EmperorofIceCream

Join Date 09/2004

The Shape of Things to Come

has nothing to do with H.G. Wells

Political fiction covers everything from imagined Utopias and Dystopias, to satire like Swift's suggestion that the famine-struck Irish should eat their children, to Apocalyptic visions like the manifesto of the Communist Party. They all conjure worlds which aren't yet but which are based in what is, and which might come to be.

What follows was not written by me. It's a dystopic view of the remainder of this century and its value is not in the writing itself, or in its attempt to portray a possible near-future, but in its analysis of our (by which I mean America and the West) current state of weakness. This is a link to the original. (Link).

The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve, 2004. He was a stolid, grizzled man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He also appeared to be the veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars on his face and neck and hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair cropped short in a military cut. One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing 911 he announced in a husky voice that he was a Time Traveler come back to talk to me about the future.

Being a sometimes science-fiction writer but not a fool, I said, “Prove it.”

“Do you remember Replay?” he said.

My finger hovered over the final “1” in my dialing. “The 1987 novel?” I said. “By Ken Grimwood?”

The stranger – Time Traveler, psychotic, home invader, whatever he was – nodded.

I hesitated. The novel by Grimwood had won the World Fantasy Award a year or two after my first-novel, Song of Kali, had. Grimwood’s book was about a guy who woke up one morning to find himself snapped back decades in his life, from the late 1980’s to himself as a college student in 1963, and thus getting the chance to relive – to replay – that life again, only this time acting upon what he’d already learned the hard way. In the book, the character, who was to experience – suffer – several Replays, learned that there were other people from his time who were also Replaying their lives in the past, their bodies younger but their memories intact. I’d greatly enjoyed the book, thought it deserved the award, and had been sad to hear that Grimwood had died . . . when? . . . in 2003.

So, I thought, I might have a grizzled nut case in my study this New Year’s Eve, but if he was a reader and a fan of Replay, he was probably just a sci-fi fan grizzled nut case, and therefore probably harmless. Possibly. Maybe.

I kept my finger poised over the final “1” in “911.”

“What does that book have to do with you illegally entering my home and study?” I asked.

The stranger smiled … almost sadly I thought. “You asked me to prove that I’m a Time Traveler,” he said softly. “Do you remember how Grimwood’s character in Replay went hunting for others in the 1960’s who had traveled back in time from the late 1980’s?”

I did remember now. I’d thought it clever at the time. The guy in Replay, once he suspected others were also replaying into the past, had taken out personal ads in major city newspapers around the country. The ads were concise. “Do you remember Three Mile Island, Challenger, Watergate, Reaganomics? If so, contact me at . . .”

Before I could say anything else on this New Year’s Eve of 2004, a few hours before 2005 began, the stranger said, “Terri Schiavo, Katrina, New Orleans under water, Ninth Ward, Ray Nagin, Superdome, Judge John Roberts, White Sox sweep the Astros in four to win the World Series, Pope Benedict XVI, Scooter Libby.”

“Wait, wait!” I said, scrambling for a pen and then scrambling even faster to write. “Ray who? Pope who? Scooter who?”

“You’ll recognize it all when you hear it all again,” said the stranger. “I’ll see you in a year and we’ll have our conversation.”

“Wait!” I repeated. “What was that middle apart . . . Ray Nugin? Judge who? John Roberts? Who is . . .” But when I looked up he was gone.

“White Sox win the Series?” I muttered into the silence. “Fat chance.”

I was waiting for him on New Year’s Eve 2005. I didn’t see him enter. I looked up from the book I was fitfully reading and he was standing in the shadows again. I didn’t dial 911 this time, nor demand any more proof. I waved him to the leather wingchair and said, “Would you like something to drink?”

“Scotch,” he said. “Single malt if you have it.”

I did.

Our conversation ran over two hours, but the following is the gist of it. I’m a novelist by trade. I remember conversations pretty well. (Not as perfectly as Truman Capote was said to be able to recall long conversations word for word, but pretty well.)

The Time Traveler wouldn’t tell me what year in the future he was from. Not even the decade or century. But the gray cord trousers and blue-gray wool tunic top he was wearing didn’t look very far-future science-fictiony or military, no Star Trekky boots or insignia, just wellworn clothes that looked like something a guy who worked with his hands a lot would wear. Construction maybe.

“I know you can’t tell me details about the future because of time travel paradoxes,” I began. I hadn’t spent a lifetime reading and then writing SF for nothing.

“Oh, bugger time travel paradoxes,” said the Time Traveler. “They don’t exist. I could tell you anything I want to and it won’t change anything. I just choose not to tell you some things.”

I frowned at this. “Time travel paradoxes don’t exist? But surely if I go back in time and kill my grandfather before he meets my grandmother . . .”

The Time Traveler laughed and sipped his Scotch. “Would you want to kill your grandfather?” he said. “Or anyone else?”

“Well . . .Hitler maybe,” I said weakly.

The Traveler smiled, but more ironically this time. “Good luck,” he said. “But don’t count on succeeding.”

I shook my head. “But surely anything you tell me now about the future will change the future,” I said.

“I gave you a raft of facts about your future a year ago as my bona fides,” said the Time Traveler. “Did it change anything? Did you save New Orleans from drowning?”

“I won $50 betting on the White Sox in October,” I admitted.

