Tank Man And Tank Commander

From Lawyers, Guns, And Money:

What follows is a long, largely unoriginal rumination on the state, coercion, the Odessa Steps, and Tank Man. Skip to the end for trivial observations about the current situation in Iran. Or just skip entirely...

The modern nation state is an extremely efficient killing machine. We know this from our Tilly; the nation-state replaced its competitors, such as empires and city-states, because it could develop and support institutions of internal and external domination. The nation-state successfully extracted a large surplus from its population, which it transformed into the coercive means for acquiring even more internal surplus and for waging external wars.

Read more ....

My Comment: An examination of the modern state .... and how it controls its populations. I do not put these long commentaries in this blog .... most of you are probably not interested in these things anyway .... but if you have 15 minutes, read the above post.