Modern Greece has been a hapless country. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greece was occupied for almost four hundred years by the Turks. The War of Independence, which began in 1821, continued for twelve years before it was finally resolved and the Triple Alliance implanted the Bavarian King Otho on the throne. Great Britain soon came to dominate Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean—a dominance that lasted, except for the German occupation of 1941-44, until 1947, when the U.S. stepped in with the Truman Doctrine. Thus began the period of the latest domination of Greece.

At the outbreak of World War II, Greece was under the dictatorship of General Metaxas. When, on October 28, 1940, Mussolini issued his ultimatum to Greece, Metaxas replied with his now famous “Ohi” and the Greek troops humiliated Mussolini's minions in the mountains of Albania.

It has come as a surprise to me that quite a number of the reviewers of my book The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview (Columbia University Press, 1981) classify my views as “nonliberal” and inconsonant with pluralistic democracy. “Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose disdain for parliamentary democracy is well documented,” contends Joshua Rubenstein in The New Republic. “Turchin's ideas reflect a fundamental distrust of conventional politics.” Says David Paul Rebovich in Worldview: “While he advocates democratic rights, he has little affection for Western-style liberalism.” And Michael Scammell asserts quite unequivocally in the London Times that “Turchin…disagrees with political pluralism.”

Analyses of the U.S.-Soviet balance of power usually focus on relative military strength—the number of tanks, planes, nuclear warheads, and other items in the so-called strategic balance. But many other factors determine a country's overall power and influence. Among the most basic is a country's capacity to feed its people. By this measure the Soviet Union appears to be in deep trouble.

This year the USSR will try to import 46 million tons of grain, more than any country in history (source, here and elsewhere: U.S. Department of Agriculture). Nearly a fourth of all Soviet grain for feeding both people and livestock will come from the North American breadbasket, most of it from the United States.