Lechistan 2150 (a satire)

The year 2150. Varshuva, capital of Lechistan. The Pałac Kultury is the biggest mosque in central Europe, the call to prayer sounds from the top five times a day. All the statues have been knocked off as being un-Islamic, although a few other statues dot the landscape as testament to uneasy compromises between the Moslems and the ‘natives’. Polish people now only number about 500,000, they’re outnumbered twenty to one by Moslems. Most are of Arab origin, either expelled from a Germanistan where the Turks have the political ascendancy, or who have made it this far from the Middle East, escaping from the nuclear holocaust unleashed (possibly accidentally) by Israel, which has destroyed both itself and Palestine and rendered much of Iraq and the Peninsula uninhabitable. There are also Moslems from the ex-Soviet Union, and a few from Africa. The Moslems outnumber the white native Poles by dint of outbreeding them.

These Moslems are not fundamentalists, they have not burned or killed their way to power; the opening of borders in preceding decades has made it easier for populations to move, and the unwillingness of white populations throughout Europe to breed in sufficient numbers has led to this demographic unbalance. The most intelligent and able of the white Poles had emigrated, either to the rest of Europe, or to America or Canada, where they intermarried into cultural oblivion. Those who remained, less intelligent (the Arabs call their areas ‘Burakistan’), tried to organise political defiance. Although successful initially, they found themselves marginalised by a society glad of the arrival of the immigrants, who were ready to do the hard work which the whites had had to do previously, and who proved far less fearsome in person than their reputation had promised. As a form of guerrilla resistance, nevertheless, a few hundred ‘Sons of Poland’ exist, but they are reduced to graffiti campaigns and occasional blowings-up of country mosques.

Most of the remaining Poles live in small country communities. Many are still Christian, Catholic; but their faith has become increasingly eccentric, worshipping Wojtyla as the Third in the Trinity after God and Mary. (‘Mary is the Daughter of God, and JP2 is her Great-Grandson, via Jesus. The prophet Dan Brown said so.’) Little model Popemobiles (with working wheels) are often seen on altars in church next to crucifixes, symbolising Wojtyla’s physical infirmities; children receive them as toys on religious holidays. It is rumoured that now only homosexuals are allowed to become Catholic priests. Missionaries from Christian Africa turn up occasionally, on their way from proselytising in the West, and are seen as figures of fun, although not treated with hostility. Nevertheless, most villages contain both a church and a mosque. In the cities, most large Christian churches have become mosques, museums or concert halls.

But there has been little overt religious repression, as standard Islam is tolerant of the faiths of the other ‘peoples of the book’ (i.e. Christianity and Judaism) – however, being a Moslem is a prerequisite for advancement in any career, or to travel to the neighbouring countries, where similar Moslem-majority populations flourish. The religious police make sure Christian communities don’t get too many radical ideas, and occasionally chuck noisy priests into reservoirs.

All billboards, like other signs, are bilingual in Arabic and Polish. But the Polish is often printed in smaller letters. This Polish has almost no diacritics anymore – generations of computer use mean that everyone has got out of the habit of putting the bar through the soft Ls or the nasal hooks under the Es and As, with concomitant effect on the spoken language. A few philologists bemoan this, but all the white children are bilingual in Arabic anyway.

The Poles speak a Polish with fewer declensions (the vocative [wołacz] has gone, and the accusative [biernik]/locative [miejscownik]/genitive [dopełniacz] and instrumental [narzędnik]/dative [celownik] cases have syncretised, except for the pronouns), and which contains many Arabic words, just as the Arabs speak a version of standard Arabic containing Polish words. (‘maa qurwa uriid’ – ‘I don’t fuckin’ want to.’) English influence on both languages still persists as well, although America is feared as a dangerous place. (See below.)

All people are registered at birth with both Arabic- and Polish-style names, so they’re called things like Layla al-Quwaliya (Kowalski), Muhammad al-Adami (Adamski), Rafiq al-Jimini (Ziminski) and Farida al-Gabrieliya. Children are given names with roots in both Judeo-Christian and Moslem culture, where possible; Dawud (David), Yakub, Suleyman, Rafiq (the Poles pretend it means ‘Rafał’), Marya, Aisha (the Poles pretend it means ‘Asia’). White children will be unable to pronounce names like ‘Przybyszewski’ or ‘Chmielewski’, and so will Arabise their names to ‘Shibishi’ and ‘Khamilawi’.

As always, racial lines are blurring; intermarriage is not discouraged so long as both parties have accepted Islam. This means an increasing number of light-brown people on the streets, many very attractive. All women wear colourful and brightly-patterned headscarves (but not full veils) in both town and country; but this, together with the wearing of trousers, jeans or longer skirts, and blouses with full-length sleeves, is the only sign of ‘Islamic’ dress, no more extreme to today’s eyes than would be noticed on a bright, but chilly, winter or spring day. (But very chilly it isn’t, as global warming is kicking in. Snowmen are a memory of the older people – most winters are like in southern England today, rain, wind and mud, and temperatures very rarely below zero.)