The Time Traveler only shook his head. “Quod erat demonstrandum,” he said softly. “I could tell you that the Mississippi River flows generally south. Would your knowing about it change its course or flow or flooding?”

I thought about this. Finally I said, “Why did you come back? Why do you want to talk to me? What do you want me to do?”

“I came back for my own purposes,” said the Time Traveler, looking around my booklined study. “I chose you to talk to because it was . . . convenient. And I don’t want you to do a goddamned thing. There’s nothing you can do. But relax . . . we’re not going to be talking about personal things. Such as, say, the year, day, and hour of your death. I don’t even know that sort of trivial information, although I could look it up quickly enough. You can release that white-knuckled grip you have on the edge of your desk.”

I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.

I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred Year War? Fifteenth Century? Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England? Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or was it . . .”

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

Great, I was thinking. Of all the time travelers in all the gin joints in all the world, I get this racist, xenophobic, right-wing asshole.

“After Nine-eleven, we’re fighting terrorism,” I began, “not . . .”

He waved me into silence.

“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college you went to long ago,” said the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”

It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being called a “podunk little college” to be able to concentrate fully.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In philosophy and formal logic, and it has its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is the term for having stated or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that problem, through dialectic or any other means.”

I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”

The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let me give you an analogy . . .”

God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.

“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and asked them to declare war on aviation.”

“That’s absurd,” I said.

“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships, cruisers, harbor installations, Army barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were all struck by Japanese aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on aviation . . . threatening to wipe it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to defeating aviation, so help us God.”

“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I said, “were just a method of attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany, lived up to its treaty with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on aviation, on goddamned airplanes rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never have . . .”

I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem unsolvable through your inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.

The Time Traveler was smiling at me from the shadows. It was a small, thin, cold smile – holding no humor in it, I was sure -- but still a smile of sorts. It seemed more sad than gloating as my sudden silence stretched on.

“What do you know about Syracuse?” he asked suddenly.

I blinked again. “Syracuse, New York?” I said at last.

He shook his head slowly. “Thucydides’ Syracuse,” he said softly. “Syracuse circa 415 B.C. The Syracuse Athens invaded.”

“It was . . . part of the Peloponnesian War,” I ventured.

He waited for more but I had no more to give. I loved history, but let’s admit it . . . that was ancient history. Still, I felt that I should have been able to tell him,or at least remember, why Syracuse was important in the Peloponnesian War or why they fought there or who fought exactly or who had won or . . . something. I hated feeling like a dull student around this scarred old man.

“The war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies – a war for nothing less than hegemony over the entire known world at that time – began in 431 B.C.,” said the Time Traveler. “After seventeen years of almost constant fighting, with no clear or permanent advantage for either side, Athens – under the leadership of Alcibiades at the time – decided to widen the war by conquering Sicily, the ‘Great Greece’ they called it, an area full of colonies and the key to maritime commerce at the time the way the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf is today.”

I hate being lectured to at the best of times, but something about the tone and timber of the Time Traveler’s voice – soft, deep, rasping, perhaps thickened a bit by the whiskey – made this sound more like a story being told around a campfire. Or perhaps a bit like one of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories on “Prairie Home Companion.” I settled deeper into my chair and listened.

“Syracuse wasn’t a direct enemy of the Athenians,” continued the Time Traveler, “but it was quarreling with a local Athenian colony and the democracy of Athens used that as an excuse to launch a major expedition against it. It was a big deal – Athens sent 136 triremes, the best fighting ships in the world then – and landed 5,000 soldiers right under the city’s walls.

“The Athenians had enjoyed so much military success in recent years, including their invasion of Melos, that Thucydides wrote – So thoroughly had the present prosperity persuaded the Athenians that nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was possible and what was impracticable alike, with means ample or inadequate it mattered not. The reason for this was their general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strengths with their hopes.”

“Oh, hell,” I said, “this is going to be a lecture about Iraq, isn’t it? Look . . . I voted for John Kerry last year and . . .”

“Listen to me,” the Time Traveler said softly. It was not a request. There was steel in that soft, rasping voice. “Nicias, the Athenian general who ended up leading the invasion, warned against it in 415 B.C. He said – ‘We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him’. Nicias, along with the Athenian poet and general Demosthenes, would see their armies destroyed at Syracuse and then they would both be captured and put to death by the Syracusans. Sparta won big in that two-year debacle for Athens. The war went on for seven more years, but Athens never recovered from that overreaching at Syracuse, and in the end . . . Sparta destroyed it. Conquered the Athenian empire and its allies, destroyed Athens’ democracy, ruined the entire balance of power and Greek hegemony over the known world at the time . . . ruined everything. All because of a miscalculation about Syracuse.”

I sighed. I was sick of Iraq. Everyone was sick of Iraq on New Years Eve, 2005, both Bush supporters and Bush haters. It was just an ugly mess. “They just had an election,” I said. “The Iraqi people. They dipped their fingers in purple ink and . . .”

“Yes yes,” interrupted the Time Traveler as if recalling something further back in time, and much less important, than Athens versus Syracuse. “The free elections. Purple fingers. Democracy in the Mid-East. The Palestinians are voting as well. You will see in the coming year what will become of all that.”

The Time Traveler drank some Scotch, closed his eyes for a second, and said, “Sun Tzu writes – The side that knows when to fight and when not to will take the victory. There are roadways not to be traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be assaulted.”

