A History Maker
Page 13
In the twentieth century rich trading companies toppled electoral governments in South America and Asia by a combination of bribery, financial manipulation and lying news stories. They were assisted by governments they had bribed. Since these governments were nominally democratic the assistance was given chiefly through secret intelligence networks.
The virus used by Delilah Puddock to destabilize the modern world was developed on the K20 asteroid, and aimed to combine the advantage of all previous methods. It was a normally harmless strain of the common cold which she passed to Wat through sexual congress after weakening his immune system with drugs. It was so infectious and contagious that a few hours later he passed it to almost everyone he spoke to or who shook his hand. The virus had hardly any noticeable effect on people’s health, but harboured a nanomechanism which became active and started replicating when it touched a powerplant, eventually destroying the plant’s ability to photosynthesize. The inventors of this plague hoped to achieve the following results.
1 – The death of half the world’s powerplants in a week. Households using them would have no food but what they grew or could hunt on the commons. Besides hunger they would also lack heat, lighting, sewage disposal and means of recycling waste.
2 – In seeking help from uninfected neighbours they would spread the disease further. When households in uninfected districts realized this they would keep out infection by creating boundaries and forbidding the starving to cross. This would enclose the commons, make all travellers dreaded and rejected, divide humanity once more into the desperate poor and selfish prosperous.
3 – The frontiers would be defended by soldiers who would want guns, grenades and bombs to avoid being infected through hand-to-hand fighting. These would be ordered from domestic powerplants, thus depriving homes in the uninfected areas of items everyone took for granted and putting women under military rule. Generals would also form world-wide alliances to keep the poor householders in their places. A stern military patriarchy would therefore replace mild matriarchy as a system of government.
4 – The Red Cross would try to organize famine relief co-operatively through the open intelligence net but be defeated by the size of the problem. The network would soon evolve seedlings of a plague-immune powerplant, but since these would be distributed under military control the dominant officer class in healthy areas would first replace their own powerplants with the plague-immune kind, postponing help for the poor indefinitely for reasons of security.
5 – Powerplants take at least thirty years to reach household-supporting size and before then the new ruling class would see any wide extension of peaceful prosperity as a miserable levelling down, a failure of law and order. Like all patriarchies they would have acquired wives and mistresses who supported them and wanted to give their advantages to their children. They would do so by continuing the scarcity which allowed them to dominate the rest. The patriarchs would therefore grow powerplants on estates carved out of the commons, employing some of the poor to keep the rest out and paying them with food and occasional luxury items. In these conditions it would soon become possible to run the world on a monetary basis again.
6 – Chaotic historical eras tend to be dominated by monstrous egoists. Alexander the Great, Augustus Caesar, William the Conqueror, Tamerlane, Henry the Eighth, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Bismarck, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Thatcher would have been harmless if treated as equals by sensible people. But in competitive historical states common sense is scorned. Both rich and poor want leaders who embody Godhood, Destiny, Unyielding Reality, so many give unlimited obedience to whoever best acts such parts. Delilah Puddock’s clique of plotters gloried in their insane egoism. They were sure their longevity and foreknowledge of events would make them rulers of a new historical era.
Page 119.
The bright old day now dawns again etc. This is the last verse of a ballad which Charles Dickens contributed to The Examiner in August 1841. It parodies a right-wing popular song. Here is the full text.
THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN
(New Version, to be said or sung at all
Conservative Dinners)
I’ll sing you a new ballad,
and I’ll warrant it first rate,
Of the days of that old gentleman
who had that old estate;
When they spent the public money
at a bountiful old rate
On ev’ry mistress, pimp and scamp,
at ev’ry noble gate,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
The good old laws were garnished well
with gibbets, whips, and chains,
With fine old English penalties,
and fine old English pains,
With rebel heads, and seas of blood
once hot in rebel veins;
For all these things were requisite
to guard the rich old gains
Of the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
This brave old code, like Argus,
had a hundred watchful eyes,
And ev’ry English peasant
had his good old English spies,
To tempt his starving discontent
with fine old English lies,
Then call the good old Yoemanry
to stop his peevish cries,
In the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
The good old times for cutting throats
that cried out in their need,
The good old times for hunting men
who held their father’s creed,
The good old times when William Pitt,
as all good men agreed,
Came down direct from Paradise
at more than railroad speed.
Oh the fine old English Tory times;
When will they come again!
In those rare days, the press was seldom
known to snarl or bark,
But sweetly sang of men in pow’r,
like any tuneful lark;
Grave judges, too, to all their evil deeds
were in the dark;
And not a man in twenty score
knew how to make his mark.
