Now, moving on into the 21st century, twenty years after WW3.
Chapter XIV: Dawn of a New Century in the Post-War Western and Eastern Blocs, 2003-2008.
Twenty years had passed since World War III, and some measure of recovery had taken place in the United States though nowhere near pre-war levels yet. Gary Hart had been re-elected during the 1988 Presidential election in a landslide even bigger than four years earlier by winning 70% of the popular vote, carrying all fifty states and obtaining all 535 electoral votes (the three electoral votes of Washington DC went to no-one as it was a desolate ghost city with no inhabitants left to vote, except if rats and cockroaches were ever enfranchised). Hart was not eligible anymore during the 1992 US Presidential elections due to the term limits imposed by the 22nd Amendment, but Joe Biden had been his Vice President for eight years. When Biden announced in early 1991 he would be throwing his hat in the ring, Hart endorsed him. He went largely uncontested in the 1992 primaries and faced negligible competition for the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Tulsa. Biden easily secured a second Presidential term in 1996, positioning his own Vice President and former Massachusetts Senator John Kerry for the Presidency in the 2000 election (he in turn selected Congressman Dick Gephardt as his running mate).
Their policies displayed a lot of continuity, trying to turn the “Disunited States” into the United States again. By now safe corridors free from marauding gangs and warlord fiefdoms existed between the fortified safe zones. More and more of those had emerged in two decades as the federal government had worked tirelessly to secure the loyalty of all surviving US Army, National Guard and police forces and to combat local warlords. Scarce surviving industrial installations, infrastructural sites like railway shunting yards and utilities like power plants and sewage were under federal control. Most resources were devoted to keeping up these basic utilities in these areas, and expand them if at all possible.
By 2003, there were results. Those few surviving major cities that still existed in their pre-war form had electricity again at the very least, though the countryside mostly had to make do without. Radio was being broadcast from these cities again and simple radio sets with rechargeable batteries were widely distributed to make sure every town had at least one in their city hall, library or police station so news could be communicated from there. Every once in a while they had to recharge the batteries using the diesel aggregate they’d been given, though only if fuel had been delivered to town (most towns had such an aggregate at a central location by the 2000s). Such deliveries didn’t always come through due to supply chain breakdowns caused by anything from vehicular technical malfunctions to theft and fluctuations in foreign aid.
Economically, the United States was on par with other Third World countries. Like many of them, the US was very rich in natural resources which included coal, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, phosphates, platinum, rhenium, vanadium, silver, sulphur, titanium and zinc. Extracting these was a different matter, as it had to be done by hand and other primitive techniques or by securing modern equipment through foreign investment (in the latter case the US paid with products, as the US dollar wasn’t worth much). There was little other modern industry and outside the major cities most people engaged in subsistence farming and artisanal activities, trading what surpluses they had on local markets.
Just like national trade was based on exporting resources in exchange for finished products, the local economy was also based on bartering. The reason was that the US dollar still faced rampant inflation: the US had tried money printing based on Modern Monetary Theory, but lacked the economic base to back it up, resulting in extreme hyperinflation in the 1980s and 90s that the country was only just coming off of in the early 2000s. In the early 1990s a loaf of bread cost $2 trillion, but by 2003 that had come down to $350. If there was nothing left to trade people performed physical labour, which sometimes evolved into a kind of de facto indentured service. Another option was crime, working as a drug dealer for the Mexican cartels or the competing Chinese triads and Japanese Yakuza that were on the rise (legalization of marihuana had put a dent in organized crime, but didn’t stop it).
A related trade that remained rampant, and which authorities turned a blind eye to was the sex trade, primarily prostitution. The American porn industry had collapsed because the performers had been killed or had scattered to the wind, recording equipment had been destroyed in the war, because modern media like televisions sets and videocassette recorders had nearly been wiped out, because there was little electricity to operate such devices with, and because the normal distribution channels had largely collapsed. Prostitution therefore remained as the only remaining option to earn a living through sexual services, first becoming a widespread activity across the entire country from 1983 onward as some people engaged in “survival sex” (i.e. engaging in prostitution because of extreme need like food, a place to sleep or other basic needs, or to support an alcohol or drug addiction). In fact, more people engaged in these activities than survivors of the 1983 Nuclear Holocaust care to admit and this wasn’t restricted to women either: plenty of heterosexual men had seen no other choice, though few liked to mention their experiences.
