The Long 20th Century

a story

Hello everyone! Hello! Is this on? Ah, there we go. Hello! If you could just return to your seat and settle down, we’d like to begin our program. Thanks everyone.

It’s my great pleasure tonight to welcome everyone to the final plenary of the Fiftieth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of the Long Twentieth Century. We’re privileged to be here at Luna University’s De Mevius satellite conference center, and to be co-meeting with the Terran-Lunar Historical Association and the Early Modern Languages Academy. I am Jamie Santos, outgoing president of the S.S.L.T.C., and it’s my final act in office to preside over the presentation of the society’s first ever Career Achievement Award to Dr. Robin Serenitatis.

But first, let’s take this moment to reflect on the somber circumstances in which we find ourselves. Our numbers are diminished as we mourn the colleagues lost in the terrorist attack at Mare Cognitum. Among the dead were seventy-seven students and three faculty members. This sort of barbaric, dare I say primitive, act has no place in our time. I know there’s a lot of different opinions – both here on Luna, and of course more so in our affiliated remote sites across the system – on the Consul General’s response to the bombing and the advisory board will be discussing the various motions on boycotts, institutional letters of solidarity, and related petitions during the business meeting later today. But still, surely we can all come together to remember the fallen.

Thank you. 

Ok, well, now I hope we can shift gears to our honored guest. It’s hard for me to imagine a scholar who needs an introduction less than Dr. Serenitatis, at least here at this gathering. They were of course the first president of the society and a founding member, and from the very beginning of their work coined the concept, ‘the Long 20th century.’ What can we say — the idea took off. Their work just brought together so many strands and it’s been so fruitful to think about everything those people living just at the cusp of our modern had, and how much they lost. 

I’ve uploaded a copy of Dr. Serenitatis’ “abridged” CV – still longer than most of ours! -- to your program sheets and distributed in our networks to the off-site conference attendees. Just let me name a few highlights. 67 years ago, here at Luna University, Robin defended a dissertation entitled Hearst, Murdoch, and Zuckerberg: Infotyrants of the Long 20th Century. A few years later, as an assistant professor at Valles Marineris College, they published the dissertation as a book, with the same title, and the launched the study of the Long Twentieth Century -- an idea that we might find the origins of the Collapse and the Cleansing War reaching back as far as the 1800s.  They followed it up with Context Collapse and the German War 1871-1945 then Context Collapse and the Iraq War 1980-2031. Then after returning to Luna, From Jackson to Trump to Trump, Genocidaire Presidents of the Long Twentieth Century. And most recently, despite having recently named Peer of the Lunar Academy and appointed to the Humanities Advisory Council for the Consul General of Luna, consulting with Consul Singer to provide vital historical perspective on matters of Lunar security, has completed a draft of their next book: Everyone Saw it Coming: The Great Pandemics (1855-2043).  

Now let’s welcome Dr. Robin Serenitatis to the podium.”

*

“Well, thank you very very much. Thank you Jamie for the lovely introduction, the university for hosting us, our beloved sibling academic societies, and of course every one of you. I have been generously given a half an hour for my remarks, but I hope I won’t take even half of that. I’ve never wanted to be remembered for my writing or talks, but for the conversations they spark, whether in formal Q&A or, best of all, later over drinks. All the best work is done in conversation and collaboration, and that’s been true from the start. Back when I was just starting out here at Luna, I was part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers tasked with analyzing a huge trove of 1990s digital data we extracted from a number of orbital ruins. Without the countless engineers and data architects who worked with me then and since, there would be no history of the long twenty, because I wouldn’t have much to read. By the 1990s, far too many people had placed all their bets on types of digital information that they believed would be eternal, but mostly didn’t make it through the Collapse anything like intact. We’ve scraped and clawed so much information out of trashed and degraded heaps of data and so many people in this room have turned it to gold.

I’ve been asked to reflect on where I think the field is going.  It’s very exciting. I just came from a brilliant paper on analyzing the emotive underpinnings of hashtag meta-commentary on early 21st-century public koan construction in pre-Collapse virtual community that, well, it blew my mind. We’re just getting closer and closer to understanding how these people thought about themselves, their political and affinity-based communities, and their own sense — and this is where I hope I’ve done my most useful work — how they located themselves in history. I have spent my decades advocating for a long view, to see consistencies and patterns across generations, with the twentieth century acting as a center of gravity for those centuries of devastation and suffering. 

