Los nazis no perdieron la guerra, los nazis no perdieron la guerra, solo se mudaron de Europa para América, y el Tio Sam los acaparó, les dio trabajo y los animó para que siguieran ingeniando como moderarnos!
- Los niños estelares
Just the other day I was wandering the street and pondering about the things that have been happening, wondering about the state of the world and what it was that was really happening, and the why of it all. Lost in my thoughts I was that I didn't notice when a strange vehicle had stopped right next to me, and out of it came a caricaturesque old man of messy white hair and wearing what looked like a lab coat. He struck me as a particularly stereotypical personage that I felt as if I were the target of some kind of joke that I started looking around for a hidden camera. The old man approached me and said something along the lines of
"Great erudite detritus, it's an honor."
By now I was sure I was being the object of an elaborate hoax. Naturally, I played along. The man invited me to hop on his car, a model that I was sure I'd seen elsewhere, it was that familiar, though I couldn't put my finger on where that would be. The man told me he came to me with a mission that would change the course of history, if I only were to join him. Having longed for adventure for a while, and this old man seeming harmless enough, I agreed to his mysterious request. On the car I pointed to a strange device on the panel, something that's usually missing from most cars.
"That is just the Flux Capacitor " he said.
"Oh"
It was then that it hit me, the car was a Delorean, of course. How could I not realize this sooner. As we were travelling through something like a scene out of a Kubric film, he started to explain. Apparently, I would become a real pundit of history and society in the years to come. I am by modesty obliged to tell you, dear reader, that he was surely exaggerating, for according to him I would become something like the Karl Marx of this century. If I mention this it is not because I want to boast my yet unachieved merit, but in the spirit of full disclosure as to the strange happenings of that day.
After driving for a short while we arrived... exactly where we had left off. I could tell because we were in an old part of the city, where the buildings are at least a couple centuries old. In this case, they were much older, though they seemed newer, everything seemed a lot newer, so familiar and yet so strange. Interestingly, it didn't look particularly strange. For some reason, I was expecting everything to be lacquered in silver. There were some rather minor differences, such as, for example, a man walking his robot dog on the street. I couldn't help but wonder why he had to take out his robot for a walk, maybe it was the robot taking out his human.
I was suddenly full of questions for this mysterious man, but he said everything would be answered in time. To make a long story short, he dumped me in the nearby library and he went out for a meal, said he'd meet me outside and offered to fetch me something to eat.
Naturally, I went straight for the history books. I am not rude, so I am not going to spoiler you on the outcome of the ongoing developments in world history. I will only say that 2026 is the accepted date in most books as the year of the ending of what they call they "half millenium of european imperialism." I was quite surprised, for I have always been told that imperialism ended a long time ago.
The history books were rife with surprises, but one that struck me was the conspicuous absence of the name of the last president of the United States. I grabbed as many books about the era and I could not find one single mention of his name. He was abundantly mentioned, alright, but he was always referred by a wide (and I must say, rather colorful) array of posthumous names, such as the Senile Pedophile, Mr Epic Failure, the Orange Emperor (this one was credited to me!), the Son of Satan, etc. However, the most common name by which he went in history books was simply The Second Hitler. I couldn't figure whether his name was lost to history and nobody actually remembered, or if it was just that nobody wanted to say it. I almost felt bad for the guy.
I stayed in that library all night reading perhaps dozens of books. I learned that the library opened 24 hours a day when I lifted my head for a moment to see the library completely empty and the halls which had been bathed in natural light when I entered were now dark and silent. Half of the time, I couldn't believe what I was reading, certainly, it became clear to me just how much the accounting of past history can change from one time to anotherr. Here are some interesting excerpts I found:
The fact that this period is now known as the 80 year terror may lead us to think about this time in a very different way than the people who lived it did. While it is true that it was a period of continued imperialist invasions and a regime of terror imposed on the whole world by the anglo-zionist empire, it would seem that few people thought of it that way while it lasted. During that time, an imperial institution known as International Law was established as a set of rules which were said to establish limits to the damage that a country could do unto others, to prevent wars and invasions, to protect the sovereignity of countries, to end massacres and genocides, and to protect the citizens of the countries from being the targets of ill-meaning actions made for political purposes. Today we know that they failed to do any of these, and that the institution of International Law served mostly to protect the interests of the empire.