The reason for turning a blind eye was that politicians believed that legalization and taxation of prostitution could bring in some sorely needed revenue for the continuously cash strapped federal government. It was a widely discussed topic in politics, a proverbial hot potato. Though the morality of legalizing prostitution was a hot topic in Congress, few people cared by now if it was legal or not. It was happening and people considered it a part of everyday life at this point, putting whatever pre-war moral or religious objections they may have had on the backburner. Police tolerated the activity as the widespread drug problem was already more than they could handle as the Mexican cartels were often more heavily armed than police officers were, having organized themselves along the lines of militias. They used America to produce drugs without impediment to export back to Latin America (American drug users were few among their customers as they had little to pay with). Polls indicated a majority of the population had engaged in some kind of sexual service at least once, and many of those apparently refrained from hypocrisy by judging others who did the same.
The law was modified to accommodate to reality. The 1910 Mann Act, which had resulted from widespread white slavery hysteria, was revoked by Congress in 2003 after a debate that had lasted a decade (by then the Mann Act was considered vaguely worded, based on outdated morality and conducive to a “witch-hunting atmosphere”). Congress replaced it with the “Clinton Act”, named after Arkansas Congresswoman Hillary Rodham Clinton who had defended it in the House of Representatives (she was the widow of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who had died in 1983 after less than a year in office when a Soviet nuclear strike had annihilated Little Rock). The Clinton Act is officially known as the “Regulatory Act for Interstate and Foreign Commerce related to Legalization of Commercial Sexual Activity between Consenting Adults”. Federal law decriminalized prostitution in other words.
It meant prostitution became legal as long as local and state laws didn’t say otherwise, eventually resulting in a 2007 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in favour of nationwide legalization, regulation and taxation (like the drinking age, the legal age to offer or purchase sexual services was set at 21). A side effect was that the United States became a popular destination for sex tourism for well-to-do Brazilians, Chinese, Indians, South Africans and Aussies (legalization allowed American law enforcement to focus on illegal kinds of sex tourism involving adolescents as well as illegal kinds of pornography involving zoophilia or paedophilia). The legal side was being taxed, providing the federal government with a desperately needed source of income.
In the early 2000s, a legal American prostitute charged $500, which meant she (or he) could buy enough food for that week. The rest of the income was used for some kind of low rent or board tenement. Payment in more luxurious goods like meat, seafood, butter, cheese, milk, sugar, salt, pepper and, on extremely rare occasions, chocolate was accepted instead of money for acts not part of the “standard package” (for female prostitutes the “standard package” meant oral and vaginal intercourse; for male and transexual prostitutes anal took the place of vaginal). Particularly outside the major cities, where such luxury goods were even harder to come by, barter from time to time took the place of money. Often the people bringing in these goods were foreign visitors, who also had the effect that prostitutes could charge what they did because foreigners were able and willing to pay it. American johns had to follow suit, or else their business wouldn’t be welcomed by working girls.
In the eyes of many a Godfearing American, and quite some of those remained, America had become Sodom and Gomorra. These developments made the zealots, born from religious mass hysteria in the wake of WW III, even more fanatical. They preached fire and brimstone, declaring that the country deserved these hardships if it was willing to stoop to these levels of sin. Christian activists made it their point to protest at brothels, trying to shame men into not going in and harassing the women working there. Local authorities had to force them to protest at a distance where they couldn’t interfere.
Anti-prostitution, anti-abortion and anti-pornography activists made their way into the Republican Party. The conservative religious swing that had begun under Reagan now went far further to the extreme right, but it didn’t have much effect. The country and Congress remained majority Democrat and twenty years of Democratic Presidents ensured that SCOTUS was packed with generally left-wing progressive justices.
