Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

  There was also the possibility that, if I were to go out with Halsing and help put Farmer Brown in power, he wouldn’t last. The fact that he aspired to be an evil genius like Hitler didn’t make him one. This looked like history first as tragedy, then as farce. A Nazi regime that decayed quickly would probably not return to chaos. The forces of chaos would have been liquidated quickly, as its first order of business. More probably, it would evolve into something authoritarian, but not totalitarian. In an authoritarian state, everything that is not permitted is forbidden. Under totalitarianism, everything that is not forbidden is compulsory. The latter was unbearable, but the former tolerable, and in a time of general collapse it might be a fair trade-off for order and competence. Nazi ideology was empty enough that it also might collapse, leaving a vacuum that could be filled by a return to tradition.

  Half-way through my second Upmann, I made a decision. My decision was that this was above my pay grade and I’d buck it up the chain. There were more subtleties in the situation than my Marine brain could untangle. I turned to reach for the telephone, and caught Halsing standing in the doorway, still holding the maul. An image of Trotsky’s fate flitted through my mind.

  “Had enough wood-chopping for one morning’s PT?” I asked.

  “No, sir. I’ve split all the wood you’ve got out there,” Halsing answered.

  I glanced at the clock, which said twenty before twelve. “You got through almost two cord in just over two hours?” He wasn’t sweating, either.

  “Yes, sir. Do you have any more work for me?”

  “Waal, I got a couple acres of trees that ought to come down sometime,” I replied. “Think you could handle that this afternoon and be done by supper?”

  “Yes, sir. Where away?”

  “That was a joke, Halsing,” I said. “Not even Nietzsche's superman himself could work that fast.”

  “We are Übermenschen in the Party of Will, sir,” he replied. “And we don’t joke about work.”

  “What do you joke about?”

  “Jews.”

  “Yeah, I might have guessed. Well, I expect we’ll be traveling this afternoon, so the trees will live another day. I’m taking you and your letter down to see Governor Kraft. He’ll decide our response.”

  I called Bill Kraft and got an appointment with him the next morning. I still had a good supply of Confederate gas, so we took the truck down to Waterville to catch the afternoon train. Being with me would cover Halsing’s lack of entry documents, if he were challenged. I half hoped he would be; it would be fun to watch someone ask a Nazi, “May I see your papers, please?” As it happened, the trip was uneventful, beyond my watching Halsing take careful mental note of the terrain along way. Androids never sleep.

  At 07:30 the next morning, Captain Halsing and I presented ourselves at Bill Kraft’s office. Bill wasn’t a morning person, which is why I’d requested an early meeting. I figured he’d be in a surly mood and thus more likely to say no to Leader Braun’s request. I really didn’t want to go on this one.

  I explained the case briefly, and handed Bill the letter. He read it silently, without expression. After taking a few minutes to think, he turned to Hauptsturmführer Halsing. “Are you familiar with the contents of this letter?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Halsing replied.

  “What do you think our answer will be?,” Bill inquired.

  “You’ll refuse, sir,” Halsing answered.

  “You’re right,” said our Governor. “You may inform your Leader to that effect. I would rather not enter into correspondence with him myself. Let’s just say we State o' Mainers believe in maintaining standards. But I do want him, and you, to understand why we refuse you. It won’t do him any good, but it might do you some.

  “It’s not just the usual Nazi stuff, the ranting, the anti-Semitism, the demand for total control of every aspect of everyone’s life. It’s more basic than that.

  “You see, Captain, your 'ism,' and every 'ism,' is an ideology. Ideology itself is wrong –always, everywhere.

  “The word ‘ideology’, and the thing itself, came from that Pandora’s Box of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution. An ideology takes a set of ideas, from one philosopher or another, and from them constructs an abstract ideal of how society should work. Invariably, the ideal runs afoul of human nature and of reality itself. Perhaps you remember the Third Reich joke that the ideal Nazi is slim like Göring and blond like Hitler.

