The Garin Death Ray

When I was a kid, one of my favorite Sci-Fi books was called The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin (published in English as "The Garin Death Ray"). The story is of a megalomaniacal scientist who invents a laser like machine which he uses to drill down to the Earth's core and mine the gold and other precious metals that exist there in abundance. Using this gold he crashes the world's financial markets by devaluing gold completely, and making himself an absolute dictator.

A good story, written by Alexei Tolstoy, the other Tolstoy's distant, poor relation;although extremely ideological, communist propaganda.

Why did I bring this up? In the story, when Garin sets up his mining operations, he brings in a multitude of workers of different ethnicities and races. They are all segregated from one another and inter-ethnic strife is encouraged as a way to prevent the workers from organizing and overcoming the people in charge.

The place where I am working right now is pretty unusual; at least I've never encountered this type of environment before. People seem to be hanging out purely with their ethnic groups - the Filipinos with other Filipinos, Indians with Indians, Russians with Russians, Chinese with Chinese. This always happens to some degree, but here it is very pronounced. Weird.