(This entry is a "speculative history" that runs to nearly sixty pages. Please pay attention to the "Author's Note" below, a succinct and very good explanation of what it is.)
Author’s Note
What Went Wrong is a speculative history of the next twenty years, written both as an extrapolation of current history and as an interpretation of Biblical prophecy concerning events leading up to the second coming of Jesus Christ. My goal is find a way—speculative, of necessity, but plausible and realistic—by which these two quite distinct viewpoints might be reconciled. Just how are we going to get from here to there? How will contemporary history merge with Biblical prophecy? Most recent Christian end-times literature may be good fiction and more or less true to what the Bible says, but it seldom relates recognizably to the world we currently live in.
In placing all these events in the next twenty years I may be telescoping the time-line, which God alone knows. The Great Tribulation may be somewhat further in the future. But the causal connections are sound. If we believe that Biblical prophecy has verifiably been fulfilled in the past and will be fulfilled in the future, then the Tribulation is coming, in real-time history, and it will emerge seamlessly from the world events we now experience.
What Went Wrong is not predictive prophecy but is offered as a reasonable scenario. The supposed author is a historian writing, anonymously and clandestinely, in 2031. “May you live in interesting times.” He does (will?), and so do we.
Primary Biblical texts: Psalm 2, Isa.9:1-7, Ezek.37-39, Dan.7-12, Joel 3, Amos 9, Micah 4-5, Zech.12-14, Matt. 13, 24, 28:18-20, Mark 13, Luke 21, John 15, Acts 1:8, Rom.11, 1Thess.4:13-18, 2Thess.2:1-12, 2Tim.3:1-5, Rev.6-7, 11-13, 17-18.
What Went Wrong: A Brief History of the Troubles
Foreword
The clock is striking thirteen.
When I began this history fourteen months ago, I expressed a doubt about how many readers it would ever find. Now, as 2031 opens in darkness, I have much more reason to fear there will not be many. The Authority is everywhere, and time is not on our side. I am now sending this document throughout our network, as securely as possible (security being only a memory). At this point I can only express my deep gratitude to those who risk everything for the sake of freedom—above all, the freedom to know and speak the truth. Or, at least, to record it. History ought to be recorded even if there is no one able or willing to read it.
My wife (whose name, like my own, I will keep to myself) has been conscripted into one of the Local Watch units, made up of civilians ordered to spy on their neighbors (and family members) and report all incorrect speech or behavior. She will do the best—that is, the least—she can for as long as she can. Our two sons have been out of touch for many months now, ever since they were drafted into the organs of the Authority. They may be dead by now, or they might be better off dead. One grows numb to things which, in another life, would have horrified us. In every city, in every street and alley, disease, starvation and the Special Police are our close companions.
Strangely, I do find myself regretting the loss of those “fanatical arrogant haters,” the Christians and Jews—or those millions (billions?) of them that are missing. Whether they were sucked up by the Authority and secretly exterminated, or sucked up by their God as some people say, I don’t know. One measure of how weird things have become is that either explanation seems equally unbelievable, yet there is no other. At least they had the nerve to reject what anyone who values his neck praises as being above and beyond all criticism. The Leader has been vague on their disappearance, saying only that they got what they deserved. “On behalf of the People we tirelessly devote ourself to the elimination of selfish and treasonous elements.”
By whatever fate or fortune remains to us, I have survived to finish this accounting, down to the present. And you, good reader, have begun it. I hope you will live to finish it.
Chapter 1: Where Did It Begin?
“The past is over and done with.” The Leader, interview, 2019
I don’t know how many people, if any, will ever read this history. I have decided to write it nevertheless, come what may, because the truth always needs to be told. The first question that must be asked and answered is: At what point, and out of what causes, did the Troubles emerge? One might, of course, trace it all the way back to the first early human who picked up a rock and brained one of his fellows, but a narrower focus would be more to the point. The general calamity in which we now live—or exist—was gathering steam and building to a crisis during the 1990’s. It seems possible to identify three major causes, which interacted with one another in complicated ways. These three are fossil fuel overuse, climate change, and a global financial system grown beyond any control.
A Fountain of Energy
I will start with the fossil fuel problem. The massive extraction and burning of fossil fuels began with coal in the nineteenth century, followed by oil, a more concentrated energy source, in the twentieth century. This sustained fountain of energy supported several technological revolutions and enabled the human population to explode, from around one billion in 1800 to seven billion by 2015. A predominantly rural, agricultural civilization became an urban, industrial civilization and then a mega-urban, technocratic civilization. Countries that had been backward until recently—notably China—suddenly became the leaders of global economic growth and the largest consumers of oil, coal, timber, wheat, iron, copper, and so forth. All this transformation faced only two limits, but those two limits were absolute: the planet’s ability to support endless economic growth, and its supply of oil. The population, expanding both numerically and economically, came up against both limits at about the same time, during the second decade of the twenty-first century.
This sustained growth had collateral effects. Many basic natural resources besides oil were depleted or damaged, especially fresh water and forests. Much of the natural environment was polluted by noxious emissions and industrial and domestic garbage. This pollution was more than an aesthetic problem; it aggravated many public health crises and inflamed social discontent. The reigning economic model, however, demanded continuous growth as the basis of social well-being. It demanded growth, but the planet could no longer support it. Offshore drilling got into ever deeper and wilder waters. Tar sands were mined, turning northern forests into sulfurous wastelands. In spite of all this, global oil supplies could no longer keep up with demand. Political instability in the Middle East, Nigeria and Venezuela made things worse. Sporadic terrorist attacks against vulnerable production and transport facilities made things worse still. Oil and gasoline prices ratcheted upward, pulling other prices up with them.
During the 20-teens there were hopes that alternative, renewable energy sources would be able to replace most fossil-fuel energy. Wind, solar, and geothermal energy were widely developed and deployed, but they never became productive or cost-effective enough to be more than minor players. Several more decades for development might have made a difference, but we will never know now.
This accelerating growth in population, industry and energy consumption had another major side effect. Billions of tons of “greenhouse gases” were released into the earth’s atmosphere, causing the planet’s mean temperature to rise. The rise was slow in comparison with the rate at which we live our daily life, but fast for the planet’s rhythm of life. Within a few decades—an earth eyeblink—the Arctic ice retreated, glaciers everywhere were melting, huge chunks of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets broke off and slid into the ocean, hurricanes and river flooding intensified, deserts advanced, rainforests dried out and burned, and monsoon rain patterns shifted. The effects of these changes on human life seemed minor at first, but by 2015 they were alarming and by 2025 they became catastrophic.
Toward the Icebergs
The third major cause of our Troubles, an out-of-control financial system, is also closely linked with our industrial and technological growth. Simply put, economic growth both produces and depends on financial growth. Businesses and industries produce wealth; banks store and invest that wealth; investments increase the banks’ wealth, and they then loan out some of that increase to finance new businesses. This symbiotic relationship has been going on for four or five centuries. In the economic boom since the end of World War II, however, and especially since around 1990, the large investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P.Morgan Chase, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and so on—garnered the greatest wealth and became indispensable to businesses, industries, and governments alike. They became “too big to fail,” which meant they became essentially autonomous. In their quest for profits, playing the risk/reward game, they could make high-risk gambles, knowing that if they lost, sovereign governments would be forced to bail them out with taxpayers’ money, because otherwise the whole Titanic would go under. For the bankers it was win/win, all the way to the point at which everyone went bust.
These three things, then—fossil fuel consumption, climate change, and the financial system—were the main things pushing the ship toward the icebergs. They weren’t the only things, though. There was also the lucrative (billions of dollars) international trade in military weaponry—guns, missiles, chemical explosives, land mines, and various high-tech weapons. Not that the weapons caused the fights; tribes have been fighting each other ever since there were only two of them. But assault rifles kill more efficiently than knives and spears, thereby arousing a lot more anger, hatred, and desire for vengeance—and for more lethal weapons. Nations (we fooled ourselves about this) are mostly tribal amalgams. The United Nations were never going to do much more than finger-pointing. Civilization (open borders, trade of goods and ideas, Human Rights) is a veneer that erodes when we are attacked.
The worst weapons, of course, were the nuclear ones. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction (with its perfect acronym) kept the world safe, or at least deterred nuclear annihilation, for a remarkably long time—over seventy years. America and Russia reduced their arsenals, but the genie was long since out of the bottle. Nukes proliferated, and it really was only a matter of time and circumstance.
Boom and Bust
The first clear milestone on the descent to the Troubles was the economic boom and bust during the first decade of the new millenium. (I am discounting the rise of China, Russia’s travails after the Soviet Union fell, and 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because, in hindsight, they were relatively less decisive.) The Great Recession that began in 2008 was correctly seen at the time as the worst blow to the world economy since the Great Depression. The collapse began in the financial industry, which had come to dominate Western economies. Central to the exponential growth of finance was the ever expanding use of what economists call
leverage, which simply means making bets—gambling—with borrowed money: other people’s money. Greed is normal in finance, but Wall Street players added wholesale swindling to their greed. The American mortgage industry, in particular, was riddled with fraud and conflict of interest, most of which was actually legal at the time. It was the old story of the rich and powerful finding new ways to fleece the poor. The mortgage bubble was in fact an enormous Ponzi scheme, a house of cards, and it fell apart in 2007.
The advanced economies were hit the hardest and longest by the ensuing recession. Excessive debt—federal, state, municipal and private—along with lingering high unemployment and the corrupted mortgage industry kept the United States in near-zero growth for five or six years. This stagnation slid into a period of “stagflation” in 2014-16. The combination of mammoth debt and “quantitative easing” (printing money to stimulate the economy) brought on inflation rates of 10-20% even without much economic growth. Ever since the recession began, successive administrations and congresses blustered about the urgency of reducing the federal deficit, and thus eventually the federal debt, before the whole economy was crushed under the weight. But the political parties were too polarized to agree on any meaningful plan. Compromise with the adversary was anathema, so most politicians devoted their energy to figuring out how to fling blame for the debacle across the aisle and avoid getting hit by it.
The U.S. dollar had been the global reserve currency for the better part of a century, but the dubious outlook for the American economy made investors leery, and they began (or continued) fleeing the dollar. No other currency—the euro, the yen, the yuan—looked any more secure, so they swung back toward precious metals. No one wanted to be pegged to the price of gold again, however, and there was no agreement on how to structure a “basket” of currencies as a global reserve. Things muddled on inconclusively.
Growing Pains
The European Union, meanwhile, underwent its own stresses and strains. Its member states, historically and currently, had considerably less in common with one another than New York, Florida, Texas and California had. After months of rancorous labor strikes in Greece against government belt-tightening, while the government itself floundered ineffectually, the long-dreaded default on sovereign debt finally occurred in March, 2013. The debate within the E.U. leadership over how to handle the crisis was equally rancorous. When they decided in May of that year to cut Greece loose from the Union, the episode was compared with the Bush administration’s 2008 decision to let the investment bank Lehman Brothers fail. In the consequence, the E.U. came within a hair of breaking up altogether and the euro barely survived as a common currency.
Japan, at this period, having endured its own economic doldrums and governmental incompetence for a quarter century, reverted toward ultra-nationalism. Its public rhetoric became more strident than at any time since the 1930’s. The government increased its long-standing protection of Japanese industry. Military spending doubled between 2013 and 2015. Relations with the U.S. were strained and with China were, verbally at least, belligerent.
And China responded in kind. As it had been doing ever since the epochal turn toward capitalism under Deng Xiaoping, the Communist regime strove to manage and contain severe pressures within the giant country. The Party leaders were experts at riding the tiger, but the tiger kept getting bigger and more agitated. Great wealth was created in the coastal cities, but it was concentrated in a few well-connected clans along with the Party bureaucracy. Half of the fourteen hundred million people (as of 2014) still lived in rural or urban poverty. Despite brutal government suppression, Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in the northwest province of Xinjiang kept up their struggle for independence. Heavy pollution made urban air unbreathable, while river and coastal pollution killed the fish. Water was scarce on the dry northern plain, and overworked farmlands were lost to erosion. The Party could maintain its legitimacy and its hold on power only as long as the economy kept on growing at rates approaching 10% per year. Both domestic problems and the long recession among the advanced economies (China’s main customers) darkened the Party’s prospects, and so, like their Japanese antagonists, they sought to rally the populace with jingoistic rhetoric and hard-fisted international relations.
If China’s economy was growing at “only” 6 to 7% per year, that growth, along with 10% annual growth in India, was enough to stress the world’s supply of basic commodities, such as oil, copper, tin, zinc, wheat, and timber. It was hard for people in the West at that time to conceive the magnitude of what had been going on in the developing world for two decades. The arithmetic is simple, though. The poorer half of the world’s population, who formerly had consumed negligible amounts of those commodities, were now consuming a lot, and more all the time. Prices kept rising, and the supply could not be increased indefinitely.
The Middle East, as ever, had its own problems. As the Iraq War (2003-10) wound down with the withdrawal of most U.S. forces, Iraq slid into low-grade, chaotic civil war. The country, carved out of the defunct Ottoman Empire by Britain and France after World War I, never made much sense, being a forced coalition of Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, and Kurds. With Saddam gone, with unity no longer enforced by totalitarian power, Iraq went the same way Yugoslavia had gone twenty years before.
In the same neighborhood, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, which had been simmering and seething for almost a century, went into one of its periodic simmering phases. In April, 2012, in a deal brokered as usual by the Americans, Israel and the Palestinian Authority reached a limited accord. Israel ceded some more territory and (what sealed the deal) granted more water rights, while the P.A., having secured a rather tentative agreement with Hamas, promised to rein in the insurrection. Most observers remained skeptical about the longer-term prospects.
America’s war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and an assortment of other Islamist mafias fared no better than the Iraq war had. A counterinsurgency “surge” in 2010-11, having been presented as a final, make or break effort, fulfilled the expectations of most outsiders. Local guerilla forces ruled by local mafias can always outlast foreign occupiers, especially when the locale is Afghanistan. By the summer of 2012, in the midst of a bitter presidential election campaign, both major parties realized that political support in America for the war effort had completely evaporated. The U.S. continued irritating the Taliban with special forces operations and drone attacks, but the main effect of these was to energize Islamic fundamentalists. The “war on terror,” if not lost, was certainly not won.
In January, 2013, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake destroyed most of Kathmandu, Nepal, along with many surrounding villages, killing over 80,000 people and injuring even more. Since that disaster, the city has been only partially rebuilt and has a third fewer people than before.
Chapter 2: Gathering Storms, 2013-15
“Most nations and national leaders are only looking to their own interests. Corporations are the same. What concerns me is the interest of humanity.” The Leader, addressing the United Nations, 2021.
Those events, as I have said, marked the beginning of the Troubles. In hindsight it is evident that what came later involved complicated cascading and multiplying effects. The domino theory as a metaphor for cause and effect in modern history has been widely debunked; that was reasonable but probably premature. The more standing dominoes there are, and the more tightly they are packed, the greater the chances that one domino toppling will start a cascade. During this period the world was growing ever more tightly packed with people (due especially to rapid urbanization), ethnic groups, buildings, vehicles, factories, telecoms, and weapons. More friction made for more heat. Social heat translates to instability, and instability to toppling.
