To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation, though it was greatly facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian liberals.1 Lenin’s goose...
They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods.
These days, nearly everyone claims to be democratic. I have even heard it claimed that the Chinese Communist Party is democratic. ‘Capitalist’, by contrast, is a word too often used as a term of abuse...
There are two disadvantages to this political fragmentation. Small countries are often formed as a result of civil war within an earlier multi-ethnic polity – the most common form of conflict since 19...
The thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely creatures. . . . The university most worthy of rational admiration is that one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, mos...
The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.
The reality, then, was that Indian nationalism was fuelled not by the impoverishment of the many but by the rejection of the privileged few.
The odds of the average American being shot to death are 1 in 314. But he or she is even more likely to commit suicide (1 in 119); more likely still to die in a fatal road accident (1 in 78); and most...
The Kissingers descended from Meyer Löb (1767–1838), a Jewish teacher from Kleineibstadt who in 1817 took his surname from his adopted home of Bad Kissingen (complying with an 1813 Bavarian edict that...
The Four Black Boxes To demonstrate that Western institutions have indeed degenerated, I am going to have to open up some long-sealed black boxes. The first is the one labelled ‘democracy’. The second...
The English language is the one thing the Commonwealth still has in common.
Stalin’s power consisted of three distinct elements: total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication – with the Kremlin telephone network as the central hub – and t...
Soros regards himself as more a philosopher than a hit man. His book The Alchemy of Finance (1987) begins with a bold critique of the fundamental assumptions of economics as a subject,
Sometimes, as in the case of the American Revolution, crucial roles turn out to have been played by people who were not leaders but connectors.
Some of the network graphs that Able Danger produced were twenty feet long and almost wholly unintelligible because the print was so small.8 Krebs himself concluded that there would be no substitute f...
Sería más acertado hablar de «nihilismo islámico», o quizá «bolchevismo islámico», pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros años Lenin y Stalin fueron también terroristas. En
Power, let us not forget, is not just about being able to buy whatever you want; that is mere wealth. Power is about being able to get whatever you want at below the market price.
Me estremezco al pensar en cuál ha de ser el resultado de una lucha entre sistemas tan distintos; uno de nosotros ha de prevalecer y el otro será destruido, en cualquier caso no podemos existir ambos...
La Unión Soviética, a diferencia de anteriores aspirantes a la hegemonía, está animada por una nueva fe fanática, antitética a la nuestra, y busca imponer su autoridad absoluta sobre el resto del mund...
In their book Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and Jim Robinson make a striking comparison between Egypt today and England in the late seventeenth century: The reason that Britain is richer than Egypt...