Contd.:

Armies have their own momentum, logic, life.

Any government putting men, or women, into uniform, and keeping them in one place under discipline knows it has to exercise this mass constantly and vigorously, to make sure its energies are safely harnessed: though few Shikastans understood that phrase in its dimensions as they could, and should. Masses of individuals in military conditions are no longer individuals, but obey very different laws, and cannot be allowed idleness, for they will begin to burn, loot, destroy, rape, from the sheer logic of the mass of their diverse powers.

The remedies were not many, and not effective, or at least not for long. One was to create not one army, owing allegiance to one slogan, commander, idea, but as many as possible, and in many uniforms. In each geographical area were dozens of different subarmies, encouraged to think of themselves as different from each other. And encouraged to compete in as many ways as could be devised. Sports, public games, mock battles, treks, hikes, climbs, marathons-the whole of Shikasta was overrun by energetic young people in a thousand different uniforms, competing energetically and vociferously in what were being kept, by dint of much official vigilance, harmless ways.

And still the millions increased.

Even more the wealth of the planet was being spent on war, the nonproductive.

These armies were fed, were kept warm, were cared for, but outside the armies the populations were fed increasingly badly, and there were fewer and fewer goods to go round. Terrorised by their "protectors," dependent entirely on the good will of the uniformed masses, the civilians, the unorganised, the unmilitarised, the uninstitutionalised, sank always more into insignificance and helplessness.

The gap between the young-in uniform or hoping to be-and the old, or even the middle-aged, was almost total. The older people became increasingly invisible to the young.

At the top of this structure was the privileged class of technicians and organisers and manipulators, in uniform or out of uniform. An international class of the highly educated in technology, the planners and organisers, were fed, were housed, and interminably travelled, interminably conferred, and formed from country to country a web of experts and administrators whose knowledge of the desperateness of the Shikastan situation caused ideological and national barriers to mean less than nothing between themselves, while in the strata below them these barriers were always intensifying, strengthening. For the crammed and crowding populations were fed slogans and ideologies with the air they breathed, and nowhere was it possible to be free of them.

These myriads of armies of the young, with their variegated uniforms, or, at least, banners and badges, were only one type of the armies of Shikasta.

In every country were small specialised armies, trained quite differently from the young. These were armies whose function was actually to fight. The high technology had made mass armies of the old sort redundant. The specialised armies were mostly mercenaries: that is, people recruited from volunteers who had an aptitude for killing, or experience of it in previous wars, or a desire to find an excuse for barbarism.

Although most of those in the armies of the young had been given very little education, and that of no relevance to the problems that faced them, this did not mean that they had been left without what was in fact an extremely thorough indoctrination, mostly into the virtues of conformity, through the propaganda media. The various forms of indoctrination did not always coincide with what was imposed on them in the armies. And it must be remembered that even the simplest and most basic facts taught to a young Shikastan in the latter part of the Century of Destruction were bound to be more accurate--nearer
reality--than anything his father and grandfather could have approached. To take one example, the ordinary, mass-produced geographical maps in use in classrooms: the information in these, for accuracy and sophistication, was beyond the wildest dreams of geographers of even two or three decades before. And geography is the key to an understanding of the basics--much more than most Shikastans had any idea of at all. Even the most sketchily educated and ill-informed youngster had at his or her fingertips facts that had to contradict, in all kinds of ways, obvious and implicit, the propagandas which afflicted them.

Contd.

What Shikastans had early on in the Century of Destruction called "doublespeak" quickly became the rule. On one hand every Shikastan used the languages and dialects of indoctrination, and used them skillfully, for the purposes of self-preservation; but on the other they at the same time used the ideas and languages of fact, useful method, practical information.

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised-and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

What happened very soon was what every government had foreseen, been terrified of, had tried to prevent: the armies of the young began to throw up leaders, not those designated by authority. These young men and women were able to understand, because of the amount of information still available (though governments always tried to suppress it) the mechanisms of the organisations they were in, the methods used to control them: their subjection, in fact. And these they explained to the masses under them.

Very quickly, the masses of youth were conducting what amounted to self-education in their own situation. That they had been set to compete with each other, make formal enemies of each other, were not allowed or at least, not encouraged, to mix and mingle, had been taught to see uniforms and badges not their own as the mark of the alien, the feared; that their very existence made governments tremble; that the arrangement, organisation, every moment of their lives was a function of their redundance, their uselessness in the processes of production of real wealth-their lack of worth to society-all this was taught to them by themselves.

But understanding it did not make their situation any better.

They had the misfortune to be young in a world where ever-increasing multitudes competed for what little food there was, where there was no prospect of betterment save through the deaths of many, and where war could be expected with absolute certainty.

From country to country, everywhere on Shikasta, moved the representatives of the youth armies, their own representatives, conferring, explaining, setting up organisations and understandings that completely undermined or went counter to the ukases and ordinances of the ruling stratum, the experts and administrators--and it was as if everywhere on Shikasta arose a great howl of despair.

For what could be done to change this world that had been inherited by the young?

They were locked more and more into a sullen and despairing loathing of their elders, whom they could see only as totally culpable--and, realising, at last, their power, began issuing instructions to their superiors, to governments, the overlords of Shikasta. As had happened so many times on Shikasta before, the soldiers had become too strong for a corrupt and feeble state. Only this time it was happening on a world scale. The governments, and their dependent classes of military and technical experts, tried to pretend that this was not the case, hoping that some miracle--even perhaps some new technical discovery--would rescue them.

The armies covered Shikasta. Meanwhile, the epidemics spread, among people, and among what was left of the animal populations, among plant life. Meanwhile, the millions began to dwindle under the assaults of famine. Meanwhile, the waters and the air filled with poisons and miasmas, and there was no place anywhere that was safe. Meanwhile, all kinds of imbalances created by their own manic hubris, caused every sort of natural disaster.

Among the multitudes worked our agents and servants, quietly, usually invisibly; sometimes, but seldom, publicly: Canopus, as we always had done, was working out its plans of rescue and reform.

And there, too, moved the agents of Shammat. And of Sirius. And of the Three Planets--all pursuing their private interests, unknown to, for the most part invisible to, the inhabitants of Shikasta, who did not know how to recognise these aliens, whether friend or enemy.

(End of chapter)

And now the closing page from the first volume of

Originally written by Jacek K. on November 11, 2009 10:23 AM Doris Lessing's the Canopus in Argos: Archives space fiction series, i.e. Shikasta (1979).

[SEE History of Shikasta, VOL. 3015, The Century of Destruction, Twentieth Century War: 3rd and Final Phase.  SUMMARY CHAPTER.] 

So here we all are.

I am writing this, sitting on a low white wall that has the patterns on it. People are alle around me, working this and that. We are in tents in the meantime, everything makeshift and even difficult but it doesn't seem so, and everything is happening in this new way, there is no need to argue and argue and discuss and disagree and confer and accuse and fight and then kill. All that is over, it is finished, it is dead.

How did we live then? How did we bear it? We were all stumbling about in a thick dark, a thick ugly hot darkness, full of ennemies and dangers, we were blind in a heavy hot weight of suspicion and doubt and fear.

Poor people of the past, poor, poor people, so many of them, for long thousands of years, not knowing anything, fumbling and stumbling and longing for something different but not knowing what had happened to them or what they longed for.

I can't stop thinking about them, our ancestors, the poor animal-men, always murdering and destroying because they couldn't help it.

And this will go on for us, as if we were being slowly lifted ans filled and washed by a soft singing wind that clears our sad muddled minds and holds us safe and heals us and feeds us with lessons we never imagined.

And here we are all together, here we are...