Prelude
“Totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”
--President Harry S. Truman
“The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.”
--Karl Marx
PRELUDE
It’s for the common good, they say. The “common good” is why we don’t really use the Internet anymore, or say anything too personal on the phone. The “common good” is why the only place to have a true conversation is a long walk far away from the cities and suburbs, and even then you can’t be sure that it’s truly safe. Everyone has heard the paranoid whisperings of microphones in the trees and the omnipresent eyes of hidden cameras, after all.
It’s on such daring walks that our grandparents fondly tell stories of a different time, before the word Socialism terrified people to their core, before we scrutinized every person we passed on the street, wondering what secrets they might be hiding.
We are living in an entirely different world now – a world in which the fight for survival is much more savage than it has been in hundreds of years. A fight that is daily engaged, lurking under the thinly veiled disguise of societal norms.
