If you haven't done so already, please read
first ---- Letter 1 of 4 Birth of a Banana Republic
then --- Letter 2 of 4 Client Kings
Dawn came slowly, almost reluctantly. The skies were overcast with a reddish hue. There had been huge explosions overnight in the south, lighting the sky and sending rolling thunder across the land. The few kingdoms remaining after the Apocalypse were still fighting and – hopefully - killing each other. If we get southerly winds, they will bring radioactive fallout, toxic gases, and black rain. There isn’t any shelter to protect from it. I was up on the lookout in the middle of the night. In helpless fury I raised my fists to the sky and screamed into the thunder “No wind... No wind !”. Afterwards I wondered who I had been yelling at. There was nobody up there.
At noon the settlers signalled from the valley and urged me to come down. An important visitor had arrived and they wanted me to meet him. It was a long and difficult walk for an old man like me. Elsa waited for me at the village entrance looking upset and miserable. She asked me to come to her hut after the meeting to see her brother.
The visitor came from a settlement two days to the north. They had been approached by the Commander of the Sun Kingdom. I know the Sun Kingdom, because I came from there six years ago. It was one of the few that didn’t employ Bandits to harass the Barbarians. The Commander was sending greetings to “his old friend Rolf”, the visitor said. I will explain later how it came that we knew each other. The Commander was inviting all Barbarians in the territory to help fight invading Bandits from other kingdoms. The villages should inform the Sun fortress of any sightings of Bandits. The fortress would then send out soldiers to protect them. The King was giving every village a two-way radio to communicate. I wondered why he was doing it, but accepted it with thanks. It might be useful.
I went to see Elsa. Her brother had gone back to work prematurely because he didn’t want to be a burden for the others. The Barbarian rule was simple: No work, no food. Digging and harrowing the parched soil he had overdone and broken his arm again. It got infected and was now much more painful than before. He was feverish, his arm very hot, swollen and dark red. He was a young and strong man, but without medicine he would get blood poisoning and die. I took her aside. This is bad, I said. His body will keep fighting the infection, but he will die in the end. Because he is strong, it will take longer and cause him more pain. Make it easier for him by helping him die sooner, I said. Come with me to the spring, there is some hemlock growing there. No, no! she cried, I will not kill my brother. I started walking towards the hill. She hesitated, then came running to catch up with me. Walking by my side she wept quietly. Up at the spring I picked some hemlock, put it in her hand and folded her fingers around it. I hugged her and said gently: Be strong. Help him.
She turned without a word and walked back to the village.
Apocalypse
The terrible years from 2060 to 2085 AD
The King brought order to the realm. And prosperity for a favoured few. Fear, hunger, and back-breaking work for the rest. The large underclass of slaves served a tiny oligarchy which ran a brutal system of exploitation. They called themselves the “Lords” in order to cover the stench surrounding their origins. They owned the land, the slaves, the mines ... everything. They lived in fortified palaces protected by thousands of soldiers. They elected the Council advising the King. The King was the centre of power and the ultimate authority, governing, adjudicating, administering life and death.
Democracy had been lost and forgotten. This was not a big loss. It had been a sham in most countries around the world anyway. A fig leaf to hide the corruption, violence, and fraud underneath. Many a tyrant was meticulously holding regular “democratic” elections. In the western world it degenerated into a farce, a stage-managed pop event, financed by corporates and other parties with vested interests. It was useful, though: It distracted the populace from the real issues, hiding what was going on and giving them the warm feeling to have had their say.
At court King Zhang-Ho would grant audiences to the privileged few, his inner circle, those in the know. He would expect the more important Lords to be in attendance. And my father had to be there, too, because he knew all these flunkeys. He would advise the King discretely about their hidden motives and ambitions. The King’s promotions and demotions could be very quick. Therefore, the Lords courted and hated my father, at the same time. I have learned a lot from him about the dirty games that were being played. And about the hypocrites, the opportunists, the devious and the dangerous. Of course, all kings need skilled administrators because they themselves are often stupid. Drunk and blind with power and greed. King Zhang-Ho was generally a bearable king. He spent most of his time pursuing his pleasures, spending the nights with young boys and the days at elaborate banquets. Therefore, he rarely interfered with the work of his underlings, because they made his life of luxury possible (although he didn’t see it this way). He regarded them as disposable serfs, even the higher ranking ones like my father. This became clear occasionally when he would suddenly fly into a mad rage. On one such occasion he had the palace guards kill all his servants, more than a hundred of them, because someone had painted the word SOW on the palace wall. Everyone knew that he was the son of a whore.
