Ryszard Kapuscinski, from the third chapter titled The Collapse inside The Emperor
Penguin Classics, 2006 (org. in Polish as Cezars, 1978)

Also from this book: The Throne & It’s Coming, It’s Coming

Experience confirms it. A man starved all his life will never rebel. Up north there was no rebellion. No one raised his voice or his hand there. But just let the subject start to eat his fill and then try to take the bowl away, and immediately he rises in rebellion. The usefulness of going hungry is that a hungry man thinks only of bread. He’s all wrapped up in the thought of food. He loses the remains of his vitality in that thought, and he no longer has either the desire or the will to seek pleasure through the temptation of disobedience. Just think: Who destroyed our Empire? Who reduced it to ruin? Neither those who had too much, nor those who had nothing, but those who had a bit. Yes, one should always beware of those who have a bit, because they are the worst, they are the greediest, it is they who push upward.
113

…in order to limit excessive war expenses, only officers had a right to a funeral, while the bodies of the common soldiers were left to the vultures and hyenas.
122

They [the soldiers who finally ended Haile Selassie’s reign by a coup d’etat] were completely dumbfounded, however, completely unable to understand, when they saw that His Most Singular Majesty wore his military uniform all the time (medals jingling), and carried his marshall’s baton, as if he wanted to show that he still commanded his army, still stood at his head, and still gave the orders. No matter that this army had designs against the Palace. Well, so it had, but under his command it was a faithful, loyal army, which did everything in the Emperor’s name. They rebelled? Yes, but they rebelled loyally!

That’s it, my friend—His Venerable Majesty wanted to rule over everything. Even if there was a rebellion, he wanted to rule over the rebellion, to command a mutiny, even if it was directed against his own reign.
134

Ryszard Kapuscinski, from the second chapter titled It’s Coming, It’s Coming inside The Emperor
Penguin Classics, 2006 (org. in Polish as Cesarz, 1978) 

Also from this book: The Throne & The Collapse

[After a failed coup d’etat…] That same night His Unrivaled Highness ordered that his favorite lions be shot, because instead of defending the Palace they had admitted the traitors.
74

These generals, with His Gracious Majesty’s help, arranged such a good life for themselves that in out Empire, which contained thirty million farmers and only a hundred thousand soldiers and police, agriculture received one percent of the national budget and the army and the police forty percent.
93

His August Majesty chided the bureaucrats for failing to understand a simple principle: the principle of the second bag. Because the people never revolt just because they have to carry a heavy load, or because of exploitation. They don’t know life without exploitation, they don’t even know that such a life exists. How can they desire what they cannot imagine? The people will revolt only when, in a single movement, someone tries to throw a second burden, a second heavy bag, onto their backs. The peasant will fall face down into the mud—and then spring up and grab an ax. He’ll grab an ax, my gracious sir, not because he simply can’t sustain this new burden—he could carry it—he will rise because he feels that, in throwing the second burden onto his back suddenly and stealthily, you have tried to cheat him, you have treated him like an unthinking animal, you have trampled what remains of his already strangled dignity, taken him for an idiot who doesn’t see, feel, or understand. A man doesn’t seize an ax in defense of his wallet, but in defense of his dignity, and that, dear sir, is why His Majesty scolded the clerks. For their own convenience and vanity, instead of adding the burden bit by bit, in little bags, they tried to heave a whole big sack on at once.
97

Ryszard Kapuscinski, from the first chapter titled The Throne inside The Emperor
Penguin Classics, 2006 (org. in Polish as Cesarz, 1978)

Also from this book: It’s Coming, It’s Coming & The Collapse

Each step was a struggle between shuffling and dignity, between leaning and the vertical line.
6

…in the Palace questions were always asked from top to bottom, and never vice versa. When the first question was asked in a direction opposite to the customary one, it was a signal that the revolution had begun.
9

[After his usual morning visit to his leopards, lions and other animals of prey in the palace’s garden, The Emperor…] …approaches a flock of flamingos, but the shy birds scatter when he comes near. The Emperor smiles at the sight of creatures that refuse to obey him.
10

