Sublime

Un officier de rang plus élevé, qui avait commencé sa carrière dans le renseignement à Dresde, en Allemagne de l’Est, une fois rapatrié en catastrophe puisqu’il n’y avait plus d’Allemagne de l’Est se retrouvait sans emploi, sans logement de fonction, réduit à faire le taxi sauvage dans sa ville natale, Leningrad, en maudissant les « nouveaux Russes

On Yeltsin’s watch, the ignorance of many, combined with the cleverness of a few, allowed for the biggest, fastest, and most egregiously unjust reallocation of wealth and resources in the history of the world. It was klepto-capitalism on a monumental scale, but it wasn’t the first time. The Bolsheviks had done something similar under Lenin.

The doctrine that the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government should be kept separate is characteristic of liberalism; it arose in England in the course of resistance to the Stuarts, and is clearly formulated by Locke, at least as regards the legislature and the executive.

the use of both old and new media in military-style strategies of deception. To maintain a semblance of democracy, the ruling party combines top-down governance and practices of co-opting anti-regime actors with techniques taken from television, advertising, PR and increasingly the internet in order to generate a managed debate.

Because campaign contributions were not a deductible business expense, Brown & Root distributed to company executives and lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars in deductible “bonuses” and “attorneys’ fees,” which Internal Revenue Service agents came to believe were then funneled, in both checks and cash, to the Johnson campaign—contributions

Prime Minister Winston Churchill also recognized the power of using irregular forces to combat the Wehrmacht in conjunction with regular military operations. In July 1940, he charged a new organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with the mission to “set Europe ablaze.”9 For the next several years, British agents assisted local resista

Smith was not only a politician; he was a Tammany politician. In the simple Tammany code, the first commandment was Loyalty. Smith’s loyalty to his appointees was legendary. Once he gave a man a job, he was fond of saying, he never interfered with him unless he proved himself incapable of handling it.

As a result of Austria’s defeat combined with Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of national self-determination and democratic ideology, a plethora of states weak in structure and inadequate in resources now faced Germany in Eastern and Central Europe. Any future resurgence of German military capacity would have to be defeated by a French offensive into the

The argument in this book is that while Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the New Labour government might well have dispensed with just about everything the Labour Party stood for, as far as domestic politics are concerned, with regard to imperialism they are very much in the Labour tradition. This may well surprise many readers, but the contention here