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08/26/2005 Archived Entry: "Propping up the "weary titan""

THE "WEARY TITAN" STAGGERS. British journalist Timothy Garton Ash compares the state of the American empire in 2005 with that of the British empire in 1905 after the Boer War.

Rather bizarrely, he concludes that the good old empire deserves a friendly propping up. But his analysis is interesting.

Garton Ash is also the author of a slender little book called The File: A Personal History. This book deserves to be a classic of surveillance-state literature. In the 1970s, he went to east Germany to study. Naturally, he came under the gaze of the Stasi and its omnipresent citizen-informant network. After the fall of communism, he went back, got his Stasi file, and began to trace the sources and motives behind all its information, misinformation, and deliberately planted disinformation.

As one Amazon.com reviewer noted, the book gives "a peek into the madness and organized obsurity" of the security state. If you want to get an idea of your future, read on.

Posted by Claire @ 09:19 AM CST
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