[Every morning while strolling through his gardens The Emperor Haile Selassie listens to reports from his various information agencies who competed against each other. These spying organizations ‘live in fear of not reporting something in time and falling into disgrace, or of a competitor’s reporting it better’] Haile Selassie never commented on or questioned the reports he received, during his morning walks, about the state of conspiracy in the Empire. But he knew what he was doing, as I shall show you. His Highness wanted to receive the reports in a pure state, because if he asked questions or expressed opinions the informant would obligingly adjust his report to meet the Emperor’s expectations. Then the whole system of informing would collapse into subjectivity and fall prey to anyone’s willfulness. The monarch would not know what was going on in the country and the Palace.
11

Haile Selassie was a constitutional Chosen One of God, and he could nor associate himself with any faction (although he used one or another more than others but if any one of the favored coteries went too far in its eagerness, the Emperor would scold or even formally condemn it. This was especially so for the extreme factions that our Emperor used to establish order. The Emperor’s speeches were remarkably kindly, gentle, and comforting to the people, who had never heard his mouth form a harsh or angry word. And yet you cannot rule an Empire with kindness. Someone has to check opposing interests and protect the superior causes Emperor, Palace, and State. That is what the extreme factions, were doing, but because they did not understand the Emperor’s subtle intentions, they slipped into error—specifically the error of overdoing it. Desirous of His Majesty’s approbation, they tried to introduce absolute order, whereas His Supreme Majesty wanted basic order with a margin of disorder on which his monarchical gentleness could exert itself. For this reason, the extremists’ coterie encountered the ruler’s scornful gaze when they tried to cross into that margin.
29

I’ll come right out and say it: the King of Kings preferred bad ministers. And the King of Kings preferred them because he liked to appear in favorable light by contrast. How could he show himself favorably if he were surrounded by good ministers? The people would be disoriented. Where would they look for help? On whose wisdom and kindness would they depend? Everyone would have been good and wise. What disorder would have broken out in the Empire then! Instead of one sun, fifty would be shining, and everyone would pay homage to a privately chosen planet. No, my dear friend, you cannot expose the people to such disastrous freedom. There can be only one sun. Such is the order of nature, and everything else is a heresy. But you can be sure that His Majesty shined by contrast. How imposingly and kindly he shone, so that our people had no doubts about who was the sun and who was the shadow.
33

Mr. Kapuchitsky, do you know what money means in a poor country? Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things. In a rich country, money is a piece of paper with which you buy goods on the market. You are only a customer. Even a millionaire remains a customer. He may purchase more, but he remains a customer, nothing more. And in a poor country? In a poor country, money is a wonderful, thick hedge, dazzling and always blooming, which separates you from everything else. Through that hedge you do not see creeping poverty, you do not smell the stench of misery, and you do not hear the voices of the human dregs. But at the same time you know that all of that exists, and you feel proud of because of your hedge. You have money; that means you have wings. You are the bird of paradise that everyone admires.

Can you imagine, for instance, a crowd gathering in Holland to look at a rich Dutchman? Or in Sweden, or in Australia? But in our land—yes. In our land, if a prince or count appears, the people run to see him. They will run to see a millionaire, and afterward they will go around and say, “I saw a millionaire”. Money transforms your own country into an exotic land. Everything will start to astonish you—the way people live, the things they worry about, and you will say, “No, that’s impossible”. Because you will already belong to a different civilization. And you must know this law of culture: two civilizations cannot really know and understand one another well. You will start going deaf and blind. You will be content in your civilization surrounded by the hedge, but the signals from the other civilization will be as incomprehensible to you as if they had been sent by the inhabitants of Venus. If you feel like it, you can become an explorer in your own country. You can become Columbus, Magellan, Livingstone. But I doubt that you will have such a desire. Such expeditions are very dangerous, and you are no madman, are you? You are already a man of your own civilization, and you will defend it and fight for it. You will water your own hedge. You are exactly the kind of gardener that the Emperor needs. You don’t want to lose your feathers, and the Emperor needs people who have a lot to lose.
45

