@narcho-quiz

1. Where might you pay for something with ‘rain’?

2. Well-meaning conservationists cut off the horns of rhinos in Zimbabwe to stop them being poached for their horn. What happened to the rhinos?

3. What do Chinese Anarchists and animal rights activists have in common?

4. Whose manifesto argues that revolutionaries should “acquire political power”?

5. Which science fiction author described the space-faring society he wrote about as “externally anarchist, internally socialist”?

answers

1. Botswana. The currency is the ‘pula’, which means rain in Setswana. It is divided into 100 ‘thebe’, or raindrops. Botswana is 80% arid savannah.

2. Of the 90 rhino poached, 84 had been dehorned. The Asian buyers for rhino horn told the poachers to shoot all the rhinos, with or without horns, because as soon as the animals become extinct, the value of their stockpile will become priceless.

3. Tofu. After 1906, there were two principal currents of Chinese Anarchists abroad, one based in Tokyo and another in Paris. The Paris-based anarchists financed their activities in part through ownership of a tofu factory.

4. The Unabomber’s. He states (in paragraph 194) that “Probably the revolutionaries should even avoid assuming political power, whether by legal or illegal means, until the industrial system is stressed to the danger point and has proved itself to be a failure in the eyes of most people... until the system has gotten itself into such a mess that any hardships will be seen as resulting from the failures of the industrial system itself and not from the policies of the revolutionaries.” Needless to say, this advocacy of government and the taking of political power by revolutionaries has not stopped him being called an anarchist by the media (and some primitivists).

5. Iain M Banks, describing ‘the Culture’ in his series of science fiction books which began with Consider Phlebas.