Lost In Eurasian Land Lust: A Critique of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith experiences an epiphany during a war rally when he realizes, that “…the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax…. Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete.”i During the commotion, Smith receives a copy of an illegal, secret tome, “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism“, written by a member of the Brotherhood, Emmanuel Goldstein. Nestled in an armchair, Smith reads about the geopolitical reality underlying the continuous wars in a chapter entitled, “War is Peace”. Three super-states, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are locked in a cycle of warfare for control of cheap labor in a western Asian and African shatter zone and to mobilize their respective citizens in perpetual mobilization.