“All right, goddammit,” I said irritably. “Your point’s made. So we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in this . . . what did you call it? This Long War with Islam, this Century War. We’re all beginning to realize that here by the end of 2005.”

The Time Traveler shook his head. “You’ve understood nothing I’ve said. Nothing. Athens failed in Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren’t ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that once engaged they could win without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as ruthless and merciless as their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed, turned against their own generals and political leaders – and their official soothsayers. If General Nicias or Demosthenes had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent them off with parades and strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from limb. They blamed their own leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own belly.”

I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how it related to the future.

“You came back in time to lecture me about Thucydides?” I said. “Athens? Syracuse? Sun-Tzu? No offense, Mr. Time Traveler, but who gives a damn?”

The Time Traveler rose so quickly that I flinched back in my chair, but he only refilled his Scotch. This time he refilled my glass as well. “You probably should give a damn” he said softly. “ In 2006, you’ll be ripping and tearing at yourselves so fiercely that your nation – the only one on Earth actually fighting against resurgent caliphate Islam in this long struggle over the very future of civilization – will become so preoccupied with criticizing yourselves and trying to gain short-term political advantage, that you’ll all forget that there’s actually a war for your survival going on. Twenty-five years from now, every man or woman in America who wishes to vote will be required to read Thucydides on this matter. And others as well. And there are tests. If you don’t know some history, you don’t vote . . . much less run for office. America’s vacation from knowing history ends very soon now . . . for you, I mean. And for those few others left alive in the world who are allowed to vote.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

“I am shitting you not,” said the Time Traveler.

“Those few others left alive who are allowed to vote?” I said, the words just now striking me like hardthrown stones. “What the hell are you talking about? Has our government taken away all our civil liberties in this awful future of yours?”

He laughed then and this time it was a deep, hearty, truly amused laugh. “Oh, yes,” he said when the laughter abated a bit. He actually wiped away tears from his one good eye. “I had almost forgotten about your fears of your, our . . . civil liberties . . . being abridged by our own government back in these last stupidity-allowed years of 2005 and 2006 and 2007 . Where exactly do you see this repression coming from?”

“Well . . .” I said. I hate it when I start a sentence with ‘well,’ especially in an argument. “Well, the Patriot Act. Bush authorizing spying on Americans . . . international phonecalls and such. Uh . . . I think mosques in the States are under FBI surveillance. I mean, they want to look up what library books we’re reading, for God’s sake. Big Brother. 1984. You know.”

The Time Traveler laughed again, but with more edge this time. “Yes, I know,” he said. “We all know . . . up there in the future which some of you will survive to see as free people. Civil liberties. In 2006 you still fear yourselves and your own institutions first, out of old habit. A not unworthy – if fatally misguided and terminally masochistic – paranoia. I will tell you right now, and this is not a prediction but a history lesson, some of your grandchildren will live in dhimmitude.”

“Zimmi . . . what?” I said.

He spelled it out. What had sounded like a ‘z’ was the ‘dh.’ I’d never heard the word and I told him so.

“Then get off your ass and Google it,” said the Time Traveler, his one working eye glinting with something like fury. “Dhimmitude. You can also look up the word dhimmi, because that’s what two of your three grandchildren will be called. Dhimmis. Dhimmitude is the system of separate and subordinate laws and rules they will live under. Look up the word sharia while you’re Googling dhimmi, because that is the only law they will answer to as dhimmis, the only justice they can hope for . . . they and tens and hundreds of millions more now who are worried in your time about invisible abridgements of their ‘civil liberties’ by their ‘oppressive’ American and European democratically elected governments.”

He audibly sneered this last part. I wondered now if the fury I sensed in him was a result of his madness, or if the reverse were true.

“Where will my grandchildren suffer this dhimmitude?” I asked. My mouth was suddenly so dry I could barely speak.

“Eurabia,” said the Time Traveler.

“There’s no such place,” I said.

He gave me his one-eyed stare. My stomach suddenly lurched and I wished I’d drunk no Scotch. “Words,” I said.

The Time Traveler raised one scar-slashed eyebrow.

“Last year you gave me words about 2005,” I said. “The kind of words Ken Grimwood’s replayers in time would have put in the newspaper to find each other. Give me more now. Or, better yet, just fucking tell me what you’re talking about. You said it wouldn’t matter. You said that my knowing won’t change anything, any more than I can change the direction the Mississippi is flowing . So tell me, God damn it!”

He began by giving me words. Even while I was scribbling them down, I was thinking of reading I’d been doing recently about the joy with which the Victorian Englishmen and 19th Century Europeans and Americans greeted the arrival of the 20th Century. The toasts, especially among the intellectual elite, on New Year’s Eve 1899 had been about the coming glories of technology liberating them, of the imminent Second Enlightenment in human understanding, of the certainty of a just one-world government, of the end of war for all time.

Instead, what words would a time traveler or poor Replay victim put in his London Times or Berliner Zeitung or New York Times on January 1, 1900, to find his fellow travelers displaced in time? Auschwitz, I was sure, and Hiroshima and Trinity Site and Holocaust and Hitler and Stalin and . . .

The clock in my study chimed midnight.

Jesus God. Did I want to hear such words about 2006 and the rest of the 21st Century from the Time Traveler?

“Ahmadenijad,” he said softly. “Natanz. Arak. Bushehr. Ishafan. Bonab. Ramsar.”

