Prophecies

According to Paul Valéry, no great power in modern times has been able to hold on to its conquests for more than fifty years. Should this be true, Russia’s day of judgment will come in the 1990s. Yet the staying power of the colossus seems awesome. Russia seems large and rich enough to weather any crisis. It may well continue more or less unchanged despite the chronic inefficiency of its economy and the antihuman absurdities of its system. However, if Russia’s day does come, everyone will wonder that few people foresaw the inevitable end. The final breakup of a clumsy conglomerate of a hundred nationalities situated between nine hundred million irreconcilable Chinese and millions of resentful colonial subjects in Eastern Europe will seem to have been foreordained. — Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath **** How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer one single common principle between the partisans and the enemies of the existing form of society, between liberalism and the…