portion of
Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western
frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the
Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria,
Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states are
permanently at war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War,
however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in
the early decades of the twentieth century. It is a warfare of limited aims
between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material
cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological
difference This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the
prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more
chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in
all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children,
the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against
prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon
as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the
enemy, meritorious. But in a physical sense war involves very small numbers
of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparati