The enduring lessons of the First World War are how not to fight a war and why not to fight one.
Ruling
In ’37 Stalin made a hash
Of party loyalists and army brass.
Decimation: One in ten are shot.
What’s the word when one in ten are not?
No exit, no voice.
Revolution is for an imagined future, and revolt, on which it depends, for an imagined past.
In normal times, the party offering the most extreme version of popular ideas natters pointlessly. In revolutionary times, it wins.
A networked world is a legible world, and a legible world is an unfree world. We all have social credit scores now.
There can be order without law, but not law without order.
Every policy I support seems to threaten democracy itself.
Kings, prime ministers, and presidents are often imbeciles, but regents never are.
We used to burn old books; the modern refinement is to alter them.
The letter of the law avails nothing against rulers with contempt for its spirit.