Goodbyes, Part 1
There's a series of - relatively - short interviews here, so I'll be blitzing through them as much as I can.
BURLINGTON, VERMONT
[Snow has begun falling. Reluctantly, "the Whacko" turns back for the house.]
You ever heard of Clement Attlee? Of course not, why should you? Man was a loser, a third-rate mediocrity who only slipped into the history books because he unseated Winston Churchill before World War II officially ended.
America's last civilian president is up first, and like… immediately he makes me really, really mad.
This is like, the stance that the British government has started to try to push, and it is
absolutely deranged - the National Health Service and welfare state were the largest successes of the left in Britain
ever, and neither of them surviving the war is a not insubstantial part of why their whole edifice is one bad week away from large scale rioting.
Churchill kept pushing to help the United States against Japan, saying the fight wasn't finished until it was finished everywhere. And look what happened to the Old Lion. That's what we didn't want to happen to our administration. That's exactly why we decided to declare victory once the continental U.S. had been secured.
The "we could've kept fighting, honest!" stance is always laughable, but here especially - the Junta was never more obviously running on fumes than when they'd just finished the cross-continental push.
Six percent of their population from behind the Rockies died on the advance - that's not six percent of the army, it's six percent
of the entire population - and then they had to reintegrate their loyal enclaves whilst keeping the boot on the neck of the thirty million or so survivors of the Christian States and the Great Lakes.
America did not have two spare soldiers to rub together after they reached the Atlantic.
Which, I mean - that isn't a million miles from the reason why Britain couldn't send more men out east, though-
Okay so as briefly as possible, because I'm not a British Nationalist and I don't care that much about defending 'our honour' in WWII but like…
Britain and the Empire absolutely was already involved in the war against Japan, you historically illiterate fuck. The Japanese didn't just decide to leave Singapore and Malaysia for fun, idiot.
Gah. I don't even
care, I just find this myth frustrating. It's all part of the general attempt to downplay the historical fact, which was that the British public voted for the Labour Party because they
wanted it, not just because they were temporarily unhappy with the tories.
We still had to help out our allies and clear whole parts of the world that were entirely ruled by the dead. There was still so much work to do, but since our own house was in order, we had to give people the option to go home.
Of their military strength at the end of the war - approximately 11 million people under arms - in the three years immediately after they declared victory, the Junta demobilised four million, with approximately one million of those being the soldiers no longer mentally or physically competent to continue waging war. [SOURCE]
The 'option' to go home existed, but by and large they still needed their troops to occupy swathes of their own country.
Honestly this whole revisionist hagiography of the post-war in America is funny because it just doesn't pass the sniff test, right? What American government since Woodrow fucking Wilson would look at the opportunity to define a post-war world order by taking charge and go "actually I think I'll pass"
They ran the reclamation through the UN because it let them hit up some of their allies more brazenly - now say "thank you Brazil" if the UN saved you.
Anyway, he talks about American volunteers to join the UN reclamation force - I'll just note these volunteers weren't, like, demobilised civilians? They were serving in the US military and volunteered to be part of its contribution to the UN force.
We actually had to turn some of them away, put them on the reserve list or assign them to train all the young bucks who missed the drive across America. I know I caught a lot of flak for going UN instead of making it an all-American crusade, and to be totally honest, I really couldn't give a damn.
They always do this - they invent these groups that are mythically criticising them from some position even more out-there than their own, so they can ignore the legitimate criticisms they were receiving. Once you notice, it becomes
really obvious. "Oh, everyone wanted it to be an All-American Crusade but I bravely refused" yeah, sure.
On the other note - America had to recruit heavily from areas they were still in the process of pacifying, but even then, this is mostly theatre? He's alleging that they were training "all the young bucks" to imply that they had a glut of new recruits, that the Junta remained popularly supported.