Tankers Targeted
On two successive days in April, 2013, Muslim extremists blew up and sank a giant oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz and then another in the Strait of Malacca. These two straits, the first leading in and out of the Persian Gulf and the second being the chief funnel for all Far Eastern commerce, were critical lifelines for global commerce in general and especially for oil tankers. An intensive investigation found that the Hormuz strike was carried out by terrorists based in Somalia, while the Malaccan terrorists were from Indonesia and the Philippines. Al-Qaeda claimed to have coordinated the strikes, and the investigation seemed to substantiate their claim.
Different methods of attack were used. In the Hormuz incident, a private jet plane packed with high explosives took off from somewhere in eastern Yemen and slammed into the tanker just above the waterline, piercing the hull and igniting the cargo, causing a tremendous explosion. In the Strait of Malacca, the next day, converted fishing boats were apparently used during the night to lay mines in the supertanker’s path. The mine detonations slowed but didn’t sink her; that was the job of two large speedboats filled, like the jet plane, with explosives. (It goes without saying that these were suicide missions; destructive suicide had long since been the ultimate heroism in radical Muslim culture.) The tanker didn’t explode, but its hull was breached, tons of oil were spilled, and the ship sank in the narrow strait, blocking traffic for several weeks.
These terrorist strikes had repercussions. Stock markets staggered while the price of oil shot up to nearly $200 a barrel. Officials and pundits from all the advanced economies declared that this was an overreaction, but their assurances did little to allay the markets’ fears. The anxiety was not so much about the damage caused by these attacks but about what the near future might bring.
Reactors and Reactions
What it brought came soon but from a different direction. On June 19, just two months later, another Russian-built nuclear reactor suffered an explosive meltdown. It was an RBMK-type reactor, the same relatively primitive technology involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. This time the disaster occurred in Russia itself, at the nuclear complex at Kursk, 500 miles south of Moscow. The dynamics of the accident were much the same as at Chernobyl. The staff monitoring the reactor were, in all probability, tired, bored and inattentive. When an unexpected power output surge occurred, they apparently overreacted, and their attempt to shut down the reactor resulted in a still greater surge and an explosive loss of containment, sending a radioactive plume drifting over a wide area, mostly eastward. The Putin government doubtless would have preferred to throw a Soviet-style blanket (at least a temporary one, as in 1986) over media coverage of the event, but that was no longer possible in 2013. This time the world was watching on CNN and YouTube as several hundred thousand people were evacuated over the next several days, many of them taken to hospitals and hastily thrown-up triage centers.
With the growing worries over fossil fuels, nuclear power had been enjoying a certain renaissance. After Kursk, a strident debate arose between those who contended that nuclear power was simply too unsafe to be a major and growing industry, and those who argued that it was the least bad option. The “anti’s” included veteran anti-nuke people but were now drawing in many others. They pointed to the still-unsolved problem of nuclear waste and the growing fact of nuclear proliferation. The defenders ignored these matters and contended that new reactor technologies were far safer than the Chernobyl-Kursk design. The problem, they said, wasn’t so much antiquated technology as lax or corrupt management. The anti’s vehemently co-opted the last point and organized parades, picket lines and mass demonstrations. This cause became the chief rallying point for left-wingers during this period and snowballed in a way which seemed somehow disproportionate to the specific grievance. It was feeding, probably, on a huge reservoir of pent-up anger and frustration over many things that people, not just left-wingers, felt were metastasizing beyond anyone’s control—economic problems, governmental intrusion or incompetence, Wall Street arrogance, immigration, global warming, and terrorism. Within a few months it grew into an international one-size-fits-all protest movement.
The protests came to a head at a G-20 (major national economies) summit in Paris during the second week of October. It was reminiscent of similar clashes in Seattle and Montreal around the turn of the century, but larger—by some estimates close to two million protesters jammed the streets of the City of Light. It wasn’t well-organized; it was largely spontaneous, it was chaotic, and it was bloody. Protest morphed into riot, destruction and looting. By the third day the police, even with all their reinforcements, were overwhelmed. The summit was curtailed and the army called in. During the night of October 13 vehicles and buildings all over the city were ablaze—the eery, smoky orange luminescence glowed on TV’s around the world—and the staccato of automatic gunfire continued for hours. It was a wartime spectacle, but the war was soon over. By morning the rioters were dispersed, arrested, wounded or dead. By that evening the fires had been extinguished or had burned themselves out, and the city was a smoldering shambles. The official count published several weeks later listed 12,088 dead, including protesters, civilians, police, firemen, and soldiers, considerably more than had died so far in the Kursk disaster. Property damage was estimated to be well over thirty billion dollars. The media dubbed it (naturally if not altogether consistently) 13/13.
This “counterproductive calamity,” as it was described, sparked intense postmortem public soul searching and blame casting. Most people seemed to agree with the protestors’ case—entangled and even contradictory as it might be—while deploring the violence. The questions raised were the same ones that had been raised a thousand times, but they were good questions. When the numbers are so large, how can you keep a peaceful protest from escalating into mob hysteria? How much of it was stoked by drugs and alcohol? How many guns did the rioters have, and where did they get them? Should the army have sent more bullets skyward and fewer into the raging crowds? Good questions, but the answers were mostly worn-out retreads.
Restoring National Pride
Before the Kursk meltdown sidetracked them, Moscow’s rulers had been planning an aggressive push to the west. Ever since the debacle of the 90’s, many Russians, especially the still-powerful
nomenklatura left over from the Soviet regime, nursed feelings of having been belittled, humiliated and scorned by the West and by America in particular. Russia had been left weak by the grandiose failure of Communism, but many Russians felt that the Americans exploited those weaknesses and tried to make them permanent. Russia still had lots of energy resources, smart scientists, weapons, and national pride. Vladimir Putin’s hold on power depended in part on stroking that wounded pride, and he did so with guile and gusto. Kursk re-opened all the wounds, but Putin already had an answer. Attempts by Chechen nationalists to break away from Russia, including a series of terrorist atrocities, had been firing up Russian patriotism for a decade, and Putin’s propaganda industry fanned the flames, never more than in the aftermath of the reactor meltdown. Patriotism became the national obsession, almost the national mania. Brushing off and polishing up an old concept, the Kremlin identified itself—and Moscow and the whole country—as the Third Rome (after Rome itself and Constantinople).
Ever since taking power, Putin had been rebuilding Russia’s military forces. In the spring of 2014 he sensed the time was ripe. The army conducted large-scale exercises just to the east of Belarus and Ukraine, and then in a “peaceful blitzkrieg” beginning, doubtless with deliberate symbolism, on May 1 (the Communist holiday), they flooded into those two countries. Western governments were taken completely off-guard, since the consensus view of their intelligence services was that, while Putin and his advisers might consider such a move, they would surely realize it would be too provocative, too dangerous.
The Russians threw the dice nevertheless, knowing the dice were loaded. Their “fifth columns” in both countries were large and well-prepared. The autocrat running Belarus had his police and military put up token opposition before “accepting generous terms.” Ukraine was more difficult and genuinely risky, besides being considerably larger. The country was divided ethnically and politically between its western half, dominated by ethnic Ukrainians, and its eastern half, dominated by ethnic Russians, who held positions of political and economic power even where they were a minority. The western half looked, with anxious hope, toward the West for its future security and identity, while the eastern half gravitated back toward Mother Russia. The national government had long been torn between these two factions, but in 2013-14 the faction favoring closer ties with Russia held most of the levers of power.
So when the tanks and troop carriers rolled across the border, the response of the Ukrainian leadership was at first similar to that in Belarus. But fights soon broke out among members of the parliament in Kiev, with shouting, shoving and punching, each side accusing the other of treason or cowardice or something worse. Nothing was decided, and meanwhile the Russian forces moved deeper into the country, reaching the outskirts of Kiev by May 3 and beginning to cross the Dnieper River. Elements of the Ukrainian military with nationalist loyalties put up resistance at that point, with firefights breaking out across a broad front, but they were only able to delay the Russian advance.
Where, in all this, was the response from NATO and the United States? The Russian action was a blatant violation of their security interests, a poke in their eye. It turned out, though, that Moscow had correctly judged how weak their opponents’ hand was. Psychologically, America was suffering another Vietnam Syndrome, a malaise reminiscent of the late 70’s. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were widely seen as bloody, bullheaded, budget-wrecking failures. The economy struggled on, dragged down by protracted 10% unemployment, which in turn was caused largely by a long-term disconnect between the training and abilities of the workforce and the skills required by an evolving, tech-driven global economy. The American public had no stomach at all for another major military campaign on the other side of the world.
Without American moxie, NATO was an empty shell. Britain was undergoing similar problems, similar dejection. The French discussed the matter brilliantly among themselves. For the Germans, of course, a land war against Russia was a psychic nightmare. Consequently, NATO lodged a formal protest in the strongest possible terms at the U.N., and Russia re-absorbed Belarus and Ukraine into its Federation. The leading newspaper in Warsaw ran a banner headline (translated): AGAIN?
Tsunami
Over the next few months the world tried to come to terms with the new geopolitical map after what came to be called the Mayday Coup. Blame was assigned and vulnerabilities were reassessed. Summer came on with record-setting heat waves across both North America and Europe. Then on June 29 a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck under the Pacific Ocean, with an epicenter 400 miles east of Japan. The resulting tsunami spread in all directions at about 500 miles per hour, giving the Japanese 45 minutes to prepare. Their tsunami-awareness and cultural discipline paid off, and most people managed to evacuate the primary danger zone before the waters drew back two hundred meters and, a minute later, the first wave came ashore. It was only four or five meters high but had more than a mile of water behind it—a mile of water pushing inland, now slowed to about fifty miles per hour, cresting to ten meters or more when it encountered obstacles like hills or large buildings. Most hills survived, most buildings did not, nor did several thousand of the tail-enders fleeing the monster.
That was the first of three significant waves that struck Japan over the next two hours, a normal feature of tsunamis. Human casualties were remarkably low for such a catastrophe, but Japan’s eastern littoral, several miles inland, was demolished. The great ports at Yokohama, Osaka and Kobe would take years and perhaps a trillion yen to rebuild. There were no guarantees. The tsunami spread in other directions as well, but it had attenuated enough by the time it reached Southeast Asia, Hawaii, and the west coast of the Americas that the damage in those places was not as great.
Blackout
Several months later, in the first week of December, another kind of trouble hit the developed world: A sophisticated cyber attack crippled the power grid in the north-eastern quadrant of the United States. The focus of the attack was the ASCADA system (advanced supervisory control and data acquisition system), an elaborate computer network that controlled the regional power stations. Subsequent investigation suggested that the cyber attackers must have gotten into the ASCADA system at some low level, then quietly penetrated under the radar, perhaps for months, until they were able to throw the whole system into haywire. Who were these attackers? The source of a cyber attack is notoriously difficult to identify. In this case the operation was too sophisticated for any but the most advanced, well-financed agents. The “usual suspects” were floated—Russia, China, Iran—but nothing was ever proved, and no serious suspects claimed responsibility. Whoever they were, they did leave one cheeky calling card in the system, the short message: DONT LAUGH YOU ARE NEXT. No one was laughing.
The efforts of utility software engineers to repair or reconfigure the system were frustrated for over a week, and they wound up essentially having to replace it. In the meantime the northeastern states, from Maine to Ohio and Pennsylvania, went without power for two weeks in mid-December. Backup generators were pressed into service, but life mostly went on in the cold and dark. Business and industry stopped. Shipping slowed to a halt. Emergency services were overwhelmed; during the final days of the blackout, surgeries were performed and babies delivered by lamplight and flashlight, with only blankets for warmth. It was like stepping back a thousand years.
That was the first of several major cyber attacks during that decade. How directly these were connected to the YOU ARE NEXT threat was never finally determined. A 2016 attack on two large Japanese banks, probably originating in China, caused a financial crisis there that took more than a year to unwind. The next year cyber terrorists confused the air traffic control system at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, causing one plane to crash land and shutting down that airport and most others in the region for a week. The source of that attack was never discovered. And in 2019 an attack crippled the control systems of three nuclear complexes in Iran, causing one partial meltdown and effectively setting their nuclear program back several years. Israel, of course, was the prime suspect.
The Niger Delta
The United States was still laboring to recover from the Northeast Blackout when, in February, 2015, their power supply suffered another blow—this time it was the whole world’s power supply. The insurgency in southern Nigeria, which had been fitfully gathering steam for years, finally boiled over. Up until that time, Nigeria had been the eighth largest oil producer in the world. Most of the oil wealth, however, was siphoned off by the big oil companies who pumped, stored and sold the “light sweet crude” and natural gas, and by the usual corrupt government of a petrostate. Tribes in the Niger Delta had seen their homeland turned into a smelly, toxic wasteland. Their insurrection began as disorganized vandalism by poorly armed gangs, but over the years they grew in numbers, coordination, weaponry and tactics. They fought against government police and soldiers as well as mercenary units hired by the oil companies to protect their personnel and facilities. They targeted pipelines, storage tanks, and vehicles transporting industry workers. The violence escalated, off and on, throughout the decade between 2004 and 2014. Then in the opening weeks of 2015 the insurgent forces mounted a surprisingly well-designed offensive which, in short order, overwhelmed the defenders of most onshore oil production facilities and led to an orgy of killing and destruction.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. In February, before the Nigerian government or the oil companies could regroup, the rebels followed up their triumph by attacking two large offshore oil rigs, using portable anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Their armaments derived, in roundabout ways, from several countries including Russia and, ironically, the United States. While they failed to capture or destroy those rigs, they damaged them enough to put them out of operation indefinitely. More importantly, the assault caused the major oil companies operating in the region—Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, and Texaco—to temporarily suspend operations while they scrambled to figure out how to protect their assets. Overnight the price of oil in the markets jumped from $180 to $245 a barrel. It seesawed around that figure for the next few months, then started moving upward again as governments increased their hoarding and investors discerned the handwriting on the wall. “Energy security” overtook unemployment atop the list of what most people were most worried about. In the first quarter of that year, stock markets around the world lost an average of 22% of their value.
The problem wasn’t just that oil was our primary energy source, it was also the source of many things our civilization had grown to depend on, like plastics, lubricants, petrochemicals and fertilizers. Any threat to our oil supply was a threat to half our industries and literally to “civilization as we know it.”
Korean Holocaust
An even more serious political crisis threatened the world order that summer when the army of North Korea surged across the Demilitarized Zone and moved against Seoul. The attack was not really a surprise. For years the Hermit Kingdom had been wracked by famine in the provinces and factional struggles within the super-secretive leadership. And for years they had been lashing out with small but violent pinprick attacks, deliberate provocations designed to force South Korea and its allies (mainly the United States) to make further diplomatic concessions in order to avoid all-out war.
The 32-year-old Kim Jong-un had been, nominally at least, calling the shots since his father, Kim Jong-il, died in 2012. All available evidence, however, indicated that he was a featherweight, and several factions within the party, the military, and the most powerful clans fought over control of the puppet. As both economic and political conditions grew more desperate, so, apparently, did whoever was actually in charge. The government’s official pronouncements had been hysterical for decades, and by 2014 they were sounding maniacal. The attack confirmed that impression.
