The Prism 2049
Churchill had a long political life that covered more than sixty years, many more recent European political leaders have been around for thirty years or more and in power for fifteen. Men like Mao reigned over the Chinese Communist Party more than forty years. Middle Eastern despots ruled over countries like Syria and Iraq for over thirty years and many dictators in African countries, such as the Congo, ruled for over thirty years. Castro held Cuba in an iron grip for almost fifty forty years.
So it is easy to see over a fifty-year period many of the persons, institutions, industries and technologies remain stable.
In the second half of the twentieth century the world learnt to live with the atomic bomb, there was the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the transformation of Communist China into a capitalist economy, there was creation of the European Union that was transformed into a Federation of States, and the abrupt disappearance of the communist systems of Eastern Europe.
During the same period Apartheid had reigned and disappeared in South Africa. Wars started and ended in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. Wars blew hot and cold in Israel, between India and Pakistan. Civil wars simmered in Algeria. Rebellions broke out in Turkey with the Kurds, in Russia with the Chechens. Other wars broke out in the Balkans and against terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda.
New technologies arrived, the personal computer, the internet, the mobile telephone, satellite television, air travel was democratised, high speed train travel arrived, credit cards, electronic banking and cash points, hypermarkets and motorways ... the list was long
In the first half of our century we saw the first nuclear exchange between belligerent powers. First there was decline of the petrodollar economies, then the end of the Israeli-Arab wars. New technologies such as the fuel cell transformed industry; fusion technology gave us cheap electrical power.
On the other hand the population of the planet has increased by three billion, which is sixty million a year. Hunger has increased, war and strife has not disappeared. Islam dominates the world religions and controls the lives of half the population of the planet.
The rich have become richer; the powerful have become more powerful. The economic crisis split our century into before and after, a little like WWII in the twentieth century. The poor countries have never really recovered from that crisis; most of Asia has seen a decline in their living standards. Only East Asia, Coastal China and Japan have progressed.
The rich could afford organ transplants and replacements through regenerative drugs. Life-spans had grown for certain but many countries life expectancy had fallen, even in Algharb.
Most Asian countries do not have the capacity to invest in new technologies, power cells for motor vehicles and electricity generation. They cannot rebuild their car factories overnight, in the West it was already difficult, but we had planned for it. It even helped us out of the economic crisis with new production plants and the service economy linked to the new technology.
India and most of Asia still continue to use petrol driven vehicles and oil fired power stations, so they are forced to have rationing for fuel and energy.
Today America is content to pull the strings from a distance whilst it lives live in comfort far from the crisis zones. They watch every corner of the planet with their satellites, leaving Europe to settle its own problems on its southern and eastern flanks.
France and England for example were transformed in the blink of an eye. My grandfather, who was, incidentally, born in 1940, told me when I was a kid that when he saw for the first time a black man, he was eight years old. He lived in central London at that time and the ‘blackman’ he saw was an American soldier. He was fourteen when the first coloured boy, he was light skinned and had no accent he could remember, arrived in his school.
That same district of London, nearby Harrow Road, which I visited as a student, it was over ninety percent Black or Indian. It was obvious to anybody, but the most blind, in the second half of the twentieth century that cities like London or Paris had undergone an extraordinary transformation. They had become greatly different to a vast part hinterland of their own country, of course there were other city areas that had also changed.
However the politicians whilst preaching integration and assimilation told the country nothing had changed, ‘there is little migration, there are few foreigners,’ in a certain manner of speaking they were right as the non-Europeans took British or French nationality. Mitterrand had the face to say there were only two hundred thousand Settlers in France in the early nineties, he was of course right in the strictest sense, the others had been naturalised.
My father who lived in Paris for many years told me that in the nineteenth and twentieth arrondissements the whites had become a minority at the beginning of the century. We saw the result in the Zone; the majority were Blacks and Asians, both from the sub-continent and from East Asia.
Pau
They sat by the pool in the warm evening sunshine, Gabby had opened a bottle of chilled Champagne and place a bowl of olives and slices of saucisson on a table.
“Let’s drink to your safe return home.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Ennis.
The lifted their glasses and sipped the Champagne.
“Excellent,” said Ennis, “I’m pleased to see some things haven’t changed.
“Down here in Pau we’re far from all the troubles, life is pretty much the same as it has always been. There were some troubles in Toulouse a few years back but since thing things are fine.”
“Is your family from Pau?” asked Ennis.
“Yes, as far back as we can trace it. I’m retired from business today but for over fifty years my family owned a very profitable concessionaire for Renault in here in Pau, it was started after the Second World War by my grandfather. Together with the garage and after sales service I have to say we have lived very comfortably. Being the only son I suppose I was spoilt but my father brought me up to run the business, which I did. After leaving school I went to University in Toulouse to study economics, I had a good time, didn’t do much studying so my father pulled me out and sent me to a business school for international commerce and after that I started in the business.”
He refilled the glasses and checked the barbecue where he had two enormous ribs of beef over the glowing embers.
“I enjoyed the garage, I always had a great car and was well paid with a guaranteed future.”
“Alright for some,” Stone said with a laugh.
“Well it wasn’t entirely without problems. The difficulty we experienced came suddenly with the wars in the Caucuses and the price of oil started to go up. At first it didn’t effect us much, sales continued as usual, the people in this region are fairly prosperous, but them came the problems in the Gulf with the Saudi revolution and then another oil crisis, that really hurt our sales of new cars.”
“That’s when the recession started.”
“It hit us in Europe fairly badly, I suppose it was the start of all the problems, or at least when they came to a head.”
“It was after that we the parallel currency made its first appearance,” said Stone.
“Well we had started to sell electric utility vehicles at the beginning of the millennium, not many, they were more of gadget than anything else, you known environment and all that, it gave Renault a good image. The first serious fuel cell vehicle I saw was at the Geneva car show in 2002, we knew that several constructors were working on them but it was a kind of futurist thing.”
“I remember that, it was all rather futuristic.”
“That’s what I thought but in 2005 we had the first fuel cell vehicle in our show room, it was a utility vehicle, a delivery van, it ran on natural gas that was converted to hydrogen for the fuel cell. It was mostly sold to the municipality. They worked very well.
Then with the war in the Caucuses, things started to change quickly, we saw a series of small electric cars and then fuel cell cars arriving on the market. At first the problem was recharging the bat
teries and then hydrogen or gas for the fuel cells, but by about 2015 about half of the vehicles we sold were fuel by alternative fuels.”
“So that was the end of the internal combustion engine.”
“No those cars were expensive and there were still a lot of problems, refuelling, maintenance, spare parts were expensive and things like that.
It was when the second Gulf War broke out, things permanently changed, it was a real crisis, not only did the price of oil rocket but rationing was introduced and for two years our business went really sour, on the other hand the demand for electric and fuel cell cars shot up, unfortunately for us at that time the car builders couldn’t follow the demand.”
“So what happened in 2020 when the oil market had returned to normal?”
“First people had lost confidence in petrol driven vehicles, the age of the hydrogen powered cars had finally arrived, they were clean almost silent and they were powered by cheap pure water and better still they had become fashionable, they were modern. The hydros as we called them represented fifty percent of the market.”
“In addition the same time public transport had been improving for a long time,” Stone chipped in, “the high speed train network covered the country, it connected with safe and fast local networks. The municipalities built tramways and underground systems in the large towns and