Fitzpatrick’s War by Theodore Judson
A lot of people enjoy thinking about - fantasizing about, if we’re being honest with ourselves- the apocalypse. For whatever reason, the concept of the current world order crashing and burning and being replaced with anarchy and violence is a pleasant thought for a lot of audiences. There is undoubtedly plenty of good chunks of Psychological Significance Ore to be mined from figuring out why this might be, but one aspect I rarely see in modern depictions of the world ending is that the world has already ended many, many times and the human race kept going anyway, and those crises resulted in new civilizations with new cultural modes that seemed radical and alien to those that came before, even as the next few hundred years shall very likely seem horrifically bizarre to us living today.
That’s the problem with history; it doesn’t end. It just keeps pouring out from the primordial slime of the distant past until it ends up at your doorstep, and then it crashes through your walls and out the back while you’re still trying to get a handle on things.
Fitzpatrick’s War is a 2004 novel by Theodore Judson. In it, the modern, globalist world ended in a series of disasters- plagues, nukes, EMP terror strikes, civil war- and the rightwing tradcon survivalists inherit the earth. The plot of the novel, as compelling and relevant as it is, is almost secondary to exploring the society that these militant rednecks created for themselves, and how this society responds to the world outside of its borders.
The world of Fitzpatrick’s War strongly resembles a nightmare from the alt-right psyche (or a daydream, depending on how accelerationist the dreamer is). The world is divvied up into 3 major powers- communist China which dominates most of East Asia and the Pacific Islands, a Pan-Islamic Caliphate that rules the Middle East and most of Europe, and the Yukon Confederacy, which has forged a new version of Western civilization that incorporates the continental United States, Australia, Canada, and the British Isles (in this universe Brexit clearly did its job and did it well). There are also some minor powers- several bandito kingdoms and mini-empires in South and Central America, Pan-Slavia (a rump state in what was once Russia, where the old Soviet bloc still resists the Muslim horde), and India. Sub-Saharan Africa gets screwed with nonstop civil wars as each superpower uses it as a proxy battleground- the Caliphate arms any group calling itself Muslim, the Yukons arm any group calling itself Christian, and the Chinese arm any group spouting Marxism.
Since the vast majority of this review and most of the book itself revolve around the culture and structure of the Yukon Confederacy, it is worth investing some time in describing it in some detail. The Yukons started as a loosely organized network of survivalists, Mennonites, farmers, and blue collar engineers spread throughout the world. In the course of the long and drawn out apocalypse, the Yukons coalesced into a unified front and violently purged their countries of the Mad Max style raider gangs and the last remnants of the legitimate government. To end the civil war, the Yukons’ pet engineers unleashed self-perpetuating EMP storms to permanently knock out all technology more complicated than a steam engine across the entire globe, thus giving the rural and mechanically inclined rednecks a dominant edge forever. The day they marched on Washington to give the treacherous, immoral, arrogant lawyers in Congress the bayonet is their Independence Day.
The Yukons are, as a people, deeply reactionary. They hold the family to be sacred, dividing themselves up into clans based on blood and marriage. They have a rigidly stratified society based on some manner of neomanoralism, with Lords and Barons and Dukes owning land and permanently renting it out to small farmers within their domain (this neomanorialism is in practice less oppressive than it sounds, since almost every renter is a blood relative of their landlord- I’m given to understand that historical manorialism was often like that as well). They are extremely militaristic, with every male not needed on the farm signing up for the Army and beginning their combat training before puberty even begins. They are also deeply devout Christians, although they tend more towards an Old Testament “smite the heathen hip and thigh” style of worship in contrast to the “Sermon of the Mount” flavor. The Yukon women are diligent mothers-and-wives-in-training until inevitable marriage at age 25 (no older, no younger, for inheritance reasons), at which point they become diligent wives and mothers and start raising the next generation of Yukon killers and breeders. Like the British Empire whom they consciously mimic, they fetishize Greek and Roman philosophy and history to the point where mastering Cicero and memorizing the Anabasis in the original Greek is considered a major component of an officer and a gentleman’s education. They are also super, super racist- their society is explicitly and unapologetically white supremacist, to the point where even hinting that a man might have some Jewish heritage is grounds for a duel to the death. Every racial minority is relegated to the fringes of society doing work that is considered dishonorable for real Yukons, and even when the coloreds know their place, the police still hassle them.
All of this sort of blends together into an ethos that has been transmitted from one generation to the next for hundreds of years. If you are familiar with Albion’s Seed, imagine a culture wherein the fervent rectitude of the Puritans was cross-pollinated with the savage xenophobia of the Borderers. To wit: the Yukon Confederacy is special. We are chosen by God to represent his light in the world. We cannot falter, we cannot become corrupt, and we can never, ever lose a war or else the scary foreigners will wipe us off the face of the planet and God’s light will be extinguished from the world. Other empires have risen and fallen in accordance with Man’s sinful nature; that fate must never befall us. As long as we keep ourselves pure and show courage in adversary, God will always deliver us from the evil foreigners. So praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
By the time that Fitzpatrick’s War begins in the early 2400’s, the Yukons have settled into a comfortable rut. They leverage their superior technology to produce most of the planet’s medicine, food, and tools, and enforce their economic monopoly by serially waging wars against the Yellow Menace of China, the heathen Muslims, the Mexican banditos, and anyone else who looks at them funny. Their only allies are India and the Pan-Slavic remnant. Since the Timermen (the same engineers who had once ruined the sky and delivered the world into Yukon hands) control the only remaining satellites, and these satellites allow for precision air strikes and advance warning of enemy movement, the Yukons win every war they fight. However, they do not fundamentally unbalance the world order doing it- think of it like hunting conservation, almost. They never kill people at unsustainable levels, and that means their sons and grandsons get to go to war with the same enemies their dads and grandads did.
From this pattern emerges the plot of Fitzpatrick’s War.
The book is structured as the memoirs of an elderly and thoughtful Robert Bruce, a Knight and hero who had served in an epic world war in his youth. He was the close friend and servant of the eponymous Isaac Fitzpatrick, the greatest statesman in Yukon history, who had set out to conquer the entire world and actually succeeded within about half a year. Every schoolchild knows and venerates the beloved and assassinated Fitzpatrick, but Bruce was actually there and saw the dark side of the hero that never made it into the history books.
Judson skillfully derives some humor from the format. Bruce’s memoirs are presented and fact-checked by a bigoted and vain academic professor who keeps butting in with footnotes, insisting that certain events (such as war crimes, corruption, and religious deviance) that Bruce describes were either misinterpreted or are baseless slander against the great Fitzpatrick. Also, as Bruce begins questioning some of the tenets of Yukon life, all of the ethical choices that Bruce makes in accordance with our morality- mercy instead of brutality, love instead of ambition, egalitarianism instead of bigotry- are used as evidence of Bruce’s untrustworthy nature. Any man who would refuse to execute helpless prisoners of war would obviously lie about a saint like Fitzpatrick; a man who would dance with his wife like a sissy boy is too morally bankrupt to believe when he makes accusations of patricide.