(I.M. Provement) wrote in message . com...
Lev Khariton wrote:
"Or, how would Orwell have responded to the US expansionism today?"

I do not know how Orwell would have thought about expansionism, but I
know how I feel. Expansionism at any time and place is the result of
excess stored energy or energy greater than the immediate
surroundings. America just happens to be the country with the most
energy and is now in the process of diffusing and spreading its
energy. I think this is some kind of law of matter that more
concentrated substances will always flow to a state of less
concentration. America today is like the blue dye added to a cup of
water, a potent blue that will eventually become a dilluted blue.
This law of energy and matter moving from a greater concentration to a
lesser concentration along paths of least resistance can also be seen
in chess games. The parts of the position with more concentrated,
energetic material will flow into areas of the board that offer least
resistence. Of course the best players, Botvinnik included, knew how
to handle opponents who offered the greatest resistance. Resistance
like anything else that happens on the chess board can only be done by
making legal moves or by letting material stand on squares (refraining
from making legal moves).

"Here I lay it down that Imperialism, of which petrifacts such as the
Egyptian, Chinese and Roman empires, the Indian world and the world of Islam
may remain in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, and out of
conquering zeal invade one another--dead bodies, amorphous, lifeless masses
of men, the spent material of a great history--is to be taken as the typical
symbol of the end. Imperialism is pure civilisation. In this outward form
the destiny of the West is now irrevocably set. The energy of culture-man
is directed inwards, that of civilisation man outwards. For this reason I
see in Cecil Rhodes the first man of the new epoch. He represents the
political style of a Western, Teutonic, particularly German future. His
phrase 'expansion is everything' contains in its Napoleonic form the most
real tendency of every mature civilisation. This applies to the Roman, the
Arab, the Chinese. It is not a matter of choice. It is not the conscious
will of individuals or of whole classes or peoples that decides. The
expansive tendency is a fate, something daemonic and huge which grips, forces
into service and consumes the late mankind of the world-city stage, whether
it wills it or not, whether it knows it or not."
--Oswald Spengler (Der Untergang des Abendlandes: The Decline of the West)

--Nick