Barrel Strength

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
George Orwell
1903-1950

I have come across a copy of Foreign Affairs,vol 68, no 1. 1989. Soviet Communism was in the process of collapsing. The satellites were flying off in their own directions. Within a year the Russian state would sign the Treaty of Paris, [Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, November 1990] signifying the end of its pretensions to overthrow the international order, and its return to the comity of nations, after having rejected the same in the Bolshevik Revolution.

So what are all the learned international relations and political science profs writing in Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1989?

Professor David Holloway of  Stanford University was writing a chapter on “Gorbachev’s New Thinking”, mentioning the end of revolutionary faith in the Soviet Union.

Professor Robert Legvold was writing about the “Revolution in Soviet Foreign Policy”. They no longer thought about conquering the world.

Professor Charles Gati was writing about “Eastern Europe on its Own”.  The dictators were having as much trouble assimilating Gorbachev as the learned professors.

The normally highly sagacious Richard Nixon was  describing Gorbachev in that issue and changes in Soviet policy as “changes in style and rhetoric” not to be confused with “shifts in substance and policy.” (at p.200)

But one article you will not have seen in Foreign Affairs or anywhere else for that matter, was a confident statement beginning with “1989 will see the demise of Communism as a serious political idea, and the end of the Soviet Union as an effective regime.”

No article in 1989 began “It’s over”.

Yet it was happening before our noses. In 1989 I was 39. I had been for years firmly anti-communist. I had no illusions about the nature of communism: the essential rubbish of Marxism, the tens upon tens of millions killed to sustain the lie and make the way for the new soviet man; the thuggish brutality, the deliberate destruction of Russia’s productive farmers, the endless slaughters in the prisons of the KGB.

Yet none of us got up and said: communism is over. It is finished. The house of cards will collapse within 18 months. Not one person on this side of the Iron Curtain. My friend the Dark Lord recalls listening to  a Hungarian taxi driver in 1986 or thereabouts telling him “it is finished” in such definitive terms, but even the Dark Lord failed to grasp the dimensions of the taxi driver’s remark.

Which brings is to the present day. What do we fail to see that is before our noses?

Islamic demographic take-over of Europe?

Mark Steyn in “America Alone” and Christopher Caldwell in “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” are slowly creating awareness among the well read on this issue.

The world getting colder instead of warmer?

Failure of regulatory oversight of markets? Too late for that barn door!

You get my drift. Orwell reminds us that a constant effort must be made to see the obvious. It is not enough to speak of economic cycles. You have to be ready to sell out of the market before the crash, even as you endure the opprobrium of many for being a bad sport. You have to be ready to state the obvious in public places, even as the faithful are scandalized. And if I am slightly more apt to scandalize the faithful (global warming alrmists) I am no better at predicting the future than Joe Average.