Ch 2 (Pt 2): How To Achieve Permanent Global Conventional War

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(Harrington)

The war, in reality, is a theatre of endless consumption. The three superpowers use the planet’s abundant resources to fuel a perpetual arms race, each side inventing newer, more extravagant weapons to outdo the other. Members of the Leader class participate in a kind of sport in which they compete to see who can reap the greatest profits out of stock and commodities price fluctuations, weapons sales and reconstruction contracts. The profiteers’ coffers swell as the lower classes labour to meet the ever-growing demand for raw materials, energy, logistics and manpower. There is really no point to it other than the preservation of the hierarchical social structure in all three superstates.

For the Infotech and BuilderHelper classes, however, the conflict is a tangible justification for their basic deprivation. The constant threat of attack, including occasional orchestrated acts of terrorism in residential and industrial districts, legitimizes rationing, curfews, and the allocation of most raw materials and provisions, ostensibly, to the war effort, while the lower civilian populace subsists on nutrient cubes and recycled waste water. The war narrative offers them a sense of purpose: we suffer because we are defending our religion and way of life. It transforms systemic near-poverty—what Leaders would consider a most bleak condition of penury—into into a story of noble sacrifice for the cause of spiritual and patriotic duty.

Kade pauses the drone’s movement for a moment to observe the charred remains of the terrorist cell we’ve just eliminated.

I’m thinking now, as I tend to do. I’m thinking about how this perfect system of perpetual war was engineered.

After the world improvements and the Earth Purge and consolidation of total world control, we had to create a system under which perpetual war against a real, capable, frightening enemy was possible. As anyone knows, war is by far the most efficient means of maintaining complete social and economic control in the hands of a tiny oligarchy.

War as a means of control is rivalled only by a “freedom” based social-political system that forces every political, social and economic issue into a “left vs right” popular political paradigm. The Prophet Of Old Quigley wrote, plausibly deniably, about this system of control. In the past, even worldwide health crises such as engineered disease outbreaks were forced, rather artificially, into this left vs right system. Such a system, once it has been internalized by the populace, allows governments to do things to their citizens that no clear-thinking person would otherwise agree to, no matter what their political outlook. On any proposed government action, roughly 50% of the people automatically oppose it, and 50% automatically agree with it, depending on which “side” is in power, doing the action. In that situation there is literally nothing to stop the government from proceeding with the action. Any people who wish to debate it one way or another only argue with the “other side” people who oppose them. They do not take action (other than “voting”) against the government.

But we needed a kind of war that didn’t instantly wipe out all command and control hubs along with their leaders. The newer weapons technology, even if deployed conservatively, could kill off all leadership in short order.

We had already carved the planet into the three competing spheres of influence roughly following the guidelines set forth by the great Prophet Of Old, Blair (also known as Orwell), and his book-within-a-book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by his fictional nom de plume, Emmanuel Goldstein. One difference, I think, is that large swath of the Southern region which is under the control of the Trans-Eurasian Federation. That’s the front we are visiting now. The disputed territory between the far south and our northern region allows ongoing conventional warfare to take place directly on the formerly “American” continent. People on this continent now share the experiences that the rest of the world, particularly the former Europe, dealt with for many generations – missile attacks, terrorist bombings, outright land invasions, and so forth, directly where they live.

Each sphere of influence became a de facto superstate. With great patience over many years, we hobbled the economy and, more importantly, the cultural cohesion of the erstwhile dominant Anglo-American sphere, while the other two states, especially Trans-Eurasia, caught up to be theoretically capable of holding their own in a total war scenario.

Then the hostilities began. Border conflicts, terrorist attacks, revenge attacks, blockades, spying and political intrigue, peace talks and betrayals, were guided, in a kind of open secret arrangement, by a World Controlling Authority pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The World Controlling Authority still exists, but it has never been an organization or official body of any sort. It has no elections or appointments or memberships or known families. It has no location. It never appears in public or in official news reports. It only exists as an unknown number of unknown people who make global decisions and agreements based on mutual trust and self-interest. It’s quite similar to the earliest plans for our world takeover laid out, and initially funded, by the great Prophet Of Old, Rhodes, and his famous Round Table. It’s all based on “handshake” agreements, if you will, that loosely or tightly guide world policy depending on what is needed to maintain equilibrium and hostilities.

