Unbidden

dailymeh:

George Orwell, writing in October, 1945, possibly the first use of the term “cold war” to describe, well, what was to become the Cold War:

For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

Orwell also has an interesting theory about weapons:

It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

While this is a little colored by a polarized view of history as one of continuous class struggles, it does have if not a truth then at least the ring of one to it. If Orwell is right, we may never again see an age of successful people’s revolts, since the most powerful weapons get more and more complicated, and the simplest get weaker and weaker relative to the most complicated weaponry. Instead, we’re left with the dismantling of empires by, as Orwell puts it, “slow and unpredictable demographic” — and, I’d like to add, democratic — “changes”.