Next, he [the Emperor] writes that he forbade the custom that a man who had been accused of murder—and this was only an accusation by the common people, because there were no courts—would have to be publicly executed by disembowelment, with the execution performed by the closest member of his family, so that, for example, a son would execute his father and a mother her son. … Next, he abolished by decree a method that we call lebasha, for the discovery of thieves. Medicine men would give a secret herb to small boys, who, dizzy, stupefied, and directed by supernatural forces, would go into a house and point out the thief. The one who had been pointed out, in accordance with tradition, had his hands and legs cut off. Just try to imagine, my friend, life in a country where, even though you are completely innocent of crime, you can at any moment have your hands and legs cut off.
51

Standing on a platform, His Highness would hear the case as it was presented by counsel, and then pronounce his verdict. This was according to a procedure established three thousand years ago by the Israelite King Solomon, of whom His Most Exalted Majesty was a direct descendant—as established by the constitutional law. *
55 

* From the Wikipedia article on the Rastafari Movement:

The Rastafari movement or Rasta is a new religious movement that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica, a country with a predominantly Christian culture where 98% of the people were the black descendants of slaves. Most of its adherents worship Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia (ruled 1930–1974), as God incarnate, the Second Advent, or the reincarnation of Jesus.

Lesley Hazelton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam
Doubleday, September 2009 

   Mısır’da olanlar için “Bu bir Allah-sız devrim!!” diyenlerin anlamadıkları en az iki şey sayabilirim: Devrim, ve Allah.
//
   I can speak of at least two things which those who say that “This is an Allah-free revolution” about what happened in Egypt do not seem to quite understand: Revolution, and Allah. 

   « The ruling class of Mecca was back in control, and with a ven geance. There was no doubt as to who was drawing the milk, and the ones left holding the horns became increasingly outspoken as nepotism and corruption devolved into their inevitable correlates: wrongful expropriation, deportation, imprisonment, even execution. The most respected early companions of Muhammad began to speak out in protest, as did all five of the other men who had sat in caucus and elected Othman, and none more clearly than Ali.

   The property of Islam was being embezzled, he warned. The Umayyads were like a pack of hungry animals devouring everything in sight. “Othman shrugs his shoulders arrogantly, and his brothers stand with him, eating up the property of God as the camels eat up the springtime grasses.” Once that brief treasured lushness was gone, only barren desert would be left.

   But the voice that gained the most attention was that of Aisha, who found herself for once on the same side as Ali. “That dotard,” she called Othman—a doddering old man in thrall to his relatives—and the word stuck, demeaning and mocking.

   Some said she was roused to action only when Othman reduced her annual pension to that of the other Mothers of the Faithful, challenging her prominence. Others said she acted in the hope that her brother-in-law Talha would take over as Caliph. But there is also no doubt that Aisha was truly outraged by the extent of the corruption, which came to a head over the scandalous behavior of Walid, one of Othman’s half brothers.

   As the governor of the garrison city of Kufa in central Iraq, Walid did not even bother to disguise his aristocratic disdain for the residents under his control. With a kind of Arabian snobbery that would surface again and again, he contemptuously dismissed the native Iraqis as “provincial riffraff.” Unjust imprisonment? Expropriation of lands? Embezzlement from the public treasury? Such complaints against him, Walid declared, were worth “no more than a goat’s fart in the desert plains of Edom.”

   One particular goat’s fart, however, would reach all the way to Medina when Walid appeared in the Kufa mosque flagrantly drunk and, in front of the assembled worshipers, vomited over the side of the pulpit. The Kufans sent a delegation to Medina to demand that he be recalled and publicly flogged, but Othman refused them point-blank. Worse, he threatened to punish them for daring to make such a demand, and when they then appealed to the leading Mother of the Faithful for support, he was heard to sneer in disdain: “Can the rebels and scoundrels of Iraq find no other refuge than the home of Aisha?”

   The gauntlet was thrown: a challenge not just to “the rebels and scoundrels of Iraq” but to Aisha herself. As word spread of Othman’s sneer, many thought it a foolish thing to have done. Perhaps Aisha had been right in calling Othman a dotard. Perhaps he really was losing his grip, or at least his judgment. Certainly it seemed that way when a respected Medinan elder stood up in the mosque in public support of the Iraqis’ demands, and Othman’s response was to order him thrown out—so violently that four of his ribs were broken.