Trade happened without money, through a giant barter system. Once a year the bigger kingdoms would organise a “World Trade Fair”, sometimes even called “Fair Trade Fair”, in one of the cities. They made sure to invite the sponsoring power blocs as they were the most important hidden players. When the fair was in some foreign capital, King Zhang-Ho would head a delegation, consisting of some twenty Lords, assorted servants and sex slaves, and my father. While the upper ranks were having fun at the fair, my father and the administrators of other powers did the haggling. Slaves for water ? Food for weapons ? Sounds easy, but how much and what food and what weapons ? Was the food safe ? Did the weapons work ? For my father it was a question of life and death. Because if anything went wrong after delivery, he would be blamed. And promptly executed. For the King these things were easy. At least in the short term.
Water had become a scarce commodity and was furiously traded. Without it good agricultural land was useless. Lack of rain dried out the ground. Hot winds would then blow away valuable topsoil. Successive droughts led to ever increasing desertification. The scorched wastes of the once fertile Midwest were producing less every year. Hence, the most important ingredient of the King’s giant plantations was water. He ordered rainwater to be collected in reservoirs, ground water to be pumped up for irrigation, and water to be diverted from other kingdom’s rivers. The diversion of rivers destroyed a large swath of nature. And didn’t go down well with the other kings. Everyone was being starved of water. This turned into an ever increasing disaster year after year. Large parts of the earth that were once productive farmland had already turned into arid desert. My father said that three quarters of what was once prime American agricultural land was now barren wasteland..
Devastating wars were to be fought over water. And wars over land would soon follow. For the protection of “our” water and land the King used thousands of soldiers. But the soldiers had to be fed, housed, and equipped. As a consequence only the very big kingdoms could afford this level of protection. Naturally, the smaller ones were soon to be robbed of their share ... after all their soldiers had been killed.
Feeding so many slaves to work on the plantations and in the factories was costly, too. Or so the Lords’ advisors said. The slaves were consuming a lot of soybean bread which could otherwise have been exported. The captains of industry reckoned that, if more automation was applied and less down-stream processing, three quarters of all human labour could be saved. In the case of the Zhang-Ho kingdom alone some ten million slaves could become surplus to requirements. That equates to a lot of saved bread, they would say. In the end everyone (except my father who was not part of the inner circle) agreed: There are just too many slaves. Also, they are not as efficient as a machine. They get sick, they die. And, as a cynic added, a machine “knows how to keep its mouth shut”. So, once we have increased automation and reduced processing, what are we going to do with them ?
Well, natural attrition was the answer. We will stop feeding them, some suggested. Others thought that it would take too long for them to die. How about a large-scale industrial accident ? For instance, leakage of a deadly gas into the densely packed labour camp. Or a typhoid epidemic. Maybe an explosion of herbicide tanks containing dioxin. Perhaps we don’t need any smoke screen at all as there is no opposition to placate. Why not simply detonate a few medium-sized nuclear bombs. You find that cruel ? Inhumane ? Sure. But it wouldn’t be the first time. Man has always done this to his fellow men. Think of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai. Other examples stretch back thousands of years.
When my father heard of the plan, he protested violently - in public - at the Court - and was promptly sentenced to death. Inexplicably the King stayed the sentence. However, my father was found a few days later with a knife in his back. He had made too many enemies among the Lords.
----o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o------
I have to interrupt at this point, because the radio is warning of sightings of Bandits. After the Apocalypse the few smaller kingdoms that survived the catastrophe, had lost their trading partners and hence their livelihood. They were starting to go hungry. They sent out Bandits to plunder whatever they could from the Barbarians and from other kingdoms. Some Bandits had just raided a village to the east. The villagers radioed for help, but the Bandits were quick and had left before the Sun soldiers arrived. So I have to be on the lookout around the clock now until further notice.
