Douglas Mercer
December 15 2024
Continued from Empyrean (Part Three)
GERMAN SCIENCE
Research must remain free and unfettered by any State restriction; the facts which it establishes are the truth and the truth is never evil—Adolf Hitler
The young man who came to pick me up was impossibly correct and wore a simple gray tunic which the functionaries of the state had taken to wearing. I had been flown in to the town next to the complex totally unaware of the nature of my visit and dressed in a brown suit I let myself be escorted from the hotel to the long black Mercedes and got in for the short drive. The night before I had taken a walk among the nearby fields to see what I could see, stark white buildings of imposing majesty, brutally monolithic and they reminded me of those stone buildings that raving lunatic Lovecraft used to portray, a memento from my youth. From the limited perspective I attained I could not see how far back it went on either side, but it appeared to extend for at least two miles. I was suitably impressed by the hum and silence of it all and how clean and light and white it looked, like an immaculate happening was set to occur, the apotheosis of spotless minds. My expectations piqued with a nostalgia for the future I retired for the night after re-reading Gibbon and thinking of an Empire built so much from the ground up, and so solidly, that it would never fall.
In the last half of the 19th Century German Universities became a magnet for the White intellectual elite and it was no wonder; our German Science had put the future on the map and everyone who wanted to be a part of this music flocked to the nest. Once Victory and Peace were attained Hitler was ecstatic that the colossal waste of resources could now go into the universities and, more importantly, the independent Research Institutions which soon were spread out over the Reich. No expense was spared and once more White scientists from all over the world were invited into the adventure; the perfection of television came first and while the Americans used it (for the most part) for the relative trivia that they had always been known for we Germans used it on a much more restricted scale: for music first and foremost, and for education and, to a limited degree, for dramas and other historical recreations. In the Brown Book (a compilation of Hitler’s Sayings) which comes down to us is his first reaction upon hearing of this marvel of human ingenuity; my God what evil could this machine do in the hands of a psychopath! But as always with us the future was in grave and good hands.
Being a man of letters (but having accrued the respect of a Warrior and one who tended to view what used to be called the humanities with more than a bit of skepticism, having cleaned house from the inside so to speak) I was met with great cheer at the facility. On the ground it was as austere and sleek and serenely beautiful as it must have been from the air. Despite its massive theme of whiteness and its calculated cold imperial feel it gave off nothing of the clinical, indeed the dominant note was that of life, and wild spurts of water in great oval fountains were dotted throughout. Of course everyone was interested in my monograph and how it was coming along and they hoped that this visit would find a place in the story. I assured them that it most certainly would, that while I was going backwards (for a kind of victory lap as it were) they were going into the future and that when it came to the History of the German People it could not hold a candle to its future. After consulting briefly with the System’s overseer my unflappable guide led me into an out of the way corner and in through a nondescript and unmarked door. Once through the brief stone gray foyer inside were all manner of screens and other unusual paraphernalia which reminded me of the vapid science fiction films which for some reason the American continue to churn out into the 1960s. My guide handed me over to a man who I came later to learn was the Chief Artist and other who was the Chief Engineer, they welcomed me then the Engineer begged off and left us. On the brisk walk to our destination The Artist gave me a brief history of German Idealism and the perfection of the spirit and apologized for telling me something I already knew. But he said that he wanted to lay special emphasis on the German as the inward man, the land of poets and thinkers and all that, and that it was the inner intensity of the Germans as abstract thinkers which had always impressed itself (and more than a little frightened) the world. He then told me that on this staff the most plentiful discipline were the psychiatrists and pharmacologists. As we stood in front of the door we were to go into he asked if I had been given LSD 25 and I told him yes, early on in the mid-fifties as part of my retraining. I averred that I had always thought it was impressive but that it was the lazy man’s way to the inner world. He quickly agreed only offering the caveat that though there was no Royal Road to the truth every avenue must be explored. He then gave me some insight into depth psychology, and Heidegger’s notion of mirroring and then like a magician pulling a rabbit out of his sleeve pulled a dog-eared copy of Carroll from his pocket and waving it like a fan said this man saw farther than all the rest. To tell the truth at the moment I considered this to be a bit histrionic, I had spent those days in quest of the mind’ eye and I said as much to him. He said that he sympathized and noted that he had read my seminal essay on image and word and did not altogether agree with it. He likened the word to a prosthetic device which once one was whole one would dispense with and it was images (and here he smiled broadly)--it was image all the way down. But he said words would persist in singing and the human voice would play a great role in the cues. I had heard this line of reasoning before and I think he could tell that I was less than persuaded. He then said that as the Americans always say nothing succeeds like success—and told me to give him my opinion on the matter an hour hence.
