We speculated about what one of President Bush’s background advisers would tell us if abducted from a hotel for a day or two and subjected to questioning by an Underground Revolutionary Court, having taking a truth drug. Lies, of course, will continue to be told if they are contained in the questions, so a truth drug would probably only help to smooth the process a little. As a result, we feel that in what follows, although the truth surely makes an appearance, lies (and secrets) still skulk around in many places, as well as omissions, denials and all the other tracks that lead back to the obscure, hidden from us because of our own involuntary dependence on lies. But although Power knows itself very well and conceals a myriad of secrets, there is always far more it can never comprehend.

“On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 meters away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometers distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometers away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away.” (Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, 2003

The University of Milan was the place to be in those years. Everywhere else in the country students were taking over classrooms and telling the professors they should teach only proletarian sciences, but at our university, except for a few incidents, a constitutional pact –or rather a territorial compromise –held. The Revolution held the grounds, the auditorium and the main halls, while traditional Culture, protected, withdrew to the inner corridors and upper floors, where it went on talking as if nothing had happened. (Umberto Eco, “Foucault’s Pendulum”,1989)

Prosperity is not a moral question and the justification of San Domingo was its prosperity.

The article reproduced below takes its present form for several reasons, two of which I shall mention here, one immediately, the other towards the end of this introduction. The first would be revealed were the reader to ask why the article says so little about Germany and why I refer to the 20th century as if it were America’s. The second part of this first question will, I hope, be answered by the article itself –at least in part.

We shall start by looking at how much the economy has grown since capitalism took its first steps, i.e. when the so-called Industrial Revolution first got under way early in the 19th century.

Capitalism, where profit is the spur! Capitalist growth can be appreciated by the movement of its blood, i.e. what makes its system tick -its means of income, profit. While the aggregate figures for profit are not immediately available for most countries, they are for the United States, and since that economy was (and remains) the world’s largest for a single country, the figures are highly relevant.

The First World War is a convenient place to start because of its traumatizing effects and because it sets the stage for what happened throughout the 20th century. In 1917, some months before his death, the poet Wilfred Owen wrote:

“...But this morning at 8.20 we heard a boat torpedoed in the bay, about a mile out, they say who saw it. I think only ten lives were saved. I wish the Boche would have the pluck to come right in and make a clean sweep of the pleasure boats, and the promenaders on the Spa, and all the … Leeds and Bradford war profiteers now reading John Bull on Scarborough sands⁸.” (my emphasis)

Compared with World War I, American capitalist prosperity was even more clearly enhanced by World War II.

There appears to be evidence pointing to treachery by leading U.S. business groups during World War II.