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What went wrong? There are many answers, but one is that we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment. The U.S. has more Nobel Prizes for science than the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the deployment and widespread adoption of technology—even technology that we invented, even technology that’s not so new anymore—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling. Americans invented the first nuclear reactor, the solar cell, and the microchip, but today, we’re well behind a variety of European and Asian countries in deploying and improving these technologies.

The aim was to maximise profit, enrich management and shareholders, and circumscribe worker militancy. Outside the US, as the Cold War raged, management consultants were willing foot soldiers in the global battle for capitalism.

Bogdanich and Forsythe’s​ book is a damning account of the way McKinsey has made workplaces unsafe, ditched consumer protections, disembowelled regulatory agencies, ravaged health and social care organisations, plundered public institutions, hugely reduced workforces and increased worker exploitation.

It is imperative to note that the Nazi Party adopted the hooked cross (Hakenkreuz in German) as its emblem in 1920. There is no evidence that Hitler ever heard of the word “Swastika”. Hooked Cross had been a sacred symbol of Christianity since its inception in ancient days and it is very natural to find Hooked Cross symbols in old churches and chapels. The Christian symbol had nothing to do either with Hinduism or Swastika. It existed as an important symbol of Christendom since its very existence. It was found in early Christian Graves of Rome in the second century CE.

Many of the Kenyan excavators, who would typically open the trenches and dig the various layers by following the various strata, had expert local knowledge about the ancient sites, including their geology, histories and oral traditions. This knowledge was highly prized by the European scholars, who rarely did any digging themselves. But it was colonial practice, to intentionally “forget” the contributions of Africans to African history, Abungu said. “And the scholars went along with that.”