The Corrupt Society by Robert Payne published by Praeger Publishers, NY 1975. The strength of cultures, and their weakness cannot be measured exactly by any known measuring rods. We simply do not know how much residual strength lies in a culture when it is confronted by a powerful enemy determined to destroy it.

The five faces of corruption are old age, conquest, tyranny, treachery and subversion, and clash of cultures.

In Mr. Payne’s book he focuses on society in general and has some very hard to read but descriptive chapters on the Soviet and Labour Camps as well as German Extermination Camps. Although they were from different types of government – one Socialist, one Fascist or one on the extreme left, one on the extreme right, in terms of the camps if you had flown over one of them, they would be remarkably similar in design. They served the same purpose – the planned degradation and destruction of the prisoners. Both camps were the same merciless and arbitrary punishments, the same coarse guards recruited from the criminal class, the same rows of desolate wooden barracks laid down as meticulously as a Roman camp, the same watchtowers and searchlights and barbed-wire entanglements. A heartless, mechanical bureaucracy ruled. Filth and misery and torture reduced the prisoners to mockeries of themselves and only the bravest and luckiest survived. The camps were places where men were stripped of the last vestiges of their human dignity, and this was done deliberately, according to plan, in the manner approved in the appropriate regulation without any feeling of guilt.

What is more terrible is both Stalin and Hitler were kept very much in the loop as to the results and the lists of people who went. Stalin’s camps killed in the range of 25 million people, Hitler killed at least 6 million people, only because the machine broke down during the last 6 months of the war.

Corrupt men/women are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies or half-believe them. They test out their skill in lying in the Area of Confusion, where they serve their apprenticeship in corruption, and when they have passed through the gate in Toward Absolute Corruption, they lie more adroitly, certain at last they have acquired the keys of power. Corrupt men will choose other corrupt men as allies.

The tragedy of corrupt people gaining access to power is a waste of assets of both money and people, as well as the cynicism that builds up. Where they had been hope there is hopelessness, where they had been courage then is cynicism, where there had been life, there is a living death.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, it is never hard to find corruption of one sort or another, it is harder to ensure that power works for the many. As shareholders, you have choices what to do with your dividend, but the priority is to invest in a company which pays a dividend. As shareholders, we believe that our companies are doing good and providing hope in the world, which is why our companies can continue to make profits to pay the dividends.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.