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TALES OF POWER
In the last century, two
great names - Hitler
and Stalin. Everything else
accessory. For what
triumphed over them was
spiritual mediocrity, and what was
spiritually greater was
dispersed, so that only
Hitler and Stalin stand
as the symbols of the age, as
Napoleon, Darwin, Marx (but not,
I think Nietzsche - not
sufficiently well defined)
of the age before.
Face up to it. They
commanded immense
loyalty and sense
of a future. What sense of a future
do we have?
Scrabbling round in the wreckage
of their idea - seeking
solace in
wrap-around video games,
the entry into hyper space, the loss
of the human scale. Will
Africa recover
a sense of the future?
Is that where
most likely something new
will appear?
A people at any rate something
other than us.
For we can't get an idea higher
than power, and the power
greater than Hitler and Stalin that we live
at the present time
isn't human
(and certainly isn't divine).