Lack of access to foreign capital, low amounts of skilled labour, high levels of illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition, inadequate water supply and sanitation, poor health and fuel shortages were socioeconomic challenges that the United States and every living American faced even though twenty years had passed since the war. Skills and knowledge were lost as pre-war generations died off, often not succeeding in passing on all their skills to younger people. The sharp generational divide in literacy rates was illustrative: those who had completed elementary school by 1983, mostly people born in 1970 or 1971, were generally literate or semiliterate. Generations beyond Generation X were increasingly illiterate, particularly the Millennials and Generation Z. They were a large group, as Third World childbirth rates emerged: given high infant and child mortality, people in the 1980s and 90s began having very large families to make sure some of their offspring reached adulthood. Besides that, there was quite the brain drain going on as remaining educated Americans spent much of their time abroad to earn money and send remittances back home. Meanwhile cancer remained as the omnipresent illness affecting demographic developments, remaining cause of death number more than twenty years after the war.
So, in other words, the Kerry Administration (2001-’09) presided over a country that showed all the hallmarks of a developing, low-income country. The United States had a fast growing but largely agrarian economy, a small industrial base, very high birth rates and a relatively young population, but also slums, high crime rates, limited access to clean drinking water, limited sanitation and hygiene, lack of access to healthcare and subsequent illnesses, school desertion and subsequent low literacy, high unemployment rates, widespread hunger, energy poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, prostitution, teenage pregnancies, human capital flight, corruption and a large informal economy. Economic growth in 2003 was 11%, but as critics of the incumbent President pointed out 11% of little wasn’t much.
President John Kerry believed that besides securing foreign investments into America’s industry – now primarily consisting of mining and exporting its vast mineral and fossil fuel wealth – a literacy campaign was necessary. Kerry was the first US President since Reagan to leave the country. Cynics described Kerry’s goal as holding up his hand for a handout and critics pointed out how much fuel this foreign trip would cost because fuel was very expensive and hard to come by for most Americans. His supporters praised his speeches to the Latin American Parliament in Rio de Janeiro, the New Zealand Parliament, the Australian House of Representatives and India’s Lok Sabha. He managed to secure foreign aid for his literacy campaign, using it to provide elementary education for free.
In Europe, the situation wasn’t much different. Like America, they faced a lack of access to foreign capital, low amounts of skilled labour, high levels of illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, malnutrition, inadequate water supply and sanitation, poor health, substance abuse, high crime, fuel shortages and so on. The few cities and towns that had survived the war intact harboured the remnants of Western civilization and those examples of working technology and industrial facilities that remained, which were generally under government control. Outside the cities the main economic activity consisted of subsistence farming. Outside the safe pockets controlled by surviving loyal military and police units the loyalty of local authorities, for as far as they existed, varied. Loyal areas collected taxes in produce, keeping part for themselves and giving part to the government for redistribution. It was almost a feudal, medieval economy. Countries like Great Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and the former Warsaw Pact members were all in a similar state and resorted to authoritarianism in varying degrees.
Worst off was Germany, which had been the central battlefield of the Third World War where NATO and Warsaw Pact troops had clashed directly. Tactical nuclear weapons had been used liberally with yields ranging from as low as 10 kilotons to as high as 300 kilotons, and in the final phases strategic megaton range weapons had destroyed most cities in West Germany and East Germany. Berlin was the notable exception as neither side wanted to risk nuking their own troops, which meant the city survived intact. The intensity with which nuclear weapons had been used in Germany meant that – save for some pockets in sparsely populated and mostly mountainous and forested areas – the country was an immense blackened, radioactive dead zone in the immediate aftermath of the war in 1983. Germany was so hard hit that the government failed to establish any semblance of control, as opposed to its Western neighbours. The West and East German governments simply faded into obscurity. Given that Germany was reduced to 10% of its pre-war population during WW III and its aftermath, this shouldn’t be surprising.
