De Mortuis nil nisi Bonum? Probably Not

So President Chavez is dead; no more "raspberry beret" then.

I shall, in a way, miss his absurd - indeed sometimes almost surreal - rants; I suppose every stage needs a comedian sometimes.

For the Cubans' sake I hope that whichever of his socialist henchmen takes his place will be as generous as the late-lamented one; and for the Venezuelans' sake that the replacement might have at least a minimum understanding of economics or even a basic education.

There's an old joke:
"What would happen if the Sahara desert was taken over by communists?"
Nothing for a few years and then there'd be a shortage of sand."

With arguably the world's largest oil reserves, these socialist goons have a country with crumbling infrastructure and have had even to devalue their currency.  Typical left-wing balls-up - and remember that they have nationalised everything - normally the kiss of death it is true.  If a real lefty takes over I suppose they'll start making an atom bomb like that clown in North Korea.

Sic transit gloria - or perhaps not.

Until the next time

Succinct

I have, in front of me Michael Barber's rather blokey biography of the novellist Anthony Powell.

I have said "blokey" because one cannot help feeling that Barber rather lets "his slip show" here and there, since it seems pretty clear that he wishes to show himself at all times a modernist; whilst doing pretty well a lot of the time he does like to have a poke here and there (and by that I do not mean a "free poke" in Borrit's words).  Overall though quite good - say 7/10.

All this is entirely unrelated to the point of this post, or at least almost... In a footnote on p. 178, Barber says that whilst Powell was unsympathetic to Liberalism, he was anxious to add that he was not a totalitarian.  To underline this he (Powell) quotes, approvingly, one Curzio Malaparte, whose definition of a totalitarian state was:

 "A state in which everything that is not forbidden is compulsory."

Rather elegant isn't it? When one reads about five fruit and/or vegetables per day, units of alcohol, tobacco, seat belts, speed limits, the race-relations industry etc., etc., one can't help asking how far away those conditions actually are in our western European liberal democratic Utopia.

Correction...Correction...Correction...Correction...Correction...

Well I did suggest that I was not overwhelmed by Barber's biography; a good thing too it seems.  The quotation does not originate with (the very interesting) Curzio Malaparte, but with another interesting character, English writer Terence Henbury White in his book The Once and Future King.  (Referring to an anthill as viewed by an ant) a notice above each entrance reads: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." The expression has been borrowed by physicist Murray Gell-Mann in his Gell-Mann Totalitarian Principle, something to do with what to me is the utterly unfathomable discipline of Quantum Mechanics. Remember, I have never been able to comprehend the Relativity Theory so I have no chance with Quantum Mechanics.

If Malaparte used the phrase, I can find no other reference to it; he began as a fascist and ended as a communist; I suppose that he could only have used the phrase if he were an idealist within those disciplines, since I doubt any realistic fascist or communist could have kept a straight face!

Until the next time.