The White House and the Pentagon had been game-planning this event for more than half a century, modifying their strategy as conditions evolved. Their thinking altered, naturally, when North Korea acquired nuclear weapons and when all efforts to persuade them to renounce those weapons in return for normalized relations with the outside world failed.
The assault began with a massive artillery and rocket attack against Seoul, just south of the DMZ. There was an almost suicidal element in the ensuing North Korean attack. When their battalions and tanks pushed into the DMZ and across the border, they advanced into a barrage reminiscent of the charge of the Light Brigade. The difference was that this wasn’t a light brigade, it was close to a million well-armed soldiers with the constant threat of nuclear weapons backing them up. Even as decimated as they were by the defenders, within two days they had Seoul nearly surrounded.
Washington’s strategy—over the frantic objections of the South Korean government—was to immediately defang the cobra. On the third day of the war, the Americans sent in three submarine-launched missiles armed with small nuclear warheads. The targets were three sites believed to be missile launch platforms, at Kiljugun, Kanggyesi, and Yongbyonsi. A fourth nuclear bomb was detonated over the main staging area for the North Korean army, twenty miles north of the border. Simultaneously, stealth bombers and cruise missiles armed with conventional explosives destroyed the North’s military air bases.
This counterattack had immediate military and diplomatic consequences. Militarily, North Korea was finished, unable to prosecute the war any further. Diplomatically, the world exploded with furious protest and finger-wagging. The big risk in resorting to a nuclear counteroffensive, of course, was what China’s response would be. In taking this risk, the Americans were strongly influenced by the course of events over the past few years—the economic morass, oil supply uncertainties, and especially the lingering cloud of expensive failure in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another long slog in Korea was politically and financially impossible. The choice came down to either abandoning the Republic of Korea after token resistance or taking the North out of action by nuclear means. And leaving the ball in China’s court.
In the short term, at least, the gamble paid off. China screamed the loudest; they encouraged an angry mob to sack and burn the American embassy (whose personnel had been evacuated out of the country just in time); they broke off diplomatic relations with the U.S.; but they held back militarily. Even now it is hard to say just why Beijing didn’t retaliate militarily (though it is understandable that they didn’t care to trade missiles with America). For one thing, they probably had no immediate forewarning of North Korea’s attack against the South. For another, losing North Korea was like losing a cancerous finger. In any event, they contented themselves with diplomatic rage, for the time being.
Chapter 3: Storm, 2016-18
“Where will we look for answers when all the solutions of the past have failed? The one with the right answer is the one who sees and seizes the future.” The Leader, Systemic Faith, 2018.
During this whole period, one of the main changes affecting most of humanity was steadily increasing urbanization. The rate of population growth had slowed—except in the poorest countries who could least cope with it—but the total was still growing, and more and more of those people were gravitating to the cities, mostly in search of work and income. By their millions they crowded into cheaply built high-rise apartment buildings and jerry-built slums. In 1960 there were no metropolitan areas with more than ten million people; by 2015 there were over forty. This teeming congestion aggravated many other problems. Disease spread faster, and so did drug abuse, gang activity (mostly around the drug trade), property crime and violent crime. Natural disasters like floods, earthquakes and cyclones harmed more people.
As 2016 began, the world was still reacting and adjusting to the cataclysm in Korea. Over 200,000 North Koreans had been killed in the Three Day War, most of them soldiers in the first wave and those massing near the border to join the invasion. Almost a quarter of the country was contaminated by nuclear fallout. The primary question was what was to become of North Korea itself. As humanitarian aid rushed in from many quarters, debate fumed over the political sequel. Both South Korea and China claimed the territory—China as the “legitimate conclusion” to their forbearance during the war. Most other nations supported the idea that it should become a “United Nations Special Zone,” something like an expanded DMZ on welfare. The trouble with that was that the U.N. was chronically incapable of carrying it out. So, as in other similar cases, the status quo lingered on. Verbal wrangling and humanitarian aid continued, and China and South Korea both, in effect, extended their borders.
Earthquake and Hurricane
In March of that year a massive earthquake, 8.3 on the Richter scale, struck Istanbul, Turkey, a city of 13 million people. The result was compared with the devastation after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, six years previously, and in Kathmandu three years before. The difference was that Port-au-Prince was an underdeveloped backwater and Kathmandu a remote urban outpost, while Istanbul was a sophisticated modern city, a living historical monument and an international hub. The wreckage there was more than just one more humanitarian disaster, it also sent an economic shock wave across Europe and the Middle East and around the world. Which was worse, the loss of 360,000 lives, the loss of the Hagia Sophia, or the loss of untold billions of dollars in commerce? The politically correct answer was the lives, but the real answer wasn’t that simple. While it is true that the lives “couldn’t be replaced,” it is also true that the psychological and economic damage could scarcely be estimated. “Recovery” from such trauma could never be more than partial.
They were still unearthing bodies in Istanbul when, on the first two days of August, a category 5 hurricane, dubbed Henry, swept into Miami. In the years since Katrina flooded out New Orleans in 2005, there had been many Atlantic hurricanes, but none of them had been as destructive as Katrina. Many people saw this as evidence that global warming, while it might be real and measurable, was not as dangerous as professional alarmists had been warning. Henry changed all that. It could have been worse; more than half the population had evacuated during previous week. But it was the most violent storm ever recorded to date, with a top wind speed of 210 mph and sustained winds of 180 mph. Those buildings in Miami that weren’t blown apart by wind were flooded or washed away by a 26 foot storm surge. By August 4, when the storm moved on to the north (bringing record rainfalls and more flooding), the city was largely demolished. People around the world wondered out loud: Is any place safe any more?
Increasingly at this time, experts in various fields debated whether natural disasters—earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, and so on—were actually occuring more frequently. Statistics were batted back and forth. Those who believed the increase was only apparent put forward three main explanations of the phenomenon. First, population growth and urbanization amplified the damage to human life and property. Second, terrorists had gotten better organized and had access to more powerful weapons. (It was emphasized that while terrorist acts are not “natural disasters,” the harm they cause is similar enough to include them in the discussion.) Third, and generally considered most important, the global saturation of modern media made everyone aware of every calamity. Earthquakes and typhoons half a world away came right into your living room—every day, if you wished to tune in or log on. You watched the masked survivors carrying away the bodies. No wonder no one felt safe.
The Crash of 17
The global economy had taken many hits, but it staggered and struggled on. After the Great Recession of 2008-10 came the flat, stagnant “phony recovery” of 2011-14, during which time only the newer economies like China, Brazil and India showed significant growth. Then serious inflation arose in almost every country, even where there was no economic growth. Everyone’s money, in effect, was shrinking in value. A great deal of money was still sloshing around, however, and nervous investors searched for the least bad place to put it. In this environment, two bubbles started swelling in the markets: a surge toward energy stocks and industrial commodities (iron, steel, copper, potash) and a Chinese real estate bubble. The energy/commodities bubble began with the fundamental dynamic of limited supply trying to satisfy growing demand, but it escalated, in the old-fashioned way, into a stampede for profits while the getting was good. Direct investment in Chinese real estate, meanwhile, was mostly limited by the government to Chinese punters, but savvy outside investors had ways to get in on the action.
What really galvanized the boom, however, were some new profit-multiplying gimmicks invented by clever people in the banking sector. The bubble that grew and then burst during the previous decade had been sparked by financial derivatives (collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and so forth), and the financial meltdown that brought on the Great Recession gave these things a bad name. Bad or not, though, derivatives were still profitable for investment bankers, so they were reinvented or rehabilitated as “insured” and “integrated” derivatives. These new entities, investors were assured, were fully debugged and fail-safe. Those who do not learn from history, Santayana said, are doomed to repeat it. And as P.T. Barnum observed, there’s a sucker born every minute. By 2016 there was a compulsive gambler graduating every minute from a prestigious business school and going on to manage a multi-billion dollar portfolio for a major investment bank. And there was still that steady supply of suckers. As applied to financial derivatives, “insured” and “integrated” were just marketing mumbo-jumbo referring, vaguely, to abstruse mathematical formulas which might be good math, but might not relate point-for-point to the real world, the economic, human world.
All that being said, investor psychology was ripe for a big bubble (or two). Investors, from billionaires to bus drivers trying to grow a retirement nest egg, were tired of being endlessly drubbed by bad news from the markets. It was time, at last, to make some good news happen. And so they did. Stock markets went on an accelerating bull run from September 2016 through the following July, gaining an average of 48%. This was from a low starting point, to be sure, but it was still an exhilarating run, reaching highs not seen for five years.
All during the boom, various people were warning that this bubble, like the last one and all the ones before, was self-destructive. By the late summer of 2017 they had the dubious satisfaction of being proved right. Just as had happened nine years previously, some large investment banks suddenly found, like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoon, that they had ventured off the cliff edge and were standing on high air. At that point they invoked, in suitably oblique ways, the too-big-to-fail clause: Bail us out again. The problem was that Western governments no longer had deep pockets. Instead, they were deeply entrenched in sovereign debt, and virtually no taxpayer/voters wanted to increase that debt. But, the bankers threatened (no longer obliquely), if we go down, we will bring you down with us. That was true enough, and it left the political leaders in those nations in a hopeless bind. In fast and furious teleconferencing, they agreed that they had only one option left. Then in solemn addresses to their consituencies, flanked by national flags and colors, they advised everyone to take a deep breath, stay the course, hunker down, and either pray or think good thoughts.
Those speeches were given on Tuesday, August 29; over the next few days Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and BNP Paribas all went into bankruptcy. As expected, the global financial system immediately froze up. No banks that had any money left were willing to extend credit. They feared, reasonably enough, that any loan under these circumstances would be a bad loan. Over those same few days all the major stock indices tumbled into freefall (like the Coyote), losing all their recent gains and much more. In the bond markets, no one was buying anyone’s bonds.
Within a week the world economy was in a deep depression, with no fixes in sight. Over the next several months international trade slowed to a trickle as demand slumped and protectionist barriers went up. Businesses large and small, unable to obtain credit and running out of customers, failed. Most airlines went out of business; in most countries, the government subsidized one national carrier. Many trucking companies also went out of business; freeways were no longer congested. A third of the workforce was out of work.
For nearly everyone, life became more local. As supermarket shelves emptied out, small farms, which had been dying out for generations, suddenly prospered, since people still had to eat. Even with depressed prices, though, many people no longer had money to pay for farm produce. Various forms of barter evolved. As economic desperation spread, gangs and militias formed almost everywhere, even in formerly prosperous and civilized suburbs.
Over the next few years, national governments generally found themselves unable to secure the cooperation of their citizens, or exert control over them, to the same extent as before the Crash of 17. In consequence, national politics tended to become more intensely nationalistic, even fascist in some cases. The rationale for this was that there was no other way out of the crisis—the same rationale that arose in Europe between the two World Wars.
Chapter 4: Deluge, 2018-22
“All people are born in chains. I will break your chains. I will set you free.” The Leader, on posters and billboards, 2024.
The summer of 2017 was the driest on record in the Amazon basin, and this drought followed a sparse rainy season. In early October, fires broke out all over the region. High winds fanned the flames, and within a week several conflagrations had merged and were completely out of control. Before the rains began in November and the fires burned themselves out, over 300,000 square miles were blackened ash. Smoke clouds drifted across the Atlantic and spread a lingering brown haze over North Africa and Europe. This event was one of the main things which, according to many scientists, contributed to the global temperature rising another full degree over the next several years. Not only were tons of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere all at once, but the loss of so much “carbon sink” (carbon dioxide absorbing vegetation) meant that in subsequent years, that much more carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere.
A Dramatic Victory
The Crash of 17 hit the advanced economies most directly, but the reverberations were felt throughout the developing world. For China it was especially bad fortune. The Party still called itself Communist, but for two decades it had been working, with considerable success, to invent a new hybrid, which might be called totalitarian capitalism. This was essentially an oxymoron (if politics are regimented, can markets actually be free?), but from around 2005 to 2015 it seemed to be working so well that many other authoritarian governments tried to imitate it, with mixed results.
China’s main economic vulnerability was its dependence on exports. The regime worked on increasing domestic consumption, but the country was simply so large, and still so largely backward and impoverished, that they ran out of time. (No one will ever know whether, given more time, their contradictory project might have succeeded.) As export markets shrank, factories by the hundreds laid off workers or shut down altogether, and political unrest boiled up. Mass protests against the government—not unlike those in the West following the Kursk reactor meltdown a few years before—grew more violent. In order to retain any legitimacy at all, the Party knew, they needed a dramatic “victory,” and they needed it now. In hindsight, the answer they came up with seems obvious: swallow, at last, the renegade province of Taiwan.
In making this move, Beijing’s military calculation was similar to Putin’s when he re-absorbed Belarus and Ukraine four years ago. The only serious obstacle in both cases was American military power. America’s defense commitment to Taiwan was firmer than it had been in Eastern Europe, and they had more military assets in the region. All other things being equal, the chances that America would honor its promises to Taiwan would seem high.
Other things weren’t equal, however. America’s economic and strategic position had eroded badly since then. The country and its leaders were still reeling from the Crash. In February of 2018, when the Chinese army and navy attacked Taiwan, no one in America knew whether their economy and the global economy had even hit bottom yet. All attention was turned inward; political leaders were absorbed in forestalling panic. Certain segments of the political right wing called for a military response to the Chinese aggression, but even they stumbled at the question: What response? After the holocaust in Korea, a nuclear response was out of the question (nuke Beijing or Shanghai and accept the same for New York and Los Angeles?). America’s conventional forces could deter China’s attack, but at a drastic cost in ships, planes and lives, and they probably couldn’t change the outcome. In the process they would finish bankrupting the American economy. With all this in mind, Washington denounced China’s “naked aggression” and pulled back its naval forces. Taiwan’s own forces fought fiercely but were overwhelmed in ten days of bloody combat. For the time being, the Party was back in the saddle atop their huge, turbulent country.
Apocalypse on the Subcontinent
The world at that time had regions even more politically unstable than the Far East. The list of failed states—countries that were swamped by anarchy and poverty no matter what their nominal leaders might claim—kept growing. Most of these were in Africa, but the most dangerous to outsiders, by far, was Pakistan, because of its ninety or more nuclear weapons. The withdrawal of most American forces from the Afghan theater in 2012 left Pakistan as politically fractured as ever, and it diminished the already shaky hold of the Islamabad government over its people. The many radical Islamist tribal groups were divided among themselves but united against a government they saw as corrupt, apostate, and inept. The main thing Islamabad had going for it was its control of the military, the counry’s strongest institution. Increasingly, however, that control was undermined by officers and troops who were either sympathetic to the fundamentalists’ grievances, and thus reluctant to use force against them, or secretly in league with them. Under these circumstances, the struggle for power was inevitably sporadic, confused and messy. Both sides in the struggle, though, shared the fear that their conflict would embolden India, their prime enemy, to move against them, most likely in the disputed province of Kashmir. Those fears may have been well grounded, but in the event it seems to have been the fear itself that caused the ensuing war.