“Those words don’t mean a damned thing to me,” I said as I scribbled them down phonetically. “Where are they? What are they?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” said the Time Traveler.

“Are you talking about . . . what? . . . the next fifteen or twenty years?” I said.

“I’m talking about the next fifteen or twenty months from your now,” he said softly. “Do you want more words?”

I didn’t. But I couldn’t speak just then.

“General Seyed Reza Pardis,” intoned the Time Traveler. “Shehab-one, Shehab-two, Shehab-three. Tel Aviv. Baghdad International Airport, Al Salem U.S. airbase in Kuwait, Camp Dawhah U.S. Army base in Kuwait, al Seeb U.S. airbase in Oman, al Udeid U.S. Army and Air Force base in Qatar. Haifa. Beir-Shiva. Dimona.”

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.” I had no clue as to who or what Shehab One, Two, or Three might be, but the context and litany alone made me want to throw up.

“This is just the beginning,” said the Time Traveler.

“Wasn’t the beginning on September 11, 2001?” I managed through numb lips.

The one-eyed scarred man shook his head. “Historians in my time know that it began on June 5, 1968,” he said. “But it hasn’t really begun for you yet. For any of you.”

I thought – What on earth happened on the fifth of June, 1968? I’m old enough to remember. I was in college then. Working that summer and . . . Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination. “Now on to Chicago and the nomination!” Sirhan Sirhan. Was the Time Traveler trying to give me some kind of half-assed Oliver-Stone-JFK-movie garbled up conspiracy theory?

“What . . .” I began.

“Galveston,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “The Space Needle. Bank of America Plaza in Dallas. Renaissance Tower in Dallas. Bank One Center in Dallas. The Indianapolis 500 – one hour and twenty-three minutes into the race. The Bell South Building in Atlanta. The TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco . . .”

“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

“The Golden Gate Bridge,” persisted the Time Traveler. “The Guggenheim in Bilbao. The New Reichstag in Berlin. Albert Hall. Saint Paul’s Cathedral . . .”

“Shut the fuck up!” I shouted. “All these places can’t disappear in the rest of this century, your goddamned Century War or not! I don’t believe it.”

“I didn’t say in the rest of your century,” said the Time Traveler, his torn voice almost a whisper now. “I’m talking about your next fifteen years. And I’ve barely begun.”

“You’re nuts,” I said. “You’re not from the future. You escaped from some asylum.”

The Time Traveler nodded. “That’s more true than you know,” he said. “I come from a place and time where your grandchildren and hundreds of millions of other dhimmi are compelled to write ‘pbuh’ after the Prophet’s name. They wear gold crosses and gold Stars of David sewn onto their clothing. The Nazis didn’t invent the wearing of the Star of David . . . the marking and setting apart of the Jews in society. Muslims did that centuries ago in they lands they conquered, European and otherwise. They will refine it and update it, not toward the more merciful, in the lands they occupy through the decades ahead of you.”

“You’re crazy,” I cried, standing. My hands were balled into fists. “Islam is a religion . . . a religion of peace . . . not our enemy. We can’t be at war with a religion. That’s obscene.”

“Have you read the Qur’an and learned your Sunnah?” asked the Time Traveler. “It would behoove you to do so. Dhimmi means ‘protection.’ And your children and grandchildren will be protected . . . like cattle.”

“To hell with you,” I said.

“Your dhimmi poll tax will be called jizya,” said the Time Traveler. His voice suddenly sounded very weary.“Your land tax for being an infidel, even for fellow People of the Book – Christians and Jews – will be called kharaz. Both of these taxes will be in addition to your mandatory alms – the zakat. The punishment for failure to pay, or for paying late, a punishment meted out by your local qadi, religious judge, is death by stoning or beheading.”

I folded my arms and looked away from the Time Traveler.

“Under sharia – which will be the universal law of Eurabia,” persisted the Time Traveler, “the value of a dhimmi’s life, the value of your grandchildren, is one half the value of a Muslim’s life. Jews and Christians are worth one-third of a Muslim. Indian Parsees are worth one-fifteenth. In a court of the Eurabian Caliphate or the Global Khalifate, if a Muslim murders a dhimmi, any infidel, he must pay a blood money fine not to exceed one thousand euros. No Muslim will ever be jailed or sentenced to death for the murder of any dhimmi or any number of dhimmis. If the murders were done under the auspices of Universal Compulsive Jihad, which will be sanctioned by sharia as of 2019 Common Era, all blood money fines are waived.”

“Go away,” I said. “Go back to wherever you came from.”

“I come from here,” said the Time Traveler. “From not so far from here.”

“Bullshit,” I said.

“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and you, the innocents of 2006 and beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame your brothers and yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law, tolerance, science, democracy – even while your enemies grow stronger.”

“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and growled at him. “The world is a complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”

“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the Time Traveler. “Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”

He stood and set the Scotch glass back in its place on my sideboard. “How, we wonder in my time,” he said softly, “can you ignore the better part of a billion people who say aloud that they are willing to kill your children . . . or condone and celebrate the killing of them? And ignore them as they act on what they say? We do not understand you.”

I still had not turned to face him, but was looking over my shoulder at him.

“The world, as it turns out,” continued the Time Traveler, “is not nearly so complex a place as your liberal and gentle minds sought to make it.”

