Hermes wrote:GreekIslandGirl wrote:All agricultural and industrial equipment was handed over to them and they were left to manage their own affairs. The result exactly fulfilled all the theoretical predictions. The land wasn't properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intriguing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were. Within six years they were having a first-class civil war. When nineteen out of the twenty-two thousand had been killed, the survivors unanimously petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the island. Which they did. And that was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen."
GR is right. A prophetic account of the Anatolian shambles in the north. Incredible really. Nice find ...
That's an interesting interpretation; that this satire can reflect the present-day scenario of ethnic cleansing and colonisation of the north by 'Turks' who are the (self-considered) superiors or 'Alphas'.
Huxley was considered an intellectual, and personally, I found the allegories in this book quite demanding. Huxley doesn't draw on any ideas, nor use phrases or terms lightly and the novel is loaded with meaning based on concerns about the price civilisation pays, and how it pays, for forgoing truth for happiness. Real insights, themes, into the worries that must have been circulating among the learned liberals of his time. I had been musing as to why he used the name 'Mustapha' for the World Controller of Western Europe. Which is why I reeled upon reading of this 'Experiment in Cyprus' and pondered on what news must have been circulating as to Cyprus' future, back in the 1930s.
Certainly the prevailing attitude, in Imperial Britain, must have been one of total ownership of Cyprus to "do" with as they wished ...
