Nightmare Fuel / "What Madness is This?": Redux

• The Immolation of Mexico.
  • To start with, a massive genocide of an entire nation is in and of itself nightmarish. But scarier than the tragic loss of so many lives is the sheer callousness of both the ORRA men involved in the genocide and the international community. In real life, even many committed Nazis in the Einsatzgruppen, Nazi paramilitary death squads that were part of the SS who shot Jews, Intellectuals, and many others as their explicit job found the massacres that they were assigned to perform to be difficult to perform, with many of the perpetrators suffering from physical and mental health problems or turning to alcohol to cope with it, which was a large part of the reason for the transition to the more widely known gas chambers. In chapter 44 of What Madness is This Redux, by contrast, ORRA simply drags millions of Mexicans out into the desert and shoots them with machine guns before dumping their bodies in mass graves. No Gas Chambers. No man-made famines. An entire nation is simply dragged into the desert and shot dead.
  • Then the Emperor of Europa Napoleon III, about the only man in the world who could have done anything to stop this, happily signs a treaty with the Republican Union to allow European shipping through the Panama Canal (which the RU was building with Mexican slave labor during this), effectively signaling to the entire world that the world's greatest superpower and the self-proclaimed Defender of the Faith of the religion the Mexicans practiced simply didn't care about the genocide of the Mexicans, and not only wouldn't do anything to help them, but would actively take advantage of it out of greed and legitimize it on the international stage. Nobody helps the Mexicans, and America gets away with it. By the time the 20th century rolls around Mexico is as American as Pennsylvania, with all traces of the people who used to live there erased. In many ways, the rest of the world’s callous lack of care for what happens to Mexico is at least as scary as the genocide itself.
  In the quiet of the Mexican desert, a tumbleweed blew across the plains. Hundreds of vultures circled in the sweltering summer heat. The air was thick and rancid with the smell of rotting flesh. Packs of coyotes dined on human meat. A gunshot rang out. The vultures and coyotes were used to the sound now, and carried on as normal. Then came the sound of the coffee grinders opening up, facing no returning fire. Little did the world know that in the old Sonoran Desert... ORRA was very busy. By 1905, over two million ethnic Mexicans and those designated Inferior would be taken out to the middle of the desert and shot. Their corpses were dropped into shallow graves and not even filled in, depriving the Inferiors of a proper burial and leaving the animals to finish the job. The actions ORRA committed were never discussed or even mentioned in Philadelphia. Custer knew. Vice President Miles knew. Roosevelt knew. Dewey certainly knew, as head of ORRA. But in the far reaches of the desert, only the coyotes and vultures knew. In the far reaches of the desert, only the coffee grinders spoke. A nation... an ethnicity itself... was no more.
• In Chapter 49 of Volume II, Oswald suffers a hallucination where he talks to both his dead brother and a more openly evil version of himself, which the narration refers to as “Other Oswald”. The whole sequence is surreal and nightmarish, but the scariest part is that Other Oswald “reveals” that he is Satan. Although the TL contains no outright supernatural occurrences and this is most likely just another facet of Oswald’s delusional god-complex, the fact that the leader of the most powerful country on earth and one of the only nations with nuclear weapons is so mentally unwell that he is suffering from the Antichrist Delusion and openly rejecting reality to “embrace the fantastic” is terrifying.