FILE 00126KPinochet's Chile is the third case study in the Stratford authoritarianism series, and it turns the series toward its hardest question. Mussolini taught us the timer. Amin taught us the channel. Chile teaches what both were pointing at: money, law, and memory are ledgers, every ledger has an owner, and in an emergency the owner takes a side. What remains for the citizen is a discipline the arpillera women understood perfectly, which is to keep a true account when no court will read it, and to trust that entries compound. The general proved the corollary himself: financial privacy never vanishes under a ledger regime. It is reserved.
FILE 00216KPope Leo XIV declared just war theory outdated while preserving 'the right to self-defense in the strictest sense.' The history of Italian fascism, retold this summer at the Stratford Festival, shows what that clause means in practice: the right to resist is real, but it expires. The moral question is not whether to fight. It is whether you act while resistance is still cheap, still legal, and still nonviolent.
FILE 00318KPope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas declares the centuries-old doctrine of just war 'outdated,' and ties the declaration directly to autonomous weapons systems. He then coins a phrase for what should replace it: disarming AI. Not rejecting technology. Freeing it from the logic of armed competition that has already captured the labs, the budgets, and the language.
FILE 00418KOn May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, a 38,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence. Buried inside the Catholic Social Doctrine is a framework for decentralization that predates Bitcoin by 130 years, arrives at the same structural conclusions, and goes further than most crypto whitepapers in diagnosing what concentrated digital power actually does to people.
