Despite predictions, the missiles did not fly within an hour of Buckman's inauguration. He explained why: "We must put our own house in order first. We must . . . "
* * *
Chapter VIII
No one thought it particularly odd when President Buckman, with the overwhelming support of his party's members in Congress, pushed through a bill making a very large number of crimes, most notably politically motivated homicide, purely federal in jurisdiction. Even many of the remaining Democratic and Republican members of Congress joined in supporting this "Federal Supremacy over Politically Motivated Crimes Act of 2017." Some, to include we must suppose, Montgomery Chamberlain, must have breathed a heavy sigh of relief when political speech was not criminalized.
If so, such sighs of relief were soon proven to be premature. Chamberlain was found in his Ann Arbor apartment, wounded by gunfire and then strangled to death by the sole surviving member of a family lost in the Kansas City attack. The killer, former liberal Democrat and former husband and father of four, Mark Moulas, called the police after the murder to inform them of it, and calmly awaited arrest while contemplating Chamberlain's cooling corpse. He confessed immediately, and never showed a trace of remorse. At the subsequent bench trial, Moulas was found guilty and sentenced to a term of ninety-nine years by the judge.
Though there is not the slightest bit of evidence that either Buckman, or any member of WUA, was complicit in the Chamberlain murder, Moulas was immediately pardoned and released.
This murder was followed by the private killing of two left-leaning Supreme Court justices, half a dozen congressmen, forty-seven newspaper editors, and an amazingly large number of academicians. All the murderers except one was pardoned, and that one was not pardoned only, so it would seem, because his motivation for the killing had been that the academician concerned had been sleeping with the killer's wife.
This was perhaps the only truly original and brilliant bit of domestic statesmanship ever engaged in by Pat Buckman. No one previously had ever suspected that the power of pardon, of executive clemency, was also a power of summary execution . . .
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Chapter XII
By early 2018, President Buckman had his "house in order." Similarly, across the Atlantic, the king, too, was ruling with an iron fist. Whether there was collaboration between the two may be doubted. What cannot be doubted was that, under similar threats even rather dissimilar men may act similarly. Unlike Buckman, of course, the king was sane.
The first Muslim containment camps opened near Dearborn, Michigan, in the spring of 2018. Citing the case of Korematsu v. United States, as well as the related cases, Yasui and Hirabayashi, and the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the President, by executive order, directed the internment of all male Moslems, to include Black Muslims, over the age of twelve, whatever their citizenship. The Supreme Court, now with two more justices firmly in the WUA camp, endorsed the order, eight to one.
Another pardon from the president was required, when that one dissenting member of the court was killed.
The next major political act of the Buckman administration, the "Redefinition of Religion Act of 2018," defined Islam as "primarily a hostile and dangerous political movement, and only incidentally and dishonestly a religion," and expressly placed it "squarely outside the protections of the First Amendment." This the Supreme Court approved unanimously.
While the order originally purported to intern only males, a subsequent order also directed the internment of females who were related to males implicated in "terrorist or anti-American activities, whatever the degree of relation, and whatever the degree of complicity."
Separate camps were established for women, in order to avoid future pregnancies and, hence, future Moslems. Moreover, any who could produce permission from an Islamic country for asylum, and were not suspected of complicity in terrorism, were permitted to go, under guard, and at their own expense.
The United Kingdom did not establish camps; the prison system was adequate to hold those Muslims believed to pose a threat. For the rest, in a sort of reverse Dunkirk, the Royal Navy dumped them unceremoniously on the shores of France. After all, the EU thought them citizens of the EU and so could hardly object.
It must be said that the British were fairly civilized about the operation, more so than the United States, in any case.
In addition to the camps for males and females, President Buckman also opened camps for the political opposition, such as it was, though these were integrated. No particular effort was made to fill these camps. Instead, the administration published lengthy lists of people it considered enemies of the state. The camps were declared to be "safe zones," where those same people would be protected from the anger of the masses.