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Saturday 28 February 2009

Communism aspired to be the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where communism failed: the quest for economic growth. Capitalists, nationalists — indeed almost everyone, communists included — worshipped at this same altar because economic growth disguised a multitude of sins. Indonesians and Japanese tolerated endless corruption as long as growth lasted. Russians and eastern Europeans put up with clumsy surveillance states. Americans and Brazilians accepted vast social inequalities. Social, moral and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could solve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere. J.R. McNeill

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