By the summer of 2018—a summer of torrential heat which the monsoon rains only intensified—radical Islamist factions, including factions within the military, had gained control of two-thirds of the country’s territory, including most of the largest city, Karachi. At that point perhaps half of Pakistan’s missile launching facilities, and as many as a third of their nuclear weapons, were in the hands of the insurgents. No one seemed to know (or was willing to divulge) exactly what happened next. The version most widely accepted at the time is that an Islamist commander, apparently under the impression that forces loyal to the regime (if it could still be called that) were about to retake his position, took it upon himself to launch a Ghauri-I medium-range ballistic missile targeted on Delhi. One inside source indicated that he paid large bribes to secure the necessary codes. Why he would trigger a war with India when he felt threatened by his fellow Pakistanis is not clear. Possibly he heard voices, like Joan of Arc, and thought he heard the Prophet telling him to do it; probably we will never know for sure. In any event the missile was launched, and several minutes later it was tracked on Indian radar. There was nothing anyone could do to stop it. At 5:35 pm local time the warhead detonated over Delhi, instantly killing half a million people and another half million within the hour.
India immediately retaliated by sending a dozen nuclear missiles targeted on Pakistani missile-launching sites and military bases. Since many of those sites were near heavily populated areas, and since radioactive fallout covered much of the country, Pakistan ceased to exist as an organized nation-state. It was millions of people dead or dying, wailing, crawling or running from horror to horror. And this time the international community, exhausted from previous horrors and calamities, could do little to help the survivors. There was even relatively little censure and scolding from foreign capitals; mostly there were expressions of mourning. What else was left to say?
The Universal Caliphate
There was more left to do, however. The adage that “all politics is local” became all the more true during this period. In the Middle East, the civil war in Iraq had gradually intensified since the American withdrawal in 2010-11. The main factions and their territories became more well-defined. In the northern quarter of the country were the Kurds. During the aftermath of the terrible Istanbul earthquake of March 2016, the Kurdish rebels in eastern Turkey, in concert with their kin in Iraq, managed to establish a sort of de facto separate state. This “Kurdistan” was recognized by neither Turkey nor Iraq (or anyone else), but they dug in and, hedgehog-like, defended their territory during the confused turmoil of the following decade. The western half of the country was controlled by the Sunnis, the southeastern part by the Shias. Long-suffering Baghdad was once again a battle zone, the prize up for grabs. In the course of the long struggle, the surrounding nations became more directly involved, no longer just covertly. By 2018 armed forces from Syria and Saudi Arabia (Sunni) were clashing on numerous fronts with forces from Iran (Shia). The fighting went on inconclusively, but in the spring of 2019 it produced one serious consequence: a grassroots rebellion against the House of Saud.
The revolution on the Arabian peninsula had several sources, two of which were paramount. First was the flagrant contrast between the luxurious, hedonistic lifestyle of the thousands of Saudi princes and the austere Wahhabi fundamentalism of most of the Arab population. Second was the sharp decline in oil revenues following the Crash of 17. Oil wealth had, of course, supported both the opulence of the Saudi regime and the welfare they spread around to appease the masses. As welfare benefits shrank, so did the tolerance of Wahhabi mullahs and their followers. Finally two leading imams took the extreme step and declared jihad against the corrupt, faithless regime. A wave of suicide bombings ensued, but as had happened in Pakistan (and in Russia a century before), the turning point of the revolution came about when it infected the armed forces, many of whom were engaged in the murky conflict in Iraq. Like most political revolutions, this one was passionate and bloody, with no quarter asked or given. After the first few chaotic weeks, the outcome was not much in doubt, and the self-styled Universal Caliphate—a name widely resented in the rest of the Muslim world and especially in Iran—was declared in September, 2019. After that, both sides intensified their efforts in Iraq.
“Close Enough”
In the United States, as the summer of 2020 began, both major political parties were engaged in bitter presidential nomination campaigns. Once the nominees were chosen, the election campaign promised to be even worse. The basic and harsh dispute was over “who lost what”—who lost American prosperity, who lost Taiwan, who lost the Middle East, who lost America’s hope for the future. The way they debated these questions was childish, as usual, but there were good reasons for all the pessimism. Many state and local governments were essentially bankrupt. Unemployment stood at around 25%, but no one really knew what the figure was. Many people had no steady job but worked irregularly, off the books, on farms or in auto repair shops or in the ubiquitous flea markets. Loan sharking and the “protection” racket were still illegal but were flourishing, controlled by local mafias that fought savagely among themselves for turf and clout. High schools looked and were run like prisons; since the inmates weren’t forced to attend, not many did. Like most everyone else, teenagers scratched for money any way they could—shoplifting, selling drugs, prostitution, or shaking people down, usually as gang members or wannabes.
On July 2 a terrorist group, linked with al-Qaeda but made up of U.S. and Canadian citizens, set off a “dirty bomb” in Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. The device was a conventional but powerful bomb encased in radioactive materials. It destroyed a city block and, more importantly, spewed radioactive residue over much of the urban area. An evacuation began immediately, disorganized and panic-driven. It was eventually estimated that over a million people suffered radiation injuries of varying severity. Greater Chicago was rendered uninhabitable for several centuries.
Over Al-Jazeera intervision, a spokesman for al-Qaeda claimed responsibility. The bomb was intended to go off on July fourth, but the second was “close enough”; the attack was “payback for Pakistan.” Two members of the terrorist cell were killed in the explosion, and three others were captured in the all-out manhunt that followed. The FBI determined that they had brought the bomb into the country from Canada through the lakes region of northern Minnesota in a truck full of chickens. No radiation detector was used at the border crossing. Chicago was chosen as the target because they thought it would be easier than New York or Washington, D.C. The premature detonation apparently resulted from confusion and panic among the terrorists. Both the ultimate origin of the bomb and how it was smuggled into Canada remained in doubt; the group who brought it into the United States had been intentionally kept in ignorance. Based on uncertain evidence, U.S. experts surmised the bomb was made in the old Soviet Union, but the Russian government categorically denied this.
The Great Flood
In China that same summer, record rainfalls combined with glacial melting in the Himilayas caused extensive river flooding. At first the floods were described as the worst since 2010, but that comparison was blown away when a “small leak” in the gigantic Three Gorges Dam quickly became a “partial failure.” A medium-size (magnitude 5.4) earthquake in the area was probably a contributing cause of the failure. Several photos taken at this point made their way past the censors onto the Internet. They show a horizontal jet of water about 60 feet wide and 100 feet high shooting as if from a giant hose. Within the next half hour or so the gap in the dam widened and deepened, so that the velocity of the escaping water slowed while its volume increased. From the Three Gorges, the Yangtze River flows 600 miles to the sea. All the people living next to the river, and all their buildings and livestock, were swept away. The megacities of Wuhan and Nanjing were devastated. The flooding itself was a natural disaster, but the dam failure was a man-made disaster, probably the worst since the two world wars of the previous century.
Among the massive Chinese populace, this catastrophe also swept away the sense of patriotic elation over the retaking of Taiwan two years before. All their various and accumulating grievances against the “Communist” regime were rekindled and flared up in hundreds of huge, spontaneous, violent protests and insurrections. Local government officials were beaten or hacked to death, their buildings ransacked and torched. The Party leaders in Beijing, however, had plenty of experience in handling this sort of thing. They called out the army and implemented contingency plans. But this insurrection was much bigger and more widespread than any preceding ones. Army units all over the country suddenly found themselves battling local mobs, and their orders from Beijing were to use all necessary force. Under the circumstances, tear gas and truncheons weren’t nearly enough, so officers ordered their men to open fire with automatic rifles and machine guns. It was Tiananmen Square all over again, across the length and breadth of China. And the outcome was much the same. The fires were stamped down and martial law was imposed indefinitely.
Disaster Up Close and Personal
On December 4, 2020, Popocatepetl, the active volcano 40 miles southeast of Mexico City, erupted explosively. The eruption was comparable to that of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State in 1980, but this time it affected a densely populated area. Pyroclastic flows wiped out thousands of homes, businesses and people, and several inches of volcanic ash choked the entire city.
The question might be asked why natural disasters like the Kathmandu earthquake and the Popocatapetl eruption are included in a history of this period. Such events have happened throughout history, after all, and are not unique to this time. And weren’t good things also happening during this period—acts of heroism and selflessness, ordinary people working hard under difficult circumstances? All true, but the paramount thing is the psychological effect of such events occurring amid those circumstances.
The tenor of the times might be compared to the seventh century in Europe, with barbarian war bands everywhere ravaging Roman civilization, or to the mid-fourteenth century when the Black Death killed, in hideous fashion, around a third of the people. In the time I am reviewing, the time that brought on the Troubles, it was the combination of “bad things” of all sorts, and their cumulative effect, that created so much anxiety and fear among people around the world. So when they heard of a distant earthquake or typhoon or terrorist atrocity, it felt close to them. And they did hear; a remarkable feature of this time is that, with all the wars and economic disruptions and other afflictions, telecoms were still flourishing—television, intervision (now omnivision), the Internet, and the omnicommlinks (“links” for short) that by that time were evolving from smartphones. The sky might be falling, but the first priority was to stay connected and see it happening. This came at a price, though. Security, as a state of mind, no longer existed.
By the spring of 2021 tensions between Israel and the Palestinians had once again cycled around to open hostility. The “limited accord” they reached in 2012 had brought four or five years of relative peace, but world events over that time conspired against them. America, the main support of both Israel and the “peace process,” was seriously weakened by the Crash of 17 and other adversities. Civil war in Iraq combined with the fall of Saudi Arabia to Islamic fundamentalists in 2019 further destabilized an already unstable region. Over the second half of the decade the Palestinian Authority gradually lost its long political rivalry with Hamas. Effectively in charge of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas ramped up both its propaganda and guerilla campaigns against Israel. Rocket attacks increased, and also suicide speedboat-bomb attacks against Israeli commercial shipping (as in the Strait of Malacca incident in 2013). To no one’s surprise, the Israeli government got tough again, hitting back hard against Hamas headquarters and other assets controlled by them. Spokesmen for Hamas expressed confidence that even though Israel was stronger militarily, time was on the side of the Palestinians. Most Israelis wouldn’t say so out loud, but they probably agreed.
Storm and Pestilence
The summer of 2021 brought unusually unsettled weather across the North American continent. Record heat waves in some areas were joined by violent electrical storms in others. The middle region of the continent was familiar with tornadoes and even with super-tornadoes, but this summer brought a succession of super-tornadoes—as black as night, several miles in diameter, annihilating everything in their path. Over a dozen towns and suburban areas were completely destroyed. Tulsa, Oklahoma looked like a giant bulldozer had scraped away the city center. By the time the tornado season wound down, over 18,000 lives were lost.
North America wasn’t alone in experiencing violent weather that season. In September, typhoon Helo, a huge tropical cyclone with winds in excess of 220 mph, came ashore in Shanghai and lingered for thirty hours. The destruction was on the same scale as in Miami five years before, except that Shanghai had twenty times more people. Chinese officials estimated as many as four million deaths, but it could never be better than a rough estimate. As for property damage and the cost of reconstruction, governments during this period were turning a corner. They no longer bothered to calculate the damage in monetary terms, since no insurance companies would be paying for it and reconstruction would never be more than partial.
Over the last decade, infectious disease rates had been rising around the world, largely as a result of spreading poverty and political and social deterioration. People’s lack of access to clean water caused continuing epidemics of water-borne diseases. In various regions there were epidemics of malaria, dengue fever, cholera, and hepatitis B, among others. The greatest scourge, however, was AIDS. People infected with the disease could be helped by a course of antiretroviral drugs, but worsening economic and political conditions limited their use. Up until about 2012 the pandemic was focused in Africa, but by 2020 it had broken out and was surging in Southeast Asia, China, India, Central Asia, and Russia. As it had done in Africa, it outran the medical resources in these regions and aggravated social and economic regression.
Along with disease came its companion, famine. Starvation became more common, especially among children, not only in Africa but in all the poorer regions of the world. International aid programs had less money than they used to and were stretched far too thin.
Chapter 5: Chaos and Collapse, 2022-26
“The Leader is the source and focus of all value. He embodies humanity, and his values are humanity’s values.” Timon Sadanta, address in Jerusalem, 2027
In February, 2022 coordinated terrorist strikes wrecked three offshore oil drilling rigs in the Atlantic, one off the coast of Africa and two off the coast of Brazil. The attacks were carried out not by Muslim terrorists or any other of the usual groups, but by a small mercenary navy funded, equipped and directed by an eccentric Australian billionaire named Cashel Mogren. Mogren’s obsessional belief was that Big Oil was the main single force causing economic disintegration, global warming, and war—in short, just about all of humanity’s current problems. The vessels he used in the attacks were bought second-hand from the Australian and United States Coast Guard, refitted, and armed to the teeth, particularly with missiles made in Russia and France and purchased through the clandestine international arms bazaar. Mogren conducted this whole affair through layers of business fronts and offshore banks, a system set up and operated by a small team of smart lawyers. As a result, even though his political views and his culpability were widely known, he was never indicted, and civil suits brought against him by the oil companies came to nothing. Nor were the United States Navy or any other navy able to intercept his vessels before they returned to the harbor he had built for them near Brisbane. This buccaneering freedom on Mogren’s part underscored the general decline in international law enforcement at this time.
The loss of those three oil rigs would have been a pinprick back in boom times, but now it was like one more open vein in an oil production and delivery system that was hemorrhaging mortally. To the chaos in Nigeria and the revolution in Saudi Arabia must be added the political implosion in Venezuela in 2015, which resulted in disorder and violence almost a bad as Nigeria’s and a steep drop in the nation’s oil production. Mexico wasn’t much better off, since the powerful and lawless drug cartels undermined all other businesses in the country, including the oil business.
On top of these regional production problems was the drastic decline in international commerce of all sorts following the Crash of 17. Those oil tankers still in service were increasingly at risk from pirates operating out of Somalia, Yemen, Madagascar, the Philippines and Panama, among other places. These gangs were not as well funded as Mogren’s force, but desperation made them dangerous. When they seized a tanker or container ship, they threatened to kill the crew and scuttle the ship unless a ransom was paid. Outcomes varied, but either way it was bad for business.
War and Arbitration (I)
Russia was the one country whose oil business was still turning profits. They were Europe’s chief supplier of petroleum and natural gas. Internally, the country had reverted to something like the Soviet Union without the Communist ideology, which had been replaced by strident nationalism. Russia was now a fascist state, a large and powerful one, still ruled by the new czar, Vladimir Putin. Those who served the state usefully were rewarded with the usual perks, while the rest of the populace were regimented and poor, and solaced themselves with vodka. Minimally treated, many were dying of cancer, liver disease and AIDS, and suicide was common.
Just as China’s invasion of Taiwan in 2018 was motivated by the regime’s need for a victory, so Russian fascism needed territorial expansion to justify itself. Eight years ago, in 2014, that need had been temporarily satisfied by taking over Belarus and Ukraine. Now, as often in the past, Russia contemplated Poland with growing appetite. Provocations were fabricated, amplified and ranted over. The Russian Army, already massed near the border, went on high alert. Poland, naturally, reacted with every kind of alarm, trying to answer Russia’s accusations diplomatically while readying their own military (no match for Russia’s) and frantically summoning NATO. In May of 2022 Russia launched its second Mayday Coup, hurling tanks, troops, artillery and fighter planes across the border.
