Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [124]
Post-futurism was Wilde’s way of coping with living on, into his own imagined future – albeit in a constricted, local form – and finding it, as he’d said, merely the present. Jordan doubted if Moh fully sympathized with this view – still a believer in a socialist future, still a receiver of news from nowhere – but the connection between post-futurism and Jordan’s own detestation of the competing ideologies of the mini-states helped to clarify why Moh had been so keen on getting Jordan’s ideas out on the Cable.
Cunning bastard, Jordan thought. Moh had wanted him to attack the ideologies, do his best to weaken the mini-states because, in doing so, he’d be doing his little bit to help the ANR! Not that Moh had shown much faith in the ANR but, as he’d said, ‘anything rational would be better than those smelly, cosy subtotalitarianisms’. And it couldn’t be a short-term thing, either: there was not enough time before the ANR’s offensive for anybody’s words to make much difference.
But after the offensive – when the ANR’s future, its New Republic, had itself become the present – then it might make a difference. Places like the one Jordan had come from, the ideal society a few kilometres down the road, might fall militarily at a good push. Undermining their self-confidence would be a slower process.
Well, why not?
Wasn’t that what he thought anyway? Wasn’t that what he had to say?
And there was one particular person he wanted to say it to. Even if she never heard it. He went out of Moh’s room and down the stairs and along the corridor to that other room where the cameras waited.
His voice was hesitant at first, becoming more confident as he found his pace.
‘This is Jordan Brown, with…the Global Village Atheist Show. I’m here to entertain, enlighten, and enrage.
‘Since this time yesterday, another forty thousand people, plus or minus the odd thousand, have been killed. Killed quite legally, according to the famous Annexe to the Geneva Convention, in recognized conflicts around the world. All the noncombatant deaths were inflicted under Paragraph 78, section 10, subsection 3. That’s the one saying that civilians can be killed only by explosive devices aimed at legitimate military targets, and yes, I have checked, and I can assure you that no instances of poisoning, machine-gunning in front of freshly dug trenches, release of radiation or radioactive substances, or throat-cutting have come to the attention of the relevant authorities.
‘And how do we know? We know because we’re watching. The whole world is watching. About fifty years ago somebody in Edinburgh came up with a video-camera the size of a coin. Within a few years they were in mass production, and getting smaller and cheaper by the year. And they started turning up on the killing fields of Central Europe, in the torture chambers of the Americas, on the blighted plains of Africa.
‘Now they’re so small that you can take someone apart bit by bit before you discover that one of those cockroaches on the floor was a bio-comp news-gatherer, heading for home with some very interesting pictures. And that your face is on satellite television, your genetic fingerprints are on public databases, and various public-spirited if not – ha, ha – public-funded agencies are bidding up the price of your head. Just think: there was a time when torturers only had to worry about getting letters from Amnesty International!
‘So, whereas once it was possible to bomb entire countries – Laos – bludgeon a tenth of the population to death – Cambodia – or wipe out a third – East Timor – and plausibly deny that it had ever happened (the “ongoing process of holocaust revisionism”, as I think a famous linguist called it), they couldn’t get away with it any more. The silent slaughter ceased. The blood dried on the walls of the torture chambers. Starvation simply had to be wiped out, and it was,