Foreword "Geopolitical Thinking in Those Days"

[Dave Monroe]

"Geopolitical thinking in those days was enchanted
with teh 'World-Island' idea of British geographer
Halford Mackinder--meaning Europe, Asia and Africa
considered as a single landmass surrounded by water,
'the pivot of history,' whose heartland was 1984's
Eurasia.  'Who rules the Heartland commands the
World-Island,' as Mackinder had put it, and 'Who rules
the World-Island commands the world,' a pronouncement
not lost on Hitler and other theoreticians of
realpolitik.
   "One of these Mackinderites with connections in
intelligence circles was James Burnham, an American
ex-Trotskyist who around 1942 had published a
provocative analysis of the world crisis then current
called The Managerial evolution, which Orwell
discussed later in a lengthy article in 1946.  Burnham
... argued that with the conquest of Russia and teh
global heartland imminent, the future would belong to
Hitler.  Later in the war, while serving with the OSS,
with teh Nazis headed for defeat, Burnham changed his
mind in a lengthy afterthought, 'Lenin's Heir,' in
which he argued that unless the United States did
something about it, the future, actually, would belong
to Stalin and the Soviet system, and not Hitler after
all.... traces of Burnham's geopolitics can be found
in the tripartite world balance of power of 1984 ....
   "The grouping of Britain and the United States into
a single bloc, as prophecy, has turned out to be
dead-on, foreseeing Britain's resistance to
integration with the Eurasian landmass as well as her
continuing subservience to Yank interests ...."
("Foreword," pp. xiv-xv)


George Orwell, "You and the Atomic Bomb" (1945)

http://www.blancmange.net/tmh/articles/abombs.html

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79e/part33.html

__________, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1946)

http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/burnham/e/e_burnh.htm

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79e/part40.html


Halford Mackinder

http://wwwstage.valpo.edu/geomet/histphil/test/mackinde.html

http://www.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/mackinder.htm

http://www.geocities.com/eurasia_uk/heartland.html

http://www.geocities.com/eurasia_uk/mac1.html

http://www.geocities.com/eurasia_uk/mac2.html


James Burnham

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/sept02/burnham.htm

http://users.cyberone.com.au/myers/burnham.html


And cf. ...

http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html

http://utenti.lycos.it/Delenda_Carthago/chessboard_eng.html

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19971101fabook3692/zbigniew-brzezinski/the-grand-chessboard-american-primacy-and-its-geostrategic-imperatives.html

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