Amerika

As said before, Western Civilization remains stuck in WW1, itself (for Americans) a replay of our Civil War. We fought for equality and democracy; now what? Clearly we have no goals, and our society will grow no further, only keep going through the cycle of more equality leading to more tedium.

A profound fatalism settled on the West after WW1. We fought this massive war, killed millions, and nothing was decided. We do not like our modern society; designed as a paradise for workers, it has made us all into interchangeable cogs in the machine.

Some of our most profound literature came out of the early days of this time of despair. All other options were gone; liberal democracy had won. Into this emptiness and decay, our minds reached looking for the light, and found only darkness.

A few writers took that darkness and flipped it around, turning it into an epic battle for the salvation of the West which would occur after liberal democracy was deposed. Perhaps the best of these may have been the Buck Rogers series, which involved a post-apocalyptic Chinese-occupied USA:

Except for a few brief exciting moments at the time of our air raid on the intelligence office in Nu-Yok, I had seen no living specimens of this yellow race at close quarters.

They looked little like the Mongolians of the Twentieth Century, except for their slant eyes and round heads. The characteristic of the high cheek bones appeared to have been bred out of them, as were those of the relatively short legs and the muddy yellow skin. To call them yellow was more figurative than literal. Their skins were whiter than those of our own weather-tanned forest men. Nevertheless, their pigmentation was peculiar, and what there was of it looked more like a pale orange tint than the ruddiness of the Caucasian. They were well formed, but rather undersized and soft-looking, small-muscled and smooth-skinned, like young girls. Their features were finely chiseled, eyes beady, and nose slightly aquiline.

They were uniformed, not in close-fitting green or other shades of protective coloring, such as the unobtrusive gray of the Jersey Beaches or the leadened russet of the autumn uniforms of our people. Instead they wore loose fitting jackets of some silky material, and loose knee pants. This particular command had been equipped with form-moulded boots of some soft material that reached above the knee under their pants. They wore circular hats with small crowns and wide rims.

Strange as it may seem, no Han rendered any respect to another, nor expected it in return; that is, not genuine respect. Their discipline was rigid and cold-bloodedly heartless. The most elaborate courtesies were demanded and accorded among equals and from inferiors to superiors, but such was the intelligence and moral degradation of this remarkable race, that every one of them recognized these courtesies for what they were; they must of necessity have been hollow mockeries. They took pleasure in forcing one another to go through with them, each trying to outdo the other in cynical, sardonic thrusts, clothed in the most meticulously ceremonious courtesy. As a matter of fact, my captor, by this crude reference to the origin of his ruler, was merely proving himself a crude fellow, guilty of a vulgarity rather than of a treasonable or disrespectful remark. An officer of higher rank and better breeding, would have managed a clever innuendo, less direct, but equally plain.

In this passage, Philip Francis Nowlan reveals a great understanding of the character of Asia as highly individualistic. Unlike the honor-culture of the West, Asia is a shame-culture, and therefore consists not so much of goals but jockeying for power in the system. All Asiatics carry this, to some degree.

He addresses their materialism and lack of a transcendental goal:

The Han philosophy for centuries had not admitted the existence of souls. Its conception embraced nothing but electrons, protons and molecules, and still was struggling desperately for some shred of evidence that thoughts, will power and consciousness of self were nothing but chemical reactions.

At one point even speaking directly to one of the Han:

Your ancestors thought they had made mere beasts of the American race. Physically you did reduce them to the state of beasts. But men do have souls, San-Lan, and in their souls the Americans still cherished the spark of manhood, of honor, of independence. While the Hans have degenerated into a race of sleek, pampered beasts themselves, they have unwittingly bred a race of super-men out of those they sought to make animals. You have bred your own destruction.

Nowlan has no problem bringing in some ancient race science, since it fits the pattern of observed Asiatic traits:

But that monstrosity among the races of men which originated as a hybrid somewhere in the dark fastnesses of interior Asia, and spread itself like an inhuman yellow blight over the face of the globe—for that race, like all of us, she felt nothing but horror and the irresistible urge to extermination.

Latterly, our historians and anthropologists find much support for the theory that the Hans sprang from a genus of human-like creatures that may have arrived on this earth with a small planet (or large meteor) which is known to have crashed in interior Asia late in the Twentieth Century, causing certain permanent changes in the earth’s orbit and climate.

The theory is that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the “Asiatic Bowl”) with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further their mental powers.

Much of what he wrote was borrowed from earlier works by Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose “Mars” series captured the imaginations of many American children.

As Chinese occupation of the USA intensifies and the government further collapses, we have a Buck Rogers future to anticipate. We will end up in these kind of conflicts, fighting a vastly numerically superior foe who may have more advanced technology, hoping to recapture what was once our birthright.

Tags: buck rogers, chinese occupation, race war