Category: Access

Like any massive fraud, whether successful or unsuccessful, Russia’s recent parliamentary election is an interesting subject.  Fraud, swindle, pyramid–perpetrated or operated by all sorts of impostors, flimflam artists, and snake oil salesmen–where would world literature be without them?  Thomas Mann’s Hochstapler, or confidence man, in Confessions of Felix Krull is alone worth a million real-life fraud victims. Conrad would never have written Chance, the masterwork that pulled him out of obscurity, without its central character, the swindler Smith de Barral.  Gogol would not have written Dead Souls without Chichikov, the spectre of Western monopoly capitalism in the guise of a...

Please imagine two foes from the annals of history, say, Wellington and Napoleon, or a pair of ideological adversaries, like Burke and Robespierre.  Obviously there’s a whole ideological mythology trailing in the wake of each of these combatants, and to this day the world – whether it is conscious or oblivious of it – is divided between partisans of one or the other.  So, whether they know it or not, folks who opine that the European Union is a good thing for Europe are on Napoleon’s side; so 3.5 million Russian secret policemen endorse Robespierre, even if 3.4 million of...

I have known many rich people in my lifetime and had ample occasion to remark upon what seemed like an endless spiral of personal tragedies they invariably suffered.  As a Christian, I always found this unfair.  The rich are supposed to be thoughtless of God and careless of the salvation of their souls – with eternal anguish their likely posthumous lot – but here on earth their existence is meant to be cushy, replicating or evoking the serenity of paradise. Instead it looked like their future suffering unto eternity was merely a continuation of their present sorrows in this earthly...