INVADED!

Have you ever considered what would happen if the United States was really invaded? 9/11 was a terrorist attack but there was no follow up. In The Man in the High Castle Philip K. Dick imagined what the United States would have been like had the Japanese (an the other Axis powers) actually won, a state of affairs that was not entirely out of the realm of possibility before Hiroshima put Japan out of the running for good. During the war German submarines frequently visited the Eastern coast of the United States so the idea that only Europe was directly threatened by German advances was more of a wish than a reality. In his The Plot Against America Philip Roth imagines an alternative history in which Lindbergh was elected president and chose a Chamberlain type policy of appeasement over going to war with the Nazis. On 9/11 the Pentagon was actually threatened and then there was the bombing at the Boston Marathon by the Tsarnaev brothers. But what would an actual invasion be like and how would the American people respond? The Kurdish Peshmerga was thought to be a force to be reckoned with, but it had trouble defending both their capital of Erbil and the enormous dam at Mosul, until the United States started to bombard ISIS positions. And remember that ISIS  currently comprises only approximately l0,000 soldiers (“The rise of Isis: Terror group now controls an area the size of Britain, expert claims,” The Independent, 9/3/14) What will happen when their ranks swell with the poor uneducated denizens of refugee camps who constitute a good proportion of their recruits? You live for 7 years in a Syrian refugee camp and the only graduation diploma you’re going to have is your ISIS membership card. Will the legacy of the Enlightenment with its championship of human rights and individual freedom be any match for the fervor of a new generation of jihadist who could very possibly reach our shores? In Human Smoke: The Beginning of World War II, the End of Civilization, Nicholson Baker proposed another alternative history, this time based on real facts and suggesting that lives might have been saved if the Allies had taken a pacificist stance towards the Axis powers. Al-Qaeda recently declared a jihad against India (“Al-Qaeda leader announces India wing,” Aljazeera, 9/4/14) If Gandhi were alive what would he have suggested as a response?

The Mexicanadian Threat

European and Middle Eastern countries are often bounded by hostile neighbors. The Battle of Britain was a turning point in the Second World War. Yet if the English had lost the Germans still would have had to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States. Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle imagines the colonization of America by the Axis powers. In Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, it’s a homegrown fascist backlash that makes the country vulnerable. But before we feel a smug superiority to the geographic turmoil abroad, we should be aware of the threat of invasion from the South or the North, from Mexico or Canada, who someday may turn into the equivalent of the Axis powers. While the landmass of Mexico or Canada might not rival Russia, China or even India, they are both greater than Japan, Italy and Germany, our enemies during the second world war. Why are we being complacent? Why are we not arming ourselves against an invasion, particularly by the Canadians? Back in the 50’s there was a popular television series called Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. The series was a thinly veiled manifesto of Canadian superiority. Remember Canada boasts Alice Munro one of the greatest short story writers in the world and lest we forget Dan Aykroyd emanated from Canada. The Canadians will start by taking over organs of culture like The New Yorker, where many of Munro’s stories have appeared, and SNL which Aykroyd once dominated and before long their will be mounties and dogsleds lined up along our borders. It might seem like an unholy alliance but who is to say that one day Canadian short story writers and humorists won’t join forces with the followers of Mexican culture heroes like Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz. In a deadly pincer movement Canadians and the Mexicans will place their puppets in The White House.