Sublime

So for Vann, the thinking was, these stupid Vietnamese peasants are making a mistake—it’s us smart guys who are the ones who can run the social revolution for them. They think the N.L.F. can run it, these people running around villages organizing them, but we’re really the only ones who can run it. And out of our duty to the poor people of the

I sip my coffee. It’s good. “The de facto king of Iraq is a Kissinger acolyte named L. Paul Bremer III. On taking office, he passed two edicts that have shaped the occupation. Edict number one ruled that any member of the Ba’ath Party above a certain rank was to be sacked. With one stroke of the pen Bremer consigned to the scrap-heap the very civil

Turner noted that “man is both a structural and an anti-structural entity, who grows through anti-structure and conserves through structure.”

The knowledge-capitalism of professional imperialism subjugates people more imperceptibly than and as effectively as international finance or weaponry.

a lot of what the popular movements had been fighting for slowly began to work its way into the development of British political democracy [e.g. constitutional monarchy was established in 1689 and a Bill of Rights adopted]. And ever since then, every time popular movements have succeeded in dissolving power to a certain extent, there has been a

For Scott, to “see like a state” means to accept the order of things and to internalize them; it means that we begin to deploy and think with the logic of the superiority of orderliness and that we erase and indeed sacrifice other, more local practices of knowledge, practices moreover that may be less efficient, may yield less marketable results,