“I’ve been told.”
“Well, then, leave that for later. Let me bring the story up to date. The SS… what was left of it… had business objectives before and during World War n. When the war was lost they just kept on, but from other places: Bogota, Asuncion, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Colombo, Damascus, Dacca… you name it. They realized that the world is heading towards a ‘corporocracy’; five or ten international super-companies that will run everything worth running by the year 2100. Those super-corporations exist now, and they’re already dividing up the production and marketing of food, transport, steel and heavy industry, oil, the media, and other commodities. They’re mostly conglomerates, with fingers in more than one pie. Some of them are owned now by the old-money interests; the Japanese and various foreign cartels run others; the Born-Agains have a couple; the Jews and their buddies control some big ones; and we, the SS, have the say in four or five. We’ve been competing for the past sixty years or so, and we’re slowly gaining.”
“Lose the war, win the peace. Which ones do you button-down Nazis own?” Lessing was interested in spite of himself.
“I’ll let Mulder tell you, if he wants. But I’ll give you an example, one I saw myself. About ten years ago we swung a merger, a takeover, and got voting control of a supercorp that runs a small but significant chunk of the American media. Not openly, not with bands and trumpets…”
“Or swastikas flying…”
“…But quietly: one huge corporation cuddling up to another one and gently munching it up, like a great, gubbing amoeba. Since then we’ve been replacing executives, pushing somebody out here, bringing somebody else in there. We’ve swung program content around, too. Not much, but a little, so it won’t show. We’ve cut down on ‘nasty-Nazi’ movies… good guys in white hats and bad guys in black SS hats… lovable Jews versus fiendish Germans… and we have media psychologists, ad agencies, and behavior modification specialists working on image changes. Hell, if you can con granny into buying Sugar Turds instead of Bran Farts, then why can’t you swing public opinion over to a cause as vital and important as ours?”
“Hard to get people to love death camps.”
“We don’t try. You can’t erase a hundred years of lying propaganda overnight. We play those aspects down and stress the positive ones instead: the mystique, the scientific approach to racial genetics, the efficiency and organization, the dedication, and the heroism. People will buy that. Good people, who haven’t seen a real American victory for a century now. People who are tired of watching the Jews and the mud races gobble up the world. People who don’t want their country run by guys with alien ideas. People who ‘re tired of being shat on and fucked over.”
“But the gas chambers! The ‘Holocaust’…?”
Wrench held out his hands, palms up. “What gas chambers? Show me one piece of real evidence! There were labor camps, sure, and thousands died from typhus, dysentery, poor treatment, and malnutrition. What do you expect during a war? Your country surrounded, fighting off Russia, Britain, and the United States, the three most powerful nations on earth with manpower and supplies to bum while you’re scrounging for undigested grain in the chicken shit! A lot of Germans died, a lot of Americans and Englishmen and others too. People died in the war, people died in the camps, people died in the Allied bombings of Dresden and Berlin and Hamburg. But all we ever hear about are the poor, innocent Jews and the awful ‘Holocaust,’ when, in fact, there never was an ‘extermination policy,’ a ‘Final Solution,’ or anything like it!”
“Oh, come on! What were the gas chambers for, if not for extermination?”
“Oh, there were shootings of partisans, hangings of saboteurs, and the usual atrocities that always happen in every war, but the real use of the so-called ‘gas chambers’ was for decontamination: ridding the clothing of camp inmates of lice and fleas!”
“Nuremberg? People confessed.”
“Under pressure, Lessing. Some real bad pressure, though nobody likes to think about that now. Confessions? Either hokum or else poor bastards hoping for a lighter sentence from the victors!”
“How in hell do you expect me to believe this? All my life… all my parents’ lives… everybody has taken the ‘Holocaust’ for rock-solid truth.”
“Some rocks are less solid than others. This one’d wash away with the tide if it weren’t for certain ‘interests’ propping it up. Look at our evidence sometime. In any case, we’re slowly replacing those negative images with others: the ‘Good Bad Guy’ routine.” Wrench spooned a tea leaf out of his cup. Outdoors, in India, it was wise to do that: it could always be a fly gone in for a swim. “What do you think of Jesse James? John Dillinger? Julius Caesar? Genghis Khan?”
Lessing raised his pale eyebrows.
“Bad guys, maybe, but nobody hates them. The same with the North Koreans, the Red Chinese, the North Vietnamese, the Con-federates, the Romans, the Turks, Attila the mother-humping Hun, for God’s sake! The reality may have been rough, but there’s a sort of glitter about most of those dudes: mean honchos but respectable. It’s all how you package it. Opinion is a goddamned commodity!”
“Impossible with the Nazis…”
“It works with anybody. Remember the Pied Piper, the guy who tootled his flute, stole everybody’s kids, ran off with ‘em, and was never seen again? A child abuser! But who hates hirri! Now he’s a dinkin’ fairy tale! Image, just image.”
“Next you’ll make Joseph Mengele over into naughty, sexy Doctor Joe, every housewife’s soap-opera wet dream!”
“You’re a funny man, Lessing. I mean it. Mengele was a physician and a scholar. He wanted to help his country’s war effort at a time when it was needed. Some of his experiments were rough… as rough as putting American soldiers next to an A-bomb test, or trying Agent Orange on your own men, like the U.S. government did. He didn’t do most of the things the Jews have accused him of, but he did put people into freezing water in his efforts to develop techniques for saving the lives of fliers shot down over the North Sea. His experiments were really a lot more humane than those performed by the Russians, the Japanese, or other scientists back when medicine was younger. Nobody advocates such experiments today, but you do have to understand the urgency which existed then.”
“Sure.”
“Some guys get good press, others get bad. Compare the Palestinians with the Jewish gangs who murdered both Arabs and Britishers before Israel was founded. Ask any American: he’ll tell you the Arabs are murderous terrorists, and the Israelis are lovable freedom fighters and heroes! If George Washington had lost, today’s kids would be reading about him as George Q. Terrorist, the Scourge of Decent Englishfolk!”
“You’ll never convince enough people to matter!”
“Give it time. Aside from the media, we’ve been buying up private schools… and helping some public ones through philanthropic foundations… and working on the churches and the Born Agains.”
The ceiling fan was doing its valiant best, but the verandah had grown hot. Lessing arose, squinting against the raw sunlight pressing in through the vines on the east side of the senior-staff-quarters building. He stopped in front of Wrench. “When… and if… this happens, what does your little band of supermen want?”
“We’re in competition, Lessing. We win, it’s our genes that survive and our Western heritage… our Aryan culture, if you like… that provides the model for how people will live on this planet for the next millennium. If we lose and the Israelis win, then they run the bagel shop their way, exactly what they’ve been trying to do for centuries. If both of the above lose, then the Chinese, the Japanese, or some new booga-booga ‘power’ in the Third World gets to pilot the ship on the cruise down to Hell. As a White man, I wouldn’t want to live in such a mongrel world!”