I did not respond.

“Thucydides taught us more than twenty-four hundred years ago – counting back from your time – that all men’s behavior is guided by phobos, kerdos, and doxa,” said the Time Traveler. “Fear, self-interest, and honor.”

I pretended I did not hear.

“Plato saw human behavior as a chariot pulled by precisely those three powerful and headstrong horses, first tugged this way, then pulled that way,” continued the Time Traveler. “Phobos, kerdos, doxa. Fear, self-interest, honor. Which of these guides the chariot of your nation and your allies in Europe and your surprisingly fragile civilization now, O Man of 2006?”

I stared at the bookcase instead of the man and willed him gone, wishing him away like a sleepy boy willing away the boogeyman under his bed.

“Which combination of those three traits -- phobos, kerdos, doxa -- will save or doom your world?” asked the Time Traveler. “Which might bring you back from this vacation from history – from history’s responsibilities and history’s burdens – that you have all so generously gifted yourselves with? You peaceloving Europeans. You civil-liberties loving Americans? You Athenian invertebrates with your love of your own exalted sensibilities and your willingness to enter into a global war for civilizational survival even while you are too timid, too fearful . . . too decent . . . to match the ruthlessness of your enemies.”

I closed my eyes but that did not stop his voice.

“At least understand that such decency goes away quickly when you are burying your children and your grandchildren,” rasped the Time Traveler. “Or watching them suffer in slavery. Ruthlessness deferred against totalitarian aggression only makes the later need for ruthlessness more terrible. Thousands of years of history and war should have taught you that. Did you fools learn nothing from living through the charnel house that was the 20th Century?”

I’d had enough. I opened my eyes, turned, reached into the top left drawer of my desk, and pulled out the .38 revolver that I had owned for twenty-three years and fired only twice, at firing ranges, shortly after it was given to me as a gift.

I aimed it at the Time Traveler. “Get out,” I said.

He showed no reaction. “Do you want more than words?” he asked softly. “I will give you more than words. I give you eight million Jews dead in Israel – incinerated – and many more dead Jews in Eurabia and around the world. I give you the continent of Europe cast back more than five hundred years into sad pools of warring civilizations.”

“Get out,” I repeated, aiming the revolver higher.

“I give you an Asian world in chaos, a Pacific rim ruled by China after the vacuum of America’s withdrawal – this nation’s full resources devoted to fighting, and possibly losing, the Century War – a South America and Mexico lost to corruption and appeasement, a resurgent Russian Empire that has reclaimed its old dominated republics and more, and a Canada split into three hateful nations.”

I cocked the pistol. The click sounded very loud in the small room.

“We were speaking about ruthlessness,” said the Time Traveler. “If you fail to understand it at first, you learn it quickly enough in a war like the one you are allowing to come. Would you like to hear the litany of Islamic shrines and cities that will blossom in nuclear retaliatory fire in the decades to come?”

“Get out,” I said for a final time. “I’m ruthless enough to shoot you, and by God I will if you don’t get out of here.”

The Time Traveler nodded. “As you wish. But you should hear two last words, two last names . . .religious judge Ubar ibn al-Khattab and rector-imam Ismail Nawahda of New Al-Azhar University in London, part of the 200,000-man Golden Mosque of the New Islamic Khalifate in Eurabia.”

“What are those names to me or me to them?” I asked. My finger was on the trigger of the cocked .38.

“These religious officials were on the Islamic Tribunal that sentenced two dhimmis to death by stoning and beheading,” said the Time Traveler. “The dhimmis were your two grandsons, Thomas and Daniel.”

“What was . . . will be . . . their crime?” I was able to ask after a long minute. My tongue felt like a strip of rough cotton.

“They dated two Muslim women – Thomas while he was in London on business, Daniel while visiting his aging mother, your daughter, in Canada – without first converting to Islam. That part of sharia, Islamic law, is called hudud, and we know quite a bit about it in my time. Your grandsons didn’t know the young women were Muslim since they both were dressed in modern garb - -thus violating their own society’s ironclad rule of Hijab — modesty. The girls, I hear, also died, but those were not sharia sentences. Not hudud. Their brothers and fathers murdered them. Honor killings . . . I think you’ve already heard the phrase by 2006.”

If I were to shoot him, I had to do it now. My hand was shaking more fiercely every second.

“Of course, the odds against one sharia court in London sentencing both your grandsons to death for crimes committed as far apart as London and Quebec City is too much of a coincidence to believe in,” continued the Time Traveler. “As is the fact that they would both be introduced to Muslim girls, without knowing they were Muslim, and go on a single dinner date with them at the same time, in cities so far apart. And Thomas was married. I know he thought he was having a business dinner with a client.”

“What . . .” I began, my arm holding the pistol shaking as if palsied.

The Time Traveler laughed a final time. “All of your grandsons’ names were on lists. You wrote something . . . will soon write something . . . that will put your name, and all your descendents’ names, on their list. Including your only surviving grandson.”

I opened my mouth but did not speak.