They picked up an initial wave of recruits from places like Lafayette and Baton Rouge, Memphis, St Louis, the Blue Zones that were the most grateful once they arrived, but other than that, they'd put people into the army as a sort of punitive action, to break up organisations in occupied areas?
This has worked
really well and had no consequences. Training your own dissident population in combat is a good plan.
Maybe it's made the overseas campaigns a little slower. Our allies are on their feet again, but we still have a few White Zones to clear: mountain ranges, snowline islands, the ocean floor, and then there's Iceland…Iceland's gonna be tough.
I love the American hubris here, they genuinely cannot help themselves - oh, if we'd refused to coordinate with our allies and just done this global war against the ghouls all on our own? We'd have been fine. Better, actually, than doing it with our allies! We're number one!
Genuinely just pretty pathetic.
I think on some level it is to try to explain away their failings - Iceland is still uninhabited, and likely to remain so for a long time, but that's not because America and her allies don't have the strength to clear Iceland, it's that they let the UN do it! I don't really see the point, personally. Iceland is going to need clearing out eventually, sure, but for now? The ghouls on Iceland aren't really doing any harm.
I wish Ivan would let us help out in Siberia, but, hey, Ivan's Ivan. And we still have attacks right here at home as well, every spring, or every so often near a lake or beach. The numbers are declining, thank heavens, but it doesn't mean people should let down their guard. We're still at war, and until every trace is sponged, and purged, and, if need be, blasted from the surface of the Earth, everybody's still gotta pitch in and do their job.
… So shut up about wanting elections.
It will always be funny when some American freakshow gets up on their hobbyhorse about not being allowed to send troops into Siberia to prop up the HRE. God knows I'm glad that malignancy has been annihilated, but it has lost us some of the dumbest angry American takes, and that is a shame.
Watching some US General squirming on one of their psychotically nationalist TV interviews because the talking head has asked them why America won't help the Russians out against the Damned Reds and they have to talk around the truth, which is that they don't think they'd win.
The rest of this is just, as referenced, the Junta's excuseology for why the parties haven't split again, why the military is still privileged over everyone else, why most everyone is either in or controlled by the army and so on - it's because otherwise, Zack's gonna climb out of the lake and getcha! Scary!
Be nice if that was the lesson people took from all this misery. We're all in this together, so pitch in and do your job.
[We stop by an old oak tree. My companion looks it up and down, taps it lightly with his cane. Then, to the tree…]
You're doin' a good job.
He just says it, here - the lesson you should take from this is put your head down and don't rock the boat. Stop complaining, stop wanting civil rights.
As for the oak tree thing? I've got nothing. No idea what he meant by this. Maybe he's just senile.
On the plus side, I never have to think about this dipshit again. Moving away from an American talking about Russia to a Russian talking about Russia.
KHUZHIR, OLKHON ISLAND, LAKE BAIKAL, THE HOLY RUSSIAN EMPIRE
[A nurse interrupts our interview to make sure Maria Zhuganova takes her prenatal vitamins. Maria is four months pregnant. This will be her eighth child.]
The Reds found Maria in the last camp they liberated, just outside Vladivostok. She's given an interview from a bed on one of their hospital-trains on the trans-siberian railroad, which you can view [HERE] and read the translated transcript [HERE] if you don't speak Russian.
Three of the children the Holy Russian Empire forced her to have, so far as she knew, made it out of infancy. Hers has been a bleak, bleak life.
My only regret was that I couldn't remain in the army for the "liberation" of our former republics. We'd purged the motherland of the undead filth, and now it was time to carry the war beyond our borders. I wish I could have been there, the day we formally reabsorbed Belarus back into the empire. They say it will be the Ukraine soon, and after that, who knows. I wish I could still have been a participant, but I had "other duties"…
This is really funny when you recognise the surgery done on it - the HRE obviously was not absorbing Belarus, and the "former republics" they were at war with were, like… Sakha, Buryatia and Altai?
