Does not Mr E. P. Thompson see any connexion between the internal nature of the Soviet empire as an oligarchic tyranny and its external policies? As … - Correlli Barnett

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Does not Mr E. P. Thompson see any connexion between the internal nature of the Soviet empire as an oligarchic tyranny and its external policies? As a former communist he must know that the Soviet regime is of its very nature and from earliest origins a minority conspiracy that has gained and maintained power by force and trickery; that because of this inherent nature it always has been and remains terrified of independent centres of thought or power, whether within the Russian empire or beyond its present reach. It is the conjunction of such a regime, and its manifested wish to dominate others, with armed forces powerful beyond the needs of mere defence that is the engine of the present "armaments race". Who believes that Nato and its armaments would exist if Russia had been a Western-style open society for these last 60 years? The first requirement for large-scale nuclear or any other kind of disarmament is the withering away of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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About Correlli Barnett

Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".

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Alternative Names: Correlli Douglas Barnett
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The new German conception of organizing and planning opened the modern epoch of war. Nothing like the minutely dovetailed plans, routes, and timetables of the mobilization and Aufmarsch of 1870 had been seen before. Thus an army had become the professional and organizational peer of modern history.

There are of course the neo-Puginites or neo-Morrisites who like to think of Britain as leading the world into a post-industrial phase where this form of capability will be obsolete, and who despise so material a matter as GNP as unethical or—the trendy version—unecological. Yet these high-minded escapists are among the first to howl about the need for more resources to be invested in hospitals, schools, good works, prison improvement, subsidies for the arts and what not. A country of static or declining GNP will not be an 'Erewhon' but a pinched and increasingly bitter place. Poverty may be noble as a concept; it is rarely so in in the flesh.

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Britain came out of the Second World War as an obsolescent industrial economy with grievous weaknesses. Instead of first devoting all possible resources and effort to remedying this, she chose to load this economy with the vast and potentially limitless cost of the welfare state; current expenditure before capital investment; the patterns of the next thirty years.

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