green104

Green 104

Fashionable eschatology

It seems that every decade has its eschatological fascinations and apocalyptic visions: the threat of nuclear war, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, the threat of killer asteroids, epidemics and threats of epidemics of Asian/Spanish/bird 'flu, global warming. In the past the nightmares have been bubonic plague, invasion by the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Normans, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, the Russians, Muslims. It is hard not to hear Eric Blair (George Orwell) reading Goldstein (the fictional author of a supposedly forbidden book in 1984 in which he claims that waging war is primarily a mechanism for keeping one's own national population subdued and under control - an analysis with which Michael Moore may well agree).