Re: Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three blocs are very much the same.
You could have kidded me. Maybe in Orwell's mind but certainly not in the present-day world where the US is the only superpower and is fighting to preserve its hegemony by hook or by crook...
Actually, Orwell's foretelling was strikingly visionary... You missed the fact that he referred to "the conditions of life in all three blocs". And indeed, there is no difference of lifestyle between a Chinese media mogul and a Texas oil tycoon or between a Russian oligarch and an Indian steel magnate(*). Likewise, the have-nots, whether they slum it in a trailer park in the US Rust Belt or a shantytown in Brazil, share the same ordeal --just remember how New Orleans was universally branded "America's third world"....
Now you claim that the US is fighting to preserve its hegemony? But I seem to remember that Toyota just beat GM last year as the US's #1 car seller(**). How is the war in Iraq gonna change that state of affairs? The whole of Latin America, from Mexico all the way down to Patagonia, has turned anti-US as far as public opinion is concerned, if not the elites. Again, how is waging war for Israel going to reverse such an ominous trend? Meanwhile, China is quietly displacing Europeans and Americans everywhere not only geographically but, more crucially, also in the hearts and minds of Africans, Arabs, Latin Americans, and Asians... So much for the US's struggle for hegemony!
Here's another piece of Orwellian prediction that proved very much to the point:
Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.
Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three blocs is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
In so far as the economic war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
Between the frontiers of the blocs, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about two fifths of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the southern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
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Message 12958981
"...each of the three blocs is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries." That statement is true even for oil and other energy resources! For all the fuss about "peak oil" and the scramble for Middle East oil and gas, Canada is still the US's #1 oil supplier(***) and all of America's energy needs could be filled by Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Bolivia (gas).
Orwell's autarkic model is even true for East Asia/China if we consider Iran and the Caspian Sea to be part of East Asia.
Gus
(*) Meet the New Owners: The Billionaire Mittals
© by Mark Reutter
Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, mastermind of the Mittal family empire and new owner of Sparrows Point, has managed to move up from ownership of a single steel plant in Calcutta in 1976 to become the single largest owner of steel properties on the globe, valued at $30 billion.
Reportedly the richest Indian and a “Forbes 100 Billionaire,” Mittal, 48, paraded his gilded status last year by staging a $55-million wedding for his daughter at the Palace of Versailles, once the home of Louis XIV, France’s Sun King.
His ticket to extraordinary wealth? The same strategic control of steelmaking that earlier forged the fortunes of Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller, plus scores of lesser luminaries, not excluding America’s first “million-dollar-bonus” executive, Bethlehem Steel’s own Eugene Grace.
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makingsteel.com
(**) deseretnews.com
(***) Message 20883136 |
