Dispatches from the Fallout Shelter
Prepare, prepare the iron helm of war,
Bring forth the lots, cast in the spacious orb;
Th’ Angel of Fate turns them with mighty hands,
And casts them out upon the darken’d earth!
Prepare, prepare!
— William Blake, “A War Song to Englishmen” (1783)
The world is nothing but a smoking, vaporized ruin. To use the parlance of the time, everything was completely obliterated in the light of a thousand nuclear suns. Luckily, though, you have managed to hold on to the last remaining Internet connection on the planet, and Counter-Currents is miraculously still online thanks to arcane magicks. My suburban backyard radiation-proof bunker in the planet’s ultimate north is stocked full of Spam, pemmican, irradiated water, and a whole array of tinned sea life (I’m looking at you, canned sardines), among other things.
How did we get here, though? I reckon we climbed the escalation ladder of legend until the idiots at the top decided to destroy the entire planet. Fret not, my dear friends, for all is not lost. Let us now explore how we are to negotiate this new apocalyptic world with or without a millennium.
How did it happen?
I have managed to piece together a few bits of historical parchment that were not incinerated in the atomic firestorms. Here is what I’ve gleaned so far from these precious documents: In the year 2026, after weeks of intense aerial bombardment and international fuel-shortage panics, President Donald J. Trump announced a tentative ceasefire with the Iranian regime. The truce was on a knife’s edge, with Israel acting in typical Israeli fashion: blowing up targets in Lebanon as the Jewish state continued its ruthless expansion north to the Litani River. The purported reasoning for this was that the truce between the United States and Iran did not include this Israeli bellicosity, which is nonsense of course. The Israelis never wanted peace; they wanted the war to continue ad infinitum.
You can buy Fenek Solère’s novel Rising here
Citing the Wall Street Journal, Revolver News revealed that Israeli officials were quite angry about Trump’s short-lived ceasefire deal with the Iranians. The Israelis in power, especially Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby that had a stranglehold on the United States, wanted the war to continue indefinitely as they attempted to use American power to destroy their many enemies.
Direct talks between the United States and Iran took place, as per The Washington Post, on April 17, 2026, and were an abject failure. It seems they were merely theatrical in nature, designed to buy time while American forces in the region rested, refitted, and rearmed. The New York Times reported that China was taking a more active role in the conflict. Intelligence reports at the time suggested that the Chinese were most likely providing the Iranians with chemicals, fuel, and components that could have been used in military armaments production. (Incidentally, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “the Hitler of our time,” which is an insult to Der Führer if ever there was one.)
John Mearsheimer appeared on the Switzerland podcast to argue that the US blockade of Iranian oil would not work. Moreover, Kevin MacDonald discussed the US failure to blockade and/or use force to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Early in the war, fuel shortages became acute. Kerosene was in short supply in the aviation industry, and was crucial for them. In mid-April 2026, International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol said that Europe had six weeks of jet fuel left because of the Iran War. Furthermore, Professor Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar with the Harvard Kennedy School, estimated that the war would be costly, saying that “I am certain we will reach $1 trillion for the Iran war.”
When he appeared on Judging Freedom with Andrew Napolitano, on April 14, 2026, John Mearsheimer made the argument that Israel was in the driver’s seat and that the war would go on interminably until Israel achieved one of two goals: regime change or the destruction of Iran. It is no wonder that American Vice President J. D. Vance’s so-called peace negotiations failed; in fact, they were doomed from the beginning. They were by and large performative, and only served to allow time to gear up for round two. Mearsheimer articulated his core argument:
My central point to the judge was that Trump is in no position to work out a deal with Iran that settles the ongoing war in a meaningful way. The reason is simple: Israel has no interest in a ceasefire, much less an agreement that satisfies any of Iran’s demands, especially its demand that it maintain the capability to enrich uranium. Israel would prefer to wreck Iran, much the way Syria was wrecked. And Israel and its enormously powerful lobby have the means to make Trump dance to their tune, as they have demonstrated repeatedly since Trump moved back into the White House in January 2025. The only circumstance where Trump might stand up to Israel and the lobby is if the world economy is on the verge of disaster, and the president feels that eventuality would be so dire that he has no choice but to stand up to Israel.
Mearsheimer repeatedly made the argument that the Israel Lobby controlled American foreign policy in the Middle East, and he was correct. It was this Lobby’s hubris and pathological, paranoid thirst for blood and vengeance that sent the world over the precipice.
A ten-day ceasefire was finally declared between Israel and Lebanon. President Trump’s declaration that the Strait of Hormuz was open again on April 17, 2026 was rather meaningless given that it was closed again by the Iranians the following day. Nor did Israel end up showing any sign of reigning in their campaign of destruction in Lebanon. The world was thrown into darkness shortly thereafter. Could it have been that the nuclear arms race was reinvigorated at the time by all the uncertainty? The details are spotty as to how it ultimately happened, but that matters little now. This is why I am writing to you from my fortified concrete bunker here in the blasted land of chill in the Far North.
Home Sweet Home
In order to properly prepare for the apocalypse, you need what I alluded to in my opening paragraph: a radiation-proof fallout shelter. Others refer to it as their home base, their bunker, their Bug Out Location (BOL), or even, in more niche French-speaking milieus, their Sustainable Autonomous Base (SAB).
You can buy Anthony M. Ludovici’s Confessions of an Anti-Feminist here.
In the prepper lexicon, a Bug Out Location (BOL), in a nutshell, is “an alternate location from your home where you plan to retreat when trigger events occur.”
Similarly, in a book entitled Survive the Economic Collapse, its author, Piero San Giorgio, prefers the term Sustainable Autonomous Base for this remote, protected location. Not only should it be secure, but it should also be self-sustaining. After his exhaustive research into survivalist and prepper literature, San Giorgio concluded that “the only way to make it through the collapse is to settle in a place distant from potential trouble spots and acquire as much sustainable autonomy as one can with regards to water, food, and energy. . .” [1]
The author explains that to survive in this home away from home, your own sanctuary fortress away from the madding hordes, it is crucial to be mindful of the seven fundamental principles: water, food, hygiene and health, energy, knowledge, defense, and the social bond.[2] The book goes on to expound at length in the subsequent chapters on how to address these fundamental needs.
As the insufferable New York Times reported, homesteading became popular in the United States before everything in the world exploded. Homesteaders, who were mostly white people in rural areas, went to great lengths to become self-sufficient. Although it is well beyond the scope of this article to go into exhaustive detail about how to survive following a convergence of catastrophes, it is not too late to take the necessary steps to survive. So, in the meantime: prepare, prepare!
Notes
[1] Piero San Giorgio, Survive the Economic Collapse: A Practical Guide (Whitefish, Mont.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2013), 250.
[2] Ibid., 251.
https://counter-currents.com/2026/04/dispatches-from-the-fallout-shelter