Shooting Eros - The Emuna Chronicles: Complete Boxset: Books 1 - 3

by Benjamin Laskin

  These Americans petitioned for a return to limited government, free enterprise, and the rights guaranteed by the Founding Fathers’ Constitution. They complained that they just wanted to be “left the hell alone,” and that they were sick and tired of being treated like common criminals. They said that they were fed up with being told what they could own, use, or do, what they could eat, drink, or drive, and through state and media-enforced political correctness, what was permissible to say, believe, or even think.

  Tens of millions of Americans refused to submit to the government’s insistence that “regulation means freedom,” and that freedom means an even bigger, more encompassing government. They hated what had become of their schools, their culture, their health care, their military, and their Constitution and Bill of Rights. These Americans had also had it with the dumping of billions of their hard-earned dollars into the coffers of ungrateful, tyrannical regimes around the world that hated their guts, attacked their embassies, and kidnapped and murdered their fellow citizens.

  According to the report, despite the federal government using executive orders, the Justice Department, the IRS, the EPA, the NSA, and dozens of other bureaucratic entities to target or intimidate any individual or group that opposed it, the liberty movement remained determined, and grew steadily.

  The corridors of power found in this menace to their eminence the one thing the two major parties could unite on—the need to relentlessly and contemptuously mock, disparage, and browbeat “the terrorists” who were threatening their authority and domination.

  As the ruling class and their establishment politicians droned on about how they were going to wisely manage the huge, bloated bureaucracies that they had created for “the good of the people,” tens of millions of these “orphaned voters,” as they referred to themselves, responded by calling for the elimination of these very bureaucracies that had become the politicians’ bread and butter.

  The report told that when states such as California and Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, Michigan and Massachusetts came begging to the federal government for bailouts, and argued along with various special interest groups that they were “too big to fail,” fiscally disciplined towns, cities, and counties took umbrage, and rebelled. They boldly declared that they would no longer pay for the extravagances and arrogance of their fellow countrymen. Hundreds of rural small towns and cities threw off the shackles of their state’s capitals and metropolises, cities that a more traditional America felt had been coercing and tyrannizing them for decades.

  The once iconic map of the U.S. began to crack and break apart into a patchwork of leagues and alliances. The names of the original fifty states remained, but not the borders they once represented. The fifty states became the five hundred city-states, based mostly on counties within the disintegrated republics. The names of those counties often became the name of the new city-state.14

  Note 14: In order to help pay down the country’s astronomical debt, portions of Hawaii and Alaska were sold to Japan and China, respectively.

  Eventually, said the report, a group of twelve city-state governors, led by the governor of the largest of the Texan city-states, banded together to announce that they were going to secede from the union, and reconstitute as a new, albeit smaller Texas. They complained that the federal leviathan had become unrecognizable from the government envisioned by the Founding Fathers.

  “A government that was meant to be innocuous has become malevolent,” declared their leader. “A government intended to be limited, unlimited. A government created to protect liberty, now spends its every working minute instituting tyranny!” Their motto was: “United we fall, divided we stand a fighting chance.”

  They formed new governments based on the same principles as those at the country’s establishment—small, limited government, free enterprise, and the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.

  Soon afterwards, the Texan plan began to replicate itself around the country, with the seceding counties merging into reconstructed states with new, often amoeba-shaped borders.

  In time, these reborn states began to form ‘Federations’ or ‘Leagues’ based upon economic, geographic, and cultural ties. Ultimately, these new coalitions allied with other like-minded Federations and Leagues. Many individuals and families that had strong disagreements with the newly formed governments left. They were replaced, however, by an equal number of people from elsewhere around America.

  In short, explained the report, there were now essentially two Americas. The division was not based on race or rich and poor. It was a cultural divide. In just over a decade, six new mini-Americas were born, and among them two different coalitions.

  One coalition was made up of The Northeast Progressive Federation (NPF), The West Coast Progressive Federation (WPF), and The Great Lakes Progressive Federation (GPF). The other coalition was The Southern Liberty Alliance (SLA), The Southwest Freedom Federation (SFF), and The Midwest Independence League (MIL).

  To accomplish all of this, new borders were drawn to best reflect and integrate the ideological makeup of these new countries. The migration had actually begun in the previous decades, when millions of citizens, representing billions of dollars in business and tax revenue, began to exit heavily taxed states for fiscally friendlier places.

  The trot turned to a stampede when city after city, from Stockton, Oakland, and San Bernardino to Detroit, Scranton, Salem, Providence, and Puerto Rico declared bankruptcy, and economic collapse and secession seemed imminent. The biggest population swaps in the country’s history took place.

  Despite the large movement of persons, however, millions of nonplused citizens decided to stay put and play wait and see. Either they did not want to split from their families, or were simply too timid, indifferent, or lazy to make the challenging move.

  Within a few years the choice to leave was taken away from those in the NPF and WPF. The borders were essentially sealed, and leaving became too problem-riddled and expensive, though a trickle did manage to escape through an underground railroad established by certain groups in the SLA, SFF, and MIL known collectively as “Drew Brigades,” or simply, “Drews,” named after their deceased founder, a man by the name of Andrews.

