No Future Ch 90

XC

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."

"My feelings exactly," said Eric who warmed even more to his friend and frequent fellow guest to the sex parties organised by Fox News UK.

But although Callum's remarks were reassuring, Eric still inwardly groaned at the prospect of the many more interviews to come. Few of them would be nearly as sympathetic as those with Fox News UK. On the other hand, Eric was grateful that his first interview in the necessary round was in the studios of the national news channel where he was most in his element, even though he'd had to suppress even a hint of his normal concerns. There was no way he could angle the interview towards an attack on alarmist Green activists, the creeping influence of socialism, or the steady loss of the nation's moral backbone. He couldn't find an obvious way in which he could argue for tax cuts, increased military expenditure, and rolling back the influence of the state as a solution to an apocalyptic catastrophe in these faraway lands. Instead he'd had to propose the very kind of political intervention and nanny-state interference that he was more disposed to opposed.

"Given the present state of the Exchequer, can we afford to be as generous as you suggest?" asked Eoin d'Auberge, the dusky-skinned interviewer on the pinko BBC where, for the first time in many years, Eric ventured into their cramped studios near Old Street.

Eric hated the BBC. Just as he did any media outlet that by virtue of not being conservative could only be part of the pinko liberal establishment that had sympathies for Greens, Reds, poofs and ragheads. If he had his way, what was left of the BBC would be left to wither away but, unfortunately, over half a century of starving the corporation of funds hadn't completely destroyed the affection the general public still retained for it.

However, now wasn't the time to go off-script. Although his instinct was to respond to the half-breed d'Auberge with an attack on him having asked such a loaded question which was so obviously a reference to his general view that the British government was already far too generous.

"These are extraordinary times that demand extraordinary measures," said Eric bestowing on his clichéd words as much gravitas as he could muster. "The British people have shown many times before just how deeply they are willing to dig into their pockets to help those much less fortunate than themselves, especially when the disaster has happened on such a tragic scale..."

"Are you suggesting that the charitable and private sector should be wholly responsible for providing practical assistance?"

"What? No, of course not," said Eric who could see where this might lead to, given his many pronouncements on how Foreign Aid should be entirely discretionary. "As you reported in your news headline, the British Government has made a pledge of unconditional aid and assistance that can only be described as generous. It is imperative on governments across the world to give as much as possible to the tens of millions of displaced and mortally wounded in Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan. This is an international crisis and it deserves a commensurate international response..."

"Can we be assured that the pledge will be matched by actual funds? Or will only a fraction of the pledged funds reach its intended recipients as happened, for instance, in the Indo-Pakistani Nuclear War?"

This was another trap. Christ! Eric hated these fucking pinko news reporters. Why couldn't this d'Auberge cunt just display the same deference and respect he always got from Fox News UK and its affiliates? Eric had only a month before been pontificating on why it had been necessary to radically reduce Foreign Aid including, of course, all that earmarked for Pakistan. Now wasn't the time, of course, to tell the BBC News anchors and their loyal (but mostly non-Conservative) viewers that every penny spent on Pakistan had dropped down a bottomless pit of local corruption while the entirely predictable consequences of the self-induced trauma of all-out nuclear war remained as insurmountable as ever. Now wasn't the time to explain that he expected most of the Foreign Aid donated to the Stans to eventually be re-invested in the coffers of a handful of large corporations who'd already began lobbying for funds to help further British commercial influence in that part of the world.

"We have learnt many lessons from the mistakes made by the previous government during the last nuclear war," said Eric boldly. "You can be assured that we shall ensure that the interests of the suffering millions will be the highest of all priorities for the government in which I have the privilege to serve..."

Even if it was with that bitch O'Donnell, Eric thought, as he blustered his way through the remaining few minutes of his thankfully short interview in which he made sure that he emphasised again and again the bullet points with which he'd been briefed. And these were, of course, so far from what Eric would normally propound that he had to bite his tongue and almost recite his lines as if it were some kind of school assignment.

Occasionally, Eric considered the meaning of the words he was trotting out and would do so again for news organisations based both home and abroad. It helped, after all, to be able to match his emotional responses to the words he was using. Yes, it was truly shocking and appalling that millions of men, women and children had been fatally consumed by the billowing clouds of burning radioactive dust. Yes, he could only feel pity for the suffering of those whose skin had peeled off in the intense heat and whose eyeballs had been burnt out by a glare brighter than the sun and whose bones had been shattered by the flying debris. And, yes, he felt anguish for the plight of the many who now had to suffer for the rest of their lives with the threat of cancer, if, that is, they managed to survive the plagues, famines and civil war which were the still persistent legacy of the last nuclear war.

On the whole, though, for Eric all this was just a distraction that he'd much rather do without. If only the ragheads had killed each other off in a less spectacular way, then perhaps no one would have noticed and almost certainly there'd be no fresh influx of wretched refugees into the United Kingdom.