Victoria: A Novel of 4th Generation War

by Thomas Hobbes

  The television was covering the conference, live, and the other side was laying the groundwork for us as well as if we’d written the script. The speakers were a succession of whiney women and faggy men, all bemoaning this or that oppression and blaming the world’s ills on white males. The comments from the Hartland peanut gallery got increasingly nastier; we all felt like we’d gone through a worm-hole into a tour of the Inferno conducted by Catullus. The main sentiment seemed to be, “Why are we still putting up with this stuff?”

  By around 10:30, I began to fear the local crowd would go home before the action started. Just at the point when Farmer Corman said, “If I want chicken shit, I got plenty to shovel at home” and headed for the door, the picture changed.

  From the back of 105 Dartmouth, the camera showed Governor Kraft marching in the side door, to gasps, then boos, hisses and shouts of anger from the gutter worshipers. Bill's 300-pound bulk tossed those in his path aside like bumboats around a battleship as he climbed toward the stage. Grabbing the mic from some stingy-haired bitch reading a poem about making love with her Labrador, the governor bellowed, “Sit down and shut up!”

  They did. Auctoritas has that effect, even on the illegitimate.

  “Fellow revolutionaries,” were Kraft’s next words. Recovering quickly from their initial shock, a few of the snakes hissed at him.

  “You doubt that I am a revolutionary?” he replied to the hisses. “Oh, how very wrong you are. Very wrong indeed, as you will shortly learn.”

  “Now 'fellow', I confess, is merely a bit of polite rhetoric. After all, I cannot address you as 'ladies and gentlemen'. You would be offended, about which I care not a fig. But it would be untrue. You are neither ladies nor gentlemen. Considering how long you have coupled with demons, I'm not sure there is any humanity left in you at all.”

  No one was moving toward the door of the Hartland general store now. It was so quiet you could have heard a mouse fart. Like all effective leaders, Bill wore the masque of command well.

  “You see, I am not one of the beguiled,” Governor Kraft continued. “I know whence you come. I have studied your history. You are not descendants of the hippies, despite your bedraggled appearance. You are not the offspring of Quakers and Anabaptists, for when you say 'peace,' you mean 'war.' You did not grow from the Suffragettes, nor the civil rights movement, nor apostles of tolerance such as Roger Williams.”

  “For your father in Hell, no less yours than Lenin’s and Stalin’s and Mao’s, is none other than Karl Marx himself. Your poison, the poison of political correctness which you have striven these many years to inject into the Western bloodstream, is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms.”

  At this, one aged crone on the Dartmouth faculty, Professorette Mary Ucistah, realized the danger. The governor was about to unveil PC’s ultimate secret: where it came from and what it really was. She jumped to her feet and cried, “Come on, people, let’s shout this pig down. You know the chant: Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Know Who the People Hate!”

  Their eyes fixed on the professor, few television viewers noticed Bill look up slightly toward the rafters and raise his eyebrows. Ron read the signal correctly. 105 Dartmouth rang with one shot from a sniper rifle, and Ms. Ucistah's brains splattered across the backs of her colleagues. Everyone in the room froze.

  “Thank you for the courtesy of your attention,” Bill said quietly.

  “As I was saying, the sewage which you have poured for decades into the once-sweet grove of academe is Marxism, nothing less. The derivation is obvious. Like classical, economic Marxism, cultural Marxism is a totalitarian ideology. From Marxist philosophy, it derives its vision of a classless society–a society not of equal opportunity, but equal condition. Since that vision contradicts human nature, society will not accord with it, unless forced. So forced it will be. Thank God, you never got control of the power of the state, not in full. But on campuses like this one, where you did gain power, you made your totalitarian nature clear. Cultural Marxism was forced on everyone, and no dissent was allowed. Freedom of speech, of the press, even of thought were all eliminated. Anyone who challenged you, student or faculty or administer, was driven out.