This time, however, the response from the West was different. Europe and the United States were deteriorating economically, but the invasion of Poland seemed to push an emotional button. Putin and his generals had miscalculated their adversary’s nerve; this was an aggression too far. With all its troubles, the U.S. still had the world’s most advanced military, and Great Britain and France were more than weak sisters. Russia’s chest-thumping over the last few months had not gone unnoticed. The Russian advance was only in its second day when NATO hit back with everything they had, short of nuclear weapons (neither side in this conflict was willing to get annihilated). The fighting raged on for a week along a broad front east of Warsaw, with heavy casualties on both sides.
It soon became apparent that the only alternative to an almost unlimited expenditure of lives and materiel would be a negotiated truce, but neither side was willing to wave the white flag first. The war was threatening to escalate to other parts of Europe and Russia when, in the last week of May, there was an intervention by an international negotiating team led by a new star figure in world politics (about whom more presently). Both Putin and the NATO leaders, although unwilling to show weakness, realized that a negotiated settlement was now in their best interest. A temporary cessation of the fighting was followed by a month of hot words and hard bargaining. Without the arbitrating group, and especially their chief negotiator, the war would certainly have flared up again. But on July 1 a treaty was signed. The Poles ceded some of their northeastern territory south of Kaliningrad, while Russia paid a token indemnity and agreed to continue selling natural gas to Europe.
It was a brief war but a very costly one, particularly in military hardware. Neither Russia, the European states, nor the United States were ever able to fully replenish their military forces.
The Big One
Then on January 14, 2023 the long-awaited Big One finally hit Southern California, with an epicenter near Ontario, a suburb east of Los Angeles. The earthquake was indeed big, 8.9 on the Richter scale. The damage to buildings and infrastructure was severe; many newer buildings remained intact, but most older ones were shaken to the ground. Several fissures five to twenty feet wide opened up right across the urban area. The death toll was remarkably low—estimated at around ten thousand—for a disaster of this magnitude, but around a million were seriously injured. Paramedics and other health care workers were unable to reach many of these because the streets and freeways were buckled, collapsed, and choked with debris and wrecked or stalled vehicles. About the only motor vehicles that could get from one place to another were motorcycles, and in many places even they were stymied. Greater Los Angeles, the city that lived on wheels, now lived on foot.
Even as the injured were being treated by their families and neighbors as well as circumstances allowed, shortages of food and clean water grew more serious. Helicopter drops alleviated the situation in the short run, but the prospects for digging out and then rebuilding the infrastructure and the economy were grim. Meanwhile there was widespread looting. Liquor stores were stripped of all their intact bottles, resulting in a brief binge of mindless drunken mayhem. By the time that wore off, everyone could see that the next few months, and even years, were not about partying but about survival.
An Unearthly Groaning
As I have mentioned before, the effects of global warming became steadily more apparent over these years. Hurricanes, typhoons, electrical storms, tornadoes, and river floods got larger, more destructive, and more frequent. Droughts led to wildfires and human migration. Monsoon rain patterns shifted, becoming less predictable and more inundating. Arctic ice reached northern coastlines only in the winter. Around the world, glaciers melted and retreated at increasing rates.
The really big ice sheets, generally over a mile in depth, rested on two large land masses, Greenland and Antarctica. As early as 2008, scientists monitoring the Greenland glaciers noted meltwater falling through crevasses and sinkholes all the way to the bedrock underneath. Some scientists theorized that this melting could lead to any of several positive feedback loops whereby the friction holding the ice sheets to the bedrock might be eroded. If that happened, substantial parts of those massive sheets could break loose and slide off into the ocean. Some scientists doubted the theory, while others thought the disaster, if it happened at all, would probably occur gradually over a span of centuries. It turned out that the minority of scientists who emphasized the power of feedback loops to accelerate such processes were right. By 2021 monitoring devices detected significant movement—beyond the normal “glacial” rate—in at least three major glaciers. By the next year people could hear it—a deep, unearthly groaning. During the summer of 2023 large chunks of Greenland’s glaciers, nearly ten thousand cubic miles altogether, moved like a super-slow-motion avalanche into the north Atlantic. Two years later a similar though somewhat smaller event occurred with the West Antarctic ice sheet.
All that added water, together with the thermal expansion of the oceans themselves due to climate change, raised sea levels an average of eight inches a year from 2024 to 2028, which was the last year measurements were made public; the seas are certainly still rising. As a result, low-lying coastal areas, particularly river deltas, were heavily and irreversibly flooded. Most of those areas were densely populated—and are now even more so, as people are forced inland to higher ground. Bangladesh is in turmoil. New York City was badly flooded by a sea-rise augmented storm surge in November, 2027, which also caused the aging sewer system to back up. Similar problems have beset the Thames estuary, including London itself, and also Mumbai, Cairo, Buenos Aires, and Jakarta, among many other cities. Drinking water sources in most of these places have been fouled by sea water. Both Shanghai and Miami, already ruined by storms, are now permanently flooded, as also is most of New Orleans.
War and Arbitration (II)
In the summer of 2024 fighting broke out between India and China over disputed territories in the Himilayan region. They had previously fought a war over the same turf as far back as 1962, but the grievances behind that conflict (won by China) were never resolved. Additional tensions between the two giant countries had been growing ever since and had become critical by 2024. The main tension centered on control of the major river systems originating in the Himilayas. In addition, for several years they had both been maneuvering for control over Myanmar (Burma), which had joined the list of failed states. It was a feudal, violent place, but one rich in natural resources which both China and India coveted, both being by this time economically desperate.
The 2024 war started in the Himilayas but quicky escalated to include both Myanmar and major naval engagements in the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. The danger of the war going nuclear was imminent when, in January 2025, a negotiating team intervened, led by the same man who arbitrated the settlement of the Russo-European war in 2022 (about whom more quite soon). This team—really, this man—managed to persuade the leaders on both sides to come to the negotiating table. Exactly what happened in those talks has never been made clear, but three weeks later a treaty was signed. The terms of the treaty, as least as published, were curiously vague, but the outcome basically was that both sides backed down to the status quo ante. To thoughtful observers (those few who were not too overwhelmed by their own circumstances to observe) it was an odd and unexpected denouement.
Over the Edge
The major events of the next eighteen months, culminating in the Great Collapse of 2026, may be briefly summarized. The dominating event was the influenza pandemic which broke out in the spring of 2025 in Central Asia and swept across most of the planet. It came on too fast for a vaccine to be developed, and in any case by that time international medical resources were seriously depleted. Indeed, there was little inter-national coordination of any kind left. By the autumn of 2026 the pandemic was on the wane, but somewhere between 300 and 400 million people had died of the disease.
The political situation in the Middle East, meanwhile, had gone from bad to worse. Israel’s latest get-tough policy had last-ditch overtones to it, and the surrounding Muslim states smelled blood in the water. Over the last few years they had been firing themselves up for a showdown, and in the summer of 2026, as the influenza pandemic was burning itself out (the Arabs blamed it on Israel), they massed their forces for a coordinated assault.
In 2025-26 major earthquakes struck in Peru, Missouri, Iran and China. There were explosive volcanic eruptions in the Philippines, Japan, and Indonesia. Desperate, ragged skirmishes were being fought in many places over access to water and food. Culmulatively it was all more than human organizations could bear, and everywhere they were breaking down.
In September, 2026, the global banking system finally collapsed altogether, literally overnight. Everyone’s money became worthless, because no one trusted anyone’s ability to repay debts. Everyone was thrown back on his or her own resources, which were dwindling fast. There was only one man alive who could do anything about the calamity.
And he did.
Chapter 6: The Leader
“In obeying him, we obey ourselves.” Timon Sadanta, speech in Jerusalem, 2027
He was born in 1980 near Zurich, Switzerland. Like everyone else he had a family name and a given name, but since consolidating his rule over the World Authority, he has decreed that a birth name would lower him to the level of everyone else. He is now simply the Leader, in every language. This is perhaps the one point on which, for reasons of my own, I concur with him. His name is unspeakable.
He is, nevertheless, the Leader, and I will fill in what is generally known of his biography. His father was Syrian, a man of inherited wealth who increased that wealth as a banking executive, first in his native country and later in London, Paris, and Zurich, where his son of destiny was born. The Leader’s mother was French; from both parents he inherited a diversity of blood lines. He was educated in Paris, earned a degree in economics at Cambridge University and then an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. A natural athlete, he became a world-class skier and yachtsman. According to some accounts he trained and served in the French army’s Special Forces Brigade from about 2004 to 2008, but this is unclear. What is clear is that by 2009 he was making a name for himself in the global information tech industry, first at Cognizant, a U.S. firm, and then Infosys, the Indian giant. From there he followed his father’s lead, moving into executive positions at Credit Suisse, in both the investment banking and asset management divisions.
In 2017 he became the youngest-ever Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in which capacity he led the financial system’s response to the Crash of 17 and was widely credited with keeping the system from imploding completely. In 2018 he published the bestseller
Systemic Faith: What Holds Us Together. (Along with telecom services, the book publishing industry survived the crash fairly well; bestsellers, at least, kept selling.) It was at this time that he became the favorite darling of the global media, a statesman with wit and charm, the prize guest on everything from the BBC and CNN to late-night talk shows around the world (he spoke at least seven languages fluently). He had the rare gift of being all things to all people.
In 2021 he published
Under the Table: How They Undermine Us, a scathing, tell-all indictment of global movers and shakers—politicians, autocrats, business leaders and so on—who, he claimed, hypocritically pretended to working for the common good while in fact they were lining their own pockets at public expense. In his books and other media appearances, he presented himself as a “global citizen,” contending that nationalism had run its course and was outdated, unworthy of the future of humanity. He was, of course, the chief negotiator responsible for ending the war between Russia and Europe in 2022—for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (the last one)—and also the one who ended the war between India and China in 2024.
The Entertainment Culture
A summary like this gives some idea of the man, but an inadequate one. To understand him better and his rise to power, we need to examine some further aspects of the global society as it developed during this period. Back when the good times were rolling, in the two decades before 2008, entertainment played an increasing role in the lives of people throughout the developed world, and many in the developing world did all they could to join in the fun. Even during and after the Great Recession this trend continued—why not have fun while the sky is falling, as long as it hasn’t landed on you yet? The entertainment industry became very big business—music, movies, satellite TV, pornography, casinos, cruise liners, rock concerts, sports, iPods, video games, Las Vegas and Macau. Formerly, except for a small cluster of idle aristocrats, entertainment had been a sideline, something reserved for leisure time, which was usually scarce. It was a diversion, a temporary and pleasurable escape from the business of real life. For many people in this new era, however, their job was just a necessary interlude in the real life of having fun. With ubiquitous WiFi and smartphones, and then omnicommlinks and omnivision, the dominance of entertainment affected all our institutions and transformed many of the major ones, including politics, merchandising, and the news industry.
The mainsprings of entertainment in this new global culture were sex, drugs, and violence. The sexual revolution of the Baby Boomer generation was embraced and institutionalized by Hollywood, television producers, and advertisers, so that “soft” pornography saturated the advanced societies and hard porn was only a click away for whoever wanted it. Social restraints against casual, recreational sex vanished except for halfhearted appeals to keep it “safe.” Alcohol, tranquilizers, amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine and heroin were widely relied upon to keep people in the “feel good” state required by an entertainment culture. And the hunger for vicarious violence was fed by redundant mayhem in movies, television (then intervision and now omnivision) and video games, as if the gladiatorial games of the decadent Roman Empire had gone global through some technological miracle. Strategists in the media, in marketing and in politics concluded that in order to maintain or increase market share among the consuming public, they must grab and hold the public’s attention by entertaining them—relentlessly, luridly, and noisily.
No part of the entertainment industry thrived more than gambling. (The industry preferred the euphemism “gaming,” but the game was strictly gambling.) People gambled for fun, for thrills, and especially for money. Money was the lodestone, both for the legions of small-time players and the growing coterie of really big-time players—commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and assorted billionaires. The only real difference between Las Vegas and Wall Street was the size of the bets. The world-class players were competing in what came to be called “the big casino”—the global financial system—to see who could make the riskiest bets, the ones that pay off the biggest when you win. Of course these bets could push your firm toward bankruptcy if you lose, and in the process they might pull down the whole casino on your collective heads, but the gambler’s testosterone-charged conviction was that I will win, the others will lose, and if the casino is collapsing, governments will have to bail us all out one more time. And if they can’t or won’t, that’s just too bad. My personal fortune is safe in a Swiss bank.
Or at least it was safe up until the Crash of 17. After that, even Swiss banks hunkered down and protected their money. Their oldest, best customers could still draw funds, but it became increasingly clear who really controlled the gold. Even now there are many who don’t realize who was then gaining control of the banks. During the two decades after 2010, while he was building his fame, influence and worldwide popularity, the Leader was also expanding his immense personal fortune—hundreds of billions of dollars—while also, very quietly, building his global network of influential people, secret associations, and disguised websites. I realize that this sounds like alarmist conspiracy theory, but with the Leader it was entirely practical.
Superstar
His rise to power was the ultimate media event in a world society saturated with media and addicted to entertainment. He himself was the star of stars; it was all about personal magnetism. He combined the charm of a talk show host, the gravity of a Supreme Court justice, the command of a battlefield general, and the glamour of a Hollywood idol. He was mysterious, sexy, brilliant, and dangerous. His mind awed the intellectuals, his personal force intimidated the powerful, and his appearance (on omnivision everywhere) melted the sensuous. In a world infatuated with superficial celebrity he was the tabloid king. In a gambler’s world he was the highest, hottest roller. In a violent world he emanated cool but lethal menace.
A curious episode highlights the kind of legends that were growing around him. In
Under the Table, his 2021 bestseller, many world figures and other well-known people came in for his exposure and, sometimes, his ridicule. One was Leo Scharrens, chief finance minister of the European Union. Scharrens was high-profile, outspoken and ambitious. The Leader lampooned him as a neurotic, randy windbag. He included a couple of photographs, one showing Scharrens with a barely dressed prostitute hanging on his arm and the other of Scharrens in a garish cross-dressing getup. There were rumors that Scharrens’ lawyer talked him out of suing, but that remained in doubt. What wasn’t in much doubt was that the photos were computer-generated fakes, and that one week after the book came out, Scharrens assaulted the (future) Leader as he was exiting a meeting at a hotel in Luxembourg. Specifically, Scharrens smashed his skull with a claw hammer (carried in his briefcase), then ran into the meeting room shouting about what he had done and why. Security people engulfed him, while others rushed to aid his bloodied victim.
Eyewitness reports under such circumstances are notoriously unreliable, but most claimed the fallen man was certainly dead. A minute later, however, he walked back into the meeting room, streaming blood and parting the crowd like Moses. He grabbed the stunned Scharrens, lifted him overhead like a barbell, and hurled him across the room. (Scharrens suffered a concussion, separated shoulder and broken wrist, but survived.) Then the Leader calmly went to a restroom, washed himself and tied a towel around his head. The whole affair, doubtless distorted as such legends are and amplified through propaganda, was celebrated in the media as a modern-day miracle.