Late in the morning, after three days on the guard, I saw a dust cloud moving across the plain. It came towards me, so I raised the alarm to give the settlers enough time to hide. The cloud changed directions several times, but came a little closer in the afternoon. It was as I had suspected an armoured truck. After some time it aimed directly for my hill. I got worried and radioed the Sun soldiers for help. They responded promising to dispatch some troops immediately. The truck got closer but seemed to go in circles, as if searching for something. I could see three Bandits behind the windshield. They were studying a map. Suddenly they started going around the foot of the hill to get to the other side. This is where the settlers were hiding. I panicked and jumped up and down and waved my arms to attract their attention. But they didn’t hear nor see me. Desperate to distract them I pushed some rocks down the hill. They grew quickly into a small avalanche. Luck had it that it crashed down only a few hundred yards in front of them. They stopped dead and looked up. I waved and shouted.
It didn’t take long for them to arrive at the top of the hill. They stopped directly in front of me and two of them jumped out, knife in hand, and grabbed my arms: “Where are the settlers that were here two years ago ?” they shouted. Most of them have died, I said, the rest moved up the river towards the northeast. How far, they asked. I shrugged my shoulders. They turned to the truck to discuss with the driver. I heard him talk about fuel and the long way back to their base. The two got back into the truck and the bigger one barked “If we don’t find them, we’ll come back and wring your neck.” He made a descriptive gesture.
The river, like all rivers around here, was dry most of the year. The river bed was better for driving than the rocky slopes. And you could see the truck from miles away. The soldiers coming from the opposite direction would quickly find it. Another remote possibility that I was hoping for was a flash flood. Rain storms up in the mountains could release thousands of tons of water that would come crashing down the valleys. A wall of water would then travel at high speed along the river bed and kill everything in its path. There was no escape. When you saw the water coming, it was too late to flee.
My wishes were not granted. The three were back the following morning. I heard the engine roaring as the truck climbed up the hill. In great haste I switched the radio on to beg for urgent help, but they were too quick. The two Bandits jumped off the truck snarling “you old bastard, trying to con us, eh ?” And with a smirk on his face the bigger one put his hands around my neck.
A shot rang out and two soldiers, emerging from behind the rocks, yelled “Freeze ! Raise your hands ! Turn around !” I could see the Bandit in the truck slumping over the steering wheel. The two soldiers came closer. They both put their handguns away, pulled out a knife and stabbed the Bandits in the chest. “Cheaper than bullets...” said one of them. I went around to the back of the truck. There were five young people in there, chained together, plus plenty of food and water. I told the soldiers to release the prisoners, offload the food and water, then load the dead bodies on the truck. They laughed. You are not calling the shots here. We’ll take it all. And they turned to climb into the truck.
While I was protesting a familiar voice called from the radio behind me “Rolf ! I have heard what is going on. Turn the volume right up and stand back.” With a booming voice he thundered: “Soldiers, this is your Commander speaking.” The soldiers snapped to attention. “Do as the man tells you. Instantly. This is an order. When you are back at base, report to me immediately. Do you hear me ?” “Yes, Sir.”
After they had left, I signalled the settlers asking their elders to come up the hill. The prisoners looked emaciated, so I invited them to eat of the food the soldiers had unloaded. They were from the village to the east, so was the food. The elders asked what the young people were planning to do. Three of them wanted to stay here, the other two preferred to go back home. The elders said their village could only handle two more people. there was not enough land to support more. But the village to the north needed more people and had the land to feed them.
-----o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-------
Here I am back to continue with my letter ...
How to get rid of some superfluous ten million slaves ? That was the big question the Lords thought they had solved. But their plan wasn’t feasible, the technocrats said. It was simplistic because one couldn’t kill them all at once. Think of all the logistical problems: Safe disposal of the cadavers, keeping up production, continuity of service, etc. A phased approach was needed. You must have well-defined stages, a conducive legal environment, proper project management, and so on. For all that to work, you must employ experienced technocrats who are able to plan for, design, and implement, a structured and disciplined regime of death.
