Former Indras All — nations are geo-tools, empires are extraction rackets, and the thunderbolt was never yours
Benedict Anderson made a simple observation that took a century to reach mainstream consciousness: the nation — the thing we paint on our faces at sporting events, the cause we die for, the imagined container of culture and identity — is a social construct. Not in the soft postmodern sense where everything dissolves into relativity. In the precise engineering sense: it is a machine that someone built, for reasons, and the reasons printed on the package are not the actual reasons. …