The Warlord of the Air

The conqueror always assumes that his moral superiority—rather than his ferocious greed—is what has allowed him to triumph.

Tyrants hate original thinking.

In an infinite universe, all may become real sooner or later. Yet it is always up to mankind to make real what it really wishes to be real.

“I was wondering what made a decent English army officer turn into a desperate revolutionist overnight,” I smiled.

“It happens to many like that,” he said. “I have seen them. But you have to show them so much injustice first... Nobody wants to believe that the world is cruel—or that one’s own kind are cruel. Not to know cruelty is to remain innocent, eh? And we should all like to remain innocent. A revolutionist is a man who, perhaps, fails to keep his innocence but so desperately wants it back that he seeks to create a world where all shall be innocent in that way.”

It’s what they call a “theocracy”—priest-ridden in the extreme, full of dark superstitions and darker myths and legends, where all gods and demons are honoured, doubtless to be on the safe side. The people are cruel, ignorant, dirty and proud—they look down their noses at all other races.

Paternalism and centralism, the bane of capitalist as well as socialist politics, are for me the permanent enemy of democracy.

As I suggested to John Major (a British Prime Minister) when he told us that socialism was dead, he should not be too triumphant. After all, until his predecessor Mrs Thatcher revived it, we thought feudalism pretty much over and done with, too.

“Like most fanatics,” I pointed out coolly, “you share at least one characteristic with children—you want everything now. All improvements take time. You cannot make the world perfect overnight. Things are considerably better for more people today than they were in my—in the early years of this century, for instance.”