Twenty-five years after the war, at the dawn of the 21st century, a gathering was held in the surviving city of Regensburg in 2008. The city was located at the confluence of the Danube, Naab and Regen rivers in the Upper Palatinate subregion of Bavaria. Founded as a Roman river fort, the city grew into and to this day remains the political, economic and cultural heart of the region. Adding to the city’s historical importance was the fact that the Imperial Diet had been in permanent session there from 1663 until the Holy Roman Empire’s dissolution in 1806. Moreover, the city had a large amount of well-preserved medieval architecture, making it the largest medieval city north of the Alps.
Germany’s surviving cities had become city states, small republics with varying political models: some were headed by strongmen with an extreme right or left view or something in between, or sometimes by clergymen, with militias enforcing their authoritarian rule. Others had elected local assemblies voted into power through adult suffrage. Most of the smallest towns often followed a modernized form of Athenian democracy in which all adults voted on important decisions. Like in medieval times, these cities and towns walled themselves in to hoard scarce supplies and keep out marauders.
Those representatives attending the 2008 Regensburg Conference were sent by one hundred surviving smaller cities and towns, arriving there in October after an often arduous journey through lawless areas. They proclaimed the Confederation of German Republics, a loose alliance of city states dealing with foreign policy, defence, internal trade, currency and law and order as well as constituting a trade bloc and customs union. The German Confederal Assembly, consisting of the heads of state and heads of government of these tiny republics, convened biannually in Regensburg. German unity, however feeble, had been re-established at the eve of the Third World War’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The German Confederation, as it’s usually referred to, had a President who had a mostly symbolic role and the Presidency rotated annually among the members. Regensburg became the de facto capital of Germany.
Interesting about Germany and demonstrative was the Third World War’s effect on flora and fauna, which demonstrated the resilience of mother nature. Initially, forests across the country turned reddish-brown and died in record numbers while entire populations of animals were killed or stopped reproducing during the winter of 1983-’84. Their thyroid glands were destroyed by doses of radiation in most cases, resulting in the tragic sight of the corpses of thousands of dead horses, cows, sheep, goats and poultry. Countless sick or injured pets like dogs and cats who had wound up on the street for lack of an owner tragically suffered in the same way. In the years after the war most people were too preoccupied with their own survival to care. In fact, plenty of dogs and cats were eaten by desperate people and feral dogs and cats often came to see humans as enemies.
German nature had recovered in the decades after the Third World War in an amazing way. Many of the bombed out and abandoned ghost towns that were once human metropolises – from Hamburg in the north to Munich in the south, Frankfurt in the west to Leipzig in the east – had been reclaimed by nature. Plant life covered streets and buildings until only the armed concrete ruins of tall buildings remained as visible reminders of the previous human presence here. Animal life now called the abandoned houses, stores, factories, subways, train stations and so on home. Enormous forested areas emerged encompassing most of Germany, interrupted only by the remaining cities and towns, farmlands and rough, unpaved dirt trails.
Two species in particular made a spectacular comeback in the decades after the war: the grey wolf and the brown bear. Wolf populations had declined sharply during the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly due to human persecution, resulting in them being extirpated from Central Europe and almost all of Northern and North-Western Europe by 1945. Wolf populations began booming in the late 80s and fifteen years later they had spread across all of Germany and from there to the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France and much of Central and Eastern Europe. The grey wolf benefited from the low human population of Germany, which amounted to ~ 8.5 million in the early 2000s. Countless packs emerged and the howl of the wolf made sure people in the countryside stayed indoors at night.
As to the brown bear, it arrived in Germany from the south and east and like the wolf thrived in the immense woodlands with nary a human in sight, let alone humans willing to tackle with a bear. Germany had not seen bears since 1835 and in countries like the Netherlands and Denmark they hadn’t been seen for far longer (1.000 years and 6.500 years ago respectively in these two countries). The Carpathian Mountains had the largest bear population, but other populations existed in Spain and France in the Pyrenees, in the Latium and Abruzzo regions in Italy, in Scandinavia, the Baltics and the Balkans. Without much human interference, bears reappeared in southern Germany and made it to the Ardennes in Belgium from there. The previously non-existent population in Germany numbered 1.000 animals in the mid-2000s, most of them descending from Italian and Carpathian bears.
