Chapter 2, Looking to the West Summary and Analysis

In the people's democracies, many people looked to the West for hope, but they have basically been let down by the West. Most people feel that the world they live in has a natural order. When something happens, like a war, it destroys one's belief in such a natural order. The result is changes in the individual's behavior and habits. He now does things differently. Where he once might have reported in a body lying in the street, he now ignores it and minds his own business. People can be rounded up and sent to concentration camps or crammed into apartment buildings in segregated sectors. Records become falsified and people come to care less about formalities. What then is natural, the world of war or the world that existed before the war.

Those...