Some remarks

History of Shikasta, VOL. 3014, Period Between World Wars II and III. Armies: Various Types of: The Armies of the Young.

"Coming events cast their shadows before." This Shikastan observation was of particular appropriateness during an epoch when the tempo of events was so speeded up. Small harbingers of major social phenomena could be noted, not one or two centuries, but a few years before, sometimes even months. Never was there a time on Shikasta when it was easier to see what was coming; never a time when it could have been so easy for them to understand the simple truth that they were not in control of what was happening to them.

Already in the eighth decade every government on Shikasta was preoccupied, often fearfully and secretively, with the consequences of mass unemployment, and particularly among the young. By then it was evident that the new (and often unforeseen) technologies would make mass unemployment inevitable everywhere, even without the world economic crisis which was due mostly to the spending of the wealth and resources of the planet primarily on wars and the preparations for wars: inevitable even if the population was not increasing at such a rate. (The checks on this increase by deaths due to famines, epidemics, and natural disasters - these last enormously increased due to the cosmic pressures - did not impose a significant effect until later.)
By that time knowledge of mass psychology, crowd control, the psychology of armies, was sophisticated within the limits Shikasta had imposed on itself. [SEE SUBSECTION 3, "The Shifting Criteria and Standards in the Scientifically 'Respectable' and Permitted. Scientific Bigotry Analysed and Compared with Political, and Religious Bigotry in Several Cultures." VOL. 3010, CHAPTER 9, "Results of Secret Research in Military Scientific Establishments and Their Impacts on Civilian and Revealed Science."]
All governments had a pretty clear idea of the dilemmas they faced; and most engaged, to one degree or another, in intensive and permanent discussions with experts on the control of populations.
By the end of the decade no one could be in ignorance as to what must be expected from large numbers of permanently unemployed youth. Already the cities were helpless before the aimless, random, unorganised violence characteristic of small groups of the young, male and female, who "for no reason" destroyed anything they could. The amenities on which the cities of Shikasta were dependent for even an approximation to comfortable living - telephones, transport, parks, public buildings, anything in fact that came into the public domain - might at any moment be destroyed, defaced, or made temporarily inoperative. The cities were no longer safe at night, for these groups of young robbed, assaulted, murdered, always on impulse - and without ill-feeling, almost as a game.
The remedy, an increase in policing - a general increase in militarisation, in fact - was already highlighting the nature of the problem. What is begun has a momentum: the consequences of greater police surveillance, sharper penalties, and the further cramming of prisons already overfull, must be even greater police surveillance and powers, sharper penalties, and a criminal population becoming steadily more brutalised. But these were the beginnings of the problem: its infancy. Rampaging crowds of - at that stage - mostly male youth, on special occasions, such as public games and spectacles; the occasional, sporadic, apparently motiveless violence of small groups - these symptoms were the faint shadow of things to come, a harbinger, even though the public life of cities was already transformed, and the older people mourned lost civil standards and amenities, for it must be remembered that while we may look back at, and can study, a century of deepening barbarism, of increasing horror, a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and "peace," provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war - and its consequences - into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.
In innumerable cities during this epoch of almost permanent war, when the wealth of Shikasta was poured into war, when every information channel poured out news of war and war preparations, it was possible, for short periods, to live, by means of making constant mental adjustments, in a state of quite comfortable illusion.
But this was not possible for the governments, which had to face the problem of multitudes of people, nearly all young, who had no prospect of any kind of work, who had never worked, and whose education fitted them only for idleness.
At some point their numbers had to increase to the point where much more than occasional and haphazard violence, casual vandalisation could be expected. Crowds, masses, would, as if at a signal, but seeming to themselves "by chance," pour through cities, smashing everything they could find, killing - casually and without reason - those they found in the streets, and when the orgy of destruction was over return sullen and bewildered to their homes. Hordes, or small armies, or bands, or even smallish groups, would rage through countrysides, killing animals, overturning machinery, burning crops, working havoc.
It was clear what had to be done. And it was done. Numbers of these potential arsonists and destroyers were taken into various military organisations that had civilian designations; what was done, in fact, was what always was done in times of such disturbances on Shikasta: the thief was set to catch the thief, the despoilers were controlled by the despoilers, put into uniform and made into public servants.
But there would be more, and more, and more... there were more and more: millions. And millions.
Armies have their own momentum, logic, life.
Any government putting men, or women, into uniform, and keeping them in one place under discipline knows it has to exercise this mass constantly and vigorously, to make sure its energies are safely harnessed: though few Shikastans understood that phrase in its dimensions as they could, and should. Masses of individuals in military conditions are no longer individuals, but obey very different laws, and cannot be allowed idleness, for they will begin to burn, loot, destroy, rape, from the sheer logic of the mass of their diverse powers.
The remedies were not many, and not effective, or at least not for long. One was to create not one army, owing allegiance to one slogan, commander, idea, but as many as possible, and in many uniforms. In each geographical area were dozens of different subarmies, encouraged to think of themselves as different from each other. And encouraged to compete in as many ways as could be devised. Sports, public games, mock battles, treks, hikes, climbs, marathons - the whole of Shikasta was overrun by energetic young people in a thousand different uniforms, competing energetically and vociferously in what were being kept, by dint of much official vigilance, harmless ways.
And still the millions increased.
Even more the wealth of the planet was being spent on war, the nonproductive.