Secure in their ascendance, there is no need for fundamentalist-style violence among the Moslems in Europe. Differences between Shia and Sunni are less apparent. The struggle now is for America – young men who want to be bearers of jihad are fighting in the endless war in the eastern United States. Waves of increasing immigration broke ever harder against the rock of increasing resistance from paranoid, ultra-Protestant American authorities. This led to rioting at Ellis Island and other immigration centres, bands of immigrants breaking out and forming resistance groups (supported by boatloads of jihadis from Cuba, whose government has been bringing them over from the ex-USSR), and a collapse of civil order along the Eastern seaboard states. Now armed struggles between Moslem insurgents (supported by radicalised poor American Blacks) and American armed forces of varying degrees of officialdom are constant, and territory changes hands continually. The United Nations, held in contempt by both parties, looks the other way; poor whites have their land regularly devastated. Moslem rebels, whose great-grandfathers learned the mountain paths of Pakistan and Afghanistan, quickly adapt to hiding in the Appalachians and the Alleghenies.

In Moslem Europe, problems arise between those of different ethnic origins; Arabs and Turks clash frequently, and all have problems with those of African Moslem descent, most numerous in France and Spain. All of them beat up on Caucasians, who are mostly petty criminals (and so are called ‘the one-handed ones’, because of Sharia law. ‘Yo, Chechen, still got both hands? Ha ha.’). Arabs have the highest status in the East and in France; the Turks rule Germany (Germanistan) and in Britain South Asians predominate (Pakistanis continually clash with Bangladeshis, while Hindus make all the money).

Everywhere white populations live in gated communities, distant suburbs or abandoned village communities, trying to ignore the fact that the non-white societies are mostly stable and prosperous. Progressive-minded young white people go out into the rest of the world and intermarry, usually adopting Islam at face-value only in order to succeed in business; conservative whites stay in their isolated communities, but their numbers dwindle and their genes weaken. There are many Internet sites offering ‘arranged marriages’ between white Christians in different countries, with the aid of which some conservative white parents send their children off to marry white strangers in other countries. Problems arise when questions of test-tube breeding and genetic modifications to ensure the breeding ‘true Poles’ are discussed; as good Catholics they should reject such practices as ungodly, but as loyal Poles they should keep the race clean and strong somehow. Meanwhile, the light-browns advance on all sides.

But Poland is a safe place. Agriculture has revived since the collapse of the European Union (more and more people simply ignored the rules), and the country feeds itself. Sharia law is largely restricted to amputations, although the death penalty exists for homosexuality (something the stricter Moslems and Catholics had no trouble agreeing on) and child murder. Murder between families (clans) is not punished if proof can be furnished of a legitimate grievance. Proposals to test girls for virginity upon marriage were agreed on by both Moslems and Catholics, but were scrapped when it was realised that some habits would never change, whoever was in charge. Contraception is illegal, although clandestine condoms (imported secretly from Britain, whose main export industry they are) are a symbol of being ‘cool’ among the young.

As for alcohol, the compromise is that it can only be consumed in the private home. (There is no longer any need to make exception for tourist hotels and bars, as the few Christian travellers have no choice but to give their livers a rest.) Public drunkenness is a flogging offence; this leads to a one-stop extreme-Alcoholics Anonymous-style cure programme, as frustrated wives lock their drunken husbands out in the street. The religious police then flog them, and they either die, turn sober or drink at home. However, this leads to wife-beating becoming a major problem. Friends organise parties in remote country houses where they drink like the English do on weekend nights – getting completely plastered in as short a time as possible – then they recover in the house for two days, and quietly sneak out when they have sobered up sufficiently.

Snapshots:
· small schooltrips of dull-eyed white Polish kids, speaking their language together in whispers, as they walk round the Pałac Kultury and Nowy Świat (now renamed al-’Alm al-Jadiid – New World in Arabic), having to be told what the Barbakan (now the residence of the Grand Mufti) is, and who Copernicus was – a German who wrote scientific treatises in Latin.
· In ‘Polish school’, they have difficulty understanding Mickiewicz or Słowacki, whose works have Arabic footnotes to explain unfamiliar words.
· Slang: an ignorant, unkempt ‘burak’ is called a ‘Berber’; someone who is snobbish and pseudo-intellectual is called an ‘Iranian’.
· Cultural evenings, where light-brown kids called Leila and Ahmed do the ‘krakowiak’ dance in Polish folk costume, while the white country kids – wearing FC Najmahun Karako (Stars of Kraków) T-shirts and cheap Indonesian jeans – yawn in the audience and play ‘Kill-A-Yankee’ video games on their mobile-phone/Net-browser equivalents, with the sound turned off.

The information revolution means that attempts to ban corrupting influences in the media are fairly pointless; those mobile phone-sized things have so much memory and power that it is as if you could carry all of today’s Internet in your pocket. But the availability of so much information, paradoxically, has led to many people paying much less attention to things electronic, and information from these sources is regarded rather as fast food, burgers etc. are treated today, i.e. insufficient, plastic, diversionary, dubious. The written word is the source of authority; calligraphy is once more a valued skill.

Newspapers are thus the most respected sources of information, and battles to become the editor of a newspaper are often bloody, reflecting the struggles of political factions. They contain almost no pictures, as they are un-Islamic. Images are for the Web, which is for Christians and other losers. ‘Big-letter posters’ are how people draw attention to matters of public interest. Elections are a distant memory; turnout dwindled to almost zero as people lost interest and Islamic authorities declared them irreligious. Nevertheless, public political meetings are commonplace; lots of people shout and fight until peace is restored, and then the authorities go ahead and do what they wanted to do anyway.