Dystopia Descending goes live
[image error]If you’re one of the millions thousands hundreds handful of people who pre-ordered Dystopia Descending, the novel is now live on your Kindles. Thanks ever so much; I hope you enjoy the story and, even if you don’t, do please leave a review.
The book deals with one of my favourite themes: how we might get from ‘here’ – our semi-functional democracy – to ‘there’ – an actual dystopia. In 2017, I believe this journey has certainly begun. Events in the UK and US have evidenced a new kind of warfare, where Moscow intends to destabilise the EU and America without firing a single shot. In an example of the very worst aspect of human nature, the Russians have taken something incredible, free and designed to disseminate information around the world at almost no cost, and turned it into an agent of despair, to undermine our beliefs and values, to set the citizens of Europe and America against each other as they haven’t been in over a lifetime.
The internet today channels hatred more than any other commodity, among people who, just a year or so ago, would not have hesitated to agree the common ground of their patriotism. Now, in a mirror image of 1930s’ Germany, we see those in power in the UK and US denouncing the opposition as ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’. Patriotism has morphed into rabid nationalism. A line has been crossed this year, from robust democratic debate to vehement hatred of those on the other side of the argument.
When Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914, few people on that day would’ve thought it would trigger a war that would cost the lives of nearly 20 million people, a war which would leave European stresses sufficiently unresolved that another war 21 years later would be required, which would extinguish more than 50 million souls.
Today, Russian manipulation of the internet is reintroducing to our societies those elements required to sow distrust and discord, to nurture hatred, which grow daily like a cancer in our midst. I believe this is the prelude to a potential re-figuring of our societies to a point where a group of very few people will control us. Where will future historians see the beginning of the end of our democracies? At which point in our recent history will they nod their heads and decide that that was where it all began? The UK referendum, that triumph of simple lies over complicated truths? The election of that feeble-minded simpleton to the White House last year, a sociopath wholly in the pay of the Russians? Some action by his handlers in Russia or his enablers in Washington, Americans who at this very moment are traitors of the highest order? Make no mistake: supporters of Brexit in the UK and supporters of the Republican party in the US are merely working from within to undermine their own societies, doing Putin’s work for him, labouring under the asinine illusion that they are somehow ‘patriotic’.
Perhaps historians will be some future event as the tipping point? As the Russians’ role gains greater exposure, democratic power will reassert itself, so to stay in power, as in 1930s’ Germany, new laws will have to be enacted, terrorist atrocities will have to be permitted or indeed manufactured, a ‘state of emergency’ will have to be engineered to subvert that democratic power until, ultimately, it withers and dies. If we look through history, we see that totalitarianism seldom announces its arrival. It is a gradual process. All of the ingredients are present today, and now only time will tell. Thanks for reading.
Dystopia Descending is published today at the special introductory price of $2.99, and is available in the UK here, the US here, in Canada here, and in Australia here.