Luckily chance created its own solution. Exports of food from Zhang-Ho to the Asia bloc had been going well and were the economic mainstay of the kingdom. The food factory in the Midwest where my father had worked was the biggest producer of this food. The worker slaves there had been a bit sickly in the last few years and had to be replaced in ever increasing numbers. But nobody thought much about it. Until, one day, the Chinese ProConsul in Zhang-Ho City summoned the Council and the King to a meeting. An emergency meeting, he said. In the last few years increasing numbers of Asian consumers had fallen ill after eating soybean based food. The experts found that the food contained some mysterious chemical pollutants. It took a further month to pinpoint the source of the tainted food. It came from the Midwest factory. The ProConsul demanded an immediate investigation into how the contamination had come about and who was responsible. The inquiry found that the ground water used for irrigation and in the manufacture of soybean mash contained toxic chemicals. They came from chemical waste dumped many decades ago. The waste contained phenols, hydrogen sulphide, corrosive caustic soda from petro-chemical processes and heavy metals from weapons manufacture.
The list was long. The result was death. Slow, debilitating, painful death. It could take months. The victims became weak, infertile, and prone to infections. Some developed tumours, many had their immune system fail. They were wasting away. Who was responsible for this ? Some low-level administrators, serfs. Of course. They were executed even before the report had been completed.
The Chinese demanded redress. But how ? The Lords were in a quandary. What could they offer that seemed valuable, but didn’t cost too much ? Almost simultaneously several of them had the same glorious idea: The King. He had been in power for too long. He was too strong. The Lords were jealous of his power, his privileges and his property. So he was impeached. For carelessness in office, for damaging public property, for lewd behaviour unbecoming a king, for endangering the security of the state. He was executed in public and, although deemed a criminal, he was entitled to, and got, a state funeral. His property was divided up fairly and equitably among the Lords. In his place they elected Edward McSantil, a weak and gullible elderly Lord. He was inaugurated in 2076 as King Edward The Saint. The capital was renamed Saint-Edward City. In that same year I was promoted to Junior Administrator in the King’s treasury in charge of landholdings, trade contracts, mines, and water rights.
There had been endless disputes between the kingdoms over borders, land, access to water, etc. These escalated increasingly into squabbles, minor battles and outright wars. Some people saw these as being precursor wars by proxy, instigated by the Asia bloc, the Southern Syndicate, or whoever happened to be the overlord of a particular Client King. These battles were won or lost not so much by the soldiers, but by the availability of equipment, ammunition and fuel. Manufacturing had collapsed some 60 years earlier. Therefore motors, tanks, trucks, almost any mechanical device you can think of, ran out of spare parts. A whole subculture of machine scavengers made a living of taking apart broken-down equipment, collecting spare parts, and trading them on the black market. The same happened with fuel and older types of ammunition. The hi-tech missiles were not affected as the overlords kept those factories going for their own benefit. In the meantime soldiers died because their equipment was wearing out.
It was a classic case of a great power, outwardly invincible, rotting from within. We don’t know and can’t predict when and why empires will collapse. But they will. Inevitably. Nothing lasts forever. The trouble is we don’t know when. It may happen tomorrow or centuries after we have died.
The fighting was taking a huge toll and signalled the beginning of the end of the reign of the Client Kings. The smaller kingdoms were running out of conventional arms and ammunition. Desperate to survive they bought containers of nerve gas and grenades with the bubonic plague virus on the black market. This type of ammunition had been stolen from army depots and laboratories after the collapse of the federal army some thirty years earlier. These weapons repelled many attempted invasions with devastating consequences.. The surviving attackers, carrying the plague in their bodies, returned home and infected whole cities with the lethal disease. However, the defenders themselves were paying a high price, too. Having been stored underground for so long, many of the gas containers had corroded and started to leak their deadly contents. Overall, this meant the end of many kings, their cities, and their people with death making no difference between attackers and defenders. Which left only the big kingdoms, now fighting over the remains of the smaller ones, but more importantly fighting for their own survival. People saw the ‘end of the world’ coming. Some hoped for a ‘rapture’, others just wanted to go quickly hoping to escape pain and suffering. My father had predicted all that. Before he died, he said to me “Don’t see the end as a bad thing. It is good, it clears the air. It will be terrible and many millions will die, but without it we can not make a new start.” He was predicting the future.
