Tough love is just the right phrase: love for the rich and privileged, tough for everyone else.

The Soviet Union was pretty much what Lenin and Trotsky said it was.

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

The United States in many ways resembles a Third World country - far more elevated, but it has many of those structural characteristics: the extreme inequality of wealth, the deterioration of infrastructure because it only serves poor people, predatory operations, huge corruption, and so on.

In Europe there's kind of a reaction to the European Union, kind of a move towards some kind of regionalization. It's more advanced in some regions than others, like in Spain for example. Catelan was repressed under Franco. People spoke it, but not publicly. It's now the language of Catelonia. The Basque language is being revived, not just the language but the culture, the folk music and everything else. So you're getting more diverse societies, and it's happening in Britain as well.

When Britain and the U.S. invaded Iraq, it was with the reasonable expectation that it was going to increase the threat of terror, as it has.

There certainly are those who worship the state much as divinities are worshipped. Not just the state but even leaders.