Alex sits there, lost in thought. "I always wonder what is the purpose of telling a story for which you already know the ending...I wonder if I am wasting the listener's time," she muses out loud. "I think," she says quietly, "I think in the end, that in the retelling it honors the fallen...which is the least I can do for him whom I loved." She sits there for a moment longer. "I...I...I never quite know where to begin, how to put it all in context," she begins. "The Concordat was a nation in upheaval in the '60s and '70s...a nation searching for answers, for direction, in the aftermath of the disasterous Fourth Pan-European War, a war we did not lose a battle but somehow lost the War...the lessons we were intended to learn from it throughly unclear." "The roots of the Fourth lay squarely in the Third, and then in history before...oh hell, might as well just thumbnail it all out --the motives of the terrorists won't make sense otherwise..." "They may still not make sense after..." "After the three Reformation Wars of the sixteenth century, the United Kingdom consisted of the Isles, Scandinavia, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Protestant northern German states --Prussia, Silesia, etcetra. Over the next few hundred years, while the United Kingdom would grow overseas, the lines between British Europe and everyone else hardened. There were repeated wars, escalating into the American Civil war of 1776; the First Pan-European War with Napoleon, the Second with Louis Napoleon in 1870. Each time the United Kingdoms --and after 1860, the British Concordat-- beat their opponents -- usually the French, the Spanish, and the Russians-- soundly. All three tried *again* in 1914 in the Third Pan-European War, trying once more to crush the German states of the Concordat...and after four long years, failed." "But just as Concordat forces made their breakthroughs, just as our forces stormed down on Paris and Munich and their armies were collapsing in mutiny, a bomb devastates the Parliament, killing many of its members...and tossing the balance of the House of Delegates and Concordat Council, among the survivors, towards an ungainly political coalition which, for political reasons of its own, decides to abruptly call in the troops and negotiate terms with the French and Austrians...just as the Concordat was on the verge of crushing them totally." "To this day it can only be suspected what the Doves was...some believed it was finanical gain; others say to avoid blackmail...but the result was peace on terms extrodinarily favorable to those who had started the war in the first place!" "We call it the Age of Dishonor --the shameful, peace- at- any-price mentality that seized hold immediately after the Parliament House Bombings and held on for the next twenty- one years of appeasement...as we sold state after state down the river to the aggression of the Communist dictatorships of France, Baravia and Russia...as we sat idly by while they formed EurCon...up until we got nuked and invaded in 1941." "We lashed back hard...within five years, we had throughly overrun our enemies...but we could not hold it. The apathetic masses that might have acquiesed, even welcomed, British rule in 1918 had become the brainwashed proles fighting to the death for a government most of them didn't even belive in...beliving the lies that the Ministry of Information fed them about the horrors the Concordat would perpetrate...and fearing more the horrors that their own Secret police would do if they backed off.. and the Concordat was trapped in a quagmire of fending off gurellia warfare for six more long years before we finally washed our hands of the whole thing." "So in 1960, when the oppressed Africans of South Africa began to rebel against the racist tyrannical rule of the South African regime --ruled by the descendents of the slave-owners who lost the American Civil War-- violent arguments broke out between those who thought the Concordat had an obligation to help the oppressed free themselves and those who thought the Concordat should stay the heck out, two groups drawing totally different conclusions from the past. As the situation in South Africa became more and more bloody, and the atrocities committed by the Vorster regime to keep the Africans in check grew ever more horrible, the debate grew ever louder." "Wrapped into this time was the entire age of the counterculture --when the huge population boom post- war came of age-- Make Love, not War, Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out --oh wait, none of that will mean anything to you," she realizes. "Okay. There were a huge number of young people who had no desire to go to war in far-away Africa to die for someone else's freedom. Who rebelled against society's standards on drug use, on sex, on many other things. Who, most of all, rebelled against the establishment, fixated their anger at the system --at Her Majesty, at Parliament, at the Inci. They marched, the protested, they made a lot of noise." "They also didn't make a lot of sense, frankly --Rebels Without a Clue, I used to call them. And really, they didn't --we're talking animal rights protesters that wore leather jackets, anarchists advocating for the abolition of private property driving to protest marches in Bentleys. They lapped up EurCon's bullshi--propaganda about the Glorious People's Revolution and the Evil Capitalist Hegmonies even as the same protesters enjoyed a standard of living ten times better than any EurCon citizen could dream of and the right to protest in ways that would have gotten them shot in the EurCon! The fools didn't sit down to *think* about the slogans they chanted or *why* they were throwing bricks through windows and petrol bombs at policemen--" Alex catches herself on the beginning of a rant. She closes her mouth and shakes her head violently. "And EurCon of course played them all like violins...using the most radical of these radicals for their own ends --very easy to convince yourself you are the glorious Hero of the People when you're on drugs and getting great head from a bombshell blonde undercover EurCon State Security agent!" "Pawns! Fools! More interested in the protest, in the violence, in the shouting, than in actually making some *real* change in the world! Better to raise hell gloriously and famously than actually work humbly towards a goal and actually accomplish it!" She shakes her head fircely, and pauses to calm a bit. [to be continued]