Chapter 90: War

Eric Esterhazy

2046

There were so many other things Eric would rather be doing. For instance, he could be doing something to address the scandalous rate of immigration from the war-ravaged regions of the world: scarred as they were all the way from India to Kazakhstan and from Tajikistan to Azerbaijan. He could be consolidating his position as Treasury Secretary by outlining innovative new tax cuts and further rationalisation of public expenditure. He could be actively promoting the causes for which his constituents elected him and in which he believed so passionately.

Rather than do all that, he was having to join the chorus of government ministers gathered around Prime Minister Olanthe O'Donnell as she wrung her hands and mouthed platitudes about how appalled and distressed she and her Cabinet were by this morning's horrific exchange of nuclear warheads and the consequent loss of countless innocent lives.

Now, instead of devising new ways to keep the quarrelsome ragheads out of Great Britain where they would yet further dilute the nation's cultural identity with Arabic chants and minarets, Eric Esterhazy would have to express in glutinous syrupy tones how much he and his colleagues would do whatever they could to help the millions of unfortunate refugees even to the extent of relaxing the Kingdom's already lax border controls. It would be months, even years, until he could once again suggest that the traffic should be much more in the other direction: away from rather than towards British shores.

Like his fellow ministers, Eric now had to learn to pronounce the names of far distant cities, towns and other places just at the moment when their annihilation bestowed on them the fame and immortality they'd never have earned otherwise. Who'd even heard of Dushanbe before and even guessed that it was a city in Tajikistan? And what about tongue-twisters such as Jalalabad, Chagcharan and Dzhebel? It was a curse that the part of the world where the second nuclear war in less than a decade should take place was where the names were on the wrong side of pronounceable. It would have been far more convenient if the war had happened somewhere civilised where the names were English rather than Turkish or Arabic.

It wasn't just that the combatants' names were tricky to say without stumbling and that it was difficult to find on a map the location of the now irradiated wastelands, the biggest predicament for a professional politician was that the whole conflict from beginning to end was utterly incomprehensible. Who, for instance, were the good guys and who the bad? What had triggered all these fractious quarrelling states to finally crack and launch at each other the lethal arsenal that had ended up in the hands of absolutely the wrong nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Surely the experience of such close proximity to Pakistan and India where the last nuclear war took place should have been some deterrent to the squabbling Stans, especially since these were precisely the nations who'd just had to cope with a flood of refugees from Pakistan when the country essentially ceased to function in any meaningful sense. Wouldn't they also be left with years or maybe decades of civil war, vigilante justice, local warlords, refugee camps, a permanent legacy of radioactivity and a displaced population? But perhaps the ragheads just couldn't see what they would let themselves in for. After all, there was a reason why Great Britain was Great, the United States were United and the ragheads, wogs and spades of the world had to be dissuaded from landing on the shores of more civilised nations.

Eric Esterhazy was far too astute a politician to express such unfashionable opinions in public, however much he believed them to be true. It was all because of political correctness, of course, that the truth had to be suppressed. It was obvious that the different races of the world had to be kept apart under Anglo-Saxon stewardship (even when intermixed with Hungarian blood). But political correctness was still something that a politician whether Conservative or Liberal, especially a Cabinet Minister, had to be mindful of. Eric almost envied the Reds and the Greens. Political correctness came so naturally to them.

And now what was Eric to do other than spew out hollow platitudes? How could he distinguish himself from his colleagues when set against a bland wall of solidarity that abhorred the tragedy of a far distant apocalypse and pledged to help in every way possible?

"Don't be a prick!" said Callum O'Leary, Fox News UK anchor, when Eric confided in his anxieties after he'd answered the scripted questions on live television with a soggy account of how British government aid would help the suffering millions in Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the other republics the pronunciation of whose names Eric had been rehearsing over the last few hours. "News moves on. People will soon get as bored of watching mushroom clouds over Samarkand as they did the ones over Faisalabad. Pretty soon the news will focus on radioactive fallout, viral mutations and lawlessness amongst refugees. And where there's chaos there's opportunity for the Conservative cause..."

"Meaning what?" said Eric who was weary of cryptic comments, although he enjoyed using them himself. Behind O'Leary's head was fresh film footage of a mushroom cloud enveloping in and around itself above what had previously been the little-known city of Qurgonteppa.

"When people feel threatened," Callum explained, "they unerringly seek comfort and succour in what they're most familiar with. They don't want to be confronted by the unknown and the unfamiliar. Not long from now, we'll have the same radiation scares we had six years ago. Accompanying that, there'll be an influx of strange-looking foreigners from all these gobbledegook republics in their turbans and sandals who won't speak one word of English between them. There'll be health scares about weird diseases and unhygienic toilet habits. Before you know it, the newspapers will be full of stories about the invasion of commie ragheads who couldn't keep their fingers off the nuclear button. You won't need to suffer too many weeks in mourning the death of the millions of unfortunate women and children who've just been incinerated in how-the-fuck-am-I-supposed-to-pronounce-istan..."

"A Conservative rally cry?" said Eric sceptically.

"Fear and suspicion are a Conservative's best two friends," said Callum. "Helped, of course, by plenty of cash. And you can be sure that Fox News UK's shareholders will be willing to invest whatever it takes to ensure that news coverage on this crisis will suit your government, especially if you can get shot of that O'Donnell woman. What someone like her is doing as leader of the Conservative Party I don't know. She might as well be Liberal or even Labour. There's no spine to her."