The preliminaries dispensed with he led me into a rather small room which was all clear white and sat me down in a chair and placed the apparatus on my head. They had selected wisely and I wondered if they had been surreptitiously checking my device and knew what I was writing. Perish the thought I realized, loyalty is ever our honor, and I saw that they deduced that in the two weeks I had been writing I had to have covered the topic and saw it more as a nod of respect than anything else. I try to keep my prose to a bare minimum of drama though as you know from time to time the birds do take flight; but what I saw did change me, it made me want to see what I was doing, what we had been doing, on a much vaster and more cosmic scale. For I knew that was I was seeing was just the beginning but they wanted me to have a taste of it in order to give me, if not the widest perspective, at least a glimpse of it. For what happened is that once the power went on I found myself thrust and immersed in a foreign landscape but one in which the graphics were so excellent that to distinguish it from reality had not one retained what one might call (for lack of a better word) an authorial self would have been well nigh impossible. I realized right away I was present in a facsimile of the very battle of Teutoburg at a kind of aerial or birds eye level; I was swooping through the dense fog of the forest with its dense glittering greens and browns and the intermittent light of the sun seeping through the top of the trees; I saw the snaking line of the Romans fatally spread out; and I could hear from the piece in my ear the fanatical cries of the German men meant to chill the enemy to the bone; then suddenly higher and higher I went as if held aloft on a non-existent crane and I could see all of the Northern Plain and then all of Germany and then Europe, pictures reminiscent of the stills we had all seen from our fights into space; then no sooner had I taken in the very breadth of the great continent than I was vertiginously back down to that sand strewn field, the gold pieces glimmering among the sudden onslaught and the chaos and the helter skelter hacking and justified rage of thousands of German men with their blood up; and armored bodies pierced to trees with long lances and the look of the dead abject; as the dead mounted up in the contained killing field soon the remaining army fled and I could see nothing but the last of the legions; no sooner was this field of blood and field of gules like the forest grown incarnadine then it went from red to black; and then on a quite different landscape I found myself trailing from about a quarter mile a man on horseback who was choosing speed over caution. The force that impelled me then ran swifter than the horse and veered around to the left to ride abreast of it; the rider had quite obviously a wound in his lower stomach and one could see the blood saturating his tunic; nevertheless he drove on pell mell forward. Obviously this was Julian that I was riding along with on his way to the fateful tent and his even more portentous death, the end of an era. But no sooner did I realize this then as the horse sped on before me I was held back and up higher and soon all I could hear was the sound of the horse’s fading footsteps and the thrill of the rider riding heading headlong into what soon became a vanishing distance. Then once again all was black and the silent primordial hum.
Seeing that the ride (for that is what they had called it) was over I removed the device from my head and found myself alone. One pinches oneself to know that one is real and one blinks as well; and that is how I felt. Looking at my pure white and antiseptic surroundings I realized that what I had seen was just the beginning of what they had achieved and what they might; one could go anywhere, be anywhere, create anything, be it of what was or what never was, and in this aerial world there was no limit except to what you could dream ; indeed, for the brief moments that one was immersed and immured in it one would be a god, or a kind of simulacra thereof; were one not tied to this mortal frame that is what one would be. Such were my thoughts when the host returned and had me sit down at table for what they used to call de-briefing but now was just the casual banter of two men on the cusp of eternity, or at least that is how he put it. He asked me what I had thought and I waved him away, for some things go without saying; I asked him how long this had been going on and he said over a decade but that in the last years they had made leaps and bounds in the creation of what he called Synthetic Reality; he assured me that the science was pristine but wanted me to know was that it was the Artists (if he might say so himself) who really were the workhorses; he also assured me that although the potential canvas was infinite they had put strict bounds on what and how much they could produce; it was only the technique that truly concerned them and whatever the potential thrill of it this was but one aspect of the larger project and no one in the highest echelons wanted any mere game playing in the complex. As the historian of the Great Reich I thought I owed it to my non-posterity to go through the formal rote methods of investigation and I asked him with a wan gesture if he might not read me into what this larger project might be; equally a man of science he said that he regretted to inform me that as the science still being perfected strict controls were still regulating access to that; but that when the time was right, and my essay was complete, or near complete, I would be of course among the first cohort to be so educated. He then said that the general drift of what was occurring must be rather obvious to those who have the requisite pieces, and though one could never be totally sure, one could see the picture. I assured him that was so and as he escorted me back to my driver I noticed that not for a second was I told that none of this was for public or any other kind of consumption; after all we got rid of the last locks by 1950 and we are not a people who ever look back.
In the car I wanted a memento of the event and wrote the following in my notebook:
It is a point well taken that one might shudder to think what could have happened if these kinds of technologies would have been dropped into the hand of a psychopath; or even one intending to drug and deprive a passive and spiritually depraved community. What subtle horrors could one enact by keeping the millions entertained by such visions? And though no doubt the Mind Scientists might use this as a healing balm for the blinkered or beleaguered what mental torture rack could be devised? But of course that is the benefit of benevolence; of having taken the reigns of the world to assure that such a fate never befalls the souls of one’s people.
