Original Stories by W.H. Lamb
PREQUEL TO THIS SERIES, August, 2023
It’s been several years since I attempted to portray via articles the lives of people who won’t be born for another 400 or so years. A much shorter version of this series appeared in the old newsprint version of The Times Examiner four or five years ago. It consists of 21 parts, including this first part, all of which I’ll insert from time to time within the context of my usual Times Examiner articles, but frequently enough for you to remember the gist of the story. To tell the truth, I’m bothered by the impulses I’ve entertained for several years to tell this story again, because it concerns me that many readers will conclude that I’m resigned to the inevitability of the future I’m going to unveil to you, having spent much of my adult life, and many of my friends and fellow conservatives/Americanists I’ve had the privilege of knowing over all that time have done likewise, battling the forces of Marxism/collectivism/progressivism/socialism, all systems of repressive government that are inimical to our American concepts of freedom under law and are corrosive to the spirit of human liberty.
I assure you that I’ve not surrendered to the forces of despair, but I can look at what has been happening in our troubled nation over recent decades, especially these last few years, and extrapolate those “currents”, via this “fantasy series”, into a plausible future because if Christians and patriots of today are unable, or unwilling, to fight the collectivist forces of repression, this is the future that lies ahead for us, possibly, and certainly for our descendants. I confess to having a compelling urge to project a future time wherein our LORD Jesus has NOT YET returned to set up His Kingdom, because we of 21st century civilization do not know when our LORD will return. It might be in ten years, or ten thousand. We are to “occupy” until He does return, NOT sit around saying “woe is me” and hoping for “the Rapture” to save us from Satan’s gang and from our own follies and lack of action.
So what might that future time look like, then? I’m going to tell you about a possible future that OUR—that YOUR—descendants may experience because of what we of today do or do not do. It will not be a pleasant or pretty future—not one wherein evil has been vanquished and only good prevails. That kind of world has never existed anywhere over the entire long and violent history of mankind on earth except for the briefest of times. It doesn’t exist in today’s world anywhere, and it won’t exist in the future I’m going to unfold now. But brave and determined people of faith will exist in this future, and the tale of what they may face needs to be told. What they will face in this tale may be our lot sooner than we think. So with the “stage” being set, please open your imaginations as you read these articles—these “fantasies”-- and ask yourselves, “what if………..” (End of prequel).
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One of the problems faced by story tellers—those of us who use words on paper or in a computer’s memory rather than artists’ paints or musical notes or a performance on a stage to excite your imagination and cause you to think--is to make said tale not only interesting and/or exiting, but plausible, to raise it off the surface of the paper it’s written on, or away from the cyber medium one may read it in, and transform it into flesh and blood real-life people who laugh and rejoice, who cry and bleed, who experience joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, as well as exalt in victory and agonize in defeat. That has always been somewhat of a challenge for authors who write of our long-distant past, when the flow of history has mostly receded into the dimness of fading memories and long-lost information; and more so when projecting a possible “future history” of a conjectured dystopian existence when civilization, as we of the Western world have known it for many centuries, has ceased to exist, and George Orwell’s frightening vision of a possible future, in his masterpiece, “1984”, looks like a desirable alternative to what may be facing all of us, or at least our near descendants, sooner than we know—or care to admit.
For any writer to pontificate about “The History of Mankind’s Future” might seem presumptuous, or even a bit arrogant. After all, the prevailing belief of many Christians of our day, particularly American Christians of some Fundamentalist and Evangelical wings of our faith, is that our Lord Jesus’ return is imminent, and will probably occur during the lifetimes of many Christians alive today. So why should they, or anyone else for that matter, concern themselves with a conjectured future when it appears so apparent that our soon-to-be real future will be a glorious one after our Lord—the Righteous Ruler of all—returns on “The Day of the Lord”, when evil will be conquered and the Peace of Christ’s Love and Grace will create man’s long awaited “Heaven on Earth”?
