Kurt Schlichter is a retired US Army colonel who is a thinker, podcaster, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. As I learned very quickly in reading his 2023 novel The Attack, Schlichter leans decidedly rightward, and his novel essentially panders to every suspicion the right currently has about the damaging nature of an open-borders policy. This novel is not nuanced in the slightest. That said, the quality of the prose is good, and the story, told as a series of interviews, is an easily digestible page-turner. While I do lean a bit more right than left these days, I also tend to feel a little tingle of skepticism when a story confirms pretty much every belief I have without challenging me in any way. So in a sense, I was the perfect audience for this book while also holding myself at a critical distance.
The book is about a three-day event simply called The Attack, which takes place on August 27 in the near future, sometime during Joe Biden's term although neither Biden nor VP Kamala Harris is mentioned by name. (Both executives are portrayed as arrogant idiots, of course.) The novel is essentially a collection of interviews with people who've survived The Attack—first responders, cartel bosses, military officers, Reaper Team members (those tasked with tracking down and killing the enemy all over the world in the aftermath of The Attack), and even a few left-leaning folks. The Attack itself, happening over three days, is divided into three phases: Day 1 is devoted to terrorist mass shootings in high-traffic public areas. This forces the government to reflexively institute a lockdown and a shelter-in-place order. Thus, Day 2 is more mass murder, but the targets are American homes. With the police and the National Guard scattered and distracted, the armed people fare better than the unarmed. Day 3 is about attacking major infrastructure from airports to power stations, and even stores as a way to mess with the US food supply.
The idea behind The Attack is to envision an event similar to the October 7 event that hit Israel. How would Americans respond? The book declares that the terrorists assumed America had gone soft and would easily lose the will to fight, but The Attack had the opposite effect: with over 100,000 citizens killed, America ends up initially imposing martial law and holding expedited trials of every terrorist captured (including leftist campus insurgents who've helped the enemy). Most of these terrorists come from Muslim countries, but they get help from the Chinese, the Russians, and Mexican cartels. The terrorists hit us everywhere at once, all over the country (hit the mainland, at least: Alaska and Hawaii are never mentioned). American infrastructure is temporarily down, but with the people finding their fighting spirit again, repairs are made, new laws are written, and many legal reforms are put in place, including—at long last—the securing of the US-Mexico border. The book suggests that it would take a great shock like this for America to get back to basic priorities.
If you lean further right than I do, you'll read The Attack and see nothing but truth in it: the scenario seems all too plausible. If you lean left, you're more likely to see the book as a febrile, half-baked fantasy that caters to a fearful and fearmongering mindset. I found the book to be both readable and cartoonish, and while I respect that it brings up issues like vulnerable infrastructure and the problem with porous borders, there were moments when even I couldn't quite take everything seriously. That said, the telling chapters in which Schlichter depicts what certain leftists thought of The Attack were at least an honest attempt at empathizing with the enemy. I doubt a motivated leftist writer could get into the minds of righties to the same degree. I'm sure leftists who read the book will disagree.
For me, in thinking about 9/11 and how much worse it could have been, I have trouble imagining terrorists ever wanting or needing to do anything on such a massive scale even though Schlichter provides us a glimpse of the enemy's super-simplified command-and-control structure that made coordinating The Attack so much easier. If anything, Schlichter may have given the enemy too much credit. Personally, I think that, if you want to really strike terror in the hearts of Americans, if you truly wish to demoralize us as a people, you grab a couple hundred super-famous celebrities (politicians, journalists, actors, celebrity chefs, talk-show hosts) and TikTok influencers (whom all the young people would know), then torture and kill them on camera—high-quality footage only, please, none of the usual shaky, grainy, low-battery nonsense! Tripods, good lighting, and lots of celebrities reading forced confessions before getting their heads sawn off.
So I'll leave it up to you: if you're a leftie, read The Attack for a good laugh but at least consider how some of this dark scenario might be plausible. If you're a rightie, read The Attack to confirm your fears but be skeptical enough to see the pandering agenda.
3 comments:
The reality is bad enough; the fictionalized future predictions are no worse than what I expect to happen. I get refugees wanting to escape the commie poverty of places like Venezuela, but it is interesting to me the number of Chinese entering the country illegally. Why?
The novel includes the testimony of one Chinese spy who has lived in the culture and Americanized enough to help US authorities when The Attack happens. He even gives up many of his own comrades as a way to prevent future Chinese operations. Go, USA!
Well, maybe there is hope after all.
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