  “When an ideology attains power, it attempts to force reality to conform with its vision. But reality cannot do that. In response, the ideology becomes fiercer in its methods of compulsion: from fines and expropriations it moves to jail sentences, labor or re-education camps, random terror, pogroms, relocations of peoples, and finally simply to organized slaughter.

  “In response, the people learn to live a lie. A façade of Communism or Fascism or political correctness or whatever is laid over reality. But reality itself does not change, because it cannot. People remain people, and human nature is constant.

  “Eventually, a generation reared under the lie comes to power, knowing it is a lie. It clings to power, but no longer believes. Mere cynicism governs. Eventually, that collapses in on itself, and society is released. But in the meantime, grave damage has been done to culture and civilization, and people have perished in the thousands or millions, all to no purpose. No ideology can escape this fate, because of the nature of ideology itself.”

  “What about your own ideology of Retroculture, sir?” Halsing asked. He’d obviously been well briefed for his mission.

  Bill Kraft smiled. “That’s not an ideology, Captain, but an escape from ideology and a return to organic society. Up until the early 1960s, when the ideology of cultural Marxism began to take over, America had not been an ideological society. Like our English forebears, we thought and lived the way we did because those ways had grown up naturally, over many generations. That kind of society is philosophically untidy, but it works as well as human society can. Instead of contradicting human nature, it develops from it. Burke’s analogy was to the root system of a great tree. It follows no apparent pattern, but it is deep, and strong, and gets the job done. Have you ever read Burke, Captain?”

  “No, sir,” Halsing replied.

  “You might want to do so. He would give you some things to think about,” Bill said.

  “My Leader does my thinking for me,” Halsing answered.

  “Ah yes, the True Believer. Well, remember my warning: your children will laugh at you, and your grandchildren will despise you.”

  “I’ve got a question, Captain,” I interjected. “You said you expected us to refuse your Leader's request for assistance. I’d be interested in knowing why.”

  “You lack will, sir,” Halsing answered.

  “What makes you think so?” Bill asked.

  “What I saw on my way from your western border to Hartland, sir,” Halsing said. “You’re allowing niggers to move into your countryside. I saw ads for kosher products in some towns. You don’t have the will to exterminate the unfit. Captain Rumford didn’t have the will to shoot a dog that let me into his house. You’re supposed to be the military leader here, and you don’t have the will to keep yourself in shape. You’re fat.”

  “Stillgestanden!” Bill roared at the top of his lungs. Halsing came to German attention, feet at a 45 degree angle, fingers straight down his legs.

  “I will have you know I am in perfect shape for the operational level of war,” Bill barked. “I am fully capable of boarding the train that will take me to the next chateau. I will convince you, Captain, that the leadership of the Northern Confederation does not lack will.” Bill reached over and pushed a button on his desk. Immediately, half-a-dozen big soldiers from the battalion stationed in Augusta—no ceremonial troops these—came in from the outer office. Two were carrying a full set of leg irons and chains.

  “Captain, you are under arrest for illegal entry into the Northern Confederation,” Bill pronounc
ed. “You will be cast in chains and escorted directly to Portland harbor, where you will be put on the first ship leaving for a foreign port, regardless of destination.”

  Halsing remained at attention while our boys chained him fast. Then they frog-marched him out of the governor’s office. Bill had a sparkle in his eye, but I felt sorry for the captain. He had carried out his mission perfectly, and it was one that had been far from easy. I would have liked to offer him a commission in our own Spec Ops unit, Nazi or no Nazi.

  I knew the governor didn’t usually have troops in his outer office, ready and waiting with a set of chains for anyone who referenced his ample girth. “I guess you saw that one coming,” I said to him.

  Bill smiled sarcastically. “Good theater always requires a bit of work behind the curtain,” he replied. “Nazis used theater brilliantly—remember the Nuremburg rallies—and I thought it appropriate to turn their own tool against them. The captain will remember his experience longer than he will remember any of my words.”

  “Well, I’m glad you decided as you did. I would have had trouble keeping a straight face if I’d had to work with “Führer Braun.”

