Essay: THE IMPORTANCE OF OBSCURITY

"I HAVE lived 78 years without hearing of bloody places 1 like Cambodia," said Winston Churchill some years before his death. "They have never worried me and I haven't worried them." This remark, recalled by the great man's physician, Lord Moran, was very Churchillian and very 19th century. It was the remark of a man who, despite a keen global vision, still thought it easy for the West to regard itself as the center of the world. To many of his era the periphery of that world lay somewhere in the jungle, well beyond...

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