I’m just going to make three quick points. First, what’s riveting in this material is both how aware of the imminent crises so many people were at the end of the Long 20th.  They knew what was coming. They had solutions lined up. But they were to enact those solutions due not to technology or understanding, but the fundamental flaws of their political and cultural organizations. The flaws of how they understood their own history, I dare to say. During genocides and the rise of oppressive political regimes and the rise of financial oligarchical systems, sometimes large groups or alliances emerged to resist these forces, but they almost always understood their fight as located in the moment, not over decades or longer. So even when one malign force was turned back, the peoples of the Long 20 were just unable to restructure in ways that resisted the next assault. And what’s more, even when they did recognize the consistency over time, they never were able to impose accountability for the harms. And so, The Collapse. So, the Cleansings. 

Second, I’ve been thinking lately about how the collapsing and expanding notions of time, of connection, of cause and effect, might help us better react to our own moment in history. As you all know, we have gathered at this conference at a particularly difficult moment in our own era, as tensions seem to be shaking the foundations of the Luna-Mars Coalition that has brought us what some have been calling the Long Peace. In the 1990s, there was a similar optimism about a long peace, a world without major wars, a world that had reached a kind of end of history. Does that make you shiver, a little, my fellow scholars? It does me. A few centuries from now, how will our own moment be judged? We will be deemed as foolish and short-sighted as sometimes the people we study seem to us, and how the people of the even more distant past seemed to them? I suspect so.  

Third, given all this, is there a role for us as scholars to speak to the now directly, rather than obliquely through our scholarship? I signed a letter of protest over our government’s inaction after the Luna First paramilitaries seized control of Space Elevators Six and Seven, but then of course I did not resign my position as Peer in the government. I want to acknowledge both the criticism of that choice and the calls for boycotting this meeting. 

I respect and admire my critics; it’s some of my allies who concern me, those commentators who see this act of aggression as a singular event, a brief flash in our relatively peaceful century, a fray above which we scholars must soar, rather than seeing violence emerging from the slow growth of a deep anti-terrestrial prejudice within the Lunar-Martian nexus that’s been cynically manipulated by those who believe they can profit from war. What if we looked back — yes, all the way to the Long 20 and the coining of the concept of “eugenics,” but perhaps more reasonably we might create a Long 27th Century that connects today to the early Pure Luna genetic alteration movement from the late twenty-five hundreds and then forward to whatever comes next. It’s our job as historians to look for these connections.

But what would it look like if we did more than talk? I’d like to draw your attention to the works-in-progress section of my C.V., if you’d be so kind as to open it up. Because as it happens, one of the faculty members who was murdered at Mare Cognitum was Brook Akinyemi, an engineer and programming instructor. We were in graduate school together, part of that team who cracked the data security measures from the late Long 20, and I’ve learned a lot through the collaboration and will miss Brook for the rest of my life. But our friendship may yet build more fruit. 

As a member of the diplomatic advisory council to the Consul General, I have been granted unusual security clearances and, thanks to Brook, have developed a few skills in exploiting those clearances. What you now see on the left screen here in the hall, and hopefully at home if you’ve opened up the document and it’s made it past your security protocols, are the faces, identification numbers, names, and military records of Strike Team Gamma of the Second Lunar Marine Expeditionary Force. On the right screen is suit camera footage of the pre-breach at Elevator Seven before the assailants engaged facial cloak. You will see Gunnery Sargent Edvard Krug on both screens.

On my next slide, I’d like to show you the model and serial number of the bomb used to crack the Mare Cognitum dome. It was placed in the Second MEF’s arsenal two solars ago and is currently reported “lost.” The investigation was closed, and I have the closure order, signed off by the Consul General himself. 

The good news is that although the Consul General will deny these allegations, by now even with the light delay my C.V. is being opened in stations between here and Mars, and within a few seconds on the planet itself. The data has, moreover, likely been uploaded through your automated backups past our censor screens and into your home university systems, where a program – I really sorry about this – will cause forced replication for a few hours. I embedded significant evidence in support of my allegations with the C.V., and additional packets of data are already flowing to target points triggered by my program.  I really do apologize for the uncollegial exploitation of your trust and will understand if you wish to rescind my award in the subsequent business meetings. 

I always tell my students that in oral presentations, you need to signpost your way through it. So in conclusion: the Lunar First paramilitary assault on the elevators was premeditated, organized and approved by the Consul General himself, who has command oversight of these groups and has staffed them with our armed forces. The subsequent bomb attack on Mare Cognitum was not, in fact, a Terran independence terrorist reprisal, but rather a staged massacre by Lunar black op security forces with the intention of generating domestic support for further armed intervention. 

They are, my friends and colleagues, trying to start a war. They have killed thousands of Lunars, and tens of thousands of Terrans, to do so. 

Now, as promised, I’ll cut my remarks short, once again thanking the Society for this wonderful award. If I’m right, these remarks are being monitored but security forces won’t arrive for about twenty minutes, so we still have plenty of time. As I said earlier, all the best work is done in conversation and collaboration. Are there any questions?”