  “Like economic Marxism, your cultural Marxism said that all history was determined by a single factor. Classical Marxism argued that factor was ownership of the means of production. You said that it was which groups – defined by sex, race, and sexual normality or abnormality – had power over which other groups.

  “Classical Marxism defined the working class as virtuous and the bourgeoisie as evil–without regard to what members of either class did. You defined blacks, Hispanics, feminist women, and homosexuals as good, and white men as evil–all, again, with no attention to anyone’s behavior.

  “Classical Marxists, where they obtained power, expropriated the bourgeoisie and gave their property to the state, as the representative of the workers and peasants. Where you obtained power, you expropriated the rights of white men and gave special privileges to feminists, blacks, gays, and the like–Marcuse's revolutionary class.

  “Classical Marxists justified their actions through a warped economics. You justified your actions through a deliberate warping of the language: deconstruction. Deconstruction claimed to prove that any text, past or present, illustrated white male oppression of everyone else, just as economic Marxist analysis claimed to prove the exploitation of the working class. Deconstruction was in fact just political scrabble. Compared with it, classical Marxist economics was at least intellectually challenging. But then, most of you never had minds.

  “But that is not all I know about you,” the Governor continued. “I have visited, through history, the fetid holes where your cultural Marxism grew. I have read Gramsci, the Italian Communist who pioneered the translation of Marxism from economics into culture as early as the 1920s. I know Adorno, and his Frankfurt School that in the 1930s crossed Marx with Freud. I have studied Critical Theory, the product of that school that carried the bacillus into American universities. I know the whole, sordid story of your sorry ancestry among the exiled refuse of European Marxism, the story of how failed intellectuals worked for what is now almost a century to stab our culture in the back.

  “But as I said at the outset, I too am a revolutionary. My revolution—our revolution, here in the Northern Confederation—is against you. Marxist revolutionaries of every yellow stripe, wherever they obtained power, brought revolutionary justice. Anyone or anything that furthered their revolution was just, anyone or anything that opposed it was unjust. And the unjust were liquidated, by the millions.

  “Now, by your own standard, you will be judged. You have opposed our revolution, so you stand condemned.

  “You are condemned, let me hasten to add, not by me alone, nor merely by those who live today in our Confederation. Your jury is every man and woman who for three thousand years has labored and fought and died for Western culture, the culture you sought to sacrifice to your own pathetic egos.

  “And that jury’s sentence is death.”

  At those words, the doorways to 105 Dartmouth filled with our men. Each wore a white surplice with the red Crusader cross emblazoned on a shield over the heart. Each held a Roman gladius, the short, sharp stabbing sword of the Roman legionary, in his right hand. Through the doorway closest to the stage, a choir of monks filed in. Mounting the stage, they began chanting the Dies Irae. At that signal, the soldiers set to their work.

  The hall held 162 politically correct luminaries–163 if you count Ms. Ucistah’s corpse. The work of slaughter went quickly. In less than five minutes of screams, shrieks and howls, it was all over. The floor ran deep with the bowels of cultural Marxism, and at least in the Northern Confederation, it was dead.

  As intended, the television showed the whole thing, the faces frozen first in terror, then in death. It was not a pretty picture, even to those of us who had seen war. As the cries turned to moans, and the moans were replaced with nothing but an
occasional twitch of a limb unconnected to any living brain, the Dies Irae too softened until the choir was silent.

  Then, Governor Kraft, who had stood like some human Matterhorn overlooking the carnage, moving and unmoved, turned and walked slowly, as if in solemn procession, toward the door. As he did so, the choir broke again into song, now in a major key, strong and soaring: the Non Nobis. “Not to us, Oh Lord, but to Thee be given the glory.”

  In the Hartland general store, I had kept one eye on the television and the other on my neighbors. Perhaps my own ambivalence made me overly sensitive, but Kraft’s massacre was a high-risk move, and public reaction would determine whether it worked or blew up in his face.