So far as I know - and I'm not knowledgeable on the subject, so please don't cite me! - the Ukrainian Civil War has precipitated any plans by the RSFSR to move into the country. They might do so later, but for the foreseeable, I expect the war with Japan they are hurtling towards is going to occupy them, anyway.
[Gently, she pats her womb.]
I don't know how many clinics like this there are throughout the Rodina. Not enough, I'm sure. So few of us, young, fertile women who didn't succumb to drugs, or AIDS, or the stink of the living dead. Our leader says that the greatest weapon a Russian woman can wield now is her uterus. If that means not knowing my children's fathers, or…
There were fifteen main camps, with several dozen satellite camps for care of the babies and processing the fathers. It was the single most well-planned and well-operated part of the decaying Holy Russian Imperial state.
They kept remarkably complete records, and people are working as we speak on tracking down the children taken from these women, the scientists who ran these camps and the men who frequented them.
I don't know if justice is ever going to come, not exactly, but people are giving it the best try they are capable of giving, I think. That's not making this any easier to read.
You're wondering how this "existence" can be reconciled with our new fundamentalist state? Well, stop wondering, it can't. All that religious dogma, that's for the masses. Give them their opium and keep them pacified. I don't think anyone in the leadership, or even the Church, really believes what they're preaching, maybe one man, old Father Ryzhkov before they chucked him out into the wilderness. He had nothing left to offer, unlike me. I've got at least a few more children to give the motherland. That's why I'm treated so well, allowed to speak so freely.
There's this idea people have - a peculiarly persuasive one, and one that's very popular under the Junta - that cynicism somehow makes more "sense" than anything else. That cynics have some inherent bonus to states they run, to their ability to organise things.
The Holy Russian Empire hardly believed a word of the theology they spouted, they just flailed desperately for whatsoever they could find to prop up their state, and they were put down like dogs by a bunch of bright eyed idealists flying the red flag.
[Maria glances at the one-way glass behind me.]
What are they going to do to me? By the time I've exhausted my usefulness, I will have already outlived the average woman.
[She presents the glass with an extremely rude finger gesture.]
Recognising that it is hard to do these calculations on a state that didn't last a lifetime, the average life expectancy of a woman in one of these camps was about 50, versus an average life expectancy of a woman not in one of these camps of about 62.
All told, though, this is just… wildly depressing.
Your mission is to tell your world of ours, to make them see what will happen if anyone ever tries to f**k with us. The war drove us back to our roots, made us remember what it means to be Russian. We are strong again, we are feared again, and to Russians, that only means one thing, we are finally safe again! For the first time in almost a hundred years, we can finally warm ourselves in the protective fist of a Caesar, and I'm sure you know the word for Caesar in Russian.
This, on the other hand, is fucking hysterical. Some Okhrana weirdo tried to make this a threat when it was meant to be a puff piece to compel the Americans to back them harder - it failed on both fronts, and their vile little Tsar got fitted for a hemp necktie off the barrel of a tank.
A miserable story with at least a slightly hopeful ending. Let us all have that chance!
There's not a lot more to add, honestly? All power to the soviets and what have you. Onto the next.
BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS, WEST INDIES FEDERATION
[The bar is almost empty. Most of the patrons have either left by their own power, or been carried out by the police. The last of the night staff clean the broken chairs, broken glass, and pools of blood off the floor. In the corner, the last of the South Africans sings an emotional, inebriated version of Johnny Clegg's wartime rendition of "Asimbonaga." T. Sean Collins absentmindedly hums a few bars, then downs his shot of rum, and hurriedly signals for another.]
The Federation's absolute no exception refusal to have any sort of extradition with
anyone is an extremely strong principle.
It's almost respectable, but it is mostly used by people like this to avoid arrest for all the blood that soaks their hands.
Collins was a brute - it wasn't exactly a surprise that he was a functional alcoholic, drowning in war like that.
