-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), II, p. 24.
Another Anderson character had the opposite view of FDR. See Political Comment.
Other things being equal, each war just leads to the next war. It is possible to be allied to a dictator without doing his propaganda for him. The critique from the left had started. Trotsky wrote The Revolution Betrayed in 1937 and the earliest version of Tony Cliff's State Capitalism In Russia was published in 1948. (See also here.) To bring this story closer to the present and also to personalize it slightly, Cliff stayed with us here in Lancaster a couple of times in the 1980s.
To continue Robert Anderson's summary of 1951:
"Eastern Europe and China were down the gullet." (ibid.);
World War III was expected;
the US had never questioned its rightness;
conservation just meant preserving some places in their natural state;
ICBMs were imminent;
it was not yet realized that the oceans could be badly polluted;
transistors were in the science news but would not affect the Third World;
the alternatives were continued machine culture or back to the Stone Age.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
You already know I have ZERO use for Trotsky. I cannot forget all the blood of all the people he helped to kill during the Revolution, the Civil War, and the first years of the monstrous Soviet regime. I don't believe in the least that he would have been substantially better than Stalin if he had won the struggle for power after the first dictator, Lenin, had died.
In his early years as a writer Poul Anderson used to be a "flaming liberal" (the term he used in an author's note for one of the Psychotechnic collections). And he used to favor FDR before further study disillusioned him with leftist liberals.
Some self doubt and questioning is good and healthy for any society. But my view is that the US and the West in general has gone way too far in that direction. Into suicidal self flagellating despair and loathing.
And I agree with Robert Anderson, our only alternatives is either the machine culture or the Stone Age. We CANNOT go back to an allegedly "simpler" way of life.
Sean
Post a Comment