Power and chaos
Giuliano Da Empoli, L’heure des prédateurs
(Gallimard)
Giuliano Da Empoli, a Swiss-Italian political scientist and author previously of The Wizard of the Kremlin, has been a Number One best-seller in France. Why? Da Empoli’s subject is power: he explains who rules today’s world and how, in an elegant 136 pages, with amusing
parables about Montezuma and Cesare Borgia.
L’heure des prédateurs anatomizes
this dangerous age of ours, in which war is cheaper than peace — whether it’s nineteen men with boxcutters bringing down the Twin Towers, or a two-hundred-dollar
Houti drone provoking half-a-billion dollars worth of US missiles. Among our current batch of world leaders, too, Da Empoli writes, shock is the preferred method of governance: sociopaths like Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, and Trump terrorize people into submission by exerting maximum unpredictability. « Chaos is no longer the weapon of the rebels but the banner of those in power. »
Add to this mayhem the « tech conquistadors »: « terrifying aliens… engaged in a merciless war for planetary and intergalactic supremacy » who are unleashing a « new superior power » that will soon obliterate both them and us.