I'm addicted to murder, and that's about the nicest way I can put it. You might say that's not technically true, that since they're already dead I'm not really killing. Horseshit; it's murder, and it's a rush like nothing else. Sure, I can dis those prewar mercenaries all I want, the 'Nam vets and Hell's Angels, but at this point I'm no different from them, no different from those jungle humpers who never came home, even when they did, or those World War II fighter jocks who traded in their Mustangs for hogs. You're living on such a high, so keyed up all the time, that anything else seems like death.
Being addicted to murder is one of the most pathetic excuses I've heard for being a war criminal, I'll be honest, but I can see how he came to it.
See, you can't claim to be an adrenaline junkie without admitting that you aren't just fighting a diminishing number of slouching corpses; there's not enough adrenaline there, obviously. So instead he pretended it was just the act of killing them that got his jollies off.
But hey, I don't know - maybe he really was addicted to the act of killing them.
I tried to fit in, settle down, make some friends, get a job and do my part to help put America back together. But not only was I dead, I couldn't think about anything else but killing. I'd start to study people's necks, their heads. I'd think, "Hmmmm, that dude's probably got a thick frontal lobe, I gotta go in through the eye socket." Or "hard blow to the occipital'd drop that chick pretty fast." It was when the new prez, "the Whacko"—Jesus, who the hell am I to call anybody else that?—when I heard him speak at a rally, I must have thought of at least fifty ways to bring him down.
I mean, this is just normal adjustment to not being in combat any more? If you agree with him here, if you read this and think it makes sense?
You're desensitised. You need therapy; you're not a murderous savant or anything, you're just traumatised. This is just trauma. Just get help.
I said good-bye and joined the Impisi, same name as the South African Special Forces. Impisi: Zulu for Hyena, the one who cleans up the dead.
We're a private outfit, no rules, no red tape, which is why I chose them over a regular gig with the UN. We set our own hours, choose our own weapons.
I'm sure you'll be stunned to hear that a South African mercenary outfit hiring cracked American soldiers? Not great dudes.
They're a proscribed organisation in most countries in the world - they were used a lot by the USSA to crush any dissidents within their Cape strongholds, which was always a little awkward, because it becomes very difficult to think you're the good guys when your allies are using mercenaries to gun down Black people. They then got deployed to Namibia and have been part of the total collapse of USSA forces in the area.
[He motions to what looks like a sharpened steel paddle at his side.]
"Pouwhenua"—got it from a Maori brother who used to play for the All Blacks before the war. Bad motherfuckers, the Maori. That battle at One Tree Hill, five hundred of them versus half of reanimated Auckland. The pouwhenua's a tough weapon to use, even if this one's steel instead of wood.
Aotearoa had an interesting war - they had a bad start, no doubt, but by and large recovered remarkably fast, even if it was a pretty "decentralised" recovery - they didn't have anything even approaching a central government until remarkably late, just bands of survivors of varying sizes, patchwork across the North and South Islands.
I don't know that they're going to have much success in just slowly drifting into direct democracy and collective ownership whilst remaining in the American camp, but if they can do it, more power to them, I guess?
I suppose "the American camp" is becoming something of a moot point, so there's that.
I still got hope. Sounds crazy, but you never know. That's why I save most of my fees instead of giving back to the host country or blowing it on who knows what. It can happen, finally getting the monkey off your back. A Canadian brother, "Mackee" Macdonald, right after clearing Baffin Island, he just decided he'd had enough. I hear he's in Greece now, some monastery or something.
Baffin Island being "clear" is funny, but other than that - Stan MacDonald has given interviews on this topic before, but I specifically did email him about Collins knowing his name and having a nickname for him?
Various American special forces served alongside Canadian light infantry units in the latter stages of Canada's sweep and clear operation, and on one occasion, Collins's unit was saved from a snowstorm by a Canadian patrol heading back to base, and they spent a few weeks cooped up in the barracks with the others; that was apparently the moment MacDonald knew he'd have to set an endpoint for his war, looking at these shark-eyed American soldiers practically thrumming with unspent violent energy.
