Bookshelf: Toward a 'Warrior Age'
Ravi Batra's best-selling "The Great Depression of 1990" (Simon & Schuster, 235 pages, $17.95) predicts "the worst economic turmoil in history . . . more cataclysmic than any mankind has yet seen." It gains credibility from a foreword by Lester Thurow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who calls it "novel and brilliant." Mr. Batra has already made the cover of Financial World.</br></br>"I am no astrologer, no psychic," the author assures us, "not a sensationalist or a Jeremiah." But that doesn't exhaust the possibilities. Mr. Batra is proud of his "obsession" with the teachings of Prabhat Ranja Sarkar, described as an expert in many disciplines, "above all, spirituality." The disciple discovered that "here at last was a philosophy of history that in one stroke could unravel the mystery of every social phenomenon." Like Marx, Mr. Batra's guru preaches historical determinism and class conflict, but adds warriors and intellectuals to the usual classes of exploited laborers and greedy acquisitors (capitalists).</br></br>"The acquisitors grow richer and richer at the expense of other classes," the author explains. Fortunately, this "will force a crisis that will ultimately give way to sanity in politics, the economy, and the general state of affairs."</br></br>"Eventually, things become so wretched that angry warriors and intellectuals rise in rebellion and with the help of laborers bring an end to the age of acquisitors. . . . Society will then move into another warrior age."</br></br>What will this new "sanity" look like? "In the warrior age the army, headed by a dictator . . . controls the government as well as society. Political authority is centralized in the form of an absolute government, people are highly disciplined, family ties are morally binding, women are well respected, and so on."