John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“‘Much of a threat!’ They’re running France. Germany now. Italy. England soon ”

“England? I was just there. Travel lines are beginning to open, I didn’t see any jackboots. Certainly no concentration camps.”

“In England, it’s just beginning. Why do you think no outsiders can travel in France, Italy—”

“They say it’s because of the aftermath of the war. No functional airports yet, cholera, various other diseases, bands of hungry desperadoes—”

“Since when did those kinds of restrictions ever stop media coverage before? What happened to ‘fearless war correspondents’?”

“Look, we’re wasting a lot of good material here. We should be getting this on camera. Let’s see where it takes us, okay?” Hand’s most open, winning expression. It bounced off Smoke like a bubble, and Hand let it slide. His face went blank. “Yes or no?”

Smoke snorted. “Let’s do it. Maybe you’ll see…”

Hand nodded to the camera technicki, then raised a hand for a pause. He took out a hand mirror, checked his media-flesh and his makeup, put the mirror away, then pointed at the camera.

“Go, “the technicki said.

Hand conducted the interview in a soft combination of phrasings for A and C viewers. “Mr. Smoke, the public relations division of your organization claims that”—he glanced down at a printout on his lap—“there’s an ongoing apartheid throughout Western Europe fast becoming a genocidal Holocaust.” He looked up at Smoke. “World War Two Redux?”

“It’s not a replay of World War Two, obviously, except in the genocidal sense—and even there it’s different. Its ideological foundations are more a distortion of sociobiology than what we knew as old-style Fascist racism. Then again, to some extent it’s rooted in an extreme form of Christian fundamentalism. And as for its execution, it’s enormously broader. It applies to vast numbers of Arab and Persian and Pakistani immigrants, to Hindus and Muslims from India, to blacks and gays and Jews. Of course, more people than Jews were persecuted by Nazis during the Second World War, but the scale—”

“Whoa, chill out long enough to explain to us how something like this could go on unreported under the noses of the governments and media of Western Europe, of American forces who are still stationed along the front of the war—and most of all, Israel—”

“It hasn’t gone on unreported. It’s there on the alternative stations, on social media, a great many places. Mainstream media is treating it as a conspiracy theory. But that’s not what it is. We’ve got statements from hundreds of soldiers, including fifty-two officers, complaining of the ‘apartheid methods’ of the Second Alliance and SPOES…”

“The ‘Self Policing Organization of European States… ’”

“Yes. Second Alliance sympathizers in the NATO high command suppressed the reports, saw to it they never reached Congress or the UN. Censorship is easy to justify in those conditions.”

“A media blackout over a whole continent? That’s a little hard to swallow.”

“It’s not necessary over the whole continent. What was the last communiqué you saw from France that wasn’t from the US military or, say, from the Larousse government? Most of the lines of communication are down. Unauthorized sat-transers were destroyed, cables cut, and fone relay towers down. Travel is still restricted ‘until order is restored.’ And the question is, what kind of order will be restored?”

“And Israel is just standing by as Jews are rounded up—”

“Israel has repeatedly demanded investigations into the stories of new death camps and these so-called ‘refugee processing centers.’ It’s hard for them to go in alone and establish the truth without violating international law. They are assisting us on a certain level. They may well go further…”

“We have a new US senator,” Hand put in, referring to the printout again, “Senator Jæger, who says, and I quote, ‘These NR people are trying to foment a dangerous postwar hysteria, and if you ask me, the whole thing is a leftist fund-raising device.’ How about that? I mean, isn’t it in your interest to convince people for fund-raising reasons that there’s another Holocaust going on, Jack?”

Smoke bit down on his temper till it stopped writhing to get free of his mouth. Finally he said, “It’s in the interest of stopping the Holocaust, Norman. Senator Jæger’s company manufactures the Jægernauts used by the SA to destroy the homes and lives of thousands of innocent people. He’s hardly an objective opinion. Why hasn’t the UN been shown the charter for SPOES?”

“Ah, right. They’re more or less like Interpol was, I believe—”

“No. It’s a military alliance which I believe is the blueprint for a single Fascist state uniting Western Europe.”

“If I remember rightly, their ‘charter’ is to locate terrorists and collaborative saboteurs—”

Smoke ground his teeth in frustration. “That ‘collaborative saboteurs’ chestnut is a smoke screen, an all-purpose phrase they use whenever they want to get rid of anyone. The ‘saboteurs’ who supposedly helped the Soviets in their invasion are—just by coincidence—always Jews, Muslims, Socialists, anarchists, or the wrong kind of intellectual. The SA arrests anyone it wants with—”

“Now, whoa again. You keep referring to the SA as if it’s the same organization that was policing the war zones a few months ago. To the best of our information, the SA is now just an ordinary private-cop outfit.”

Smoke looked at him in amazement. “You really believe that?”

“Our information is—”

“Let me run the scenario down for you in its simplest terms,” Smoke snapped. “Western Europe has been through hell, and its people are hungry for the kind of orderliness promised by SPOES. But the European countries who are part of SPOES are puppet governments run by the same people who ran the SA. The SA has become a police-action arm of SPOES. They’re talking about dissolving their NATO ties in favor of the SPOES charter. Now each SPOES military force is on the surface commanded by nationals from the country it occupies, and most of its troop strength are local people—except for the SA, which functions more or less as the SS did for Hitler’s people—but the orders come from outside the country. Each country thinks it’s developing a new nationalism, but in fact it’s selling its soul to a greater European Fascist state. There are dissenting voices, but—”

“Do you have evidence for any of this? This talk of puppet governments—”

“We have video testimony, affidavits, some of our agents you can talk to. But I’d like to start with the most pressing issue, the images of ongoing apartheid and genocide…” Smoke turned and hit a button on the bank of monitors; the technicki recorded the vid for later intercutting. Hand turned to watch the monitor.

The image was sometimes focused, sometimes not; it was apparently shot from waist height, and it wobbled. But they could make out a room packed full of detainees—heads shaved, filthy uniforms, starved. One of them clearly dead. An SA bull suddenly stepping into the shot, grabbing a young girl by the throat, dragging her aside, someone rising to protest, beaten down by an RR stick wielded by a second guard, whose back blocked the cameras. “This video was shot by one of our people who penetrated a processing camp… Here’s a shot of the SA rounding up ‘detainees,’ as they call them, into a transport. You can see there are whole families here, old people who can barely walk, children, people herded like animals, hardly a raid on a terrorist camp—”

“Now, this material looks very convincing, and it could be what it appears to be. It could also have been staged, or mixed with computer-generated imagery,” Hand said. “You have to admit you have the resources. And we do have some contradictory video from these processing centers.” Hand signaled the technicki, who ran the video on another monitor. “This came to us from the French minister of foreign affairs…”