  “Fear not, my boy, we won’t waste your talents,” Bill replied, and with that I knew I was dismissed.

  I figured I’d spend a few days in Augusta taking care of this and that before I headed home, finally to get into writing the history. The next day, as I was making marginal notes on some training reports, most having to do with maintaining the proper balance between training in techniques and training in tactics—the two are opposites—someone knocked on my office door. It was my adjutant, and with him were three of the troops I’d seen in the governor’s office the day before. They’d had the shit kicked out of them.

  “What happened?” I asked one, Lance Corporal Rollings, who had a broken nose and missing front teeth.

  “He jumped us, sir,” the Lance Corporal replied.

  “He being whom?” I inquired.

  “Captain Halsing, sir.”

  “How can one man in chains jump six?”

  “Only three of us went down to Portland with him, sir.”

  “So one man in chains jumped only three of our men. That’s reassuring. Precisely how did he take such unfair advantage of you?”

  “Well, sir, we were on the train, sir, in a box car with some freight, and I guess we were smokin’ and jokin’ when we shouldn't have been. But he was all chained up, so we didn’t think about it much. Somehow he got loose.”

  “Sir, we found a nail in the lock on the leg irons,” the adjutant said. “He probably picked it up in the freight car.”

  “And, despite being in handcuffs, picked the lock,” I said. “How did he get the cuffs off?”

  “He didn't, sir.”

  “So still in handcuffs, he beat the crap out of three of our biggest men?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rollings answered, his expression reminding me very much of Brunnhilde's, back in my kitchen. “He knew how to use his boots, sir.”

  “Where is Captain Halsing now?” I was going to offer this guy a commission whether Bill Kraft liked it or not.

  “We don't know, sir.”

  “You mean he got away?”

  “Yes, sir,” the adjutant replied. “He apparently timed his move so that he broke free just before the rail bridge over the Androscoggin. He jumped from the train into the river.”

  Good map recon, I thought. “Has anybody searched in the river and along the banks?”

  “Yes, sir,” the adjutant answered. “We didn’t find anything. We assume he died in the fall or drowned.”

  “Remember, Lieutenant, that assume makes an ass of you and me. I suspect our young Nazi is alive, well, and on his way home.”

  “Do you want us to search again, sir?”

  “No. He earned his getaway fair and square. Let him have it. As for you,” I said as I turned to face our three stooges, “Private Rollings, you and your two fellow privates are in charge of cleaning the barracks' heads until further notice. You are obviously incapable of any higher responsibilities.”

  About three months later, I got a nice letter from Captain Halsing, postmarked Milwaukee, thanking me for my hospitality. He was the model Nazi, cold, competent, and perfectly polite.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  As it turned out, the Nazis took over Wisconsin while the cultural Marxists conquered Minnesota. Jews, blacks, Hispanics, and feminists fled Wisconsin for Minnesota, running headlong into whites and Asians coming the other way. Leader Braun set up a concentration camp at Oshkosh, with gas chambers, ovens, the whole works, and began building a new state capitol in the form of a swastika so huge it would be visible from space. In Minneapolis, the Catholic bishop, the Orthodox Archimandrite, and the pastor of the First Baptist church were crucified together in front of city hall, while the city of St. Paul was renamed Saul.

  Neither regime lasted very long. Braun, along with most of his top henchmen, fell victim to an unexplained release of Zyklon-B during a “Beer Hall Night” in the Rathskeller of the new state capitol building. In a brief but bloody civil war, the remaining Nazis were defeated and locked up in their own concentration camp, where they escaped only as smoke. The victorious militias actually held a clean, statewide election for governor, which was won by a former mayor of Milwaukee known for his love of traditional architecture and desire to bring back streetcars. Wisconsin remained orderly and set about recovering its past.

  Minnesota, on the other hand, disintegrated into the usual chaos of ethnic urban gangs, shoot-on-sight rural militias and wandering, bizarre cultic tribes. No central authority arose that could make anything work. On the whole, of the two states, Minnesota had the worst of it. Order, even from a defective source, is better than anarchy.

