blessed britons
One day [British colonial officer] Smith was given a secret file containing a minute that ordered him to get involved in regional elections taking place in the late 1950s in the run up to independence [in Nigeria]. He was to make vehicles, staff and other resources available to the NCNC colleagues of Okotie-Eboh who was standing in the elections. Smith was shocked at the request. He explained that the election had to be fixed because the plan was that the Northern region would hold power on independence...
Asked if such manipulation of an election result could have happened Professor Anderson, Director of the African Studies Centre at Oxford University, replied: “In almost every single colony the British attempted to manipulate the result to their advantage.... I would be surprised if they had not done so.”
mad world
Dr Robert Hare, a psychologist and internationally renowned expert on psychopathy ... told us that many of the attitudes people adopt and the actions they execute when acting as corporate operatives can be characterised as psychopathic. You 'try to destroy your competitors, or you want to beat them one way of another,' said Hare, 'and you're not particularly concerned with what happens to the general public as long as they're buying your product.' Yet, despite the fact that executives must often manipulate and harm others in pursuit of their corporation's objectives, Hare insists they are not psychopaths. That is because they can function outside the corporation... Businesspeople should therefore take some comfort from their ability to compartmentalise the contradictory moral demands of their corporate and noncorporate lives, for it is precisely this 'schizophrenia'... that saves them from becoming psychopaths.
