The End of Capitalism is Announced

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.

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