   If Aisha had been outraged before, she was now incensed. That the guilty should go free and the innocent be beaten? No curtains or veils could stop her. Covering her face in public did not mean muffling her voice, not even—particularly not—in the mosque. The following Friday she stood up at the morning prayers, brandishing a sandal that had belonged to Muhammad. “See how this, the Prophet’s own sandal, has not yet even fallen apart?” she shouted at Othman in that high, piercing voice of hers. “This is how quickly you have forgotten the sunna, his practice!”

   How could Othman have underestimated her? But then whoever would have thought that a mere sandal could be used so effectively? As the whole mosque erupted in condemnation of the Caliph, people took off their own sandals and brandished them in Aisha’s support. A new propaganda tool had made its first powerful impression, one not lost on all the caliphs and shahs and sultans of centuries to come, who would produce inordinate numbers of ornately displayed relics of the Prophet—sandals, shirts, teeth, nail clippings, hair—to bolster their authority. »

Bülent Somay, “Sol” Sona Ererken
Birikim dergisi sayı:219, Temmuz 2007

Adama sormuşlar: “Sizin evde kararları kim verir?” Adam, “Büyük kararları ben veririm, küçük kararları karım verir,” demiş. “Karınız hangi tür kararları verir?” diye sormuşlar, adam “Mesela,” demiş, “hangi evde oturacağız, hangi yemek odası takımını alacağız, kaç çocuk yapacağız, işte bu gibi kararları karım verir.” “E, peki,” demişler, “sizin verdiğiniz büyük kararlar hangileri?” “Vallahi,” demiş adam, “İsrail-Filistin meselesi nasıl çözülecek, İran’a nükleer araştırma izni verilsin mi, ABD Irak’tan ne zaman çıksın, işte bu tür kararları da ben veririm.” Söz konusu adamın George W. Bush olmadığını varsayarsak, bu fıkra 1960’lardan beri Türkiye’de “sosyalist”, “komünist” ya da “Marksist” dediğimiz kesimlerin serencamını anlatmada eşsizdir. Aslında 1960’lar sınırını koymak bile gereksiz: (Eski) TKP’nin kuruluşundan beri Türkiye’de sosyalist ve komünistler “küçük”, gündelik işleri CHP’ye ve 12 Eylül 1980’den sonra da onun yerine aday olan çeşitli Kemalist/”sol”/sosyal demokrat partilere havale edip, kendileri “büyük”, küresel meselelerle uğraşmayı tercih ettiler. Politikanın önemini ısrarla vurguladılar, ama kendileri asla ve asla politika yapmadılar. Bunun (sınırlı) bir istisnası TİP’in 19665-69 döneminde TBMM içindeki çalışmasıdır. O dönemde bile TİP tarihi bir kopuşlar tarihi oldu: Gündelik, sıradan politikayla uğraşmayı bir türlü kabullenemeyen, içine sindiremeyen “radikal” gruplar birbiri ardına TİP’ten koptu, marjinalleşti. Gündelik, sıradan politika içinde kendine bir yer beğenemeyen sosyalist ve komünistler, insan hakları ve düşünce özgürlüğü, Türkiye’nin ekonomik ve politik (yeniden) yapılanması ve dış politika gibi “küçük” konuları doğrudan doğruya CHP’ye ihale ettiler. CHP’yi beğenmemekten asla vazgeçmediler, ama pratik politik gündemlerini de onun pratik politik gündemiyle sınırladılar. Bu durumun en iyi örneği, 12 Eylül’ün hemen sonrasında Necdet Calp’in Halkçı Partisi’nin beklenmedik bir oy oranına ulaşmasında izlenebilir: 12 Eylül askerî yönetimi tarafından “bir de sol partimiz bulunsun” zihniyetiyle “kurdurulan” HP, Calp’in televizyondaki tartışmada Özal’a “sattırmam efendim!” meydan okuması sayesinde, sosyalist cenahın oylarını toplamayı başardı. Sosyalistler özelleştirmeye (günümüzde de sürmekte olan) karşı çıkışlarını bu kez de HP’ye ihale etmişlerdi.