John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“Why you going to so much trouble to convince us?” Jenkins asked.

“I need…” Steinfeld hesitated, looking for the right words. “There are men who are like seeding crystals. You drop them into the solution, and other crystals form around them. I need such men. To form the… the core of a much stronger resistance cell. And Smoke here”—Steinfeld gestured helplessly—“he has an uncanny sense for finding such people. He found Voortoven, and Yukio. And he has recommended you.” Steinfeld shrugged.

“I’m not sure I should be flattered,” Hard-Eyes said.

Steinfeld said, “Do you want to hear the rest of the… propaganda?”

“Go ahead.”

When a man tells another man a story, much of the story is untold. That is, it’s not told out loud. The unspoken part is the freight of secondary meanings and resonances attached to the spoken thrust of the story. It’s a part of the story already understood by the two men. Part of their mutual context.

What follows is what Steinfeld told Hard-Eyes. And here we speak aloud what wasn’t spoken at all.

Smiling Rick Crandall. He was one of the youngest Fundamentalist ministers in the country. By the time he was twenty he had his own internationally syndicated program. He was exporting Christian Coalition beliefs and values to the rest of the world, and he was succeeding because he, and his associates, kept tying it in with wealth. Decline or not, America still had the rep for being the wealthiest country. And Crandall kept saying it was his religion and his way of life that made it that way. Predinger bought the station that ran Crandall’s show, tripled the man’s salary, and gave him a new assignment. He was to be a sort of SAISC goodwill ambassador to the governments of foreign nations, and to other groups who were not government but were sympathetic to the Second Alliance’s aims. That was Crandall’s job, ostensibly.

But the truth is, Crandall was a recruiter. He used his international fame, or simple bribery, to gain access to people high in governments, people on the fringe of governments, people in opposition to governments. And he recruited them into a new branch of the Alliance. This was called the AntiTerrorist Lobby. And it was a cover. It might have been more appropriately named SAISC Army Recruiting. Crandall was a recruiter for a new, multinational military and political machine. The men inducted into the machine used their influence to legislate a fund that would make their nation an official SA member. They would pay the SA to help them control their domestic terrorism—sometimes real terrorism, just as often it was mere dissent—and they agreed to contribute resources and manpower for the control of international terrorism …

Each “member nation” provided men—reassigned from the military—for indoctrination in the SA’s Worldview Camps. The first and imperative goal of the operators of the Worldview Camps was to instill an absolute and undying loyalty to the SA in all “processees.” The processees were taught—brainwashed—to regard the SA as their true father and mother, their sovereign nation, and, most importantly, their link to God Himself. There was to be no possibility of sending men out for Alliance “actions” who were not genuinely loyal to Alliance aims. The Second Alliance had a public credo and a private credo. The private credo was the core of its real identity. It comes in onion-layers. Those who were first-layer processees in the Second Alliance heard a kind of standard Christian Born Again rhetoric. But in the second layer, the Initiates hear a kind of Identity Church theology preached. It is, in fact, a more refined version of the Christian revisionism taught by the Kingdom Message organizers who declared themselves to the public about 1983. That’s about when they began to rob banks and armored cars to finance their acquisition of automatic weapons and the other toys of right-wing “survivalists.” They called themselves “the Church of Jesus Christ Christian” or “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord” or “the Aryan Nations” and they held that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, was in fact of Aryan descent; that Great Britain and the United States were the true promised land, the true Israel referred to in the Bible; that blacks and other minorities were mongrel peoples who had no souls and were of no greater spiritual worth than animals. And they maintained that Hitler has been unfairly vilified by the Jews; that the Holocaust never happened. In 1985 there were about 2,500 people in such organizations in the United States—chiefly in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Many of them were recruited out of prisons, always hotbeds of racism… Supposedly there were “several hundred-thousand” sympathizers scattered across the country. Some of the more enterprising members of the Identity Church realized that they looked like country yokels, which kept people who were otherwise sympathetic from taking them more seriously. So they formed a secret society, called the Secret Aryan Fraternity. They linked up with more public groups, like the Georgia-based Council of Conservative Citizens. Groups like these were paranoiacally cautious about publicity, and security. And, very carefully, the SAF and friends began to integrate their people into urban and suburban middle-class society; into colleges and country clubs and lodges and offices. They began to support political candidates, or mount their own candidacies—without ever honestly declaring their actual political stand. They played moderate or simple conservative—when in reality they were beyond merely “conservative.” They were social time-release capsules, moles, of sheer racial hatred. Predinger is believed by some to have been one of the SAF. It’s never been proven. It may be just coincidence that the SAF and the SAISC share the same first two initials. But it has been determined that Crandall’s father was a member of The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord… Summary: The SA’s general theological creed, its public creed, is ordinary Christian fundamentalism, with no overt racist tinge. Its Initiates are privy to the Identity Church’s Jesus-as-Aryan hardcore-racist variation. Initiates administer the general membership. The Initiates in turn are governed by the Second Circle.

The Second Circle, the inner ruling council of the SA, is reported to have a more intellectualized racist vision that doesn’t insist on a belief in Jesus’ Aryan heritage. Jesus, for the Second Circle, is simply an arbitrary symbol chosen to represent genetic purity. The DNA molecule itself, twisted into a circle, is the Lord’s halo…

Politically, the SA’s private credo was, simply and bluntly: fascism.

And we are not talking fascist here as a left-wing dilettante calls a war-hawk “a fascist,” as an insulting term, a mere pejorative. We are talking about definitive fascism. Predinger and Crandall were both, privately, admirers of classic fascist and racist demagogues, including Mussolini and Hitler himself. They were anti-Semitic and anti-black…

“Anti-black?” Hard-Eyes interrupted. “You said they recruited partly from third-world countries.”

Dreamily, almost offhandedly, Smoke said, “Actually, they deceived certain black African military dictatorships into providing money and other forms of support. But they kept them in the dark about the real SA political goals. And they didn’t recruit soldiers from black countries.”

Jenkins looked at Smoke in amazement, hearing Smoke’s pedantic side emerge. A scholar hidden in rags and grime.

“The third-world recruits—” Steinfeld began. Then he broke off, listening. Looking at the ceiling.

They all heard it. The rumble and drone of a jumpjet nearby. The Armies—searching for the NR, maybe…