THE THIRTY YEARS WAR
The downfall of any people is that the individuals who comprise it do not consider the system; the system can be defined as the extent of the people and outside of the system is the Enemy; the Europe of, say, 1600 represents this perfectly; what the System should have been is the European peoples; but what occurred is that each part of the system considered itself to be a whole rather than a part and, as such, the retardation and near dissolution of our people occurred. Consider that in 1600 Shakespeare was at his fearsome peak, Kepler had announced his laws and Galileo was but a decade away from hearing the call of his Starry Messenger. In our time of rationality and peace it is hard to comprehend that the men of Europe should have set themselves to mad squabbling and internecine bloodshed, and over a few obscure points of Jewish doctrine. Rather than ordering their affairs in mutual consideration they let our blood with a savage fury. The only thing perhaps we can say in their defense is that victory and peace and planetary domination may be the only predicate on which such serene repose and perfect thinking can occur.
The tragedy of the German people was always that we were sundered from one another; indeed so vexing and distressing this problem was that the first paper I wrote that got me noticed by anyone outside of the academic cliques was a paper I wrote on synarchism (joint and harmonious rule). Taking my cue from the very obviously orchestrated demise of King Edward and the Ambassador Kennedy (that shining star among the dim “knights” of the Roosevelt administration) I wrote that in 1937 the high blood lineages of old Europe should have unified themselves in a common defense and then by offense present the world with a fait accompli from which their could be no reverse. The premise was that the Jews had their always fatal hooks in England and America, but that history is just the actualization of the possible and that a far-seeing people should have begun thinking not of world government, but a joint rule of the few, political Platonism on a grand scale. That this is very close to what happened is now matter of record; but though nothing succeeds like success one should never overlook that it might have gone differently; though admittedly now that the drama is over those seven years of delay are rendered moot.
What got me put in mind of this method was the fatal devolvement in power that had plagued Germany; Napoleon had ridden into German in force and even the great Beethoven had applauded it, though he later recanted; Germany was always the divided state with its absurd and anachronistic duchies and principalities, where toy princes held court to toy philosophers and toy poets and artificial aristocrats with their waterfly lackeys; this would always make Germany the battlefield of Europe and eventually the graveyard of our people if another path had been taken; it was Bismarck who took the first step to solve this problem but he demurred at the final solution and failed to pick up the cudgel; and it was of course Hitler who took the next logical step though there were always more to come for in his heart he defined any one a German whose blood ran with Aryan blood; a people meant to rule the world; and rule the earth together. When I think of this breathtaking visionary and his matchless dreams (which are now real) I look back on the criticisms in the thirties of his great book as garbled and turgid and of him as a clown and I laugh.
It comes down to us as the Thirty Years War; in latter days the various theological quibbles which it was fought over were seen as but masquerades for the real cause: the power and force of the various parties. This is nonsense. Indeed, we might call it the Jewish War (as so many of ours have been) of Catholics versus Protestants, which themselves are just two splinter groups or sects of Judaism and men were fighting and dying for an idea, for an airy nothing. The various powers and houses and republics and states and statelets and cobwebbed legal interrelations and deposed kings are just so much flotsam on the waves; and too tedious and nauseating to limn; whenever the dust settles on any historical event, particularly war, the only question for us should be: is Europe stronger? Are there more and better Europeans? And in this case the results are clear:
In 1618 12 million people lived in Germany. Then came the great war. In 1648 only 4 million still lived in Germany. 8 million Germans, soldiers and civilians, died from the effects of battle, famine, or disease.
It is damning verdict for unlike words number do not lie. The principal battlefield for all these conflicts were the towns and principalities of Germany, which suffered severely. During the Thirty Years’ War, many of the contending armies were mercenaries, many of whom could not collect their pay. This threw them on the countryside for their supplies, and thus began the wolf-strategy that typified this war. The armies of both sides plundered as they marched, leaving cities, towns, villages, and farms ravaged. That is due to the contending parties' mania for so called religious truth Germany proper became a mess hall and a kit bag for the men called on to fight and ravage. Faith or works! And over this which question which rightfully should have been killed in the egg masses of men for decades crossed and re-crossed out frontiers and laid to waste our homeland. And when Peace came it was no peace but a peace of states which were merely reconnoitering for the next chance to let our own blood.
The wolf strategy has always been known as a group of ravening men in war destroying each other for no purpose; that lunatic Sherman burned Georgia to a cinder for the freedom of the black bondman when one quick strike at the White House four years earlier would have led to the demise of democracy’s dream. By such mischances and misalliances and insane orgy of murder among our own were we led to the very brink of ruin. We won’t always remember it but it’s well to note that the placid strength we enjoy now was no matter of fate and our victory was a close-run thing. One slip and that might have been it, it might have been chaos and dark night. I am reminded of tale just before the war when an old Prussian was accosted at a meeting by an advocate for peace and, his blood up, said sure, why not, let’s sue the world for peace, make our millions, and become imbeciles. What a future! Most thankfully we chose a different path, the path of creative work and creative struggle; and what the world called in dark hues Totalitarianism was only coordination and balance; a coordination of the parts into a synarchic whole. Which is the goal proper of the Wolf Strategy, victory, when one is finally able to get one’s head above historical water and begin plain sailing.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Five)
