Colonel Series

Inside Out by Barry Eisler, 2010, Excerpt

Colonel Hort [Fictional]:

America is ruled by an oligarchy. If you want to understand America, you have to understand the oligarchy. And if you don’t understand the oligarchy, you can’t understand America.

The oligarchy is right out in the open. It’s just a collection of people in business, politics, the military, and the media who recognize their interests are better served by cooperation than they would be by competition. Most of the people who are part of the oligarchy don’t even realize its existence. If they recognize it at all, they think of it as just a benevolent, informal establishment.

You can’t beat the oligarchy. You can’t beat it because the oligarchy has already won. The establishment is like a virus that’s taken over the organs of the host. Now it acts as a kind of life support system, and if you remove it, the patient it battens on will die. The establishment is a creature whose first priority is ensuring that if you try to remove it, you’ll wind killing the host.

The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalists Papers, that’s all just window dressing now, the artifacts of an ancient mythology, the vestments of a dead religion. We need something different now, something suited for the modern world. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.


Barry Eisler’s Background:

Spent three years in a covert position with the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, then worked as a technology lawyer and start-up executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center along the way. When not writing novels, he blogs about torture, civil liberties, and the rule of law.


The Missing CIA Torture Tapes – Harper’s Magazine - 17 Aug 2010