Maybe there's still a life out there for me. Hey, a man can dream, right? Of course, if it doesn't work out that way, if one day there's still a monkey but no more Zack…
[He rises to leave, shouldering his weapon.]
Then the last skull I crack'll probably be my own.
On the third of December, 2033, T. Sean Collins was found in a bodybag in the walk-in fridge in the Impisi Company's base in Oranjemund when it was overrun. Despite the level of decomposition, the attending Medical Officer, Major Ana de Armas, judged that the cause of death was a bullet wound, likely from a rifle, from extremely close range, up through the jaw and into his brain. Time of death was broadly congruent with their orders to move further into Namibia and liquidate civilian resistance.
For what little credit the man deserves - and do remember, he was an indicted war criminal - when he was given an unambiguous order to go out and commit massacres, he did, actually, choose death first.
SAND LAKES PROVINCIAL WILDERNESS PARK, MANITOBA, CANADA
[Jesika Hendricks loads the last of the day's "catch" into the sled, fifteen bodies and a mound of dismembered parts.]
I try not to be angry, bitter at the unfairness of it all. I wish I could make sense of it.
Not to directly contradict her statement - and she is making a legitimate point about how resentment can poison your ability to heal, and God only knows I'm aware enough of that - but she absolutely should be angry. The US government, with malice and knowledge aforethought, decided to send as many of their population to die in the Canadian wasteland as they could get away with.
Anger is not an unreasonable response. She was betrayed, and it killed her parents.
I once met an ex-Iranian pilot who was traveling through Canada looking for a place to settle down. He said that Americans are the only people he's ever met who just can't accept that bad things can happen to good people.
Planning to start a study into whether Major Ahmed Farahnakian is the best and most convincing sarcastic in the world, or whether Americans are just uniquely credulous.
Last week I was listening to the radio and just happened to hear [name withheld for legal reasons]. He was doing his usual thing—fart jokes and insults and adolescent sexuality—and I remember thinking, "This man survived and my parents didn't." No, I try not to be bitter.
I get this. I look at some of the people who survived and I just feel this terrible, unfair anger and resentment in my chest, because my family didn't. She's not wrong.
But it isn't healthy - it isn't the fault of some radio shockjock that her parents died, and dwelling on the unfairness is just going to hurt, just going to retraumatise her.
Everyone alive still has scars from this war, and they're never going away.
TROY, MONTANA, USA
[Mrs. Miller and I stand on the back deck, above the children playing in the central courtyard.]
You can blame the politicians, the businessmen, the generals, the "machine," but really, if you're looking to blame someone, blame me. I'm the American system, I'm the machine. That's the price of living in a democracy; we all gotta take the rap.
This is such a bold start though, I have to say. She just outright says that this was her fault, not the fault of the Government or the military - its the same shit they prodded Jesika into saying - this isn't the fault of the government, they didn't fuck over their population, it was really everyone's fault, and everyone bears collective responsibility for it.
And they sort of drip in here the idea that like… Democracy is innate to the "American system" even if it means you've all got to take responsibility. It's a slow walk of "actually we don't have democracy but that's fine" to avoid upsetting people. Like boiling a frog.
I can see why it took so long for China to finally embrace it, and why Russia just said "fuck it" and went back to whatever they call their system now. Nice to be able to say, "Hey, don't look at me, it's not my fault." Well, it is. It is my fault, and the fault of everyone of my generation.
[She looks down at the children.]
Complicated riddle, right; is this the real unfiltered foreign policy opinion of an American suburban fascist, or is it what the State Department wanted to have her say?
I think it could be either - Americans remain touchy about the Russians having gone "back to whatever they call their system now," because they were really happy to proclaim that the Cold War had settled the debate, right? - but I'd lean towards them being her unfiltered opinions because she grants that China is a democracy, and the Americans, ah, really don't want to do that.
