The gradually illuminated history around Avis Everhard’s memoir is that the events described took place between 1912 and 1940 [remember those dates], that a worldwide corporate police state named The Iron Heel ruled earth for 300 years thereafter, and that the following 400 years saw a world order called The Brotherhood of Man. In all some 700 years had passed before the manuscript was brought to light. The most interesting portions of the book are hence found in the footnotes provided by the unnamed 28th Century editor, who must describe the barbarism and savagery of Avis’s time to actual humane scientific thinkers.
London’s unnamed editor offers speculative notes that help fill in the blanks of this alternative reality for the reader of London’s time. London also, as if he were sinking a note into a time capsule, made many factual references to newspaper and magazine articles published in the period when the book was written [1906-08] as well as citing legal opinions and legislative actions in the U.S. on the subject of slavery and labor politics for the period from 1835 to 1908. Keeping in mind that London was also a journalist, this is a goldmine of references for the modern student of the early 20th Century labor movement.
The haunting aspect of this book, that has sent chill upon chill up my spine for the last two days as I have read it, is the predictive genius of London. From the 1950s until the 1970s science-fiction writers were hailed as our prophets, the men that would predict the future shape of our society. It entertains many of us modern sci-fi writers today when we consider that the classic authors of the recent past have almost totally failed to predict anything, focused as they were on gadgets and technology, and ignorant of the way people actually behave. London was also a big science buff. But, unlike the classic sci-fi authors of the late 20th Century, he was a physical man: adventurer, laborer, etc., and had seen life at eye-level, not from a chair. Below is a list of the predictions that London made in The Iron Heel that came true, given in the rough chronological order that they occurred:
1. There would be a world war in the second decade of the 20th Century
2. There would be a Russian revolution
3. The U.S. government would use army reserve and national guard troops to suppress the labor movement in the U.S. [West Virginia circa 1930]
4. There would be a second world war in the fourth decade of the 20th Century, which would essential be a re-fighting of the first war, instigated by a charismatic leader who began speaking to working class men in the streets and bars.
5. The U.S. and Germany would be on opposite sides of this military struggle.
6. The U.S. Navy would suffer a major military reversal at Hawaii, and would bounce back to prevail in the war.
7. That these struggles would result in a unified world economy managed by an international American-European banking cartel and enforced by an overwhelming U.S. military presence. [When London was writing the U.S. barely had a military by European standards.]
8. The existence of an overwhelming U.S. corporate economy and U.S. military would foster the growth of virulent terrorist cells around the world.
9. That labor unions would never prevail over, or achieve parity with corporate business interests in the U.S. [Organized labor is currently a tiny slice of the non-government U.S. workforce.]
10. That the banking/business/U.S. military world order would bully journalists into compliance and imprison, assassinate and/or execute ‘whistle-blowers’.
11. That massive numbers of U.S. mercenaries would enforce the world order. [There are currently 100,000 U.S. mercenaries in Afghanistan to 68,000 U.S. troops.]
12. That U.S citizens would need documents modeled on the Czarist Russian personal identification documents to be permitted to freely travel within the U.S. [I can attest to the actuality of this prediction, as Baltimore County and Baltimore City cops demand identification from me on a roughly annual basis in order to permit my continued use of the sidewalk to get to my place of employment.]
13. Gun control laws in the U.S., which men of London’s time would have found shocking.
14. The U.S. would have a dedicated ‘homeland security’ force organized along military lines with police powers to counter internal and external terrorist threats.
15. That the U.S. would become home to designated urban ghettos policed by selectively assigned police units [Hello, Baltimore Housing Authority Police].
16. That suspected terrorists would be executed where they are found rather than brought to trial. [We need only replace London’s mercenary firing squads with our own contractor-operated drones.]
17. That ‘collateral damage’ [the death of innocent bystanders] would be regarded by the U.S. Government as an acceptable side effect of killing suspected terrorists. [Yemen, 2013]
