The Garden of the Blind

I just recently finished George Orwell's classic book 1984. I had read it before as a teenager, but I didn't really appreciate its message at the time. Now, I read it in light of years of political education and recent history (including the recent paranoia about terrorism).

I do not share the book's dystopian view (in spite of my cynical tendencies), but I think that it is very powerful as a cautionary tale. There is one issue on which I disagree with Orwell's conclusions. In the book, three superpowers have the world divided up in such a way that they cannot overpower each other, leaving them to take turns controlling some of the fringe portions of the world (such as the land between Morocco and India). One essential element of this stalemate is that all three powers have enough resources within their own territories to support themselves, making further conquest unnecessary.

My problem with this is that war is not driven by a need to control resources. Two hundred years ago, wars were about controlling minerals and resources, but that has changed. Look at all of the wars over the last 100 years. At least since the first World War, most conflicts have been driven by a desire to obtain power and to control specific land areas. It's not a matter of having a few thousand more square miles, but of having these thousand square miles. Typically, you have a region that has changed hands over the last century or two, and as a result the groups who have had control each believe that it should be under their control and they are willing to kill anyone else who tries to prevent that.

The other driving influence is the desire to control or eliminate another group of people. I have a hard time understanding ethnic hatreds (even though our country still is simmering with racism), but I can see that a lot of wars are about wiping out the people who are different from you.

The whole point is that, while perpetual war may be inevitable (although I think that nuclear deterrence and economic potentials of trade give strong disincentive to go to war), the relative availability of resources will not be the driving force behind most (if any) wars.