Word: schell
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...Schell, if you remember, is the sanctimonious New Yorker staff writer who penned the hopelessly whiny, self-righteous. Fate of the Earth, which many on the Left and in the Dovish Center embraced as the anti-nuke Bible...
Fate was the most irritating of essays, describing ad nauseum the effects of nuclear war on every manner of life imaginable, and then proposing that we save all the cute furry animals and our children by forming a world government. Schell simply wasn't playing by political science rules--one doesn't simply say things are awful and then prescribe the best of all possible worlds...
...Schell obviously understood this, and The Abolition hastily debunks much of what Schell, with much hoopla, put forth two years ago. In fact, the author, with customary hubris, goes so far as to quote his previous work as an example of a historic consensus: world government can be the only real solution to the nuclear crisis--this consensus, by the way, includes such luminaries as nuke guru. Herman Kahn, Harvard's Living With Nuclear Weapons gang, MIT nuclear specialist George Rathjens. Bertrand Russell, Grenville Clark, and Louis B. Sohn Schell explains parenthetically. "I take the liberty of quoting myself again...
Perhaps, then, the best way to approach The Abolition is to forget that Schell ever wrote Late of the Earth. If Abolition were a laundry detergent, it would be labelled "all new and improved," and housewives and husbands in TV ads would be shown embracing the new product while blithely tossing the old into the trash...
...this Schell product really is new and improved. Finding Schell back on terra firm a must be welcome to those who--like their progressive idealists flexing their thinking muscles in the realm of the possible. Forget world government, now you get a policy that is not simplistic, and--if one stretches the definition of 'possible' to its utmost breaking point--maybe even workable. There are, of course, still many bugs to be worked out in the new product...