Science Fiction Becoming Fact

I was huge science fiction fan. A number of SF books have been written about a dystopia in which population is controlled or people are “harvested” for various reasons. The survivors are happy to survive their brush with death and go on, not fighting back, but having learned to live with it. Like sheep or cattle used for food, except animals are not aware of their fate.

Victor Davis Hanson sees such a future in Britain whose people may be learning to live with the inevitability that a few of them will be “harvested” by Islam from time to time.

Gordon Brown’s uncoupling of terrorism from Islam and the relegation of the ‘war against terror’ in Britain to the rubbish heap of history is all predicated on a simple hunch: that an attrited al Qaeda cannot muster the money, savvy, and contacts to repeat a 9/11-style attack in Britain.

Hence the leisure of political-correctness that results in demonization of those who use wire-taps, detention facilities—and war—to stop jihadism.

So we know the script to come, but, like Oedipus, can’t stop it: more uncovered plots, an occasional terrorist near miss, and then finally a big bomb that kills hundreds.

And at that point, it gets Orwellian — what will a UK do if the perpetrators were suspected of residence at one time in Pakistan, Iran, or Syria? Or had financing and sanctuary provided by an Arab state? Surely not send in the gunboats or rely on the mayor of London for a stiff upper-lip.

Instead, elites will probably shrug and say these are the wages of doing business in today’s “have/have not world,” a sort of acceptance that a few British must periodically be harvested for the greater good of keeping “the British way of life”—best summer up like the Athenians, in the days before Theseus, who sent their annual tribute of 14 youths to the Minotaur’s labyrinth to pacify angry King Minos.