As I mentioned in previous blogs the 2070 s will see the end of the Nation state a
turning away from city living to a new
femto technology created countryside and the first attempts to build a universal
world state based around a
scattered world population of less than
90 million
the 1970s by contrast were my earliest memories and a
rather distant awareness of everywhere
tyrants and dictators who did not trouble me at the age of 4
Tyrants in those days were judged as rulers of regimes not
favourable to western visitors or TV reception this of
course in a world divided between American and soviet one way weapons systems
to be that of the
anonymous red mass of
communist bloc Warsaw pact red
communist menace with walls
and parallels so much that at the
time i believed the great wall of china to be the same era and purpose
as the Berlin wall but covering
the whole Chinese border- it doesn't-
just the way the map was coloured in
the anonymous
big red mass dictators was made of
the ex kingdoms ending in "ia" were called soviet
satellites which made them sound like sputnik 2, pupniks and the dictators turned out to be called anonymous
generic Erick Todnov chairman and general secretary of the central committee for state planning
it has been calculated i believe today that
more death threats are uttered
each day on Twitter than in the entire puptnik era
of dictatorship
what I noticed about the red mass was the number of
boiler plate victory monuments often erected in countries i knew were on
the losing side in the second world war and that you could built for example a
kalingrad palace of the soviets in a
quarter of the building blocks it took
to make a model of konigsberg castle
but to me the most
terrifying thing of a tyrant were the children of my own age white shirted young pioneers with little red
scarves loving the outdoor exercise ,
singing marching songs in praise of generic Erick Todnov and behaving just like the worst sneaks and tell the
teachers
only North
Korea
as North Korea
There were also emperors
in this four year olds world not the "kaisers and tsars" of his
grandmothers youth but more along the lines of "I am emperor
and I want dumplings " autocrats
both had near identical walking toy lions
waving one paw as heraldic arms
such as the crown coiffured shah of Persia celebrating 2500 years of Iranian monarchy with a
costume parade ,a square headed dynast who was as I later discovered was the grandson of the second standby driver on a
goat manure delivery cart
or the emperor of Ethiopia I had only just learnt (from flags and emblems of
the world) about the lion of Judah dynasty tracing its origins back to king Solomon
emperor too small for his throne when
said lion was deposed
the first event
happening in Africa
I can remember
with the end of world
dictatorship re red mass or US supported
south American juntas only North Korea we can safely in the west call a tyranny and
draw attention to its failure to
admit western visitors or use the internet after all this time
founded in the aftermath of the second world war and
based as with all dictatorships on the publics belief in the authority of the leaders personality for many years classed as part of the red
mass sort of an eastern hoxha's Albania in isolation boredom will be its revolution
in history tyrants rarely meet their ends from a n Harmodius
or Princep standing at the street corner
and as autocrats they are more likely to meet their deaths in similar
circumstances as well protected tyrants such as Darius III
or the Roman emperor Macrinus in
the ancient world and further examples all the way to Ceausescu
from four hour
standing ovation and golden throne to
escaping in the back of a broken down bottari truck and finally being
beaten to death with a tyre iron
by their own bodyguards
for every autocrat
with the cognomen "cruel" or
"terrible" there are others known by the nickname
"flute player" or "bell ringer"
more sauce bottle than Sauron
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