Rout or passage

And then were built up the sovereign states – and the practice of lie and deceit could become institutional, to safeguard the interests of the nation.

Espionage and military, armament and diplomacy – always the two arms of man pretend to ignore one another, for the moral comfort of those they serve.

The more powerful a nation grew, the more concerned with its position in the world-order it became and the more its ambitions must secure its advantages over the others – such advantages being made more precious by being kept secret.

But the social system made of the limitations, laws and regulations indispensable to the collective cohesion was, until recently, reining, restraining or hampering the rise and flight of actually separate wills, independent from the mass; it was only with the advent of the world financial market that the possibility of acting with impunity and pursuing definite aims outside of any sort of collective control could be seized – at varying scales and with diverse motives. Until then, only the governments of the main world powers could afford to, parallel to their visible armies, secretly finance and provide frameworks for the research and application of such methods, tools and technologies that could secure them, if not invincibility, at least a capacity of retaliation and a force of persuasion sufficiently impressive in case of a major conflict; and often enough the elected members of these governments would remain relatively ignorant of the scope of these ventures of which

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