“According to their own writings, which we all know well in my day,” continued the Time Traveler, “ ‘Hadith Malik 511:1588 The last statement that Muhammad made was: "O Lord, perish the Jews and Christians. They made churches of the graves of their prophets. There shall be no two faiths in Arabia.’ And there are not. All infidels – Christians, Jews, secularists -- have been executed, converted, or driven out. Israel is cinders. Eurabia and the New Khalifate is growing, absorbing what was left of the old, weak cultures there that once dreamt of a European Union. The Century War is not near over. Two of your three grandsons are now dead. Your remaining grandson still fights, as does one of your surviving granddaughters. Two of your three living granddaughters now live under sharia within the aegis of New Khalifate. They are women of the veil.”

I lowered the pistol.

“ Enjoy these last days and months and years of your slumber, Grandfather,” said the scarred old man. “Your wake-up call is coming soon.”

The Time Traveler said three last words and was gone.

I put the pistol away – realizing too late that it had never been loaded – and sat down to write this. I could not. I waited these three months to try again.

Oh, Lord, I wish that some person on business from Porlock would wake me from this dream.

It was not the horrors of his revelations about my grandchildren that had shaken me the most deeply, shaken me to the core of my core, but rather the the Time Traveler’s last three words. Three words that any Replayer or time traveler visiting here from a century or more from now would react to first and most emotionally – three words I will not share here in this piece nor ever plan to share, at least until everyone on Earth knows them – three words that will keep me awake nights for months and years to come.

Three words.

"

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For the extremely dense, I'll reiterate the fact that I did not write the majority of the article. I posted it here because I want a copy on my blog, and because I think its account of the failure to properly realize our situation and respond to it with necessary ruthlessness is accurate. We are already in a war. Not the ridiculous 'war on terror' but a war for civilizational domination. The failure to properly realize this is understandable; the necessary consequences of such a realization are conflict, sacrifice, privation and change. Understanding something doesn't excuse it, however.

It's time to stop wanting to be liked, wanting be known for our decency, and to realize that you cannot be decent if you do not live in circumstances that recognise your sense of decency. The Liberal individual lives a decent life when he freely exercises the illusion that his will is free and that he alone determines his actions. The consequences of ardent belief in that illusion are what we term Western culture. Because some values are illusory does not make them any less values for which people will sometimes choose to die - tragedy has always had a large role in Western culture. The tragic element in Liberal individualism is that such an individual cannot live a decent life where decency is defined as complete submission to an external authority, authority completely detached from and independent of his will. There can only be antagonism and conflict between opposing existential states, so Islamic theocracy is, therefore, completely antagonistic to Liberal individualism and there can be no accommodation between them. Though there can be tolerance where there is no incentive to direct conflict.

The Muslims have such an incentive. Our internal weakness and confusion, which they rightly see as an opportunity they can exploit to their great profit. We also have an incentive. We've been forewarned in words, and taught that those words will be carried out in actions. All we now need is the realization that there is no silent majority of peace-loving Muslims on our side - or at least in sympathy with us. All the silence of the majority of Muslims means is that they wish us to continue to labor under the illusion that they are not all our Enemies.

They are our Enemies, all of them, and necessarily so, because the ruling ideas of their world of values and beliefs are in fundamental opposition to the ruling ideas of our world of values and beliefs. When we have tolerated each other in the past we have never done so easily - in the future we will not tolerate each other at all.

Addendum: original author's note (Note: Books commented on in this essay include – The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan, The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing edited by John Keegan, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History by Lee Harris, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History by Philip Bobbit, and Replay by Ken Grimwood.)

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cactoblasta

Join Date 04/2004

+48

It's quite well-written but I don't believe it. I've spent too much time living in a Muslim-majority country to believe that we will become like them rather than the other way around. Technology is western and wherever it goes the philosophies of the west follow. The tide is irresistable.

As for the writer's assertion that China will dominate the Pacific the idea is laughable. Japan and India would go to war to prevent such an occurence and there's little doubt in my mind that they would win. China is a great power but it is not the greatest power in the region.

So the Pacific would be a sea of relative calm. How that would bode for the Anglo nations of the Pacific is unknowable, but I doubt it would adversely affect us.

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This was an interesting reading. Canada being split into 3 nation isn't that much of a pure fiction. The write do know his stuff..

But at the same time, it's a really islamophobic text.

However, I agree with Emperor when he says it's a war about civilization dominance. Occidental Vs Arabian civilization. The problem is, the U.S.A.'s action have done a lot to splitten the occidental world into antagonists factions.

On the other side, we worked to splitten Islam into 2 antagonists faction too..

I have to laugh at the big picture: America is so overreacting. You lost about 3000 lives, and you go on a crusade, sacrifying thousands, alienating the rest of the world, trapping yourself in antagonist lands. Not forgetting indebting to bankruptcy.

"3000 lives... when you think of it, it's not that much. Specially if you compare with some part of America's history. When 50 000 thousand died at the battle of [?], 3000 is small. What shocked America, however, is that, before, America managed to keep it's ennemy at it's border, far from its heart. The Empire can no longer protects it'S borders."

That'S what happened to Rome. It was sacked by barbarians, then it bankrupted itself into incredible protection, paying it's ennemy to defend against other ennemies.

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Cacto, read well what Cikomyr says in his response. How can this not happen with thinking like this,

"

3000 lives... when you think of it, it's not that much. Specially if you compare with some part of America's history. When 50 000 thousand died at the battle of [?], 3000 is small. What shocked America, however, is that, before, America managed to keep it's ennemy at it's border, far from its heart. The Empire can no longer protects it'S borders."

