"Olaf Stapledon - Light and the Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stapledon Olaf)

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/W%20Olaf%20Stapledon%20-%20Light%20and%20the%20Darkness.html (6 of 104)5-9-2007 13:26:18
Darkness and the Light




This Euro-American war was certainly not the war which is being waged while I write this book, in spite of obvious similarities.
At this time the Germans had recovered from that extravagant hooliganism which had turned the world against them in an earlier
period. They had in a manner reverted from Nazism to the more respectable Prussianism. Other facts also show that this was not
our present war. Both India and South Africa had left the British Empire and were already well- established independent states.
Moreover, weapons were now of a much more lethal kind, and the American coast was frequently and extensively bombarded by
fleets of European planes. In this war Scotland had evidently become the economic centre of gravity of Britain. The Lowlands
were completely industrialized, and huge tidal electric generators crowded the western sounds. Tidal electricity had become the
basis of Britain's power. But the British, under their effete financial oligarchy, had not developed this new asset efficiently before
the German attack began.

After the defeat of the democracies it seemed that the cause of freedom had been lost for ever. The Russians, whose initial
revolutionary passion had long since been corrupted by the constant danger of attack and a consequent reversion to nationalism,
now sacrificed all their hard-won social achievements for a desperate defence against the attempt of the German ruling class to
dominate the planet. China, after her victory over Japan, had split on the rock of class strife. Between the Communist North and
the Capitalist South there was no harmony. North America became a swarm of 'independent' states which Germany controlled
almost as easily as the Latin South. India, freed from British rule, maintained a precarious unity in face of the German danger.

But the Totalitarian world was not to be. The end of the German power came in an unexpected manner, and through a strange
mixture of psychological and economic causes. Perhaps the main cause was the decline of German intelligence. Ever since the
industrial revolution the average intelligence of the European and American peoples had been slowly decreasing. Contraception
had produced not only a decline of population but also a tendency of the more intelligent strains in the population to breed less
than the dullards and half-wits. For in the competition for the means of comfort and luxury the more intelligent tended in the long
run to rise into the comfortable classes. There they were able to avail themselves of contraceptive methods which the poorer
classes could less easily practise. And because they took more forethought than the dullards for their personal comfort and
security, they were more reluctant to burden themselves with children. The upshot was that, while the population as a whole
tended to decline, the more intelligent strains declined more rapidly than the less intelligent; and the European and American
peoples, and later the Asiatics, began to suffer from a serious shortage of able leaders in politics, industry, science, and general
culture.

In Germany the process had been intensified by the persecution of free intelligences by the former Hitlerian Third Reich, and by
the subsequent Fourth Reich, which had defeated America not by superior intelligence but superior vitality and the resources of
an empire which included all Europe and most of Africa.

The Fourth Reich had persecuted and destroyed the free intelligences in all its subject lands, save one, namely Norway, where it




file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/W%20Olaf%20Stapledon%20-%20Light%20and%20the%20Darkness.html (7 of 104)5-9-2007 13:26:18
Darkness and the Light