J Marsh: Apocalypse Rising

But the working man’s part of town is mostly spared by this dramatic new escalation of violence, with only a misplaced round here and there to mark the day. No longer is his concern that of paying the rent or forcing himself through another day, instead he, now, concerning himself with standing guard at the door while his neighbours look on. The landlord has stopped coming around to collect rents; some say he’s learned not to bother and all but abandoned this place, while others say he’s dead, killed unknowingly by someone settling a score in these chaotic times. It’s a frightening turn of events, one which prompts the working man, sometimes, to look back and in so looking consider the possibility that he may have been wrong, that the future these people thought they’d been fighting for all along was scarcely better than whatever hellish nightmare the old way was to have offered them. But this is a foolish thought, and the working man pushes it from his mind, denouncing these self-doubts as mere echoes of the lies he’d once been so fed. After seizing the Borealis , Dmitri and his colleagues secure all compartments and then muster on the bridge. They signal to the rebels their success by taking down the naval jack and flying in its place the flag of the popular front, a simple yet elegant design of crimson and gold. “Now we prepare for battle,” says Dmitri. He turns to his fellow crew and says, “the simple part is over.” Critically short on food, fuel, ammunition, and all the other supplies that fighting men and women need to fight, the crew of the Borealis have only strength of will to see them through.

For the police hadn’t expected resistance when they’d moved in to evict the residents of Dominion Courts, making the brief exchange of gunfire enough to shock them into retreat. Still, in the larger struggle it looks like the residents have won a dashing victory, and in the larger struggle how it looks is more important than how it is. On that night, the working man guards the door, looking through it and projecting himself into the world outside, joining the rebel in spirit if not in form in this latest, decisive assault on the way of things, that the way of things might yet become something incomparable to what the world has seen. In truth, Dmitri and the others on board the Borealis know theirs is a struggle that can only lead them to a place of pain and suffering. Once secure, the Borealis casts off, then makes down river a few hundred metres before dropping her anchor and training her main guns to maximum elevation. Without knowing what can come, Dmitri has teams assembled to go ashore and secure supplies, but it’s a futile effort as the men don’t get far before they’re set upon by a mob of confused and frightened people. Without options, Dmitri orders the crew of the Borealis to loot a nearby storehouse for food, then commandeer a civilian tug and seize its fuel from the desperate crew. The crew of the Borealis haven’t made any new friends among the local population, not amid the rebel’s offensive against the entire city and across the country, but they’ve secured their own survival. For the rebel Elijah and the Popular Front this new and dramatic escalation of the war in the streets is but a calculated gamble, an expenditure of so much strength in service of an offensive to push the enemy over the edge.

Not all is as it seems. In this city, where Valeri lives, the streets are filled with near-total anarchy, violence, and bloodshed, as are the streets of many other cities across the country. But there are those cities, whole provinces even, where an almost-calm still prevails. The working class here in Britain and across the whole of Europe is not yet united under the banner of their own liberation, as the consensus has not been forged. As columns of smoke rise throughout London to mark the spots where the rebel has staged his attacks, discarded shell casings and broken bodies litter the pavement. A clarity emerges from behind the thick, grey haze. In the time it takes one moment to blend with another, the last vestiges of peace begin to fall apart in the face of a sequence of events none could’ve predicted but all should’ve seen coming. After all that’s happened, it was inevitable that the governor should lose his ability to so govern, in the face of withering attacks from all sides the decisive moment in his fall coming not in the halls of the capitol but in that narrow space between one moment and the next, in an instant, late at night, a single bullet fired or a single fist raised finally depleting the last of his will to power. But where one’s will depletes, another’s strengthens, in short order the spiralling of events out of control playing right into the hands of he who would set the world on fire.

An explosion, another explosion, this one preceded by a warning phoned-in scarcely a half-hour in advance. As the working man stops to look on his screens at the carnage in the streets, he devotes the thoughts lingering in the back of his mind not to the lives lost nor to the bodies mangled on that afternoon but to the bare cupboards waiting for him when he’s to go home at the end of the day. As another of the day’s explosions booms across the sky, this one much closer, close enough to sound like the trembling of an earthquake, the working man looks up from his screen and promises that this, this will be the moment he last worries about such things as the growling of his own stomach. It’s not that he won’t ever tend to his own needs again; rather, it’s his newfound willingness to push through this momentary discomfort and on to the new beginning promised him by the future history has so earnestly promised him.

An explosion, another explosion, tearing across the city, snapping the working man out of his self-imposed reverie, forcing his attention on the here and now. He knows not what to make of this escalating campaign of terror and lawlessness; he knows only that the rebel reassures him, in a curious, backwards, roundabout sort of way, that it’s all part of some master plan, that it will lead inevitably to the changing of the guard and through to a new, better tomorrow. Amid the cacophony, an unbearable lightness settles into the working man’s nerves, freeing him, if only for this one night, from the burden of caring for himself, of caring for what happens to his person, aware as he is, now, of the greater whole to which he belongs. In the night, through the night, the restrained passions of so many of the working man’s brothers and sisters ignite, chasing themselves round and round in an endless orgy of self-delusion and self-sacrifice. All through this interlude when the working man realizes himself, events unfold which will soon enough give the working man his leadership, and in so giving place him firmly in control of his own destiny. At night, in the night the working man lies in bed and stares at his apartment’s ceiling, imagining patterns in the cracked drywall and visualizing colourful lights swirling around the darkened room. We’re almost there. It’s almost time. In the night that follows all that’s lead up to this point, the working man takes around his little apartment, boxing up books, clothes, a pair of shoes, before he leaves taking one last look around the mess he lives in, right now, and decides--realizes his lot belonged thrown in with rising tides of history all along. But it’s never that simple. It can never be that simple.

Then, in the night, it comes. A new government proclaims itself in power, having liquidated parliament, arrested all MPs, placed the King in detention, and taken command of the armed forces under its new banner, calling itself the Provisional Government. Neither republic nor monarchy, the Provisional Government is led by a mysterious coalition of unknowns who proclaim an end to the violence in the streets and promise a people’s government. Gone, they say, are the days of degradation and greed of the old regime, to come a new era of peace and prosperity for all. They invite the rebel Elijah and his Popular Front to join them, but Elijah refuses. Though Elijah and the Popular Front have achieved their long-sought goal of fostering the overthrow of the capitalist state, they see only a new betrayal rising in the Provisional Government’s determination to continue the war against the nation’s foreign enemies and to preserve the wealthy man’s dominion. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, the people are sceptical, even more than the working class of London and all other cities in England. Nothing’s changed. The rebel Elijah sees nothing less than total liberation for the working man as his goal, and these unknowns are the kind of spineless cowards who will come to be manipulated by an evil into advancing not liberation but oppression. For now, we watch, and wait for the rebel Elijah to make his next move.