The tidy purge¶

Normalised “cleansing” is a “purge” carried out in legal form, by officials, banks and parliaments doing what looks like their job. Using seven steps, stigmatisation, self-purification, ties rewritten as disloyalty, extra-juridical dissolution, archives as weapons, spectacle as policy, and the tipping point, after which nothing is left to save. None of the steps needs a dictatorship to start, and each can be pushed from inside a state or from abroad. The clerks track, state by state, which steps are already possible, which instruments for them are already in place, and who could take the next one.

Disclaimer¶

The clerks keeping this register are aware of the irony. Every entry was compiled from public sources and filed in good faith, which, as the historical record points out, is how the trouble usually starts. Should these pages ever prove useful to the wrong office, the observatory asks that they be read in full, including this paragraph.

Lord Vetinari would file these briefs under “Instruments for the Apprehension of Destabilisation”. He would not read them for comfort. He would read them to know which doors are still locked, and to find on each one the hinge: the point at which a small intervention could lock the door or open it. He would also note that a hinge does nothing by itself. Somebody has to push.