader of the Party dictatorship into an ideological idol certainly was not. It was a natural expression of totalitarian thinking. The slogan ‘Lenin is more alive than all the living’ was taken almost literally. At the Politburo meeting of 16 February 1973 a discussion took place on ‘the question of renewing Party documents’. The ‘question’ was plainly raised in order to produce the following decree: ‘Party card No. 00000001 in the 1973 format is to be inscribed with the name of the founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Soviet State V.I. Lenin. The signing of the card is to be done by General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CSPU Comrade Brezhnev, L.I. Members of the Politburo, Candidate Members and Central Committee Secretaries are to be present for the signing.’Card No. 00000002 was issued to the other ‘Ilyich’, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev».

Dmitri Volkogonov: «Lenin»

Resistance

"Initial receptivity of a system to new forms does not lead to gradual continuous change but rather to the stifling of the change, whereas initial resistance often leads later on to a breakthrough".

Immanuel Wallerstein

Africa

«The maps used to carve up the African continent were mostly inaccurate; large areas were described as terra incognita. When marking out the boundaries of their new territories, European negotiators frequently resorted to drawing straight lines on the map, taking little or no account of the myriad of traditional monarchies, chiefdoms and other African societies that existed on the ground. Nearly one half of the new frontiers imposed on Africa were geometric lines, lines of latitude and longitude, other straight lines or arcs of circles. In some cases, African societies were rent apart: the Bakongo were partitioned between French Congo, Belgian Congo and Portuguese Angola; Somaliland was carved up between Britain, Italy and France. In all, the new boundaries cut through some 190 culture groups. In other cases, Europe’s new colonial territories enclosed hundreds of diverse and independent groups, with no common history, culture, language or religion. Nigeria, for example, contained as many as 250 ethnolinguistic groups. Officials sent to the Belgian Congo eventually identified six thousand chiefdoms there».

The Fate of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence

The De Gaulle of Eastern Europe

«The Economist, in August 1966, called Ceauşescu ‘the De Gaulle of Eastern Europe.’ As for De Gaulle himself, on a visit to Bucharest in May 1968 he observed that while Ceauşescu’s Communism would not be appropriate for the West, it was probably well suited to Romania: “Chez vous un tel régime est utile, car il fait marcher les gens et fait avancer les choses.” (“For you such a regime is useful, it gets people moving and gets things done.”).»

Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

Interest Rates and Society’s Health

«Interest rates, according to economic historian Richard Sylla, accurately reflect a society’s health. In effect, a plot of interest rates over time is a nation’s “fever curve.” In uncertain times rates rise because there is less sense of public security and trust. Over the broad sweep of history, all of the major ancient civilizations demonstrated a “U-shaped” pattern of interest rates. There were high rates early in their history, followed by slowly falling rates as the civilizations matured and stabilized. This led to low rates at the height of their development, and, finally, as the civilizations decayed, there was a return of rising rates. For example, the apex of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. saw interest rates as low as 4%. The above sequence holds only on the average and over the long term, with plenty of shorter-term fluctuations. Even during the height of the Pax Romana in the first and second centuries, rates briefly spiked as high as 12% during times of crisis.
After the Fall of Rome (traditionally dated A.D. 476), rates in the Empire skyrocketed. Little more than two centuries later, Western commerce received yet another staggering blow—Mohammed’s Hejira and the rise of the Arab empire, which overran most of the Iberian Peninsula. By acquiring control of the Gibraltar Straits, the Arabs effectively cut off Mediterranean trade.
The historical trace of interest rates simply disappears during the late Roman period and does not reappear until almost a millennium later, in England. There, rates well in excess of 40% were recorded in the twelfth century, and in Italy, rates averaged about 20% later in the same century. The first glimmer of a more reasonable future appears in Holland, where rates fell to as low as 8% as early as 1200″.

The Birth of Plenty:How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created

Economists

«Leading active members of today’s economics profession…have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule — as one might generally expect from a gentleman’s club — this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen…. They oppose the most basic, decent and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs. And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not reexamine their ideas. They do not consider the possibility of a flaw in logic or theory. Rather, they simply change the subject.No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is dis-invited from presenting papers at later annual meetings.And still less is anyone from the outside invited in».

James K. Galbraith (Economist) Via «The End of Growth»

A Science of Politics

«There is no such thing here as a science of politics, because it is not to any one’s interest to make politics the study of his life. Nothing is settled; no truth finds general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated».

A Cynic Looks at Life