It is extraordinary how long a nation will allow itself to be misgoverned.
Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War (1926/1929)
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It is extraordinary how long a nation will allow itself to be misgoverned.
Rudolf Binding, A Fatalist at War (1926/1929)
Comments are closed.
He was speaking about….?
Russia. He has a diary entry when he heard about the March 1917 Revolution. But it struck me as being of general, maybe universal, application.
Yeah, I figured it was intended for general applicability, but thought maybe it had been inspired by something the Kaiser or one of his minions did…
Centuries, if Russia is any guide. Millennia,if Italy.
Depends on the culture?
Depends if the people are actually a “nation” which implies some self-awareness and literacy. But more generally it is a sad fact that masses of people are held enslaved by tiny numbers of people because the tiny group are armed and have self-confidence in their right to rule, and the inchoate mass cannot get organized to overthrow them. That is most of history. Nauseating.
It is certainly the story of Iran right now.
I think it was Adam Smith who said “There is a lot of ruin in a great nation.” I fear we are test that hypothesis this century.
The Czarist regime was the justification the Social Democrat leadership could offer to their base for supporting the war loans in the Reichstag. Without the party’s support the loans wouldn’t have been approved by parliament and Germany wouldn’t have been able to go to war. Funny how things turn out sometimes.