I wonder what future generations will say about us. My grandparents suffered through the Depression, World War II, then came home to build the greatest middle class in human history. Lord knows they weren't perfect, but they sure came closest to the American dream. Then my parents' generation came along and fucked it all up—the baby boomers, the "me" generation.
I will never understand the preoccupation with the "middle class" - it was the same in Britain, maybe even worse. Class analysis being whittled down to useless and uninformative insights on, like, income and income alone.
So far as it exists, the middle class is made up of educated proletarians despised by the bourgeoisie, and insecure petit-bourgeoisie who make up the footsoldiers of fascism.
I suppose the hangup is specifically about hearkening back to the "greatest generation" who "built" the American middle class, but I mean, the thing that built the American middle class was inheriting rule over most of the world because they effectively owned the previous hegemon outright.
This sort of nostalgia is always just nostalgia for when America was on top.
And then you got us. Yeah, we stopped the zombie menace, but we're the ones who let it become a menace in the first place. At least we're cleaning up our own mess, and maybe that's the best epitaph to hope for. "Generation Z, they cleaned up their own mess."
And this is just more of the American Junta's push for collective ownership of governmental fuckups. Worthless.
Glancing at the book some more, I'll probably only do one more interview this update.
Chongqing, China
[Kwang Jingshu does his final house call for the day, a little boy with some kind of respiratory illness. The mother fears it's another case of tuberculosis. The color returns to her face when the doctor assures her it's just a chest cold. Her tears and gratitude follow us down the dusty street.]
There's no getting around it - Public Health has, globally, crashed over the course of the war. There's some positives - the pharmaceutical companies largely have not survived, so a lot of patents aren't enforceable any more - but generally, it's really not good. Antibiotics are not
trivial to get, and major operations are riskier now than they have been in decades. It's just… bad.
It's comforting to see children again, I mean those who were born after the war, real children who know nothing but a world that includes the living dead. They know not to play near water, not to go out alone or after dark in the spring or summer. They don't know to be afraid, and that is the greatest gift, the only gift we can leave to them.
It is genuinely a novel experience, talking to children - a lot of my friends have started having them, and they're reaching the age where they can actually talk to you, now.
They have the attitude towards this that every adults strives for, but cannot reach - acceptance. Pure and unfettered; there are ghouls, but they are just part of life, like trucks on the road, or deep ponds, fast rivers. Something to be aware of, something to avoid, but not something to keep you up at night. Not something so alien and absurd, but so undeniably real that the fear of it can never leave.
It helps, actually! Grounds you in the knowledge that the world will continue.
We will continue.
Sometimes I think of that old woman at New Dachang, what she lived through, the seemingly unending upheaval that defined her generation. Now that's me, an old man who's seen his country torn to shreds many times over. And yet, every time, we've managed to pull ourselves together, to rebuild and renew our nation. And so we will again—China, and the world. I don't really believe in an afterlife—the old revolutionary to the end—but if there is, I can imagine my old comrade Gu laughing down at me when I say, with all honesty, that everything's going to be all right.
I wish I had the same confidence, but I'm working on it, at least.
I will probably call it here - I'll get the second half of Goodbyes out another time.
Make contact with your local leftist groups - I'm not going to list every leftist group in the world for y'all, but there'll be some about, I'm sure.
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE]; the fall of the HRE has not magically meant this isn't still needed.
Donate to a South American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist. Exciting to see the list get shorter for good reasons!
Donate to the Namibian Relief Fund [HERE] - the war's out of their country, but they aren't out of the woods, the country is pretty devastated.
Donate to the Red Cross [HERE] - wars are getting ugly across the world, they could use the help.
Oh, and if you're in Britain - Raise that scarlet standard high, comrade.
AN: Literally just one more update, I think. I'm so nearly done with this damn book.