Oh the fine old English Tory times;
Soon may they come again!
Those were the days for taxes,
and for war’s infernal din;
For scarcity of bread,
that fine old dowagers might win;
For shutting men of letters up,
through iron bars to grin,
Because they didn’t think the Prince
was altogether thin,
In the fine old English Tory time;
Soon may they come again!
But Tolerance, though slow in flight,
is strong-wing’d in the main;
That night must come on these fine days,
in course of time was plain;
The pure old spirit struggled,
but its struggles were in vain;
A nation’s grip was on it,
and it died in choking pain,
With the fine old English Tory days,
All of the olden time.
The bright old day now dawns again;
the cry goes through the land,
In England there shall be dear bread —
in Ireland, sword and brand;
And poverty, and ignorance,
shall swell the rich and grand,
So, rally round the rulers
with the gentle iron hand,
Of the fine old English Tory days;
Hail to the coming time!
CHAPTER FIVE — THE HENWIFE
Page 126.
powsoudie = sheep’s head broth.
drummock = raw oatmeal with milk.
kebbuck = home-made cheese.
farle = a three-cornered scone or bannock.
Pa
ge 136.
The stove was called the Aga.
Aga was the trade name of the cast-iron stove manufactured in the twentieth-century period. It burned household waste besides coal, wood or peat and was a thrifty source of heat for household uses.
We should all be gangrels.
Kittock’s faith in the superiority of possession-less people may seem the sort of romantic perversion sung in the ballads of Johnny Faa and The Raggle Taggle Gipsies. It was also entertained by Greeks, Jews, early Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Borrow and many others who found natural justice incompatible with state-enforced laws, the earth which supports us at variance with owners who evict natives from it, often murderously.
Page 138.
wheen = several; a few; a number which is sufficient when used approvingly, deficient when used disparagingly.
Page 142.
The men exchanged tobacco pouches.
This custom started in the seventeenth century when tobacco was imported to Europe in so many states that almost every smoker had his favourite blend, but thought it friendly and interesting to offer and taste other blends.
[The men] discussed whether the ten thousand years of civilization should be called The Dark Ages because of their greed and cruelty, or The Middle Ages because they had achieved some splendid things. Breaking the past into easily labelled sections is a habit as ancient as thought. Ways of doing so is a brief account of mankind.
PREHISTORIC folk split time into two: the dream time or days of the gods when earth, sky, creatures and the first people were made; the human time which flowed from then. They believed that the earlier time was eternal, that gods in the sky, the neighbourhood and underground still helped the sun and seasons and human generations return. Before civilization destroyed such people their past seemed a continually renewed present extending forever through their children.
EGYPT AND CHINA were the longest-lasting nations of the historical era and both existed because farmers on fertile plains had combined to share large irrigation systems. Both systems got armies to defend them from marauding gangrels, a class of civil servants (priests or mandarins) to run them, one big landlord (Pharaoh or Son of Heaven) to unite the whole. In both nations the civil servants invented pictographic writing and by keeping no record of earlier times mythologized their state by teaching that the one landlord, his surveyors and tax collectors were incarnations and agents of gods who had made the universe. This meant that everbody else must serve them forever. The past was divided into periods named after the presiding Pharaoh or Son of Heaven.
GREEKS AND HINDUS split the past into four:
1 – The Golden Age when people were content to gather food without cultivating it and had weather which let them live without clothes and houses.
2 – The Silver Age, a colder time when they began living in caves and thick bushes, cultivating the soil and domesticating animals.
3 – The Bronze Age, when they formed settlements which sometimes raided each other.
4 – The Iron Age, when cities, navies, trading, warfare and every social evil were perpetrated on a vast scale. Since the Iron Age was modern and the Greeks were in it they saw history as a deterioration. The Greeks did not know how it would end. The Hindus thought the four ages amounted to a single Great Age which would be repeated eternally, each iron age collapsing into chaos before a new golden age arose.
ROMANS also split time into four: the time of gods and heroes who founded Rome, the Roman kingdom, the Roman republic, the Roman empire. After the kingdom many prosperous Romans thought each of these states an improvement on the last, so viewed their history as a continual social improvement. Augustus, the first emperor, was especially fond of the notion and got poets to advertise it. This progressive view of history was later adopted by the officer class of empires too recent to claim that they had always existed.