Progress, at that time, meant a very different thing than it does to us today. A contemporary reader would be utterly surprised to read certain narratives of the past that would justify so many of the atrocities perpetrated "in the name of progress." Was it not the case that, generally speaking, this 80-year terror, as it is often called, was a period where every attempt of progress was curtailed, if not violently suppressed by the military powers of the time? It is important to remember that this was still the time where the european imperial mindset predominated. Progress, then, naturally meant nothing but technological progress. While we now know that such technological progress had catastrophic consequences on the biosphere and the social fabric, the notions that we now have of progress as the improvement of the conditions of the general populations were almost absent from mainstream discourse. In fact, it was common practice to supress most attempts towards things like universal healthcare and worker's rights by an appeal to progress, under the assumption, then widely accepted, that technological development was more important than the lives of people.
Today it is obvious to us that the anglo-american empire was the most anti-democratic terrorist empire. At the time, however, it was held as the exemplar of democracy. The reason for this is that european imperialism established an institution the branded "liberal democracy," which was, despite it's name, not very democratic at all. The essence of this kind of democracy (which an author has famously called proto-fascist) was that the entire population of a country was given every few years a handful of personalities (sometimes even as few as two!) from who they would pick a leader to govern them for several years. There is little evidence that the populations of such so-called "democratic" countries were given any further agency in the political affairs, or in any kind of decision making, important as those decisions might have been. Yet the people at this time, perhaps surprisingly to us, felt that they were really living in truly democratic systems, and they wouldn't have felt that they had practically zero control over the destiny of the region where they lived.
The anglo-zionist empire that ruled that period used a sophisticated tool to ensure that they would remain in control of their vassal countries without an overt threat of violence. A system which called itself democracy (though it didn't have anything to do with the etymological meaning of the word) was established, where associations called "parties" would vye for control of the politics of a country. There was periodic rotation, and in this way, the empire ensured that there would always be a representative of their interests right inside the political sphere of that country. A window was kept continuously opened for their agents to push imperial interests in policymaking. They were quite successful thanks to the power of money and propaganda. Where they didn't directly influence the livelihoods of the citizens, they would finance campaigns designed to infuse pro-imperialist aspirationism among the people, even the working classes that they seeked to exploit. They were generally successful. While this not always worked, and often times the interests of the working class or the desire for sovereignity prevailed, there were other tools which the empire used to impose themselves, economic blockades being a well-known example at the time. While the empire was a stern defender of this "democracy", if the results of democracy didn't benefit their interests, they would perpetrate a coup d'etat or a military invasion outright. On the other hand, if a totalitarian regime were to impose itself on it's citizens and violently crush dissent, it was ignored as long as it aligned with imperial interests.
I was so immersed in reading all of these accounts of the past, until I finally remembered that a snack was waiting for me outside of the building. Hopefully. I wondered if the old man with the labcoat was still waiting for me, perhaps he'd got tired of waiting and left. What would I do if I weren't able to go back to my own time? Clearly, I was a complete outsider in a city where I'd lived all my life. As I walked outside I wondered about those strange passages, describing the world I knew in wholly unfamiliar terms, as if everything was upside down. Was it, perhaps, the distance from their time to my own that seemed to distort reality? Or perhaps by their vantage point they had some perspective that I, situated in the midst of it, lacked?
I stepped out of the building, looking at a familiar city whose spirit seemed completely different, and yet, I could tell that some things would never change, even if everything on the outside did....