Sunday, August 19, 2007

Quote-Unquote



Revolution at once springs from and feeds on the collapse of the state’s undivided and centralizing sovereignty and its dissolution into several centers of competing power or impotence. During the French and Russian Revolutions each of several centers eventually turned to violence in an effort to reclaim or secure a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercion in its own favor at the national, regional, or local level. The attendant spiral of violence was amplified by the simultaneous breakdown of the judiciary and law enforcement generally, opening a breach for the return of repressed violence, particularly in zones of rampant civil war and terror...”
-Arno J. Mayer, from The Furies


"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things." -Niccolo Machiavelli

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