  State o' Mainers are born with poker faces and stuck tongues, so at first it was hard to judge. But as the massacre proceeded, I began to notice a few thin smiles, the sign a Yankee likes what he's seeing.

  After Kraft left the stage in 105 Dartmouth, Farmer Corman reached up and turned off the set. “Waal,” he said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I thinks that deserves a toast. Here’s a jug of my best cider, which I brought in to sell, and I see some glasses theah on the shelf.” The glasses and the jug quickly went round.

  “Heah’s to our Governor, the State of Maine, and our own Johnny Rumford, who’ve had the courage to do what we should have done a long time ago.” As the glasses were raised, a kid in back shouted “Hip, hip, hurray!” Three cheers rang out, and I bowed my thanks for good neighbors and a people who deserved their liberty.

  Bill Kraft had gambled and won. No one in the Confederation regretted the loss of the treasonous intellectual scum who, perhaps more than anyone else, bore the responsibility for what had happened to the old USA. But I felt there was still some unfinished business, and a few days later, back in Augusta, I asked Bill if he would stop by my boarding house lodgings some evening so we could talk.

  He came on a cold November night. Knowing that the route to Bill’s heart and brain lay through his stomach, I had stopped by Father Dimitri’s to wheedle something special. Not only did the good priest provide the tin of caviar I had hoped for, he threw in a few bottles of vintage Port, Bill’s favorite drink. “Just lubricating the wheels of government,” he said smiling as I thanked him and his Tsar for their generosity. He knew one good bottle often accomplished more than many memos.

  Bill arrived around eight and caught sight of the sideboard as he was shucking off his field-gray greatcoat. “I’m pleased to see the General Staff has been maintaining a productive relationship with the Russians,” he said jovially.

  “Tanks and caviar are a happy combination,” I replied.

  “Especially when it's Sevruga,” Bill added, quickly pouring himself a glass of Port and diving into the tin.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve gotten your appetite back,” I joked.

  “Nothing picks up the spirits better than a good massacre,” he mumbled through a mouthful of black pearls. “An ‘Un-rest Cure,’ you know.”

  “Having a bit of Saki with our caviar?”

  “Reginald would approve, I’m sure,” he almost purred. Bill’s ecstasies, like his rages, were something of an art form.

  Seeing an opportunity to turn the conversation the way I wanted it to go, I asked, “I wonder how many of the young men growing up today in the Northern Confederation will ever have a chance to read Saki?”

  “Not many, I guess,” Bill replied. “That’s always a problem with revolutions. You lose a lot of good things too.”

  “Is it time to start getting some of them back?” I asked.

  “What do you have in mind?” he said.

  “A real university. You know what that is. It’s a place where people study Latin and Greek, read Aristotle and Cicero and Thomas Aquinas, learn Logic and Rhetoric, and come to appreciate the classics of our English language–Jane Austin and Chesterton and Tolkien and, perhaps, even our friend Saki.”

  “I would like to see that too,” Bill said. “But can you read Chesterton on an empty stomach?”

  “Who was it that said, 'If I have money, I buy books, and if there is any left over, I buy food and clothes?'”

  “Virgil, I think,” he answered. “But I'm not sure our fellow citizens are Virgils.”

  “Why don't we ask them?”

  “You mean a referendum?”

  “Exactly. Remember the first truth about modern war: you have to trust the troops.”

  “True enough,” the Governor said. “And you have to take risks. The risk here is that if it’s voted down, it may be hard later to bring the issue up again.”

  Bill chewed thoughtfully for a while as he pondered my idea. “OK, I’ll do it,” he decided. “I’ll make the proposal to the other governors, and I’ll campaign for it in public. If we lose, we lose. If we win, we’ll be on the road to rebuilding our culture. To me, that’s ultimately what it’s all about, everything we are doing.”

