The Century War Terminus: What does it all mean?

"It's just a short story. That's all it is. A short story."
John Lennon, commenting on the ‘Paul is Dead' hoax
WKBW Radio, 1966 (from my memory)


Simmons' Time Traveler says "I came back for my own purposes" and we may assume the same for Simmons' writing this piece. His purpose is clearly more than to merely entertain. He has a message to get across, one that can be pulled out of his "political" comments in the story.

He foresees a war against Islam and calls any other view a category error - i.e. "having stated a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve." As part of his analysis of the true problem, the Time Traveler makes several observations.

1. "Athens failed in Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in the wrong place and at the wrong time, but because they weren't ruthless enough. They had grown soft since their slaughter of every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of every woman and girl there."

2. "In 2006, you'll be ripping and tearing at yourselves so fiercely that your nation – the only one on Earth actually fighting against resurgent caliphate Islam in this long struggle over the very future of civilization – will become so preoccupied with criticizing yourselves and trying to gain short-term political advantage, that you'll all forget that there's actually a war for your survival going on."

4. "Your enemies are they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and who are willing to sacrifice themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to see you and your institutions destroyed."

5. Those who do not understand number 4 are "the majority of you fat, sleeping, smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans." (Personally, I am miffed that he lets the Canadians and Australians off the hook, but that's just me)

6. "Civil liberties. In 2006 you still fear yourselves and your own institutions first, out of old habit. A not unworthy – if fatally misguided and terminally masochistic – paranoia."

7. "You peaceloving Europeans. You civil-liberties loving Americans? You Athenian invertebrates with your love of your own exalted sensibilities and your willingness to enter into a global war for civilizational survival even while you are too timid, too fearful . . . too decent . . . to match the ruthlessness of your enemies."

There you have it. The world according to the Time Traveler/Simmons. To cut it down to a political agenda:

1. War to the Death with Islam - a war for civilizational survival.

2. We must be absolutely ruthless - ruthless enough to slaughter the men and enslave the women and children.

3. Ignore civil liberties and our own institutions - to not do so is misguided and masochistic.

4. No dissent with the above program.

I hope you can recognize what you are seeing. A ruthless, militarized dictatorship allowing neither civil liberties nor dissent, bent on the absolutely ruthless defeat of the better part of a billion people. And if he is serious about imitating the ruthlessness of the Athenians, ethnic cleansing of the planet.

I have shown you why I think his predictions about the future make no sense. Now I must admit that I find his political agenda evil, and hope I have shown why. He is a man of talent and intellect and he represents the thinking of a great many people in America today. That is why I have taken so much time to refute it. This is much more than just a little short story.