Emperor, I enjoyed your writing, I'm hooked and can't wait for the next installment if there is one. The writing you present here may be seem as "Islamphobia", but it might not be too far from the truth. A lot of people are forgetting that there will be an antichrist, and we shouldn't be surprise with what's going on in the world right now.

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Well, actually, it's a quote from the movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (Les Invasions Barbares), a movie who won an oscar.

The technology is maybe western, but our western technology was stolen from the arabians during the crusades... We just perfected it..

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If you beleive in the antichrist.

And again, maybe the Antichrist as depicted will be really fought by the Muslims. Maybe the muslims will win?

Who can say if it's the christian who are on the "good" side?

Or maybe, our Savior will be Muslim's antichrist. And vice-versa...

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Well, actually, it's a quote from the movie "The Barbarian Invasions" (Les Invasions Barbares), a movie who won an oscar.

Thanks for enlightening me. What was quoted though is exactly how a lot of these people think. Not just those outside of our borders but those already inside as well.

If you beleive in the antichrist.

And again, maybe the Antichrist as depicted will be really fought by the Muslims. Maybe the muslims will win?

I doubt that, however, maybe the antichrist will do us a big favor.

Or maybe, our Savior will be Muslim's antichrist. And vice-versa...

In that they get rid of our enemies, we're on the same page.

Who can say if it's the christian who are on the "good" side?

AT this point, what is the good side? A rhetorical question really, I like to think that we are the good side, regardless of our religious affiliations. We will be one nation undevided to defeat a common enemy.

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I meant, why does we automaticly beleive that, if the prophecy actually realize, it's gonna be the Christians who will be on the Savior's side?

Since the Muslims think that THEY will be, same for the mormons, etc...

Only the atheist and laïcs will be left to be the loosers

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cactoblasta

Join Date 04/2004

+48

Cacto, read well what Cikomyr says in his response. How can this not happen with thinking like this,

A callous disregard for human life has always been an essential part of humanity, not just western culture. I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.

It might not be far from the truth, sure, but it's no more true than my opinion either. It's just based on a different view of international political and social realities.

A lot of people are forgetting that there will be an antichrist, and we shouldn't be surprise with what's going on in the world right now.

I've always been inclined against belief in an anti-christ. An anti-christ would be hard put to be any more evil than dozens of humans born every day. I just don't think such a being is probable. Possible, sure, but probable? Not really. How you would figure out who it is? Even the so-called good guys are mass murderers.

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A callous disregard for human life has always been an essential part of humanity, not just western culture. I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.

I meant, why does we automaticly beleive that, if the prophecy actually realize, it's gonna be the Christians who will be on the Savior's side?

At this point in our world, it would be anyone who is on the side of good, and not just Christians, to me that is. But you are correct in asking because this is what all Christians believe, that they're 'the only ones'.

Only the atheist and laïcs will be left to be the loosers

As I said, it would be anyone who is on the side of good. I doubt that God would turn anyone away who is for him, even when they don't know it, he does.

What Chikomyr quoted, many people, especially those who are against us, don't think our lives are important. To them as the quote says (and although its from a Movie, it rings true)"50,000 died at the battle, 3000 is small", how can anyone think that one life is not important? 3000 is a lot when it comes to human life.

And if so many think that we can no longer protect our borders, we are open for anything they want to throw at us, in a manner of speaking. As long as we're going to continue to pussyfoot around with these types of people, we will always be at a disadvantage. That's pretty much what Emporor is saying in his story here, because of how we handled 'them' our world is now theirs and we have to live in their world now. Is that the future we want? I think not.

Simon, sorry, I'm not taking over your thread, it's pretty thought provoking.

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Fascinating read YRH.

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Do you really beleive that the U.S.A. will endure forever? That the western civilization is immortal and eternal, and that never will ever overthrow it?

How naive...

On the other hand, nor will Islam endure forever! That's a bright side!

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To: all

Thank you for the comments to date. I have kept abreast of this as I would like to have done because I'm busy with the long and involved process of getting a new contract off the ground.

Cikomyr's question is pertinent. No, I don't believe that America, or the West, will last forever. But neither do I believe that the ragheads and their allies have it in them to do away with us. And I certainly do not believe that we should sit idly by, wringing our hands, while enemies work against us. We should by now have interred every Muslim in America - as was done with the Japanese in WW2. Every asset held by Muslims in America should have been seized, every Mosque closed, every newspaper affiliated with Muslim interests shut down, every shop selling radical Islamic literature closed, a boycott placed on all travel to and from America and Pakistan, and America, Iraq, Iran, to limit to as few as possible points of contact between those countries and America in order to control such contact as effectively as possible.

It hasn't been done of course. It won't be done until after a couple mor 9/11 type events have occurred - by which time it will be too late.

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Cikomyr's question is pertinent. No, I don't believe that America, or the West, will last forever. But neither do I believe that the ragheads and their allies have it in them to do away with us. And I certainly do not believe that we should sit idly by, wringing our hands, while enemies work against us. We should by now have interred every Muslim in America - as was done with the Japanese in WW2. Every asset held by Muslims in America should have been seized, every Mosque closed, every newspaper affiliated with Muslim interests shut down, every shop selling radical Islamic literature closed, a boycott placed on all travel to and from America and Pakistan, and America, Iraq, Iran, to limit to as few as possible points of contact between those countries and America in order to control such contact as effectively as possible.