  The other governors agreed the people should decide, and the vote was held on December 24th, 2029. The citizens of the Northern Confederation decided to give the future a Christmas present. The measure passed with 63 percent of the vote.

  There was a general feeling that since Dartmouth College saw the death of the old, ideologized, corrupted education, it should also be the place classical education was reborn. Besides, we wanted a college devoted to teaching undergraduates, not a research university.

  From every corner of the Confederation, real scholars emerged from hiding, hiding they’d been driven into by cultural Marxism, and offered to teach, even though the salary was small. Many had no PhD; their work was their credentials. Most proved dedicated and effective teachers.

  Autumn, 2030, once again saw students matriculating. The number was small—there were no stipends this time—but they were earnest. They came for knowledge and understanding, not a sheepskin. Small farms and factories cared little about degrees. At least in the N.C., civilization was returning.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Following the Dartmouth massacre, life became pretty quiet in the Northern Confederation. I had given up hoping the war was over. But gradually, as things stayed peaceful, I came to think life had again taken me by surprise. Maybe it was over, at least for us.

  It was hard to call it peace. In the 21st century, a nation lived on guard every moment or it didn’t live very long. Border control was as necessary as food or water or air. One moment’s inattention, one contaminated refugee or shipping container slipping through, could mean death for thousands through a genetic bomb.

  We still has some disaffected folks at home, Deep Greeners, cultural Marxists, animal rightsers and the like, but they kept a low profile. We’d made it clear what would happen to them if they didn’t. Besides, like everyone else, they were busy trying to eat, stay warm, and maybe make a little money.

  Our poverty continued to cleanse us of our sins, as the Dark Ages had cleansed Europe of the sins of the late Roman Empire. Consumerism, materialism, careerism, and the “me first” attitude of early 21st century America faded before the demands and rewards of real life. People began to see our Shaker economy as something good. Plain living strengthened old virtues and revived honest pleasures, like the smell of a fresh-mowed field of hay and a cow’s kiss on a frosty morn.

  Summer and winter, one thing grew stronger: Christian faith. We had some Jews, too, of course, and they were welcome. And each place still had its town atheist and village idiot. But our deep roots were Christian, and they were not touched by the frost. On the contrary, with the tares frozen, faith sprouted everywhere. Catholic or Protestant, high church or low, made no difference. We all knew what we shared was more important than what we differed about.

  This was real Christianity, too, not social gospel or social club Christianity. It was Christianity that changed the way people thought and lived. No longer was this world the most important. It was the place where people got ready for the world to come, through self-sacrifice, serving others, and obeying God’s laws be
cause they loved God. Like our wise medieval ancestors, we were learning to put beatitudine before felicitas. Being saved was more important than being happy.

  It was clear we would never turn back to the vulgar carnival that was late 20th and early 21st century life. But being human, we did hope for a somewhat easier time of it, for hot water and frequent trains and the power to run machines that made things we could sell.

  Here, the Christian virtue of patience stood us well. The great project to dam the Bay of Fundy was moving forward. When it was complete, we knew we would have an abundance of white coal: electricity. With plentiful, cheap, clean energy, we could be prosperous despite our lack of most other resources, so long as we worked hard and maintained our morals. Switzerland isn't poor.

  When in the Spring of 2031 the former Canadian provinces east of Quebec asked to join the Northern Confederation, our people voted yes. The Brunswickers, Labradorans, PEIers, and Newfies shared our faith and morals, language and culture, and would be assets despite their current poverty. Our economies would be integrated by the electrical grid anyway, so we felt we might as well make it official.

  The reception of the former Canadians on July 4th, 2031 completed the Northern Confederation. We had reached what Mr. MacKinder would have called our natural limits. Unlike in the 19th century, those limits were now marked not by great rivers or towering ranges of mountains or uncrossable deserts, but by chaos.

  To see how lucky we were in the N.C., all we had to do was peer over our southern border, into what had been Pennsylvania and New Jersey.