JEWS had a recorded history too intricate to be simplified, for they dated it from the creation of the world. It told how their ancestors lost a happy garden where they lived naked without toil, became nomads and shepherds, and then guestworkers, slaves, immigrants, invaders, conquerors, farmers and civic exploiters who were again enslaved, colonized, dispersed by the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires. To make this unending story bearable the rabbis explained it as a harsh middle age between the good garden where humanity was once happy and the happy Jewish city which God was preparing in the future. Sometime in A.D. 30 the Rabbi Jesus said the good future city was for everyone who loved God, even if they died first. This view of history became popular with slaves, women, labourers and other Roman subjects who did not view the empire as a continual improvement. Roman governors persecuted Christians as malcontents until the empire started cracking under its own weight.
OFFICIAL CHRISTIANITY. In the fourth century after Christ the Emperor Constantine saw the political usefulness of a history which promised mankind a happy future if it left the management of the present time to landlords like himself. He made Christianity the Roman imperial religion, officially splitting time into four again:
1 – The prehistoric happy godly garden where life started well but went wrong.
2 – History without hope before Christ.
3 – History with hope after Christ.
4 – The posthistoric happy godly city where hopes come true (if you love God as the rulers and priests tell you).
This Christian division of time lasted over two thousand years, though when famine and administrative collapse made the present unbearable the majority revolted against their priests and landlords and demanded some heaven at once.
THE RENAISSANCE. Around A.D. 1400 some Italian republics and dukedoms so prospered by trade between Asia and Europe that they recovered the Roman sense that people could use intelligence to improve their community. Historians called this recovery the Renaissance and redivided time as follows:
1 – The Ancient World — All time before Christianity became the Roman imperial religion.
2 – The Middle Ages — everything between the Ancient World and the Renaissance; a better time than the Ancient World, because it made Europe Christian.
3 – The Modern World — everything after the Middle Ages but better than these, because with Christian faith in the future modern Europeans were scientists continually enlarging the wisdom of the present, artists continually adding to the world’s stock of beautiful things, traders bringing back rare goods from every continent in the world. Some historians felt so pleased with their part of Europe that they thought history had reached a lasting state of perfection. Bishop Bossuet felt this about Catholic France in the seventeenth century, the French revolutionaries about equalitarian France in the eighteenth, Professor Hegel about Protestant Prussia in the nineteenth.
MARXISM. Yet even in those states folk were excluded from social improvements. Many of the rich lived wastefully with two or three huge houses while labouring families lived in one or two rooms. Landlords kept great fertile parks uncultivated while peasants paid them rents for the right to scratch potatoes out of stony soil. The hardest workers were taxed to pay for wars which left the rich uninjured and did the poor no good, unless a soldier son came home with loot to compensate for his wounds. The development of industrial factories enriched several new classes of people while impoverishing an equal number. In 1867 Karl Marx suggested a new division of time:
1 – Tribal Communism, when people live in communities so small that most families have a voice in the governing council so are seldom much poorer than their richest neighbour.
2 – Class Warfare, when folk live in big states ruled by small unions of conquerors, scribes, landlords, factory owners, businessmen and/or moneylenders. These unions keep power and great incomes by the continual creation of poverty in the underclass.
3 – World Communism, when the underclass form their own unions, take the land and factories from their masters and manage them for the good of themselves, whereupon the evicted uppe
r classes have to join them, riches and poverty vanish in a fair sharing of goods, and all states wither away.
This resembled the Jewish and Christian time division in giving hope for the future, though the future was to be created by human effort instead of God. Many labourers and poor tradesmen in machine-making nations were then forming unions to improve their conditions. In some states they created political parties which helped them do so.
In 1914 an inbred clique of owners who had inherited the Russian Empire went to war. They commanded a vast, obedient, conscripted people but could not give them enough food, boots and bullets to defeat smaller armies of industrially efficient neighbours. This caused a workers’ revolt. A clique of middle-class Marxists rushed back to Russia and seized control in the name of World Communism. The new clique created a party dictatorship which did not share its advantages with other Russians and died of broken promises before the end of the century.
POSTMODERNISM happened when landlords, businessmen, brokers and bankers who owned the rest of the world had used new technologies to destroy the power of labour unions. Like owners of earlier empires they felt that history had ended because they and their sort could now dominate the world for ever. This indifference to most people’s wellbeing and taste appeared in the fashionable art of the wealthy. Critics called their period postmodern to separate it from the modern world begun by the Renaissance when most creative thinkers believed they could improve their community. Postmodernists had no interest in the future, which they expected to be an amusing rearrangement of things they already knew. Postmodernism did not survive disasters caused by “competitive exploitation of human and natural resources” in the twenty-first century.