  Washington took none of this in stride. The president of the once great country threatened to send troops, bombers, and predator drones, and by now had little difficulty persuading the majority of the horror-stricken congress to get on board.

  Likewise, due to decades of military purges where hundreds of admirals, generals, and other high-ranking officers had been replaced with more politically correct presidential yes-men, the military too came out in favor of punishment.

  What the establishment didn’t count on, the report detailed, was the huge number of lower ranking military men and women who were appalled by the decision.

  Hundreds of colonels, majors and captains, as well as the majority of special forces, who were as sick of their commanding officers as the public was of their own political elites, resigned in protest, and along with their retired brothers, joined the rebels, lending them their experience and expertise. Many had long considered their commanders—both military and civilian—political toadies, sell-outs, and even traitors, and now was the time to demonstrate their disgust.

  Furthermore, the report explained, the majority of soldiers serving in the military were from the very places where the secession movements were strongest. They refused to carry out the president’s orders, making it clear that they would not fire upon their fellow Americans.

  Numerous small battles and skirmishes did occur, and thousands of Americans did die, but enough of the establishment elite running Washington were in fact so glad to be rid of the “detestable rubes and hayseeds,” that the president and his cabinet decided to let the “knuckle-dragging, intolerant halfwits” go with a flourishing sweep of their middle fingers.

  Instead of more bullets and blood, they spewed insults and self-righteous indignation; in place of more bombs and br
utality, curses and castigation would suffice. The Washington brain trust satisfied itself with the rationalization that now, finally, absent all the pesky opposition from the troglodytes among them, they could usher in their New World Utopia, sans impediment.

  The report turned to other corners of the world.

  The vacuum left behind the American retreat was not filled by a new superpower, as many experts and commentators had predicted. Rather, it was unbridled chaos that rushed into the gap.

  China, having been considered by many sophisticates as the new model for economic growth, and the engine that would drive the economies of the 21st century, sputtered to a halt after it was realized that the country had been cooking the books for decades, had trillions in bad loans, and was in much worse shape than economists, sociologists, and historians dared to admit.

  The country disintegrated into unending civil strife. Its decades-long one-child policy with its preference for boys only exacerbated the situation. Hundreds of millions of virile men who could not find wives channeled their sexual and economic frustrations into civil unrest. The authoritarian regime clamped down hard on the populace, but the brief whiff of relative freedom it had sniffed in better days was like pure oxygen to a match. The countryside flared up in rebellion, and it wasn’t long before the cities, cut off from food, began to suffer.

  Similarly, the report recounted, soaring food prices and energy shortages tumbled one autocratic regime after another throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, leading to bloody civil wars, and even genocide. Most governments were replaced with yet another autocratic regime or despot.

  Meanwhile, Russia, that massive, resource-rich country that throughout its long, woebegone history could never devise any government but one corrupt, iron-fisted regime after another, also buckled and became a rotting corpse plagued by alcoholism, drug abuse, AIDS, tuberculosis, mob warfare, Islamic insurgencies, and one of the lowest birthrates on the planet. As the Russian bear rolled over in misery and desolation, it smothered many of the satellite countries that were once a part of its heyday.

  The report turned to the situation in Europe.

  The worldwide economic disaster also shattered the European Union. As was Europe’s wont, however, the dissolution of the EU was accompanied by far more blood and brutality than that of the US. Struggles between Leftists, Nationalists, and Islamists ripped the continent apart. Ironically, the Europeans who had pressed longest and hardest for a borderless world found itself laced with more borders than anywhere else on the planet.

  Separatist movements flared up everywhere. Scotland broke away from the United Kingdom, soon followed by Wales and Northern Ireland. In Spain, the regions of Andalusia, Basque, Catalonia, Aragon, Galicia, Asturias and the Canary Islands all said adiós. Italy fragmented too, led by the secession of Venice and the Veneto region, quickly followed by Lombardy, Trentino, and Sardinia. Flanders in Belgium; Bavaria in Germany; Brittany, Corsica, and Savoy in France, and a dozen other regions of Europe also declared their independence.

  Peppering this chaotic bouillabaisse of self-determination and autonomy, dozens of self-proclaimed Muslim ‘kingdoms’ also materialized across Europe. After more than a decade of violent demonstrations, terror, and civil wars, the exhausted continent settled into heavily fortified sectors and city-states.

  As bad as things were in places like Russia, China, Europe, Africa and elsewhere, the presentation continued, the Middle East suffered even more.

  The report spoke of something called “the Arab Spring” near the start of the century, and how it never materialized into the freedom movement that foreign policy experts and the media originally claimed it characterized.

  The leadership that emerged during the so-called democracy movement proved to be as intolerant and strong-armed as the regimes the revolutions replaced. As world instability spread, the new governments became more rigid and dictatorial, all in the name of Allah and sharia.

  Internecine wars and power struggles that started in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, broke out across the Middle East, leaving the regions’ already frail economies decimated. The vast oil fields—the only real sources of income for a number of the nations—were reduced to blazing cauldrons.