The Light Bearer
In filling in the background to the events of the late 20’s, one other figure also looms large. This is Timon Sadanta, a world luminary in his own right, who became the Leader’s chief herald. Sadanta was born in central Africa but was adopted in early childhood by a devoutly Roman Catholic couple from Salzburg, Austria. Educated in Catholic schools, he was a brilliant student and went straight into the priesthood. The only thing that stood in the way of his meteoric rise in the Catholic hierarchy was his heterodox theology. In fact this didn’t slow his advancement much; he was an archbishop when, at the age of 41, he broke from the Church to found a new religious movement which he called Light Bearers to Humanity.
As it had evolved by this time, Sadanta’s theology was eclectic. To the best of my understanding the main tenets are these: The whole universe is divine, or is impregnated with divinity. The Earth is a special focus of divinity, as also are human beings. The Earth communicates spiritual truth through various symbols—mathematical, cultural, and religious. All people can understand these symbols in a vague way, but only the initiates—the Light Bearers—are able to decode their true meanings. The deeper an initiate advances into the EarthFire (Sadanta’s term), the greater his responsibility to guard this knowledge from the unenlightened and reveal it, in secret ways, to initiates coming behind him (or her—supposedly women can be initiates, but most are men). While the core of the knowledge is secret, the Light Bearers proclaim that it has revolutionized their lives and their understanding of moral truth. “The truth that frees you is the truth that reverses all things” is one of Sadanta’s famous sayings.
Initiates undergo a series of testing ordeals, which are rumored to be severe. One might think that such an initiation process would deter new converts, but the movement’s explosive growth suggests the opposite. During the last ten or fifteen years it has gained millions of adherents, most of them converts from long-established religious traditions. The worse their lives have become with regard to physical security, it seems, the more they are attracted to Sadanta’s “new gospel.” The movement has also benefitted from being widely covered and often lionized by the media. Sadanta himself has become something between a cult figure and a superhero. His style of dress, in public, combines the look of a medieval cardinal and a gothic rock star. His voice, though, is probably his greatest asset: a mellifluous deep baritone that resonates with perfect articulation in whichever language he is speaking (like the Leader he speaks many languages). It is said, apocryphally no doubt, that he once held an audience of cats spellbound for two hours.
The reason I have devoted so much attention to Sadanta and his religious juggernaut is that he was instrumental in the Leader’s rise to power. The origins of their personal association are obscure but probably go back many years. Whether the Leader himself is a Light Bearer has never been publicly acknowledged, but the general assumption is that he must be one of the Circle of Five (the deepest initiates). My own assumption is that he is the Circle of One, but in all his public statements he has refrained (until very recently) from criticizing any religion or identifying himself with any.
How the world’s religions, both the clerics and the followers, responded to the Leader is a key part in the story of his rise. Unlike many world leaders, he wasn’t hostile toward people of faith and didn’t regard them as delusional. He gave them honor, and they, overall, returned the favor.
“Strange Coalition”
As I said before, the global banking system ground to a halt in September, 2026. The financial system depends on trust—lenders trusting borrowers and vice-versa—and at that point all trust had vanished. Earlier that same year, however, over a three-week period, the Leader held private meetings with the leaders of Russia, Germany, and Iran. All three nations, by that time, were fascist states of different stripes, ruled by iron-fisted autocrats. By all reports, those three autocrats came out of those meetings looking like they had swallowed a toad. After the third meeting they held a joint news conference at which they swore allegiance to the Leader, and as simply as that the Triple Coalition was formed. The story behind this event was reported in some depth by the well-known investigative journalist and blogger Vincent Baron, in a blog entitled “Strange Closeting, Strange Coalition.” He speculated on what kind of power or influence the Leader must have exerted over those three. Was it some form of political pressure, or possibly even physical threats? Baron concluded that it probably was psychological intimidation, even some sort of hypnotism. Shortly after that blog was posted, Baron disappeared and the blog with him.
We have already noted the course by which Russia embraced fascism under the banner of the Third Rome. In Germany, after the Crash of 17, there were several years of extreme political polarization. Strong and generally unscrupulous right-wing parties clashed with an almost equally strong left wing haunted by memories of Nazism. In 2024 a right-wing regime took power, though its ideology was less messianic and more insular than Hitler’s; it was “Germany for the Germans.” Iran was still ruled, with increasingly totalitarian methods, by Muslim clerics. What, one might ask, besides despotism did these three states have in common that might unite them in a Triple Coalition? The answer prefigures the way the World Authority came into being not long thereafter: What they had in common was the Leader himself.
The Peace of Jerusalem
In the middle of August 2026 the Arab states surrounding Israel, having completed their military preparations, launched a barrage of rocket and artillery fire, followed by a tank and infantry invasion on all fronts. The Israelis, of course, knew it was coming and were as prepared as they could be. As soon as the invasion began, Israel’s prime minister warned that if it continued, he would have no choice but to retaliate with nuclear strikes against the capitals of all the aggressor states. No one doubted his sincerity, but the invasion continued anyway. After a week of ferocious fighting the Israeli lines were being pushed back. Tel Aviv was shattered and burning. Everyone expected to hear very soon, even within the next hour, that Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Amman, Riyadh and Cairo had been obliterated.
What happened instead in the next hour was that the Leader, having given short notice to all the belligerents, flew into Jerusalem aboard his personal Boeing liner. As the head of the Triple Coalition he demanded an immediate cease fire. All parties were to send an official delegation to Jerusalem, and the negotiations for a settlement would commence in 48 hours. At this point the Arabs held the upper hand militarily, except for Israel’s very real nuclear threat. Both Israel and the Arabs were perfectly aware, however, of the power of the Triple Coalition looming over both of them. At this table, the Leader held the strongest hand. So the fighting stopped and the arbitration began on September 2. It was while these talks were going on that the world’s financial system froze up on September 7-8. On September 10, Israel and all the Arab states signed the Peace of Jerusalem. It was an astonishing document, and even then everyone understood that it was the Leader who essentially dictated its terms. In return for not having their cities annihilated, the Arabs laid down their arms and went home. In addition, Israel was allowed to rebuild its Temple right next to the Dome of the Rock (there is room for both on the Temple Mount). The side-by-side structures, the document said, would symbolize and enshrine the new peace.
How the Leader pulled this off, and why, are good questions. On the surface it sounds like Israel got the better of the deal. It was widely speculated (and I believe) that the reason Israel withheld its nukes was that the Leader had been in secret communication with them. But what about the Arabs? As the ruler of the Triple Coalition, the Leader was now supreme in Iran, the heartland of Shia Islam. The grounds on which Iran entered the Coalition were that Iran’s ruling cleric, following the “strange closeting” a few months before, recognized the Leader to be the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam, and declared him to be so. The Mahdi is to Muslims, especially Shias, what the Messiah is to Jews and Christians. At a stroke, nearly half of the Muslim world now revered the Leader as the ultimate messenger of Allah. That was the official line, at any rate; this declaration produced extreme confusion and division in the ranks. Most Sunnis also believe in the Mahdi, though they differ with Shias over his identity. Iran’s recognition of the Leader as the Mahdi also created turmoil and division in the Sunni world. But the intricate web of loyalists and debtors that the Leader had woven over the last ten years included many Arabs, and now he issued his quiet summons. Many Sunnis also declared him the Mahdi, and the rest were disorganized and intimidated.
As to why the Leader ordained the terms of the Peace of Jerusalem as he did, that would only become clear a few years later.
The World Authority
So the Peace was signed on September 10, even as the global economic system largely ceased functioning. On September 15, the Leader announced—over live omnivision and through all functioning news agencies—the formation of the Complete Coalition. To the original three states were now added seven more: the United States, Great Britain, France, Brazil, Japan, Australia, and Canada. (India and China, as a result of the 2025 treaty, were also effectively under the Leader’s thumb.) Then, six days later, the Leader proclaimed the World Authority. As of September 21, 2026, the Leader ruled the world.
This summary shows how rapidly these events occurred but gives little idea of the atmosphere in which they occurred. All over the world, in every region, people lived in fear and desperation. Most people were hungry or starving; many were sick or homeless. The strong took from the weak. National governments had lost all control. The megacities had fallen into anarchy. People had run out of hope—except for the glimmer of hope held out by one man. But that one man was the most admired and celebrated man on the planet, the one absolute superstar. If anyone could lead the world out of its current calamity, he could.
Ever since the Crash of 17, the Leader had worked to keep international telecoms on a firm footing. Now, in the chaos of 2026, his calm, handsome face, his reassuring smile, his magnetic eyes, and his commanding voice were watched and heard on onmivision and omnicommlinks all over the world as he announced the advent of the World Authority. Law and order, he promised, were being restored even as he spoke. Emergency food supplies were being delivered. All existing currencies would be backed by the Authority until the new world currency was circulated. The Great Collapse, he declared, was over.
Human nature being what it is, the main thing people needed at that time was hope, and in the Leader most of them found it. His announcement of the World Authority was followed immediately by Timon Sadanta giving a fiery accolade, acclaiming the Leader as the Great Peacemaker and the Great Restorer, and calling on all Light Bearers and their followers to fan out across the globe and spread the good news to those who might have missed it.
Overall, the clarion call to pull together and trust the new government worked. By the start of 2027 many pockets of disorder and gang rule remained, but the tide was with the Leader. Over the last two years, in isolated locations around the world, spending his funds lavishly, he had been organizing and training thousands of Special Police (SP). By the time he sent them forth, the same day he announced the World Authority, they were more like military special forces than ordinary police. They were heavily armed, fast and efficient. To the officers of existing police and militia they put the question: Are you with us or against us? The few who resisted them were eliminated. Meanwhile all the media, most of them voluntarily, were trumpeting the same message: We’re all in this together, we stand or fall together—let’s pull together! Follow our Leader together!
The Light of Man
The general result, by the spring of 2027, was a shared feeling of relief. Law and order had indeed been substantially restored. The global economy was moving again, though it was tightly controlled by the Authority, and food and other essentials were rationed. Dissidents and troublemakers were dealt with. Ordinary people faced a difficult choice. They could try to steer clear of this new, sudden and heavy-handed regime and get on with their lives as best they could. Or they could apply for some position in the mushrooming new bureaucracy that administered the Leader’s policies. That might offer advantages, but it would also put you under closer and constant scrutiny by the Authority. You might survive, you might even prosper, but your life would belong to them.
The Leader flew from country to country and city to city within his domains and was received everywhere with enthusiastic acclaim. In Rome, the pope embraced him. To the surprise of many, however, he made Jerusalem his capital and took the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple as his pet project. On Passover that year—the timing could not have been accidental—he named Timon Sadanta the Spiritual Advisor to the World. In his inaugural address in that capacity, Sadanta announced what the EarthFire had revealed to him. The divine status of all humanity had been confirmed and established, a divinity that was focused in the Leader, who was the Man, the Messiah, the Mahdi, the Reincarnated One, the Deliverer, the Protector. In honoring him, Sadanta proclaimed, we honor ourselves. In exalting him, we exalt ourselves. In loving him, we love ourselves. In obeying him, we obey ourselves.
Church buildings, synagogues, mosques and temples were converted to the practice of this new religion, called the Light of Man. The Authority, represented on the local level by the newly expanded Special Police, “encouraged” all citizens to participate in Light of Man ceremonies. Those who stayed away were discouraged by being roughed up and losing their ration cards, so most of us went. The services, I thought, were rather disappointing. We, the unenlightened laity, sat in rows in dim light and watched the white-robed initiates performing elaborate occult rituals, until I found myself praying for an end to the ordeal. I know the idea was that we would be so jealous of their status, so eager to be let in on their secrets and so mortified at being left out, that we would be lining up to be accepted for initiation. Many did, of course. I have never been very religious, though, and this Light of Man business was soaked in religion.
Around the world, most people accepted the new cult, often with enthusiasm. Among Jews, Muslims and Christians, though, there were many who resisted, more or less openly. The pope changed his mind and denounced the Light of Man as rank heresy. The next day the SP stormed the Vatican and deposed the pope, mowing down dozens of Swiss Guards in the process.
Chapter 7: The Euphoria
“Make no mistake: We have the situation under control. All the traitors have been detained. None will slip through our net.” The Leader, omnivision announcement, September 12, 2029
As 2027 wore on, the world settled in to the new arrangements. The Authority grew rapidly, one might say cancerously, swallowing existing bureaucracies and digesting them until they were part of its own. Freedom of speech and association were curtailed; you were free to say what you were supposed to say and associate with people who did as they were supposed to do. Mandatory evening classes drilled you in what you should think—about our Glorious Leader, about the Authority and its Special Police, about the Light Bearers and the Light of Man cult, and about the vileness of people who were negative, cynical, arrogant, or different. There was no longer any private life or private business; all employment was through the Authority. Whatever the Authority might require people to think about their “abundant life” in the “New Way,” though, the reality was scarcity and hunger. A ration card did you little good when store shelves were empty. To keep people’s minds off their hunger, there were weekly parades and festivals celebrating the Leader. Attendance at parades and festivals was mandatory unless you had a validated exemption.
That was the general state of affairs. Conditions varied, of course, in different parts of the world. My sources of information about this period are limited, but it’s safe to say that in the more thoroughly impoverished parts of the world, like Africa, Central America, Central Asia, and most of India and China, people were even worse off than elsewhere. Most of the megacities were hellish.
Tears of Joy
I recollect a time when summer and autumn were the best seasons of the year. By 2027, summer brought unbearable heat and humidity. Air conditioning was only a memory, except of course in the Leader’s scores of mansions and recreational compounds around the world. Earthquakes continued to strike in various places—definitely more than in the past. Thousands and perhaps millions died in droughts, hurricanes and floods.
But life went on, such as it was. Then in the spring of 2028, rumors began circulating of an odd and unexpected religious revival, or mania—one certainly not sponsored by the Authority. Apparently the Jews and Christians, particularly those who laid low during Light of Man events, were getting together, reconciling with one another. The Jews, it was said—I myself am not sure how much of this to believe—were “repenting” for having rejected Jesus, their Messiah.
Their Messiah. And the Christians were repenting for persecuting Jewish people over many centuries on trumped up pretexts. It was, the rumors said, as if John the Baptist was holding forth again in a thousand different places. It was being called the “tears of joy” movement—in whispers, because the Authority prohibited any mention of it in public.
The reason I am going into this is what happened a year later, so bear with me. As for myself, I saw only a little of what was going on. From time to time I saw people embracing on the streets and suspected I was spying on tears of joy. I heard of Jewish-Christian gatherings in locked apartments, with the curtains drawn, where they worshiped a Messiah other than our Beloved Leader. Suspicions along these lines were clearly confirmed when Timon Sadanta delivered a message over all omnivision channels on the subject of Wisdom. Here is some of what he said, or resonated, in that inimitable voice:
“Wisdom! Wisdom calls aloud in the street, but who has lent an ear? Hear me, my children, who in the end can resist her call, who can turn back her tide? From the heart of the earth Wisdom has spoken. I am merely the unworthy one chosen to speak forth her word, which no man can turn aside or withstand.