  But order carries its own bad seed: totalitarianism. Totalitarianism did not come to Wisconsin, because it’s hard to revive a dead ideology. The corpse may dance, but the wires always show and the ultimate effect is comic. Live ideologies, however, were not in short supply in the early 21st century. We in the N.C. watched with growing concern as one brought totalitarianism to Cascadia: the ideology of Deep Green.

  Cascadia itself was the foal of a bastard and a witch. The illegitimate father was centralized government planning, and the hag on a broomstick was Gaia, the Earth Goddess of extreme environmentalism. Both had long fattened in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, which as early as the 1990s were calling themselves Cascadia and flying their own flag.

  Portland, Oregon, the Cascadian capital, had a deserved reputation for the most intrusive government in the old United States. Red Bureaucrats dictated land use, housing densities, racial balances, environmental protection, you name it, not only for the city but for the rest of the state as well. The urban-rural split that played so large in America’s second Civil War was established early in Oregon. Well before the end of the 20th century, the rest of the state hated Portland. But Portland had the numbers and the votes, so it got what it wanted.

  The pieces to the puzzle of environmental totalitarianism were also on the board early, though few people put them together. The environmentalists portrayed themselves as simple, peaceful people who loved furry little animals and green, growing things, who wanted nothing more than clean air and water, deep forests to roam in and craggy shores free of unsightly commercial development. Most other people wanted these things, too, so environmentalists came across as the good guys.

  What they really wanted was power. They knew that everything ultimately comes from the earth, and whoever controls the earth controls everything else. More, every human action affects the environment, so in the environment’s name, every human action can be controlled. Environmentalism was the perfect justification for totalitarian power.

  As with communism or Nazism, there were plenty of warnings. As early as the 1980s, factories were being closed, large tracts of land made off-limits to humans, and thousands of jobs lost to protect nominally endangered species like snail da
rters, which turned out to be more prolific than thought, and spotted owls, which weren’t even a separate species. Property rights were overturned with abandon but without compensation. Farmers went to jail for filling in low spots along a fence because someone called them protected wetlands. The EPA became America’s Gestapo, but because its agents didn’t wear leather trench coats and black fedoras, few people saw them for what they were. The few who did were labeled extremists or friends of pollution.

  Just as Hitler did in Mein Kampf, the enviro-Nazis published their grim vision of America’s future. At a huge eco-conference in Vancouver, B.C. in 1990, U.N. Envirocrat Mostafa Tolba said, “I am advocating The User’s Fee – a fee for using the environmental resources like air.” Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman said, “A human life has no more intrinsic value than an individual grizzly bear life. If it came down to a confrontation between a grizzly and a friend, I’m not sure whose side I’d be on. But I do know humans are a disease, a cancer on nature.” Australian eco-freak Richard Jones added, “An ant is as much a part of God as a polar bear, or a koala, or you and me…I think they're all spiritually equal.”

  They were even open about their lying. In October of 1989, Discover magazine quoted one of the many professional prophets of environmental doom, Stephen Schneider:

  We need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have.

  The prophets of global warming in the 21st century were often the same people who in the 1970s had warned about a coming ice age. But most of the media were caught up in the environmentalism fad, so the contradictions were ignored and the real scientists whose work debunked the fanatics received no mention.

  It didn’t take long for the binary munition of government power and environmentalist ideology to begin spewing poison. Cascadia became independent in 2027, elected its first Green Party majority in 2029, and by 2030 had outlawed nuclear and coal-fired power plants, gasoline-powered automobiles, fireplaces and wood stoves, backyard grills, lawnmowers, and pets. In the enthusiasm ideology begets, most Cascadians put up with cold, dark houses, sore feet, weed-lot lawns, and boiled wieners. But when the government started grabbing their dogs and cats on the grounds that it was “degrading for an animal to be owned by a human,” some resisted. Those who did were sent to sensitivity camps where they were compelled to go naked except for a dog collar, walk on all fours, and bark or meow for their suppers.