  This, in turn, sank world markets and caused the price of oil to skyrocket, further destabilizing the world. With the destruction of their oil power, those ruling families who didn’t manage to flee, lost their heads, after losing their hands and feet. The countries broke up and reverted to tribal alliances based on religious sects. The radicals took over completely and made jihad their number one export.

  In an attempt to find a common denominator to explain their woes, the fractured Islamic world of the Middle East momentarily united in a massive coalition to attack the tiny country of Israel, to “wipe it off the map.”

  The country’s very existence in serious jeopardy, Israel’s calls for help to the international community fell on deaf ears. Scores of UN resolutions were passed against the Jewish State, and as had happened during previous threats, the country was isolated, boycotted, and left to perish.

  The result, the report continued, became known as ‘The Pesach War,’ as the country was attacked on the Jewish holiday of Passover.

  Facing oblivion, the beleaguered nation gathered up four thousand years of grit, and stubbornly repelled the combined attack of its neighbors and legions of jihadi warriors from around the world. But unlike previous wars when the country gave in to international pressure for a cease-fire, this time the furious Israelis ignored them.

  Having suffered an historic number of casualties and damage, they were determined to punish the aggressors so that it would be decades before they thought of trying something like that again. The nation miraculously survived the tumult, bloodied but unbowed. It was also now more than double the size.

  The report described how the nation regrouped and rebuilt under the skilled guidance of a handsome forty-nine-year-old, tough-skinned, brilliant, but mild-mannered prime minister named Ephraim Ben-Yosef—a decorated ex-commando, successful businessman, and a Torah scholar with a law degree, doctorates in both engineering and finance, and fluent in five languages.

  Prime Minister Ben-Yosef enacted sweeping free-market, judicial, and legislative reforms. Refusing to go down the same futile road of his predecessors, Ben-Yosef quickly annexed the new territories and settled them with the influx of some five million Jews from around the world who were fleeing both anti-Semitism and shattered economies. Under Ben-Yosef’s adroit and inventive hand, the country rebounded and was emerging as a veritable superpower.

  The latter, the report went on to explain, was due in part to discoveries of vast amounts of natural gas and oil off the coasts of Haifa and Netanya, in fields known as Tamar, Leviathan, Myra and Sara, among others, as well as huge oil reserves equal to those of Saudi Arabia, tapped from the shale rock of the Shefla basin south of Jerusalem and from beneath the Golan Heights. These oil and gas fields came on line just as the oil fields in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and other major energy-producing countries were going up in smoke.

  Natural gas and oil, as well as advances in other energy and water technologies, which the country was able to develop and export, turned the country into an energy titan. After almost a century of lamenting that Moses had brought the Israelites to the only scrap of land in the Middle East without any natural resources, it ended up that Moses knew where he was going all along.

  Reforms and an energy windfall, however, were just part of the country’s newfound success. Perhaps more important was the inpouring of the millions of new immigrants. Scarcely a Jew remained in Europe or Central and South America. Even a third of American Jews had picked up and left.

  The newcomers brought with them an injection of creativity and expertise in every field of endeavor, dwarfing even that gained by the mass influx of Russian Jews near the end of the 20th century. Moreover, having maintained a 3.0 birthrate—by far the highest in the developed world, and the only
one above the necessary 2.1 replacement rate—the nation remained young and vigorous.

  Other than three of the six American Federations (the Southern Liberty Alliance, the Southwest Freedom Federation, and the Midwest Independence League), a few European city-states, and countries like Israel, Australia, New Zealand, a crippled but rejuvenating Japan, and parts of Canada, most of the world was a steaming stew of communism, fascism, socialism, dictatorship, mafia-like oligarchies, radical Islam, anarchists and pirates. This mercurial, mingle-mangling slumgullion, however, was still very powerful, and as driven by ideology as ever. For millions of people, the dream of a one-world heaven never faded.

  The ‘One Worlders,’ as they became known, headquartered at the United Nations in the NPF, continued to work tirelessly to undermine those who opposed their utopian enterprise. All that stood in their way, they believed, were the nations and leagues that emerged from the “lost decades” relatively strong and independent.

  Grace clicked off the presentation and turned to Captain Volk. “Pretty grim,” she said.

  “Has the Academy seen this?”

  “Not yet. I will present it before Judge Minos tomorrow.”

  “It won’t make a whit of difference. They are throwing everything they have into the Solow Accords and appeasement.”

  “What would you have us do, Captain?”

  “Fight.”

  “But, Captain, the yetzers have us outnumbered millions to one. And now you inform me that the Anteros cult is far more powerful than we thought. Furthermore, this so-called Swerver—if she exists at all—I’m told has been neutralized and is out of play. Your battle cry would be a suicide mission.”

  “We are going down either way,” Volk said. “We can go down in shame and humiliation, or in honor and glory. We can go as cowards, or we can go as mighty angels of valor. We can continue to be a defamation of God’s name, or we can die sanctifying it, and hope for forgiveness.”