“Hereby it is manifest,” Thomas Hobbes wrote in 1651’s Leviathan, “that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and suc.
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Dictatorial repression is often called “systematic,” but its main hallmark is caprice. It relies on the fear that even abject servility might not save one from the secret police. Genrikh Yagoda, Stalin’s head of the NKVD, orchestrated the Great Terror only to himself be “liquidated.” In a marvelously funny scene in Victor Serge’s Last Times, set in the early moments of the Nazi occupation of France, the hapless hotelkeeper Anselme Flotte is interrogated by Lt. Wichter of the Gestapo. On the brink of being released, it strikes Flotte that he might strengthen his case by informing on his neighbor, who, he says, sympathizes with “the Reds in Spain and with the English in short a man capable of any crime.” Thinking that he will be rewarded, he omits nothing and embellishes much. Instead, he is told: “You had suspicions, Flotte, you even had precise evidence, yet you kept silent. You who seemed to know the need for loyal collaboration so well.” He is classified into Ca
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Gorbachev, who is being hailed in the Western press as a statesman, was responsible for the final act of betrayal carried out by the parasites who raised themselves up above and fed off the Soviet working class the full-scale restoration of capitalism in the USSR and the dissolution of that country into more than a dozen states.