“From the fire in the heart of the earth I bring you her word, and it is a harrowing word, a word at which the faithless tremble, a word from which the renegade shrinks. And where is the renegade, who is the faithless one? They are not one, my children, they are legion, and they are in the very midst of you. They are beside you in the marketplace. They may sit beside you at the table. Wolves disguising themselves as sheep!
“And who are they? They are the ungrateful ones. Ungrateful! Ungrateful to the earth, ungrateful to humanity. Ungrateful for all they have been given, ungrateful for the New Life they enjoy. Ungrateful, my children, to our sublime Leader! Vile ingratitude, sick ingratitude, repulsive ingratitude!
“Can there be more than such ingratitude? Can there be worse? With such filth there is nothing but worse. They are selfish. Selfish! They care nothing for the community, the society, the state—for you, my children. Selfish, arrogant—arrogant in their selfishness. Slimy arrogant vermin! They worship the past—insanity! They dare to compare a pathetic impostor, a dead man, to our incomparable Leader!
“Hateful ones, filled with foul hate. Listen to them, my children, listen to them and hear their foul lips dripping hate. No, my children—do not listen to their hate! Do not listen when they come and whisper in your ear, telling you that their way is the only way. Their way? Selfish! Hateful! Whispers of demons! Joy, they will hiss at you. Lies, desperate lies! Can there be any joy, any happiness, out there in the diseased darkness, out there where the light of our Beloved Leader does not shine? In that darkness there are only stinking, scurrying cockroaches . . . .”
And much more in the same vein. Timon was a highly intelligent man and didn’t need to rant this way. On this occasion, current events had clearly taken him by surprise and rattled him. He may also have thought this was the way to sway the proles, and so far it certainly had been working for him. (He repeated the speech in fluent Mandarin, Arabic, Spanish, and a few other languages.) In any case, everyone who heard him this time—just about everyone, period—knew that something was going on.
The Great Reunion
One day in the fall of that year I was sitting on a bus bench waiting for a bus that might or might not come. A man came and sat down next to me. I noticed he was wearing a small wooden cross on a necklace, in flagrant defiance of Authority regulations. He was asking to be arrested. When he noticed me staring at the cross, he smiled and nodded and said, “Yes, I’m one of them. Don’t feel obligated to talk with me, though. They are probably watching.” By “them” and “they” he meant two entirely different groups.
I murmured that I wasn’t afraid of them (we knew which “them” I meant), although I was. He went on speaking in a low voice, looking across the mostly empty street, hardly moving his lips. He spoke about what he called the Great Reunion. Yes, it was exactly what the rumors said, and more. It was a fulfillment of Bible prophecy—he mentioned the twelfth chapter of Zechariah and the eleventh of Romans. It was an act of God; no human persuasion could produce such consequences. It was happening all over the world, and it was making waves—not only waves of alarm and suppression within the Authority, but waves of what he called “witness conversions.” The tears of joy, he said, were contagious. It was like a million birthday parties everywhere, or a million million, and people were flocking to join in.
He stopped speaking and glanced my way with a half smile, then looking away again he said, “I don’t know how much you are aware of what’s been going on. Around the world, I mean, with the spread of the gospel.”
He paused, apparently waiting for a response, and when I gave none he went on, “Up until forty or fifty years ago the news about Jesus was being disseminated mainly by missionaries, most of them from the West. But then a shift took place, and ever since it’s been the people receiving the gospel, in every part of the world, who have been passing it on to their neighbors—to the tribe in the next valley who speak a dialect of their language, or the people further up in the hills. All of this has been going on under the radar, largely unnoticed. And it’s all over the planet—South America, Polynesia, Africa, Indonesia, India, China. China!”
Muted excitement made it hard for him to keep up the deadpan ventriloquist act. He continued: “When the last foreign missionaries left China in the 1930’s, their converts could be numbered in the thousands. Then all kinds of hell broke loose there, and in the midst of that, those converts became missionaries to their own people. Now, a century later, there are three or four hundred
million Jesus-followers in China, around a quarter of the entire population. And that’s just China—as I said, the same thing has been happening all over. Do you know what Jesus said about this? He said that his story would be told among every people group in the world, and then he would come back for his followers. That day is coming into sight. It’s even happening in the Muslim world; they seem particularly susceptible to the joy of the Messiah. Well, their choice now is pretty much down to this Messiah or . . . that one. The Man of sorrows who is acquainted with their grief, or the one who inflicts it.”
I may have given a skeptical grunt at that point, but he just smiled to himself and went on, “And what about the Jews? With the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions, centuries before Christ, most of them were carried away as slaves and scattered around those empires. Many fled to Egypt and wound up spreading across Africa. Then the Roman conquest of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. produced another diaspora, a more nearly permanent one. Except for those who returned to Palestine and formed the nation of Israel after the second war, the Jews remain where they have been for two millenia, scattered throughout the world. They are not as many as the Christians, but like the Christians they are in the nooks and crannies. And when they came together with the Christians in the Reunion . . . well, it became a critical mass, and then a good explosion.”
I couldn’t let that one pass. “Good? Don’t you know what they’re doing with you people?”
“What they feel they have to do. I’ll probably be arrested in the next hour or two. I want to tell them what I’ve been telling you.”
“Why me? Why are you telling me?”
“You’re a historian. You’re even writing a history.”
An alarm shivered through me. “How do you know about that?”
He shrugged and stood up. “The Authority doesn’t have a monopoly on eyes and ears.” He nodded to me and walked off down the street. He was either braver than me or crazier than me. Maybe both.
Now You See Them
He surely needed to be braver. As soon as the Authority caught wind of what was going on—that would be soon after it started, back in the spring—they geared up for a crackdown. They began rounding up the “fanatics,” beating many of them to death in the process and herding the rest into concentration camps. Already existing camps were hurriedly expanded to contain all the new criminals, but it wasn’t nearly enough. The Authority had simply failed to comprehend the scale of this maniacal defection.
The fanatics usually put up no resistance to their arrest, however. The man on the bus bench had told me that this passivity was a novel experience for the “completed” Jews, as he called them—previously they would have fought tooth and nail with a defiant shout of “Never again!” But now that they knew their final destination, being forced into a shortcut no longer mattered.
Even with little resistance, though, there were just too many of these zealots. Hundreds of new camps were hastily constructed during the winter of 2028-29, and the SP began killing more of the traitors rather than herding them. But that strategy had intractable problems too. The Nazis had spent several years working on ways to dispose of the bodies of six million Jews. What do you do when you have to deal with two or three billion bodies?
The answer is that they did the best they could. Burying and burning, by late summer in 2029 they had disposed of many more bodies than the Nazis’ six million. Millions more were in the camps. Unprecedented plans and projects were under way for dealing with the rest.
At this point, however, the story becomes starkly mysterious. The Authority, of course, has clamped down on all information about whatever it is that happened. Rumor calls it the Disappearance. Tales are whispered—the SP truck was stuffed full of those people, and suddenly it was empty—she was sitting across the room, and then she wasn’t. I myself didn’t see anyone actually disappear, but in the following weeks and months there definitely were fewer people, and the missing were those joyful martyrs, the Judeo-Christians.
By most accounts, this bizarre event occurred on Monday, September 10, which just happened to be Rosh HaShanah, the Jewish feast of Trumpets, the feast that heralds the beginning of the new year and, according to some rabbis, re-enacts the creation of the world.
I have no idea what actually happened. Could their God really have whisked them away? The Authority’s explanation is even less credible: “All selfish and treasonable elements have been eliminated.” Maybe so, but how, and by whom?
Chapter 8: The Horror
“You are all nothing but filthy rodents.” Timon Sadanta, Yom Kippur, 2030
Unless they engineered it, about which I have already expressed my doubts, the Disappearance was perhaps an even greater shock to the World Authority and its Leader than it was to the rest of us. In one sense, I suppose, it must have come as a relief to them, a gigantic problem solved. In deeper ways, though, it must have left them shaken. However that may be, their response was to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.
Protection and Production
In October 2029, one month after the Disappearance, the Leader announced a tightening of his security measures, “to secure the complete protection of all our loyal citizens” (perhaps by oversight, he didn’t say “subjects”). The first complete protection measure was a microchip implanted on the back of everyone’s right hand. This chip contained full personal information and enabled the SP to track everyone’s movements, plus serving as the new ration card. We all had two weeks in which to report to our local police headquarters and get the implant, at which time we also swore allegiance to the Leader, “sparing myself nothing, not even my life.” Those who failed to report would be regarded as traitors—spared nothing. Even so, there were those (I don’t know how many) who went underground and tried to survive however they could. As a backup measure to the personal chips, eyeball scanners were installed at many government locations—food stores, medical facilities, and the like—to ensure against any conceivable form of cheating.
In addition to being protected, we needed to be productive. Most people not already part of the government bureaucracy were conscripted into factory work units in cities around the world, to produce the goods needed by the Authority. The supposedly discredited command economy was back with a vengeance. We weren’t called conscripts, actually, we were called volunteers. Anyone who didn’t volunteer willingly, out of love and devotion to the Leader, underwent “intensive sensitivity training.” The slogan trumpeting this operation, on factory walls and billboards everywhere, was “Work Makes You Free.” As for myself, I was assigned to a fish processing plant, monitoring a computer screen for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. That work slowed my progress on finishing this history, but it was better than working the processing line.
Another thing the man on the bus bench said, something he found “interesting,” is that “the more we are deprived of all the old luxuries, the less we care about them. What’s left are the things that matter—that always mattered, but we didn’t always see them.” I’m not sure whether by “us” he meant all of us or just people like him who court the attention of the SP. Whatever he meant, people like him aren’t the only ones who, in their own way, risk that attention even if they don’t court it.
The Network
During this time it was increasingly difficult to obtain reliable information about what was really going on in the world. The Authority controlled the media absolutely, so that nothing you heard on omnivision or the Internet could be believed. You could see what was happening locally and draw your own conclusions, but it was hard to determine what was going on fifty miles away, not to mention five thousand miles away. What I and several hundred other like-minded people have depended on is an omnicommlink network we formed—presciently, as it turned out—a couple of years before the Leader came to power. When we saw his handwriting on the wall, we devised a fairly elaborate code, using innocuous words, phrases and clauses to mean something quite different. So far it has worked reasonably well, but that may change at any time; the SP have some intelligent analysts in their ranks. If and when I distribute this history, it may prove to be our final communication. Our plan is for each of us to immediately send it on to twenty or thirty others, and so on from there. My estimate is that the Authority will ultimately manage to squelch it—certainly they will squelch us—but our alternative is just to knuckle under, which is unacceptable.
By means of this network I have learned something of what is actually going on in various places. Here are a few particulars. In Sydney the great problem is water rationing. Owing to the prolonged drought in Australia and the way the Authority has managed the crisis since they took over, people in Sydney are down to three litres of water per person per day—enough for drinking in the winter, not quite enough for drinking in the summer, and none for flushing toilets or washing anything. There have been sporadic riots on account of this, but the SP used assault rifles and machine guns to calm things down.
Beijing is one vast prison. The prisoners are herded to work at gunpoint, then herded back to their cramped dormitories sometime in the night, where they are fed watery rice soup. Their guards are all Chinese; apparently the Authority had no difficulty converting Communist Party officials into officers of the new regime, or recruiting Red Army soldiers into the SP. I have reason to think my network contact in Beijing is, one way or another, defunct.
San Diego has been one of the hardest places for the Authority to exert control over. Around 2022 the city was largely taken over by the Zetas drug cartel out of northern Mexico, amid continual, brutal fighting. The fighting only intensified when the World Authority was established in 2026. In the summer of 2027 the Leader sent in thousands of crack SP troops in armored vehicles, spearheaded by around a hundred U.S. Army M2 tanks. They killed many of the cartel soldiers and drove the rest underground. Though the city is largely pacified now, the Zetas continue to carry out terrorist attacks. The roughly two million residents, mostly Hispanic, are cowed, afraid, and hungry.
London is probably typical of most large cities in the former advanced nations. The sea level rise and heighted storms in the North Atlantic and North Sea have caused extensive and repeated flooding. Economic conditions have been grim, but even so, the conversion from a free market economy to a command economy did not take place easily or overnight. The Authority used both carrots and sticks—persuasion and force. Persuasion took the form of intensive propaganda, saturation coverage on omnivision, Internet, billboards, brochures and flyers, all loaded with promises and visions of the future. Force, as usual, took the form of battalions of SP followed by divisions of bureaucrats taking over municipal offices, commercial buildings and private businesses.
One must keep in mind the whirlwind sequence in which all this occurred in September of 2026. On the seventh and eighth came the final collapse of the global financial system, one of its centers being the City of London. Only a week later, on the fifteenth, the Triple Coalition (Germany, Russia and Iran) was expanded to the Complete Coalition, which included Great Britain. From the standpoint of states like Britain, joining the coalition was an act of desperation, a dying hope that some sort of phoenix might arise out of the ashes. So when, just a few days later, the forces of the Authority emerged out of the woodwork—they were, of course, mostly Britons, another well-stocked fifth column—the British government was already committed to the new order, for better or worse. It was a confusing, desperate time for everyone. As in most places there were some who put up resistance; they were taken into custody at gunpoint. Since that time the local economy has only worsened. There are long lines for dwindling staples. There is a black market for most essential goods—food, clothing, sacks of coal—but it has to stay very “black” because the SP are always hunting it down to exterminate it.
My contact in Capetown reports on a city of the dead and dying. Those who are still alive are reduced by disease and starvation to a feeble listlessness. They hardly have the strength left to bury the dead. It’s like one of those villages decimated by the plague in the Middle Ages, but this is a sprawling city. Most of Africa, probably, is no better off.
In Moscow they are not all dying yet, but the city is quiet. There is little protest and almost no insurrection. Muscovites are accustomed to being regimented. They are also accustomed to doing without, though not on this scale. As in most other places there is disease, hunger, and some starvation. Many apartments and dormitories go unheated in the winter, so some people, especially the elderly, freeze to death. The Authority does at least keep vodka widely available to numb the pain and hasten the end.
The New World Order
In March 2030 the Leader gave a major address in which he announced the inauguration of what he called the New World Order. He spoke seated behind a large desk, the way U.S. presidents used to, flanked by the flag of the World Authority (a blue and green global Earth on a black background) and a new flag, presumably that of the New World Order (also black, with some symbols that were obscured by the folds). He looked tanned and vigorous; also, as ever, handsome, steely and commanding. But the irresistible smile with which he charmed the world in the past was gone. He began by recounting all that the Authority had achieved over the last three years.
“Good evening to you all. I have an announcement to make that will be of concern to all of you, but first I will remind you of what you already know. Over the last three years, since we rescued every nation in the world from a catastrophic collapse brought on by your own stubborn greed and belligerence, we have brought peace where there was conflict and war. We have brought stability where there was unrest and rioting. We have purged out the worst elements of arrogance and hatred. We have brought order where there was disorder—that is, we have brought order to every corner of the world. We have given you what you failed to give yourselves.
“We have done all this with wisdom and firmness, as a father would do with his children. As you know, however, children do not always receive a father’s guidance with gratitude and compliance. Children do not like being disciplined. They complain that they are being treated unfairly. They whine and whimper.
