Asked about Bangladesh at a press conference, Prime Minister Anders Breivik smirked and told reporters, “This makes my job easier. We just sit back and watch the fun.”
“The fun” includes the collapse of sanitation systems and shortages of fresh water, which have led to outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and hepatitis. Health officials fear an outbreak of polio, the resurgent scourge of the postcolonial Global South. “The fun” includes at least fifty million displaced people, roughly a quarter of the entire population. “The fun” includes the Indian border guard mowing down refugees with regularity, shooting women and children on sight.
Yet plenty of people still make it through these killing fields to find themselves in massive concentration camps on the outskirts of Kolkata, built by American companies like Prion and international gangster-capitalist conglomerates like ANøNosiki, secured by teenage soldiers carrying grenade launchers and machine guns. A cholera outbreak in one camp killed an estimated ten thousand people in a matter of weeks, while Indian authorities did nothing but burn the bodies. India’s Hindu nationalist government, led by President Shankar Ahluwalia, has all but promised genocide by starvation for any Bangladeshis who make it through.
ON JUNE 2, AN UNPRECEDENTED HEAT DOME DESCENDED OVER Europe. From Barcelona to Moscow, temperatures soared into the triple digits across the continent, sparking a series of devastating wildfires. Seville, Spain, set the new continent-wide record with 52.9 centigrade (an unbelievable 127 degrees Fahrenheit). The Euro heat storm seemed to fuel the Independence Party’s decisive victory in the UK elections, forcing the Tories to take the back seat in their own coalition, when all they wanted to do was privatize the NHS. This victory and the blazing temperatures then summoned reactionary forces to streets across Europe as the paramilitary arms of UKIP, the Alternative for Deutschland in Germany, the National Rally in France, Vox in Spain, and the Brothers of Italy burned mosques, beat anyone with brown skin, and targeted left-wing journalists and center-left political offices. The three-day outburst was coordinated across social VR and follows a years-long pan-European campaign of barbarism against minority communities. The so-called Six Arms alliance organizes the efforts of the Far Right across Europe but answers only to Norway and its psychopathic leader, Breivik. If security forces, deportation machines, and brutal detention centers weren’t enough, Prime Minister Breivik has empowered a class of roving criminals known as the Storm Beslutningstakere (roughly translating to “storm makers”), who have terrorized the continent, producing ghastly stories of murder, rape, assault, arson, and looting. Arrests have been made by the thousands, but the Far Right parties claim they will issue blanket pardons as soon as they take power.
ON JUNE 12, AFTER FAILING TO UNSEAT VICTOR LOVE IN THE DEMocratic primary, Tracy Aamanzaihou announced that she would run as a third-party candidate. “I cannot stand by as the world is engulfed by white supremacists, dictators, thugs, and the cowards who enable them,” she railed at a press conference outside an immigrant detention camp on the Texas border. The facility, operated by Prion, was accused of leaving human beings to roast to death in metal boxes in the sun. Aamanzaihou gained in the polls and financing, as supporters flocked to her like the last lake of fresh water on a salinizing coastal plain. Many Democrats bombarded the Love campaign with Letitia Will Win memes and pictures of the prayer vigils still being held around the fenced-off National Mall to commemorate the dead. WE WILL NEVER FORGET; VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE; HISTORY WILL JUDGE US. Aamanzaihou pulled into the lead in Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and California (even though ten million of its residents were living out of FEMA trailers and tents in neighboring states). It was a three-way race now, according to the models.
ON JUNE 23, IT BEGAN TO RAIN IN PAKISTAN.
It happened once before. In 2010, a massive heat wave in Russia created a blocking pattern that led to abnormally heavy monsoon rains over the Indus River basin. Nearly a fifth of Pakistan’s total land area was inundated during the 2010 floods, which killed two thousand people. Pakistan has been a nation on the verge of implosion for decades, stressed by a detonating population and depleting water sources. The agricultural economy has dried up as the Himalayan glaciers have shrunk. Eroded by a shift from snow to rain, Pakistan’s main water source has slowed to a desperate trickle, even as its enemy India has continued to siphon off more and more of the failing glacial runoff. In 2034, famine in the northern region killed an estimated four hundred thousand.
In this tinderbox, radical elements carry out terrorist attacks regularly, violence is the norm, and a small elite hides behind blast walls, armored vehicles, and the guns of the military and corporate security services. In the past five years, the army has clamped down on nearly every facet of life, stability the only goal and also a total mirage. With American drones patrolling the skies and international donors providing food aid, this approach has kept a lid on things. For generations Lashkar-e-Taiba has been a scourge. A radical Islamic group with ties to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), its assassination of the army chief in 2032 punctuated the threat. Yet even a group as powerful as LeT could not have toppled the government without help. This summer, they got it in the form of a weather pattern.
“There were some of us practically screaming about this,” said Dr. Tufariello. “The Euro heat wave was the largest by geographic scale we’ve ever seen. It was creating conditions very similar to 2010 with a split upper-level jet stream and a deep trough penetrating to the subtropics over northern Pakistan. The Love administration was otherwise occupied with California.”
Certain cities in the north recorded as much as twenty inches during the July wet spell, shattering previous records. Densely populated cities like Peshawar became open seas, and the floodwaters reached new territory, including the capital of Islamabad. By late July, the flooding had exceeded the boundaries of 2010 and then some, covering nearly a quarter of Pakistan’s total landmass.
The death toll of thirty-three hundred, however, felt middling to the international community, especially in the wake of the famines and the unfathomable tragedy in Bangladesh. One crisis in the developing world at a time, please. Red Cross director Marcy Macon told me the agency had never had such a difficult time collecting funds.
“There have been anemic responses, and then there was Pakistan. We had so little to offer them.”
The US pledged $100 million, and President Love diverted the SS Doris Miller from its mission to Bangladesh to deliver aid. The Pastor took to the stage of his Slapdish worlde to excoriate Love’s decision. He led the chant this time, “Americans will eat first!,” for a virtual audience of twenty million.
On September 3, approximately two months from the US election, The Pastor used the first presidential debate to revel in the “magnificent handiwork of a just God intent on wiping Islam from the face of the earth.” While Congresswoman Aamanzaihou tried to interrupt and President Love gazed listlessly at his notes, The Pastor asked, “How many more of my prophecies must come to pass before you see that I already hold the sword of Christ? Psalm one thirty-seven tells us ‘Those who smash the heads of Babylonian infants on the rocks are blessed.’ Wars of extermination, the Bible tells us, are not only allowed—my friends, they are our duty.”
That his poll numbers saw no visible drift from these shocking statements proves the thesis: in a society of spectacle, this man is king.
Perhaps President Love’s near-comatose performance could be explained by what US intelligence was telling him: Pakistan was about to collapse.