Too Much To Dream

Déjà vu all over again

I think one of the reasons I find the current antiwar imbroglios to be so frustrating to encounter is the fact that it's happened all before, and within recorded memory. Please read this essay by George Orwell (written, incidentally, when he was thirty-eight years old, only a year and a half younger than I am now), about H.G. Wells and the reaction of that literary celebrity and would-be social engineer to the phenomenon of Hitler, and then turn your attentions to any of the bloviations by the contemporary intellectual elite on the lack of threat posed by Saddam Hussein to the world. I especially like this bit:

A lifelong habit of thought stands between him and an understanding of Hitler’s power.

Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side of life, symbolised in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses.

The device of people getting stuck in an endlessly repeating loop of events is supposed to be one of the more shopworn clichés of science fiction, but I have noticed that it is in fact an all too real part of existence. That does not make me very happy.

(Via Horsefeathers.)

Update: I snipped the quote -- I needed less of it than I first thought to make my point.

Posted by Andrea Harris at February 11, 2003 11:24 PM