“Now, considering all that we have done for the nations and peoples of the world, do we not have the right to expect a positive and cheerful response? Would not such a response be the least we should expect from our beneficiaries? Certainly it would be, but is that the response we have received? It is not. Instead, our efforts have been met in every quarter with a sullen, frowning, childish negativity. I see you, everywhere, pouting and sulking like spoiled brats. As any good father would be, I am deeply disappointed in you. As your Leader, I am not satisfied with your progress up to this point.
“As your Leader, however, I have a responsibility to see to it that your priorities are straightened out. I have a responsibility to persevere in discipline until it bears its fruit in your lives. I have a responsibility not only to bring order to your lives but also to bring an
appreciation of order, an
embrace of order. And to this end, I will unveil to you the way in which such an appreciation, such an embrace—I would say, even, such a love—is now going to be achieved.
“Beginning immediately, we announce and decree the New World Order. We give you one new and simple First Order: You will henceforth, on all occasions and under all circumstances, respond to our leading with a constantly positive and cheerful obedience. You are now a happy and joyful people. When our officers or our agents give you an order, you will jump to obey with a smile and a salute. As you grow in this discipline, your smiles and your salutes will become ever more heartfelt. Down in the core of your being, you will understand and feel that what we command is always for the best, always the right thing. And as you undergo this process, over time, you will begin to grow up. Eventually you will no longer be children. You will know that in cheerful obedience, in work, in serving, you are truly free.
“But for the present you must trust us. You must obey us, like good children, with a positive and grateful spirit. Otherwise your discipline will be such as no child should have to endure. Trust us. That is all.”
As with Sadanta’s speech at the time of the “tears of joy” movement, this speech was delivered, successively, in many languages. The Leader has his characteristic ways of putting things—this time he was in his “stern father” mode—but I think we all got the point. It was crackdown time.
A Tale of Two Magicians
As I have already said, the Leader had selected Jerusalem as his capital, and the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple was his pet project. All possible resources were devoted to its construction. Marble was shipped and trucked in from all over the region. Gold and silver, well guarded of course, were brought in by the ton. By the time he gave his New World Order speech, the Temple was almost complete. By all accounts, and as shown frequently on omnivision, it was nothing short of spectacular. If they didn’t feel upstaged, Solomon and Herod would be pleased.
It was at this point, after the speech, that another strange episode occurred (for “strange episodes” I refer the reader to the Leader’s apparent death at the hands of Leo Scharrens, followed by his apparent “resurrection,” and also the Disappearance). As before, I relate this event with a good deal of skepticism. Though it is said to have taken place in public and in broad daylight, the Authority, for reasons that will become clear, kept all sight or mention of it off of omnivision and the Internet. It is a matter of rumor only, but the rumors are so prevalent and vivid that, as a historian, I must report them.
Here, then, is the story. In the great square in front of the Temple, while the masons and artisans were completing their work, two men showed up one day. Bearded and shabbily dressed, they appeared to have been homeless for some time. That in itself was normal enough these days, but these two were not normal. They stood on one of the steps leading to the Temple, one on either side, and started haranguing passers-by with loud pronouncements that seared their ears and sent them scurring off so they wouldn’t be arrested with the blasphemers. As to exactly what they were saying, reports vary. According to some, they were railing against the Leader, denouncing him as a usurper and a phony. Dangerous words indeed!—if that’s what they were saying. Most of the rumors, though, have them quoting biblical verses and similar things, rather like the text of Handel’s
Messiah—behold the Lamb, Prince of peace, my Redeemer liveth, and so forth. Sayings like that could be ambiguous as to which Messiah was being proclaimed— they might be heralding the Leader’s imminent exaltation. Evidently not, though, because (according to report) the forbidden name of Jesus kept cropping up in their quotations. Nor did the Authority look favorably on their activities. The SP swept onto the scene almost immediately.
This is where the story grows truly strange. When the uniformed thugs rushed in to collar them, they ran up against something like an invisible wall of fire and bounced back, badly burned, their clothing aflame. Others raised their guns and opened fire, but when they did the guns exploded in their faces.
Now, this whole story may be sheer fable—probably is—but it is so delicious that I can’t resist giving it some play.
Police: “What the hell is this? Stop this or you’re dead men!”
Man: “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.”
Police: “You can’t talk like that! Don’t you know where you are?”
Man: “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Police: “That’s it! Fire another round!” (More guns explode.)
Man: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of
the Almighty.”
Police: “Call in the tanks!”
But the tanks did no good either. The two men were simply invulnerable and continued with their “prophesying” straight through to the present time. If rumor can be believed.
Yom Kippur
For me, as for most others, the next several months were a time of keeping your head down, working your assigned hours, no matter how long and strenuous, and trying to avoid contact with the SP or any other Authority agents. When they did bark at you, you smiled and did their bidding. It’s called survival. By that time, my main reason for wanting to survive was to finish this account and, if possible, send it out.
In July the Authority announced preparations for a major event, purportedly “world-changing,” scheduled for Sunday October 6. For one thing, it was going to be the dedication of the new Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was, naturally, going to be dedicated not to any of the old gods but to the new ones, or the new One. The announcements didn’t spell this out directly, but it wasn’t going to come as much of a surprise either. The weekly parades and festivals in honor of the Leader grew longer and more intense. Excitement was whipped up, sometimes literally. They began rehearsing us for our command performance when the great day came. Some of us who excelled in this performance were shipped to Jerusalem for round-the-clock (minus eight hours for sleep) rehearsal. I was not among those (I didn’t excel in performance), but at the end of our work shift each day we were all herded into auditoriums and theaters where we spent an hour or two viewing the preparations in Jerusalem on giant omnivision screens. We were expected to cheer, with the threat of more “intensive sensitivity training” if we didn’t. In none of these viewings, by the way, did I see those two shabby Bible-spouting magicians doing their prophesying on the Temple steps. On the other hand, the cameras never showed the Temple steps, either. It left you wondering.
Another thing to wonder about: It was brought to my attention—not by the Authority—that the night of October 6 begins the Jewish feast of Yom Kippur this year. This is a coincidence to ponder. The mysterious Disappearance of all those Jews and Christians occurred, it seems, on the feast of Rosh HaShanah one year ago. And now the dedication of the new Temple is scheduled on another Jewish holy day. One explanation of the coincidence would be that the Leader has been masterminding the whole thing, for reasons yet to be revealed. Ever since he came to power it has been obvious that he has some sort of Messiah complex. But that would mean he somehow engineered the Disappearance, and I don’t see how even he could have pulled that off. And while we ponder coincidences, we need to factor in that whole peculiar “tears of joy” movement that led to the Disappearance. For dead sure, the Leader didn’t mastermind that. But he must be aware of the timing of Yom Kippur. He is the one, after all, who chose Jerusalem as his capital and ordered the Temple to be rebuilt. Why all this obsession with Jewish things? I’m pretty sure he isn’t Jewish, except in the way that most of us have at least a few drops of Jewish blood (along with almost every other kind) in our veins.
All of this puzzled me, but what lies at the root of it, I thought, has to be his demented fixation on being not merely a political dictator—absolute monarch—but a personal religious epiphany:
the Messiah.
When the big day finally came, it answered some of these questions, but with strange and sinister answers.
Darkness
As I mentioned before, October 6 came on a Sunday this year—that is, the year 2030, which draws to its chilling end as I write. Normally, under the New Order edict, we now worked seven days a week, but not on that Sunday. In the morning we were formed into “inspirational study groups” of about thirty each. Under the watchful eye of one of Sadanta’s Light Bearers, backed by a couple of armed SP, we took turns reading aloud from speeches and articles by our Leader or Sadanta. On this occasion, even more than usually, looking less than enthusiastic was risky.
The climax of all that day’s festivities was scheduled to come at midnight with the dedication of the Temple. Exactly what that would involve was not disclosed in advance. Around ten in the evening we were once again packed into theaters and auditoriums—I assume the same thing was going on all over the world. Then the lights were turned off and the big screen transported us to Jerusalem (the illusion, I must admit, was quite good). We not only saw the streets of the ancient city thronged with well-drilled celebrants, we felt as if we were among them, thrusting our right arms skyward in salute and shouting ourselves hoarse in praise of our Deliverer and Protector. Slowly the crowds, with us virtually in their midst, converged on the vast and splendid stairway leading up to the great front gate of the Temple.
And there, with a bit of a jolt, I saw them—not very clearly, because at that point the cameras zoomed back to give a wide-angle view of the huge procession—but there the two bearded prophets were, one on either end of the stairway, still holding forth with whatever they were preaching (of course we couldn’t hear them). The procession up into the Temple courts, led by thousands of white-robed Light Bearers holding aloft what looked like genuine torches, flowed around the two untouchables as though repelled by a force field, which I suppose in fact they were.
The Temple was illuminated on the outside by ground-level floodlights and on the inside by a myriad of six-branched candlestands, rather like ersatz menorahs. On the towering walls were displayed many curious symbols whose real meaning was known only to initiates in the Light of Man cult.
What you noticed first, though, when the camera brought us further inside, was the Leader standing in the center of the Holy Place. But this was the Leader much larger than life, perhaps forty feet tall, dressed in a shimmering golden robe. It wasn’t a statue, because he moved, he was alive. It may have been some kind of hologram. Beside and a little behind him, appearing about thirty feet tall, was Timon Sadanta in a silvery robe with a large flared collar. My estimate of their size is based on comparison with all the people spread out before them, who were still assembling into their assigned places and who looked like Lilliputians.
Soon the Light Bearers, joined by the rest of the endless throng, were singing the hymns of praise to the Leader that we had all been rehearsing for months. The sound of all those voices resounding throughout the old city and reverberating within the Temple was spine-tingling. For safety’s sake I was moving my lips, but I was almost swept up into singing out with the rest. Almost. But just think: virtually everyone on the planet was singing the same thing at the same time. Awe-inspiring or creepy, depending on your attitude.
Then the Leader, holding out those giant arms in those golden sleeves as if to embrace (or perhaps to devour) all his worshipers, began to intone in a voice that resonated around the earth:
“Who am I? I am who I am. No one gave me all that I possess: It is all
of myself,
by myself, and
for myself. As are all of you: You live at my mercy. As long as you are of some use to me, you may live. Your life and your death are in my hands. I am the ever-living One, and in these hands is death.”
Slowly he lowered his arms, and then Sadanta—or that towering image of him (he certainly looked real)—stepped forward, right up to the first rank of worshipers until I thought he might crush some of them, and shouted out harshly:
“And who are you? You are all nothing but filthy rodents, good for nothing but to serve, and work, and die. Some of you will yelp to me, ‘But we are human beings —the divine nature lives in us!’ You lie! You lie and you die!” [Here he pointed to various people in the crowd, who collapsed to the floor. I doubt if their death was faked.] “You are nothing, worthless drones. There is no God except your Leader, whom you worship this night. In the past, many of you worshiped other gods—now you see what they have done for you. Nothing! They too are worthless. Now you serve only at the mercy of your Leader.
“And here you are, gathered to worship him in this glorious Temple, in the holy city of Jerusalem. Jerusalem! Zion! Some of you, of course, are Jews. You will say to me, ‘We are safe because our Leader has made a covenant with us, to protect us from our enemies.’ You lie! He is not your Leader—you are Jews! You are scum, good only to kiss the ground and die. Scum! You have a covenant, yes,
a covenant with death.
“We who stand before you are here to dedicate this Temple, and we, here and now, dedicate it to the only true God:
the Leader! [Here he paused while the multitudes roared their acclamation, either sincerely or hopelessly.]
“It is midnight. All over the earth, the night has fallen. The Leader reigns: Who can resist him? Who can stand against him?” [Here he shot up his right fist.] “We defy them all! None can stand against him! The darkness has triumphed! The Leader reigns!”
Suddenly all the lights in the city, including all the thousands of candles in the Temple, went out, and we were plunged into darkness. (I can only assume this was part of the Leader’s choreography.) In that darkness the invisible throng started cheering wildly again, chanting “Leader! Leader!” over and over again. That went on for perhaps half an hour, until the lights went back on in an entirely unexpected way—a way I don’t see how even the Leader or Sadanta could have planned. The skies overhead suddenly burst out in a tremendous aurora—dazzling, undulating waves of light in every hue of the rainbow—caused, I suppose, by unprecedented solar flares. The light pulsated as it rippled and billowed; electricity or sheet lightning crackled and flashed across the firmament, and it sounded like a hundred peals of thunder all in the same moment. It was the fireworks from hell. All the terrorist attacks of the last fifty years, put together, didn’t terrorize the world’s people as much as the last twenty four hours had. We were well and truly terrorized.
Hard Time
That uncanny spectacle continued through the night and only faded away with the coming of what seemed like a reluctant dawn. Meanwhile the stunned, disoriented worshipers were driven out of the Temple and back to their various work assignments. This confused ending to the great ceremony suggests to me that it wasn’t part of the plan. However that may be, when morning came it was with an ominous difference. The skies—worldwide, as best I can tell—were dimmed with a reddish haze. The sun was a bloody circle behind the smoke (or whatever it was) and all ambient light was shrouded in red. A few months later, as I write this, it hasn’t changed.
But that whole uncanny episode did seem to bring on or at least hasten a change in our Leader. He had gone from being the charismatic superstar to being the remote, baleful incarnation of deity. Now, taking Sadanta’s ravings completely to heart, he has come back down to earth as the rabid hound of hell. What before were voiced as threats are now carried out as policy.
Seemingly overnight the ranks of the Special Police were greatly multiplied. The Leader must have been recruiting and training (or barbarizing) them in camps around the world for months. Martial law, which we have essentially been living under for a year or two, has now become official and unsparing. The SP carry short whips along with their guns and billy clubs, and they whip us just for the fun of it as we trudge to work and while we work. Probably because I am an older worker, they shifted me onto a “quality control” detail, which meant that they subcontracted some of their brutality onto me. I was ordered to “encourage” the other workers to work harder and faster by leaning up close and shouting “reminders” in their ears. I try to inject an ironic tone into my shouts, but if I tried to yell anything really encouraging to them (or insulting to the Leader) and the SP heard me, I would be dead on the spot and you would not be reading this.
At least I am not a woman. Life under this regime is, naturally, worse for them. The SP are males without much residue of humanity to restrain them. (To be fully accurate, a few of them are women, but you wouldn’t know it.) Some of my sources have reported that younger women are being forced into cult prostitution under the supremely cynical term of “holy virgins.” The official cult, by the way, is no longer called the Light of Man but, more honestly, the Secret Dark.
What if North Korea had not been obliterated but had taken over the whole world. In effect, that is what has happened. Being a bookish person, I am reminded of the dying words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s novella
Heart of Darkness. The story takes place in Central Africa during the colonial period in the nineteenth century. Kurtz, a colonial trader deep in the jungle, has “gone native” in the worst way, combining primitive savagery with civilized power and efficiency. But at the end of his life, according to the narrator, Kurtz looks deep within himself and sums up his life by crying out, “The horror, the horror!” Conrad probably meant Kurtz to symbolize both the moral condition of the whole colonial enterprise and also, since colonizers are normal human beings, the moral condition of humanity itself. Are we really as bad as that? I don’t know—I am only a historian—but in our different ways we are all experiencing the horror together.
