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Welcome to Satan's Ball

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"You're not Dostoevsky," said the citizeness.

"Well, but how do you know, how do you know?" replied [Korovyov].

"Dostoevsky is dead," said the citizeness, but not very confidently.

"I protest!" exclaimed Behemoth hotly. "Dostoevsky is immortal!"

"Your ID's, citizens," said the citizeness.

Although the book, whose working title was "Satan in Moscow," was completed in 1940 it did not appear in print in uncensored form until the 1970s.

"The power structure is symbolized by its anonymity and omnipresence, by its mysterious nature, by its total knowledge against which there is no defense, by its ability to penetrate every space, by putting in an appearance at any hour of the day or night," Karl Schlögel wrote in his book "Moscow, 1937" in speaking of Bulgakov's portrayal of the organs of state security. "Investigating officials have no names; they are simply 'they.' The word 'arrest' is replaced by the sentences 'We need to sort something out' or 'We need your signature here.' "

Thomas Mann in "The Magic Mountain," which takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps on the eve of World War I, also chronicles the malaise and sickness of a society in terminal moral decline: There no longer are any goals worth pursuing; death is more dignified than life; illness is more conducive to reflection than health. 

Joseph Roth in "Hotel Savoy" reaches the same conclusion. In Roth's novel, Gabriel Dan, an Austrian soldier released from a Serbian prisoner-of-war camp after World War I, finds sanctuary in a hotel that "promises water, soap, English style toilet, a lift, maids in white caps." In the grand ballrooms, the rich and powerful gorge themselves in hedonistic revelry. But on the upper floors Dan discovers desperate, impoverished debtors, bankrupt gamblers, failed revolutionaries, chorus girls, clowns, dancers, the terminally ill and dreamers. Once those in the upper garrets are fleeced of their money and possessions they are tossed into the street.

Roth's protagonist says:

"The hotel no longer appealed to me: neither the stifling laundry, nor the gruesomely benevolent lift-boy nor the three floors of prisoners. This Hotel Savoy was like the world. Brilliant light shone out from it and splendor glittered from its seven storeys, but poverty made its home in its high places, and those who lived on high were in the depths, buried in airy graves, and the graves were in layers above the comfortable rooms of the well nourished guests sitting down below, untroubled by the flimsy coffins overhead."

The moral order, like our own, is upside-down.

Bulgakov, Mann and Roth understood that there is no real political ideology among decayed ruling elites. They knew that political debate and ideological constructs for these elites is absurdist theater, a species of entertainment for the masses. They warned that once societies enter terminal decay, in the end it is the blunt forces of censorship, relentless propaganda, coercion, fear and finally terror that keep a subdued population in check. Those who hold power in such systems are thieves who run a vast kleptocracy.

The rise of criminal elites is global. Vladimir Putin is a megalomaniac and a thug who is filling his personal coffers while he is the leader of Russia, and Barack Obama, who has more polish and sophistication, will fill his own pockets, as did the Clintons, with tens of millions of dollars as soon as he leaves office. The banks and corporations for which Obama works are as criminal and corrupt as the Central Bank of Russia, which calculates that perhaps two-thirds of the $56 billion that left Russia in 2012 might have been from money laundering, drug trafficking, tax fraud or kickbacks. The circular system of patronage and crime that exists worldwide varies from region to region only by degrees and style.

The Western political and financial elites, Putin knows, will not touch him. He and they are in the same decadent oligarchic class. They hold the same values. Europe depends on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas, most of which passes through Ukraine. European bankers and corporations have no intention of jeopardizing that flow, or any current or potential trade deals. Corporate profit is the driving engine of foreign policy. Our elites do not care about human rights or civil liberties, not to mention the illegality of pre-emptive war, any more than Putin. Ask the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia how much moral authority the United States has to denounce the violation of the territorial integrity of a sovereign state. Ask those in our black sites and offshore penal colonies how much moral authority we have to denounce arbitrary detention and torture. Ask the 1.3 million people who lost their extended unemployment benefits in December or those who saw food stamp cutbacks reduce their spending by $90 a month how much moral authority there is left in our corporate state.

Our elites have established the most efficient system of mass surveillance in history. They have abolished most of our civil liberties. They have trashed our economy for their own personal gain. They have looted state treasuries and thrown working men and women aside. Satan is again holding a great ball. You are not invited. I am not invited. Only the gangsters will be there. Putin will be an honored guest. So will Obama.

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Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.

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