Section One:

"We have compiled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung in order to help the broad masses learn Mao Tse-tung's thought more effectively. In organizing their study, units should select passages that are relevant to the situation, their tasks, the current thinking of their personnel, and the state of their work."

--Lin Piao
   From the Foreword to the Second Edition of
  Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
  (1966)

2082 A.D.
Rome, 45 B.C.: Caesar is made dictator for life and adopts his nephew Gaius Octavius as his heir.

Islam, 1456 A.D.: The Turks take Athens but are held by the Hungarians at Belgrade.

2083 A.D.
Rome, 44 B.C.: Caesar is assassinated. His heir forms an alliance with Mark Anthony.

China, 213 B.C.: The ecumenical government attempts to make Legalism the world ideology.

China: 213 B.C.: Confucian texts are burned and scholars sent to concentration camps, where many die building the Great Wall.

2089 A.D.
Islam, 1463 A.D.: The Turks conquer Bosnia.

2090 A.D.
China, 210 B.C.: The First Emperor dies, but the fact is at first concealed.

2094 A.D.
China, 206 B.C.: The First Emperor's son is assassinated and the world quickly falls into chaos.

Rome, 31 B.C.: Octavius, now called Octavian and soon to be called Augustus, defeats Anthony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium. Augustus is emperor in fact.

China, 202 B.C.: Kao-tsu establishes the Han Dynasty, later known as the Former or Western Han Dynasty.

In all these examples, the whole civilized world is subject for a few years to the will of a man with a plan. This plan is often designed to make the world exactly what right thinking people had been saying for generations that it should not be, a world ruled by a popular monarchy or a dirigiste bureaucratic authority, or even simply a secular military government. While in point of fact many aspects of this period last throughout the whole imperial age, the first tyrant is recalled in later times as an extremist, the exponent of a style of government too intense to last.

History suggests that being caught in a world all of which is ruled by someone with strong notions of how to make it different, indeed often with fixed ideas about how to make everyone happy and good, is at best very unnerving. The only way to get out is by fleeing beyond the limits of civilization, sometimes to barbarian states or sometimes to the wilderness. Of course, the imperial government is sometimes willing to facilitate this process by forcibly exiling those of its opponents it would be inconvenient to kill to places so remote as to be scarcely mapped. This is the classic era of concentration camps. Sometimes these are killing grounds and sometimes they are luxurious little cities where the former rulers of independent states can be kept in closely-observed idleness. Many are vast public works projects whose primary purpose is to keep political prisoners doing something of which the government approves. The Great Wall of China (actually, the Ch'in defense works at the site of the later Great Wall) is the largest terrestrial example of this sort of enterprise, though of course it also served a necessary military function. On a relative basis, however, the excavation for Luna City was the most expensive such project in human history.

Because so much of this activity was conducted by the government, the first tyrant's administration necessarily has a certain communist cast. In any event, the damage done by the terminal wars and the fundamentally capricious nature of the young imperial government do not provide an attractive environment for private investment. Infrastructure and capital-intensive manufacturing become near government monopolies for some decades. This class of communism, however, is quite different from the populist, levelling variety which may have excited the intellectuals of mid-modernity. Even the slogans are different.

In every civilization in which the first tyrant appears, his regime is based on a cult of personality which may have precedents in history but which has no equal. It is all the more effective for being genuinely popular. The characteristics ascribed to the first tyrant need not all be pleasant. Some cultivated a reputation for cruelty, though this did little to prevent attempts at assassination. (This is also a great age of highly public and extremely ingenious methods of execution.) There is a kind of popularity which rests precisely on fear, enhanced by sometimes exaggerated ideas of the tyrant's competence and omniscience. The cults of certain ancient national gods, from Mexico to Carthage, were built on this fear. A populace that watches the hearts of a thousand victims torn out in the course of an afternoon may storm the temple to stop it or they may cheer; they cannot remain indifferent. Such a theocracy is supported by the solidarity which arises among people who see themselves as part of a system based on the public sacrifice of their fellow creatures. Similarly, the worship of great dictators is a way for the people to project their responsibility onto the top of the system. Far from creating loathing for the tyrant, the cruelty of his regime creates gratitude. For a few years, such a system constitutes the civil life of the whole world.

This was a hard time to be an intellectual of any description. Traditionalists, who taught that the past contained principles which limit what the executive elements of society might decide to do, were likely to find themselves digging tunnels, or out of job, or given the choice between evisceration and suicide. Realists and modernists, on the other hand, found that, although they were willing to endorse every government reform campaign and every rising minister, these occasions for the expression of loyalty tended to succeed each other so frequently as to make perfect fidelity impossible. Since such people necessarily made their professions of loyalty in public, this meant that they could always be branded traitors in a year or two, if the policy which excited their declarations was reversed. This frequently happened.

The first tyrant is usually a personally brave man, to begin with. His personalty tends to decay with the course of time, because his victory means that there is no one in the world to give him a reality check. The great exception to the corruption of power was Caesar himself, who was always a generous and courageous person. Indeed, it was his insistence on mixing with the Senate as if he were simply another tribune which made it possible to assassinate him. In all other civilizations, leaders retreat into their bunkers and their harems, and even their closest advisers must speak to them on their knees or after an electronic scan for concealed weapons. There is no record that these measures have ever actually prevented assassination attempts, of course. This, and the fact that the first tyrant is never forewarned about the conspicuous miscarriage of his policies, induces first anger and then fear in the imperial incumbent. Indeed, in a world where everyone is a little afraid all the time and those in positions of power live in a state of intermittent terror, the origin of the great fear can be found at the very center, in the heart of the ruler of all mankind.

All the resources of a militant world civilization cannot keep a ruler breathing forever, and indeed the first tyrants are rarely very long-lived. These rulers, who were willing to leave nothing in the world to chance, also tried to ensure the continuation of their regimes through careful succession schemes. These often, though not inevitably, go spectacularly wrong. In China, the State of Ch'in which had relentlessly striven to unite the world over 250 years disintegrated in the civil war that followed the death of the First Emperor and his shortlived heir. In Rome, where matters went rather more as planned, there was still a sloppy and grotesque succession struggle, involving war both foreign and domestic, between Caesar's heir and other factions of the Roman ruling class. This conflict was not so terrible as those which led to world unification; it was not a world war, but a world civil war of the new type.

As is often the case when a civilization ages, echoes from its earlier phases can be sensed in these events, reversing the transformation that modernity had made in so many institutions. A world civil war is like an eighteenth century war in Europe, an affair of the rulers with no particular ideological content. Citizens must pay for it, but at least they are not normally expected to participate, and the war is almost never directed against civilians.

The victor in this case, however, is the savior of mankind. He is often also the most effective hypocrite in his civilization's history. Augustus proclaimed an age of peace and healing for the whole world, while executing all those ill-disposed persons whom his uncle Caesar had been willing to pardon. The founder of the Han Dynasty had pledged independence for the ancient states conquered by Ch'in and a return to traditional forms of government, while in fact consolidating the imperial power. The Emperor of the West justified his regime in part as the realization of the Christian Millennium, yet routinely used weapons of mass destruction against quite minor insurrections. In India, the Emperor Asoka, greatest hypocrite of them all, made Buddhism the world religion and compassion the chief slogan of a government which used one out of twenty of its subjects as a spy.

Still, considering human nature and the circumstances, these real "first emperors" constitute a genuine improvement on the disorders of the last generation, indeed on all of modernity. For the first time in centuries, government seeks to have only sufficient power to govern, not all the power it can get. The imperial period has begun, and the world can go back to something like normal history for many generations.