Short Breaks in Mordor: Dawns and Departures of a Scribbler's Life

by Peter Hitchens

The new monolith, gradually taking shape in the concrete halls of the Low Countries, is too bureaucratic to be frightening, too slow and devious to cause alarm. Ponderously, deliberately, tediously, it gathers power. It jeers at its opponents for exaggerating its ambitions. Then, when these opponents turn out to have been right, it says that more people should have protested at the time, and it is too late to go back now. Its mighty volumes of treaties and rules are more unalterable than the Laws of the Medes and the Persians—and probably a good deal harder to interpret. It never abandons an objective, merely repeats the attempt in a subtly different way until it succeeds. Franz Kafka would have recognized it immediately: a malevolent and unresponsive bureaucracy, convinced of its own benevolence, against which there is no appeal and from which there is no escape. You might as well try to cut fog with a sword.