I wish I could recall the source, one of the dozens of histories that I read published almost contemporaneously with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the paraphrase was "If for one day our people were once to cease stealing from one another, we would have attained the goal of our utopia for all time."
First spoken by Kruschev in his infamous "thawing" address to the party, and repeated apparently verbatim by Gorbachev in his speech announcing Perestroika.
I may have been muddled in the detail, but I only meant to convey the sentiment.
I am prompted to recall this, because of the recent inferno of a high rise in London which claimed a appalling loss of life.
The culprit in the death toll is suspect cladding which massively multiplied the blaze. .
I too lived in such a high rise, formerly a project and since 1994 privately owned.
Anyhow few years ago in our building, two floors above, a similar fire erupted.
Well we're spared inevitable casualties only because the defrauding of the building funds had ensured that the minimum work was completed.
That flat is owned by a kingmaker of British politics and the 2 bedroom apartment had just been moved into by a young Italian woman, who I slack jawed observed receiving 8 beds counting the space in doubles and a sofa bed for good measure for the tiny kitchen. Criminal overcrowding absolutely known by all owners of the properties. Shortly after my life and everything around me was systematically destroyed and I was continually imprisoned upon a forged court order and suffered multiple attacks I was lucky to survive, one clearly engineered with massive coordination of the prison staff, and one time a senior judge point blank telling me to forget about bail or trial.
I'm in total agreement with the necessity of sorting out our so called democracy. We simply don't police the rules that are supposed to protect us, and I am just barely recovering testament to corruption overriding every protection society is supposed to afford to protect the politically privileged while they steal