The Controlling Authority’s decisions permeate the thought of each superstate’s highest authority, which in our case is the Supreme Council. In fact, members of each state’s version of the Supreme Council are commonly thought, privately within Leader circles, to be members of the World Controlling Authority. This is disputed by some Leaders who credibly doubt the possibility of religious leaders working the levers of geopolitical control.

But whatever. The larger purpose of this arrangement is simple: To preserve and protect the property of the elites. That property being the planet Earth and every thing and every creature on it. This ownership is maintained through the elites’ monopoly on political and social power. When, in some distant future, an extraterrestrial civilization, if there is such a thing, reaches Earth or Earthlings reach them, they will meet us, the owners and Leaders of our beautiful resource-rich planet.

Soon after the fighting started, the World Controlling Authority orchestrated a coordinated deployment of the newest fractional-orbital bombardment systems (FOBS) paired with hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs). Because these weapons can strike from any vector on extremely short notice and travel below the radar horizon, the early-warning systems of all three powers were rendered useless.

Each state launched a measured FOBS/HGV volley that entered a low-Earth-orbit fraction, then de-orbited and glided at Mach-5-plus toward a pre-selected high-value target in a neighbouring sphere. The strikes hit some important component of each state’s war machine: Anglo-America’s carrier strike group was vaporized in the Atlantic, Trans-Eurasia’s primary air bases at the edge of the Urals were reduced to rubble, and the Greater Asian Commonwealth’s massive underground missile storage complex in the Sichuan foothills was destroyed. The sudden loss of those strategic assets was said to have potentially crippled each state’s ability to project power. This forced an immediate response from all three.

Each superstate unleashed a “first strike” limited thermonuclear salvo aimed at key strategic and symbolic targets of its rivals, ostensibly to discourage further strikes and preserve a credible next-strike capability. No one knows precisely who struck first. Anglo-America detonated a low-yield warhead over Trans-Eurasia’s capital region, Trans-Eurasia struck Greater Asia’s central communications hub, and Greater Asia responded with a tactical nuclear blast on Anglo-America’s mainland logistics and power corridor. The exchanges were calibrated to inflict measured damage with no intention of having a full-scale war of annihilation. Nevertheless, mushroom clouds appeared close enough to major population centres to kill hundreds of millions, bringing the entire world to a state of physical and emotional devastation. This mode of depopulation, unlike the others, was obviously human-caused.

The catastrophe halted itself when the three super-governments, ostensibly under immense domestic and international client-state pressure, agreed to a cease-fire and convened a hurried summit. There they signed a comprehensive weapons-ban treaty that expressly prohibited the development, production, or deployment of any fractional-orbital or hypersonic weapons delivery systems. An intensive inspection regime was built into the accord. There are to this day scheduled drone-based open monitoring missions, on-site audits of aerospace facilities, and a shared ledger of component serial numbers, so that any deviation would trigger a joint boots-on-ground interdiction in a 2-against-1 scenario.

Publicly, the Treaty was hailed as a moral triumph, a guarantee that no future “orbital bomb” would ever again threaten the innocent. In reality, the ban served a different purpose.

By eliminating the only weapons capable of bypassing a state’s early-warning systems to easily destroy C2 infrastructure, the treaty forced the global strategic landscape back into the old “mutually assured destruction” paradigm: nuclear arsenals remained intact, their existence serving only as a strategic deterrent. A perpetual state of conventional conflict was now possible. Without the spectre of an instantaneous, un-containable orbital strike, the superstates could continue to fund endless tit-for-tat battles over an endless supply of disputed borders, resources, ideologies, or inventories of human resources. The disputes could simmer without progressing to total war, for fear of thermonuclear destruction.

This system will forever justify extreme wealth disparity and keep the lower classes in a constant, healthy state of vigilance and obedience. Any sense of injustice is directed at the Godless, murderous enemy. The war has become a kind of controlled bleed ensuring the elites’ grip on wealth and power will endure forever.