Impressions on Iron Gates Chapter Three

Foundational public rites of the organization

This chapter is dedicated to outlining the founding rites and attitudes with which the organization gained power. At first, it was fairly like CIA-style infiltration and propagandizing, but perhaps with a more insidious edge. That is, the edge of the Communist, which, unlike the CIA types, aims not just at destabilizing, but at seeding a new ideology by implanting itself as a new reigning paradigm.

Like so, the organization worked itself in through spies and collaborators who believed in its ideology. We are not told why someone would support the brutality that the organization would bring. That is part of the novel. It does not seek to explain human decisions, it only emphasizes the cold reptilian and fanatic side to it.

A mother is given ideological material and supplies, alongside rough intoxicants that she would be hard pressed to gain access to in this world seventy years past the nuclear apocalypse. She uses these to train her little boy, while she feeds the organization information about the resistant locals. The son grows up with the single intent of joining the organization and excelling in it. Devoid of all that is human, all too human, and in full terror of all those who would become his prey by sheer happenstance of station in life.

Slowly but surely, territories are devoured and fall to the organization. They use outmoded tactics of engagement, from combat methods to officially sanctioned attitudes. Where all human beings fall into different frameworks of thought and action, the organization has mastered the Communist drive to create a new paradigm in which the individual strives to act more like the creatures from the Alien movie than caring mammals.

The fictive organization of the post-apocalyptic world, not just a decade but seven past total conflagration, has made it a sure thing that the humans who come under its burning gaze will be so driven under booted foot and cruel martinet, will turn black inside out, starting from their souls and boiling up to their flesh. Given every incentive to kill, torture and rape, but with one single purpose and mission: to carry out the commander’s desires. The commander the supreme paranoid sadistic personality, pointing fingers and pulling astral threads like the lethal spider across the cosmic web.

There are also references to more obscure practices. Beyond the now established brainwashing methods of attending speeches, singing songs, and watching drama representations for archetypal psychic driving, the merely metaphorical is replaced by the gruesome and real. Rituals involve voluntary suicide after days of celebratory preparation in the style of ancient (and not so ancient) earth-bound, star-cast cults of blood and sacrifice.

All of it, an experiment by higher forces, whose nature you may or may not be privy to.