These armies were fed, were kept warm, were cared for, but outside the armies the populations were fed increasingly badly, and there were fewer and fewer goods to go round. Terrorised by their "protectors," dependent entirely on the good will of the uniformed masses, the civilians, the unorganised, the unmilitarised, the uninstitutionalised, sank always more into insignificance and helplessness.
The gap between the young - in uniform or hoping to be - and the old, or even the middle-aged, was almost total. The older people became increasingly invisible to the young.
At the top of this structure was the privileged class of technicians and organisers and manipulators, in uniform or out of uniform. An international class of the highly educated in technology, the planners and organisers, were fed, were housed, and interminably travelled, interminably conferred, and formed from country to country a web of experts and administrators whose knowledge of the desperateness of the Shikastan situation caused ideological and national barriers to mean less than nothing between themselves, while in the strata below them these barriers were always intensifying, strengthening. For the crammed and crowding populations were fed slogans and ideologies with the air they breathed, and nowhere was it possible to be free of them.
These myriads of armies of the young, with their variegated uniforms, or, at least, banners and badges, were only one type of the armies of Shikasta.
In every country were small specialised armies, trained quite differently from the young. These were armies whose function was actually to fight. The high technology had made mass armies of the old sort redundant. The specialised armies were mostly mercenaries: that is, people recruited from volunteers who had an aptitude for killing, or experience of it in previous wars, or a desire to find an excuse for barbarism.
Although most of those in the armies of the young had been given very little education, and that of no relevance to the problems that faced them, this did not mean that they had been left without what was in fact an extremely thorough indoctrination, mostly into the virtues of conformity, through the propaganda media. The various forms of indoctrination did not always coincide with what was imposed on them in the armies. And it must be remembered that even the simplest and most basic facts taught to a young Shikastan in the latter part of the Century of Destruction were bound to be more accurate - nearer reality - than anything his father and grandfather could have approached. To take one example, the ordinary, mass-produced geographical maps in use in classrooms: the information in these, for accuracy and sophistication, was beyond the wildest dreams of geographers of even two or three decades before. And geography is the key to an understanding of the basics - much more than most Shikastans had any idea of at all. Even the most sketchily educated and ill-informed youngster had at his or her fingertips facts that had to contradict, in all kinds of ways, obvious and implicit, the propagandas which afflicted them.
What Shikastans had early on in the Century of Destruction called "doublespeak" quickly became the rule. On one hand every Shikastan used the languages and dialects of indoctrination, and used them skillfully, for the purposes of self-preservation; but on the other they at the same time used the ideas and languages of fact, useful method, practical information.
Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised - and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.
What happened very soon was what every government had foreseen, been terrified of, had tried to prevent: the armies of the young began to throw up leaders, not those designated by authority. These young men and women were able to understand, because of the amount of information still available (though governments always tried to suppress it) the mechanisms of the organisations they were in, the methods used to control them: their subjection, in fact. And these they explained to the masses under them.
Very quickly, the masses of youth were conducting what amounted to self-education in their own situation. That they had been set to compete with each other, make formal enemies of each other, were not allowed or at least, not encouraged, to mix and mingle, had been taught to see uniforms and badges not their own as the mark of the alien, the feared; that their very existence made governments tremble; that the arrangement, organisation, every moment of their lives was a function of their redundance, their uselessness in the processes of production of real wealth - their lack of worth to society - all this was taught to them by themselves.
But understanding it did not make their situation any better.
They had the misfortune to be young in a world where ever-increasing multitudes competed for what little food there was, where there was no prospect of betterment save through the deaths of many, and where war could be expected with absolute certainty.
From country to country, everywhere on Shikasta, moved the representatives of the youth armies, their own representatives, conferring, explaining, setting up organisations and understandings that completely undermined or went counter to the ukases and ordinances of the ruling stratum, the experts and administrators - and it was as if everywhere on Shikasta arose a great howl of despair.
For what could be done to change this world that had been inherited by the young?
They were locked more and more into a sullen and despairing loathing of their elders, whom they could see only as totally culpable - and, realising, at last, their power, began issuing instructions to their superiors, to governments, the overlords of Shikasta. As had happened so many times on Shikasta before, the soldiers had become too strong, for a corrupt and feeble state. Only this time it was happening on a world scale. The governments, and their dependent classes of military and technical experts, tried to pretend that this was not the case, hoping that some miracle - even perhaps some new technical discovery - would rescue them.
The armies covered Shikasta. Meanwhile, the epidemics spread, among people, and among what was left of the animal populations, among plant life. Meanwhile, the millions began to dwindle under the assaults of famine. Meanwhile, the waters and the air filled with poisons and miasmas, and there was no place anywhere that was safe. Meanwhile, all kinds of imbalances created by their own manic hubris, caused every sort of natural disaster.
Among the multitudes worked our agents and servants, quietly, usually invisibly; sometimes, but seldom, publicly: Canopus, as we always had done, was working out its plans of rescue and reform.
And there, too, moved the agents of Shammat. And of Sirius. And of the Three Planets - all pursuing their private interests, unknown to, for the most part invisible to, the inhabitants of Shikasta, who did not know how to recognise these aliens, whether friend or enemy.