THIS 'GLOBAL UNITY'
Netboy, Anthony
This Global Unity' ATLAS OF GLOBAL GEOGRAPHY, by Erwin Raisz. Harper's. $3.50. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy MR. RAISZ'S BOOK is the latest in a deluge of works which endeavor to orient the average...
...This means that we must struggle with a whole new set of geographic values and get used to many startling space relations...
...Raisz's book, with its ample economic, social, and cultural data on the nations of the world to be disabused of the notion that any kind of global unity is possible...
...The militarists have taken the greatest advantage of this line of thinking by creating visions of what would happen to this great country, by virtue of the shrinking of geographic distances, if we did not build a navy larger than all others combined, and an army requisite to fight any power or group of powers...
...Raisz accepts the conclusion of Colin Clark, who made a comprehensive study of global economic conditions, that "80 per cent of all the people find the world a wretchedly poor place to live in...
...Thus, what kind of lasting alignment can there be between a nation like the United States which has an average income of 541 international units per person and China, with an average of 51, or India with 65...
...The war has amply demonstrated its sinister implications—the fact that the internecine quarrels of one continent spread more quickly now to others, thus embroiling the peaceful peoples of the globe in the wars started by the belligerent nations...
...What does this spectacular foreshortening of distances mean...
...Similarly, Americans, whose diet has an index of 92, are far better fed than the famine ridden Chinese (index 18), Indians (29), or Malayans (21...
...First of all, we must realize that no point on the globe is more than 60 hours from the nearest airport...
...The new cartography, based on spherical projections, accurately measures distance as the plane flies...
...Europe, perhaps unfortunately, looms quite close to our horizon—it takes 15 hours to fly from Bermuda to Lisbon, and only 27 hours from San Francisco to London...
...Furthermore, the new geography has been exploited by the advocates of so-called global unity, those quixotic persons who would lead us to believe that because distances have shrunk, barriers between peoples—racial, religious, political, economic, etc.—have miraculously vanished...
...And that means lowering their own material level, an apparition that may become quite real to us if we continue to disperse our wealth in a prodigal manner among our Allies...
...29 hours from Moscow to Shanghai...
...You need only dip into the crowded pages of Mr...
...The flat Mercator projections, which have served us faithfully and well for almost four centuries, have become obsolete because they exaggerate distances as you get away from the equator...
...It takes 25 hours to hop from New York to Moscow, flying eastward...
...RAISZ'S BOOK is the latest in a deluge of works which endeavor to orient the average citizen in the geography of the airplane age...
...The only kind of global unity a rational person can imagine after studying a book like the present is one in which the rich nations share their bounties with the poor and miserable...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 36
