ONE WORD IS NOT A SYSTEM
Beautiful blue-sky day in the snowfields. Full ski-holiday vibe here in Jindabyne. I am off in search of some brumbies — wish me luck.
I have been working on a breakdown of government and group structure.
Time and again you hear “evil communism” — but what is communism, exactly? Are we talking about a single set of beliefs, or a word being used to cover a lot of very different arrangements of power?
Russia is the case people reach for. The Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar and ended a monarchy that had governed for centuries. What followed was a regime that killed millions of its own people through repression and engineered famine — the leaders were brutal, and they used the doctrine to take and hold control.
But then: is Russia still communist? Are the same people running it? Obviously not. And is China the same nation it was after the fall of the Qing? These questions matter, and a single word answers none of them.
That is the point. Before you can argue about an ideology you have to understand the structure underneath it — who holds power, how they got it, what checks exist on them, and what doctrine is being used to justify it. Doctrine and structure are different things, and confusing them is how people end up shouting past each other.
So I have been writing a series of memos on exactly that: the structure of power, the role of doctrine, and how the two shape the world. This is the second in the series.