However, not all Christians share the belief in the imminent return of our Blessed Savior, Jesus the Messiah. Some of us, myself included, believe that mankind in general, and Christians in particular, will almost certainly experience additional great persecution, civilizational turmoil, the deaths of hundreds of millions via wars, plagues, endless violence, starvation, pogroms, and the deliberate destruction of long established cultures and Western civilization in a not-so-distant future, most of it planned by Satan’s deluded minions; and that Christians and other people of faith will NOT be rescued from this dystopian chaos by an unscriptural interpretation of a “Rapture” so confidently looked forward to by many believers as they hope to avoid experiencing all of this “unpleasantness”. Some of us believe that these gruesome “things to come” can be foreseen by merely extrapolating the events both of our recent history and those of today, projecting them out into not only our near future but particularly into a fearful to imagine distant future, keeping always in our minds that virtually all of the horrors I’m about to write about HAVE ALREADY HAPPENED, IN VARYING DEGREES, IN THE HISTORY OF OUR WORLD, because the “Evil One” is forever going to and fro, seeking whom he may devour”, and always will until our LORD returns. Truly, as the Book of Ecclesiastes assures us, “there is nothing new under the sun.”
The series of “future tales”, or “fantasies”, I’m going to tell you will posit a possible, and to my mind a quite probable, answer to a question I’ve often asked in my writing: What will our world be like if our Lord Jesus tarries for another long period of time? What will that future unfold if Jesus’ “return” is not imminent, as so many Christians fervently wish for today? Not one person alive now, or who will live in that conjectured future, knows or will know the time of “The Day of the Lord” when our Savior returns to establish His Earthly Kingdom. Only our Heavenly Father knows when that will happen, and it will be according to HIS timetable and not our wishful thinking! Some version of this “dystopian” future will surely come about if the Americans of today---Christians and Jews, patriots, dedicated members of patriotic educational/action groups, are not successful in stemming the tide of collectivist tyranny that was so pronounced during most of the 19th and 20th centuries, and which today is threatening to destroy the Constitutional Republic of our Founders. Essentially, American patriots of the present hold the future in our hands. One future will be the continuation of freedom in our Constitutional Republic as bequeathed to us by our Founders. Another future will be the one I’m going to unfold to you over the next few months, interspersed within the context of my normal articles here in The Times Examiner. This future won’t be pleasant to behold, but tyranny and repression are never pleasant. If our LORD Jesus does tarry until the far future, this is what our descendants might have to survive. The choice of our future, it seems obvious, is up to us! I pray that we choose wisely!
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Before we begin to spin this future tale, let’s define a couple of words we need to understand:
CIVILIZATION: An advanced state of human society in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been accomplished.
INTERREGNUM: (from the Latin ‘inter’-between, and ‘regnum’-king or ruler)—i.e. between rulers or kings, e.g.:
- An interval of time between the end of one ruler’s (king, emperor, etc.) reign and the accession of a legitimate successor;
- Any period during which a country (or a kingdom, an empire, etc.) has no legitimate (or permanent) ruler, or has only a temporary ruler (who is not expected to be permanent);
- Any period of freedom (or deliberate absence) from the usual authority or social order, or any pause or interruption (for a short or quite long period) of a previous social order.
It will be the second, but mainly the third, definition of “interregnum” that I will use in these tales of our conjectured future. My “HISTORY OF OUR FUTURE” will begin in the 32nd century A.D., when the nation we know as The United States of America has long before been broken up into several smaller countries. These tales of future time will be presented as though a fictional “history professor” in that far distant time is teaching THEIR HISTORY to his class of young adults. (Are you with me?) There will be brief tangents to the flow of this history, to further flesh-out the conjectured ‘history’ of that future, but integral to it: The first will be the story of a day in the life of Amanda Jennings, set in the mid-22nd century in the swiftly dying city of Atlanta, and the second will be the extended story of the Christian congregation of Andria Church during the “Dark Time”, which begins unfolding in the late 24th century, and is set in what is today the area around Washington, D.C. So then, let’s begin to look at a conjectured HISTORY OF OUR FUTURE, taught as the “history” of their past to people who won’t be born for another thousand years from today. (You’re still with me—right?)
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TITLE OF LECTURE SERIES:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTER-CIVILIZATIONAL PERIODS KNOWN AS “THE NATIONALITY WARS” AND “THE DARK TIME”; INCLUDING THE PERIOD WHEREIN THE OLD UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WAS DISSOLVED AS ONE NATION. (A LECTURE SERIES SPONSORED BY LAN GREEN UNIVERSITY IN OLD YORK CITY.) (Copylock by LGU: 3114 A.D.)