Around this time I was negotiating a new trade contract with Sun, a smaller kingdom in the southeast that was not involved in the battles. Because of my reputation as a trade expert the Sun King invited me to become his Trade Advisor. Fearing that the situation back home would deteriorate I decided to stay. This turned out to be a very good move, because it saved my life. At Sun I got to know the Commander. He was not your usual soldier. He had brains. He was keen to understand what was going on and why. I was able to give him some insight. He seemed to like that. A typical discussion with him would be about the role everyone had in life. He would ask, Why do we need administrators ? I would explain and then ask him, Why do we have soldiers ? Oh, to protect us, he would say. Protect whom, I would ask, me or the slaves or who ? Or what ? A long pause would follow.
The Sun kingdom got into trouble very soon. Some of their main trading partners had been “closed down” as the official language would have it. In reality they and all the people within had been annihilated. The situation at Sun got precarious as the Lords couldn’t get enough trade revenue to sustain their life style and keep the military operating. Their first reaction was, as the fashion goes, to blame it all on the king. He was quickly killed. But that didn’t change anything. So the next scapegoat was the Commander. I had anticipated this and warned him. He put up extra bodyguards who caught several would-be assassins. With a little ‘enhanced interrogation’ they would quickly confess which Lord had sent them. By eliminating these Lords the Commander reduced the size of the problem, but he didn’t remove it completely. Not yet.
Things were getting uncomfortable. My close association with the Commander, while pleasant, was becoming a bit dodgy, because of his enemies. So, I took leave to spend some time with the Barbarians who had a village right outside the fortress walls. They were amazing. They had rules about life like “you must contribute to the common good”. They worked harder than slaves. I asked them about it and they said “If you work, you have a right to live. A slave works, but has no rights.” I couldn’t quite figure what that means.
The war was reaching its final climax. Some kingdoms destroyed each other almost simultaneously. The overseas power blocs got increasingly worried. At a secret meeting in the Bahamas it was agreed that the fighting had to be stopped. The overlords wanted to preserve what little the impoverished American continent was still delivering to them. Envoys were sent out to reign in the kings. The Chinese ProConsul ordered the Lords of Saint-Edward to stop their attacks on other kingdoms. But they didn’t listen and they didn’t stop. They couldn’t. Because each of their actions caused a reaction. Each attack provoked lethal vengeance and each revenge caused a new deadly attack. It had become an unstoppable chain reaction. They and their enemies were sinking into chaos and anarchy.
The Asia bloc decided to take action. The President announced Asia’s taking up arms with these immortal words: “We lead the world in battling .. evils and promoting the ultimate good .. We must lead by .. ensur[ing] the security of our people and advance the security of all people." He had taken these words from a speech by an American president back in 2009. Very similar words had been said by an earlier leader in 1938. And by another one in 1703, by one in 1536, in 1209, and so on, and on.
As a precaution the Asians first obliterated the NavStar Global Positioning System with surgical strikes wiping out its 24 satellites. This crippled all of the Client Kings’ long and medium range missiles and smart bombs while leaving the Asian GPS intact. This way they gained instant “air supremacy” ruling out any chance of retaliation. Then they dropped some small neutron bombs on Saint-Edward city. The radiation of these bombs killed everybody, but left the buildings, factories, plant and equipment undamaged for later use by Asian immigrants. This attack eliminated the Saint-Edward Lords as one of the main sources of the mayhem. Finally, by exploding massive hydrogen bombs above the other capitals, including some of the Southern Syndicate, they forced an end to the warfare, an end to the destruction and slaughter.
They created peace. There was no more fighting, because there was no one left to fight.
There was silence. The silence of the graveyard.
After all the mayhem and turmoil of the last two hundred years the earth had finally become peaceful.
Quiet.
---------- continues with Letter 4 of 4 Quiet Earth Copyright © Rolf Brandt 2009
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