Something similar occurred in the United States. After near catastrophic die offs in the 1980s, the grizzly bear and wolf populations exploded in the following decades. The spread of grizzly bears in particular had been limited to Alaska, western Canada and the north-western states of Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming. In the forty years after the war their range grew as far south as California and as far east as Hudson Bay. Bears even prowled in what was once Chicago, a metropolis that had become overgrown with only the ruins of tall buildings like the Sears Tower rising up above the leaf canopy.
Somewhat well off in the Western camp was Spain. Soviet nuclear strikes had destroyed Torrejón Air Base and the nearby capital Madrid while another strike had hit Barcelona. Spain’s young democracy hadn’t survived because another reactionary, pro-Catholic military dictatorship had emerged. The new junta headed was headed by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, who became the country’s new Caudillo, ruling the country from the provisional capital of Sevilla. He suspended all civil liberties to control the emergency and deployed remaining Spanish military units to the Pyrenees to stop refugees from entering the country and suppressing the Basque insurgency by ETA. His authoritarian regime remains in power as of the early 21st century. It is the most intact former NATO member and one of the most economically and technologically advanced European countries alongside Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Yugoslavia and Albania (none of these countries had been involved in WW III). It’s perhaps for this reason that the survivors among the College of Cardinals organized the next Papal conclave in Santiago de Compostela, where the Pope remains until today.
Finally, there were the remnants of the Soviet Union. The country was not as bad off as Germany, but worse off than the United States. It’s often referred to as the “former USSR” or “former Soviet Union” because the country de facto dissolved in the aftermath of the World War III. Before the war the country was a federal union of fifteen republics in name only, with the government and the economy being highly centralized under a one-party state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The USSR’s fifteen members could secede from the union, but that right was purely theoretical and none of them even attempted to exercise it prior to 1983. The war changed all that.
In the wake of the Third World War, ultranationalist movements made CPSU power structures increasingly irrelevant and ultimately displaced them, resulting in separatist conflicts from the mid-80s onward. CPSU orders and directives were increasingly frequently being ignored. Communism fell almost immediately in the Baltic States, resulting in new non-communist governments declaring independence in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. To defend themselves against future Russian aggression they formed the Baltic Union together with Sweden and Finland, a trade bloc and mutual defence pact.
Not long after the Baltic States, Ukraine became independent too, something which the Soviet leadership tried to challenge by attempting to hive off the coal and steel region of the Donbass as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The result was a fierce internecine war with the odd sight of the few remaining operational Soviet Army tanks accompanied by Russian mounted infantry, on horseback, invading and conquering the region. The Soviets now led by a certain Zhirinovsky subsequently faced fierce Ukrainian guerrilla activity. This on-again, off-again war began in 1985 and lingered on for the next thirty years. The Central Asian republics seceded too, but with less trouble than Ukraine.
A particularly vicious post-Soviet conflict was the so-called Nagorno-Karabakh War, a territorial and ethnic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. This conflict concerned control over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, a predominantly Soviet Armenian exclave in Soviet Azerbaijan. Armenia and Azerbaijan were de facto independent by 1984 and had formally declared their independence from the Soviet Union by 1988. Armenia demanded the transfer of the predominantly Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh region, which Azerbaijan adamantly refused. Using remaining Soviet Army equipment and transforming former Soviet units into their own armies, Armenia and Azerbaijan engaged each other in a war that fostered long lasting hatred between their peoples. After an Armenian victory, the breakaway Republic of Artsakh was proclaimed in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 1990. This was not the end, but merely the beginning of a lingering and intermittent conflict that persists until today. The conflict was long, hard, cold, sharp and bitter like many of the post-WW III conflicts.
Despite all its horrors, even the Third World War didn’t prove to be “the war to end all wars” because, apparently, war seemed to be part of human nature. That humanity had learned very little from its three world wars was the correct but also sad conclusion. Instead of cooperating, people remained divided into groups based on language, culture, religion and shared history and tried to secure the resources required by their group to survive at the expense of other groups. It was survival of the fittest.
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