“It seems strange to those of us living in the 32nd century that there were highly developed civilizations here on The Great Northern Continent between one and two millennia ago, before we who live today came on the scene. But despite virtually all of our ancient history being purposely destroyed long ago, we now know that such was the case. The tragic gap between the end of western, Christian civilization and the eventual reinstitution of constitutional liberties and a humane Christian culture reclaimed by our ancestors must have seemed to those who endured it to have been excruciatingly long, for it lasted from ca. 2030 A.D. to ca. 2430 A.D. (which, considering the scant historical information that has survived, may not be totally accurate)—four hundred or more years of terror, darkness, tyranny, brutality, disease, and quite shortened lives. For some of our ancestors who lived in Old Democrata (approximately the present Northeast part of the U.S plus most of the Canadian Maritime Provinces--WHL), and in Old Mamooda (approximately the mid-western states of the U.S.—WHL), that period was much longer and the repression much worse!
“It has often been claimed by religious skeptics that “God abandoned our ancestors” during this terrible time, but from bits and pieces of history we have discovered over the centuries, and from the oral traditions that have come down to us, faithfully preserved by the few Christians who survived those times, we know that our Heavenly Father—our Triune God—never deserted His people who continued to love, honor, and worship Him despite the anti-Christian persecution that was official governmental policy throughout this continent for all of this dark time. That they continued that worship in the face of such horrific persecution is a testament to the tenacity of faith in the “unseen” and love “For the One Who loved us, and gave Himself for us”. This, then, is a brief recounting of what our ancestors endured, so far as the scant historical records that have been recovered over recent centuries have documented, so they could eventually reestablish a new and free social order. Much knowledge of this long period of time is yet undiscovered (and may never be recovered), for as you know, all history and learning, and virtually all historical records of every kind, including monuments and buildings, were despised and purposely purged from this continent and most of the rest of this planet during this time, and many gaps still exist in our understanding of our ancestors’ struggle to survive.
THE OLD UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
“It is established fact that the breakup and eventual destruction of the Old United States of America that once occupied this entire continent, from the Great Atlantic Ocean to the Great Pacific Ocean, began long before the actual fracturing of this very unique country, so beloved for so long by patriots and patriot leaders who did their best to preserve it. Origins of the Old United States are still somewhat hazy, but it seems certain that this country was well over 200 years old when this destruction began. Unwelcome invaders from what are now Mexiduras and its Central Hispanics Colonies, and equally unwelcome invaders from many countries in what is now Oceana and various nations from what is today the Republic of Greater Europe (EuroLand) began to illegally cross the borders of the Old United States at least 50 years before its brutal civil war, which began around 2030 A.D. For some mysterious reason the ruling classes of the Old United States seemed to have resisted the demands of its people to stop this invasion of unwelcome outsiders, and despite what must have been perceived as “part-hearted determination”, little seems to have been done to quiet their concerns and ease their frustrations.
“After many decades of tensions between the invading new groups and the indigenous population that bitterly resented these illegal invaders, what can accurately be described as a true “Civil War” broke out in the Old United States around the year 2030 A.D. (the exact year is uncertain), when large groups of militia (citizen soldiers who had their own weapons and organization), aided by frustrated military commanders who pledged their loyalty to the old “We The People” Constitution that had ruled that country, apparently for centuries, attacked the forces still loyal to the so-called “elected” government, with the goal of overthrowing that government and instituting a new government that would respond to the desires of the population.
“Those in rebellion against the “old” government seemed to have used as their authority to do so their founding document that they called their “Declaration of Independence”, which we believe was the basis for their breaking away from the King of an ancient Council of Elites some 200 or more years previously, at which time the Old United States of America was formed. Unfortunately, except for some partial fragments, no surviving copies of this ancient Declaration or of the “We The People” constitution have ever been found, attesting to the completeness of the destruction of all learning and knowledge and history that was perpetrated upon our ancestors during the years of this terrible period.
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NEXT CLASS: Interregnum Part 2—The Old United States dissolves into several mini-states, aided by military forces of “The Chin Empire”.
