Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Publicity, always meat and drink for [Rhodes] was sheer poison for Beit." - so that's why then.

'The press are ready and under complete control. I can switch on an agitation at your direction." - Orbán would be jealou.

The price of lowering the cost of African mining would be largely paid by Africans. For it was the 'ridiculously' high cost of African mining wages (though a fraction of white wages, man for man) that was the mine owners constant source of complaint.

Almost overnight the mining camp became an industrial centre, Dodge City became Salford.

"The compromise was to promote former middle-management personnel to positions of CEO as these persons did not bear the stigma of being former communist cadres, and they possessed the managerial know-how and the social networks which are crucial for conducting business in post-communist conditions." - Or any conditions

"...even in Hungary, where the second economy was the most developed, less than two percent of the CEOs of the 3,000 largest business organizations in 1993 were private entrepreneurs in 1988." - how does this compare with the West?

...party affiliation was more of a liability on post-communist Hungary than it was in the Czech Republic.

This supports our argiment that the basis of business oewnership seems to be more closely linked to technical-managerial know-how (cultural capital) than to the office held during the communist period (political capital).

Rather than the nomenklatura as a whole grasping power, one of its factions - the technocratic managerial elite - appeared to have established itself as the new propertied class.

The trouble was that, at the root of most of the corruption and inefficiency, was the system of monopolies and concessions. Thd system was, in Kruger's eyes, not a means of feathering own nest, or his supporters'; it was, as he said a 'cornerstone of his coubtry's independence. - Orbán?

It was a shocking fact, as Chamberlain admitted in public, that the great majority of the black colonies which Britain was directly responsible for had still, after a century, received no real benefit from imperial membership.

In Milner's eyes, as indeed in the eyes of all the more sophisticted imperialists, Britain's main concern was not with adding to or even developing the black Empire. It was with reasserting her power in the white Empire. Could the Empire now be made into a reality as a federal Greater Britain?

This [the edict outlawing slavery from the British Empire] was the last straw for the boers on the frontier. Away they trekked beyond the Orange River and the Vaal..

I thought I read a lot about South Africa, but who the hell is Alfred Beit?

A white man's dog, that was what they called him

"Here were hundreds of books about Abraham Lincoln" - not just me making the comparison, then

"A dirty old school where he had heard them reciting, parrot-fashion ... reciting things that would mean little to them" - sounds familiar

He is in prison, for the most terrible deed that a man can do .... He has killed a white man.

I have heard that they are trying to prevent the white people from helping with cars, and that they are evem ready to take them to the courts - bus boycott before Rosa Parks.

When Socialism collapsed, then, the ideologues of 'civil society' and monetarism were confronted with fundamentally new tak. They did what 'trajectory adjustment' would lead us to expect: they took their old ideas and used them to make sense of the new realities, modifying those ideas a great deal in the process.

It turned out that the essence of the Kádárist regime was contained in these executions [Imre Nagy et al.], not in the long decades of goulash communism.

During the long decades of post socialism, people were not executed, few spent time in jail for political acts. People suffered mostly from the general inefficiency of the socialist system.

"In the concern for the souls of their young students, these intellectuals write new textbooks, and require that teachers teach only these certified texts in the same way all over the country,"

"[Under socialism] The process by which managers disputed certain elements of the 'plan', and maneuvered ro set production targets for the factories, came to be known as a 'plan-bargain'" - the process was identical within the Philip Morris budget cycle.

Hence we see a peculiar twist in the Central European discourse on civil society, which is detectable in dissident debates as early as the late socialist period: civil society cannot be counted upon to organise itself; it must be civilised. It is not a natural order, but one that has to created by moral example and, most importantly, by sacrifice.

Very quickly the new power elite realised that however formidable the task of changing property relations and restructuring economic institutions was, it paled in comparison with the task of making the kinds of people who could operate within these institutions.

For the dissidents, however this communist compromise was 'living within a lie' par excellence - it was the essence of the lie that public and private selves did not coincide.

These sociologists of civil society were proud that their theory of civil society contained a version of a real society governed by procedural reality which was also a 'real community', a task which all nineteenth century thinkers (with the possible exception of Karl Marx) knew was the 'squaring the circle'.

In place of a society of minors, who are in constant need of protection, nurturing and fatherly discipline, proponents of civil society posed the vision of a society of adult citizens.

"Thou shalt not let your fellow whites sink lower than a certain point; because, if you do, the nigger will see he is as good as you are."