The Oil Drum

Pol Pot distrusted anyone who was "learned" - he wanted to create a new society from the ground up, wanted some real clean slates to start with. That meant the young and the dumb. If you had the little marks on your nose from wearing glasses, look out! If you were studying to get a job with the Post Office, don't tell the authorities that, tell them you've always moved trash cans for a living. Co-workers who'd been in Pol Pot's camps told me these last things.

Okay, call me irony-challenged, but what I meant was that (even educated) people in so-called 'totalitarian' (worthless term) states can be genuinely ignorant of or uninterested in certain issues without that being directly the fault or even the intention of 'Big Brother' ... the same goes for people in the 'free world' (pffft) too, and to the same extent. Most people don't know or care about big issues because they have other things to attend to. Or as the great critic John Berger put it, 'Capitalism survives by compelling ordinary people, whom it exploits, to construe their own interests as narrowly as possible.'(And China is capitalist, all misconceptions to the contrary. They have Hooters in Shanghai, for heaven's sake). True, it is 'scary', but it's the market that's done it, not the CCP.