Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The ultimate authority of the modern state has always rested in extremis on its monopoly of violence and its willingness to deploy force if necessary.

not so much the US. at least the monopoly on violence part.

Only intellectuals were likely to be sufficiently moved by Sergei Eisenstein’s depiction of Odessa in the Battleship Potemkin to translate their aesthetic appreciation into political affinity; but everyone—intellectuals included—could appreciate Humphrey Bogart.

As an Eisenstein fan, I…well, actually, this is true.

We should not be misled by Che Guevara’s remarkable after-life as the martyred, Christ-like poster-boy for disaffected Western adolescents: the European Sixties were always Eurocentric.

As East Germany’s official Small Political Dictionary put it, with unintended irony, ‘in socialism, the contradiction between work and free time, typical of capitalism, is removed.’

Interesting how closely this mirrors some of the weirder corporate propaganda I've seen in the tech world.