PARIS: French author Alexis de Tocqueville was 30 when he wrote, in 1835, after a long trip to the US, this page of his Democracy in America. Of all the forecasts the last century devoted to ours it is probably the most accurate and certainly, at least in the West, the most often quoted. It’s all the more striking since he couldn’t imagine that the Tsarist Empire would someday turn red: Marx was only 17 at the time, and, although it had been advocated by Plato, communism was usually considered an inoffensive dream of a few eccentric intellectuals. Neither could he foresee the advent of the Nuclear Age, probably the main reason why the Cold War didn’t turn into a hot one. His analysis was mainly geographical, not to say physical: no other nations had such space, and so many resources, open to its ambitions.
PARIS: French author Alexis de Tocqueville was 30 when he wrote, in 1835, after a long trip to the US, this page of his Democracy in America. Of all the forecasts the last century devoted to ours it is probably the most accurate and certainly, at least in the West, the most often quoted. It’s all the more striking since he couldn’t imagine that the Tsarist Empire would someday turn red: Marx was only 17 at the time, and, although it had been advocated by Plato, communism was usually considered an inoffensive dream of a few eccentric intellectuals. Neither could he foresee the advent of the Nuclear Age, probably the main reason why the Cold War didn’t turn into a hot one. His analysis was mainly geographical, not to say physical: no other nations had such space, and so many resources, open to its ambitions.