First They Came
When people at events ask me what The Unforgiven is about, I usually repeat the now-standard, “It’s about a group of rebels trying to take down a corrupt government after a war has destroyed most of the planet.” Which is true, but…it’s also a surface-level description—and easy to spout off to quickly familiarize people with one aspect of the plot they can expect to encounter within the story’s pages.
But what The Unforgiven is really about, fundamentally, at its core, is a question: Is humanity doomed to continue making the same mistakes over and over again until its eventual extinction, or can we learn, and break free from the vicious cycle of destruction and rebirth to embrace a potential that has yet to be realized?
That one’s a bit harder to tackle with a general audience in a crowded convention hall…so I stick with the former descriptor.
The same question applies to our reality outside of The Unforgiven, of course; but, unlike a tidy fiction yarn, the resolution tying up the threads of our species’ story isn’t yet available…though it’s looking more likely all the time that it will be soon.
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As a kid, I was always good at pattern recognition—completing puzzles, video game levels, reciting and performing whole movies I watched repeatedly, learning lines and cadences and accents. As I grew, that pattern recognition expanded to identifying repetitions in real-world actions and consequences…in human behavior…in history.
I’ve surmised for quite some time that where we are now, in reality, is where we were always headed. Still just a teenager, I’d started writing The Unforgiven in 2004 almost as a warning—a post-9/11 cautionary tale about what kind of dystopian hellscape we were destined to end up in if we continued following our current trajectory.
I just thought we had more time before we got there.
Then, in the summer of 2016, I visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. In the Holocaust museum erected in the building originally used for processing new arrivals, I spent hours reading about the lead-up to the Third Reich…about the period of Weimar Germany between the world wars: the rhetoric…the propaganda…the economic conditions and mindset of the country’s people. And I realized with horror the similarities between what I was reading and what was currently happening back home.
But you try to warn people, and you’re called a “reactionary,” the things you warn about are called “hyperbole”—you’re a modern Cassandra, and no one takes you seriously. No one thinks “It could happen here” until it’s already happening. When I started giving people The Unforgiven’s synopsis in 2011, I didn’t have to dejectedly add the addendum, “It started as a work of fiction…” as people began to see the parallels reflected more and more acutely in the world around them.
This is the kind of shit I’ve been warning about since I was a teenager…and it’s going to get so much worse.
They won’t stop with Roe. You’ve very likely read the Niemöller poem “First They Came.” They’re here. Fascism is here. They’ve already got immigrants in cages and camps—what rights do you think they’ll take away next? They’ve been oppressing and gunning down marginalized groups with increasingly more flagrancy in recent years, with increasingly more impunity. They’re coming for same sex marriage, for trans rights and identities, for anti-capitalists and anti-fascists, for Black and POC who won’t quietly submit to white supremacist subjugation (and, hell, even those who do)—for everyone who doesn’t fit into their greedy, Christofascist world order. And no one will be left to speak for you or anyone else if we don’t stop them here. Now. Whatever that means, whatever that takes.
But most probably…we won’t. Capitalism will continue its decay into fascism, inevitably, as it must—an unstable, unsustainable, top-heavy system, adapted from feudalism: serfs at the mercy of lords and kings, now wage slaves at the mercy of landlords and oligarchs instead of monarchs…etc., etc. The patterns are not hard to discern once you recognize them. There is more pain and suffering and death on the horizon, and it’s more important than ever to organize with your friends and neighbors and loved ones against the coming onslaught.
Is humanity doomed to continue making the same mistakes over and over again until its eventual extinction? “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” as the saying goes—and that reality certainly seems to be bearing out. But though I recognize the rhymes throughout our horrific history, I’m not a complete cynic:
I am always, always hoping I’m proven wrong.