The Decider announces the end of triumphalist capitalism.
Whose zoo do these simians belong in now?
(International Herald Tribune 19 September 2008)
The Soviet behemoth with its official fantasy of the communist brotherhood of man looked after by apparatchiks who could make a million shoes to fit the wrong foot and keep everyone in fearful penury finally stumbled into vodka soaked oblivion in 1991. It had taken roughly a generation from the death grip of a psychopathic Stalin for Gorbachev’s glimmer of human decency to assert itself.
Another psychopath, Mao, rightly saw the Soviet transition as a fatal personal threat and did his best to destroy the Chinese people before they got any funny ideas about making a decent living. Luckily good old fashioned mortality dispatched Mao’s corpse to the underworld in 1976, and China could get on with pretending that black cats were white cats, fat cats were alley cats, and gloriously getting rich was socialism with Chinese characteristics.