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polly7

(20,582 posts)
Wed Jan 30, 2013, 12:38 PM Jan 2013

George Monbiot - When The Rich Are Born To Rule, The Results Can Be Fatal

By George Monbiot

Source: The Guardian

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Those whom the gods love die young: are they trying to tell me something? Due to an inexplicable discontinuity in space-time, on Sunday I turned 50. I have petitioned the relevant authorities, but there's nothing they can do.

So I will use the occasion to try to explain the alien world from which I came. To understand how and why we are now governed as we are, you need to know something of that strange place.

I was born into the third tier of the dominant class: those without land or capital, but with salaries high enough to send their children to private schools. My preparatory school, which I attended from the age of eight, was a hard place, still Victorian in tone. We boarded, and saw our parents every few weeks. We were addressed only by our surnames and caned for misdemeanours. Discipline was rigid, pastoral care almost non-existent. But it was also strangely lost.

A few decades earlier, the role of such schools was clear: they broke boys' attachment to their families and re-attached them to the institutions – the colonial service, the government, the armed forces – through which the British ruling class projected its power. Every year they released into the world a cadre of kamikazes, young men fanatically devoted to their caste and culture. .......


Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/when-the-rich-are-born-to-rule-the-results-can-be-fatal-by-george-monbiot
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