While the strategy was cruel, it was effective indeed.

However, the war against Japan was clear, and direct. You knew when you had won. The war against terrorism has no end in sight. Even if you round up and kill Al-Qaeda, you still have small terrorist cells here and there that will work against you. So you intend on keeping every single muslim in internment camp indefinetly?

A friend proposed a better (and less costly) solution: deportation. Massive deportation. If the U.S.A. ever arrive at that extreme kind of solution, they should not arrest and jail every muslim. Simply deport them.

But that is quite cruel, and I do hope we never come to that. However, your President doesn't seem to have any kind of strategy in mind. By no means has terrorism sympatiser lost ground anywhere. America and Occidental-hate is higher than it ever was.

The "end-of-the-line" solution, if no one want Islam to prevail, is simply to eradicate them all. But that is quite impossible. And if you do that, who will be the bad guys?

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cactoblasta

Join Date 04/2004

+48

A friend proposed a better (and less costly) solution: deportation. Massive deportation. If the U.S.A. ever arrive at that extreme kind of solution, they should not arrest and jail every muslim. Simply deport them.

Firstly there's nowhere to send them and secondly where do you send them? Some would have been Americans citizens for 3 or more generations. Where do you send someone whose only experience is of America?

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It is normal that your 1st and 2nd are the same..?

Rapatriate the Israelians into America, and send the muslims there (and you just solved the palestinian problem). If bother comes to danger (in term of civilization war), Israel will be the first in the bloodshed.

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To: little whip

Agreed. And since we cannot seem to control Baghdad, we should turn it into a parking lot, literally burn, bomb, or otherwise destroy every building, every bit of infrastructure, every road leading in and out. We wont have to worry about "controlling Baghdad" if there IS no Baghdad.

Personally, as I've said on a variety of other threads by different authors, I'd turn the whole region into a parking lot - including Israel, which would put to rest fistfuls of thorny issues. Unfortunately, that's something that isn't going to happen, and neither is the wholesale destruction of Baghdad. Americans are too convinced that they are the 'good guys' to allow themselves to contemplate such acts, or to contemplate what such acts would say about the American people. Myself, I would rather America was known for ruthless political honesty and the pursuit of its own interests first than for a predilection in regard to white hats and the wearing thereof.

The comments after little whip's all address pretty much the same issue: what's to be done with the Muslims already here, some of whom will be second or even third generation citizens. In time of war all citizens must put the interests of the Republic before their own, and before that of any other affiliation they may possess.

Even today there is a suspicion that Catholics cannot ever be true Americans because they owe allegiance to a leader other than the President and his (or her) ministers - the Pope. In the case of this war that suspicion is far more applicable to Muslims than it is to Catholics. Muslims do not, formally, owe allegiance to any one person (because Muslims are divided among their different sects and their so-called 'Caliphate' is, for the present at least, no more than a dream dreamt by the most radical of radical Muslims). However, their religion is a unifying bond that sets forth particular interests that are antithetical to those of Western democracies, and it is to those interests that most Muslims appear fundamentally loyal.

They live among us, they obey our laws, but they are not of us and do not value what we value. And to the extent that they give allegiance to the values of their religion while rejecting the values of the Republic in which they live they are traitors in spirit if not in fact - and ought, properly, to be subject to the suspicion that they will serve the interests of their religion and community before they serve those of the Republic. There is in our midst a large community of probable traitors, who ought in a time of war to be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

In times of war it is better to err on the side of caution. During the Long War between the IRA and the British State (which has only provisionally ended, being continued in name if not in fact by some of the splinter groups into which the IRA has fragmented) the British Government made provision for the incarceration of terrorists - whether merely suspected or proven - by building special prisons, the 'H' blocks, and instituting special courts in which trials were conducted 'in camera' (in secret) and without Juries, cases being heard before specially selcted Judges. These are known as 'Diplock Courts' (so called after Kenneth, Baron Diplock, English Judge and Law Lord). One motivation for their creation was to put an end to pervasive jury intimidation associated with trials of terrorists.

The Diplock Courts are to be phased out in 2007, but as recently as 2005 a sentence of six years was handed down against Abbas Boutrab, an al-Qaeda sympathizer. While the Courts are to be phased out, trial without jury is to be retained for use in exceptional cases. Where vital interests at the heart of the life of the Republic are concerned it is proper to use extraordinary measures such as these, and including torture, in order to defend those interests. It is also proper to go to extraordinary expense to pay for such defence.

I don't believe the American people would support large scale killing of Muslims simply because they are Muslims: but I do believe they would support large scale internment of Muslims, and pay for such internment indefinitely, provided internment was based on the issuance of a warrant by a Judge. I also believe they would support the seizure of assets, the closing of businesses and the silencing of journalists who advocate the overthrow of the Republic, and the closure of the publications for which they work.

America already holds two million people in her jails. There an estimated five million Muslims in America, incarcerating them all would treble, and more, the current prison population - something that could not be done without the creation of special facilities such as the H blocks. That special provision being made, I see no reason why seven million out of three hundred million could not be held as prisoners, nor can I see why five of those seven millions could not be held indefinitely. Or, at the very least, until those who were willing to do so had sworn an oath to serve the Republic before their religion.

An oath is no sure guarantee of loyalty, of course. Those who took it and were released would still need to be under constant surveillance. That would add to the costs involved - but some costs must be borne.

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