now, there was a democratic government in Berlin willing to renounce all its conquests east and west, and to relinquish huge stockpiles of arms, maki… - Arthur Herman

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.

To be a human is to have a soul, Socrates and Plato tell us. Our soul is our true essence, our true identity. It is the soul that actively seeks to unlock the mysteries of the world, including the truth about reality. Reality turns out to have a dual nature. Yes, Socrates said, the world is one of constant change and flux: as Heraclitus said, that's the visible world around us. In Socrates's and Plato's terms, it's the world of Becoming. But there is also a realm of Permanence that Parmenides described, a higher reality that we grasp not through our senses, but through our reason alone. This is the world of Being, which is divine, "the realm of the pure and everlasting and immortal and changeless," just as Socrates told visitors in his prison cell.10 Our soul serves as the essential bridge between these two worlds. Like Being, it is (Socrates says) immortal and rational. But it also dwells in the world of Becoming, because of its adherence to the body. On one side of the bridge lies a world of error and illusion; on the other, of wisdom and truth. Yet for most people — indeed, for all but a very few people — that bridge has been washed out.

concentration of wealth in capitalist countries must inevitably lead to war. That intense concentration — Britain, France, Germany, and the United States together, Lenin noted, controlled nearly 80 percent of the world's financial capital — had reduced the possibility for fresh profits in capitalist countries themselves, including the United States.