We’re on a new section now! That means we’re…..still nowhere near the end of this.

Remember how considerate the author was of mental health and how he never ever just makes up shit for drama? This chapter is more of that.

Our interviewee is “Xolelwa Azania” and he’s super into the life of Paul Redeker, of the Redeker plan we’ve been hearing about. Apparently everyone loves or hates him, but actually he was a super dispassionate guy. The interviewee is under the impression those two things conflict in some way, despite the fact that a solid 80% of evil Nazi depictions is that they’re dispassionate about all that evil they’re doing and that hating people for not caring about other people is actually kind of totally standard.

Anyway, Redeker does sound like the sort of not-Nazi I could get behind, in that he’s just not into emotions and wants to deal with stuff rationally. Maybe it’s that all American politics now is people screaming their emotions at things or something. I mean yes, ideally I’d like for our leaders to care about us and formulate policies based on that, but right now proceeding rationally toward a goal would be a huge step up over DEATH PANELS KENYA REAL AMERICA.

all dealing with alternate “solutions” to historical, societal quandaries, were what first brought him to the attention of the apartheid government.

I mean, to continue the Nazi comparison, let’s take a minute to remember that it’s not just that the Nazis decided to exterminate millions upon millions of innocent people. They did it for reasons that didn’t make any sense, in unnecessarily drawn out and hideous ways, while believing in magic.

Emotions suck.

Many psychobiographers have tried to label him a racist, but, in his own words, “racism is a regrettable by-product of irrational emotion.” Others have argued that, in order for a racist to hate one group, he must at least love another. Redeker believed both love and hate to be irrelevant.

So in other words, no one thinks he was a racist. (Despite the fact you can totally be racist without hating people.) But anyway, okay, fine, it’s not. Like how lots of Nazis were not racist, just helping a racist regime for personal power. This is not hard to understand. We hate people for aiding shitty things they don’t personally believe in all the time.

And no, it doesn’t matter that the interviewee has a vested interest in defending the guy. The point is this would not need defending. The area Redeker would need defending on is the part where he was working for evil people. No one gives a fuck he didn’t beat his maid or whatever.

This is why they enlisted the aid of Mister Redeker to revise the government’s ultrasecret “Plan Orange.” “Orange” had been in existence since the apartheid government first came to power in 1948. It was the doomsday scenario for the country’s white minority, the plan to deal with an all-out uprising of its indigenous African population.

…

His revised Plan Orange, appropriately completed in 1984, was the ultimate survival strategy for the Afrikaner people. No variable was ignored. Population figures, terrain, resources, logistics…Redeker not only updated the plan to include both Cuba’s chemical weapons and his own country’s nuclear option, but also, and this is what made “Orange Eighty-Four” so historic, the determination of which Afrikaners would be saved and which had to be sacrificed.

Now, if we want to talk about racism, it’d be the part where the question of whether or not to use chemical weapons and nukes is just merrily glossed over in favor of how oh my god some white people might die too.

The author never gives us any relevant details of the plan, content that telling us no really Redeker isn’t racism is enough.

What did Redeker’s plan call for in dealing with the Africans? Was his plan a survival plan for withdrawing with minimum loss of life and defending against attack, in which case he seems to be rationally laying out the best plan for the country as a whole, or was it based around finding a way to wipe out the Africans successfully with minimum loss to the white people, in which case yes, that sounds like a reason to hate someone.

If Redeker is reviled for giving the government a plan that would let them win the upcoming conflict by wiping out most of their country’s population, then that’s very, very different than waaah people are mean because Redeker worked with the government even though he wasn’t a racist! His defense that this point would amount to just following orders, which brings us back to Nazis and how we all agree to hate them anyway. At most, you could argue Redeker was disconnected enough from society at large that he just didn’t register this, but that’s at odds with his meticulous analysis of how the war would go – unless his plan is solely based on available resources and meant to have gaping holes when it comes to how the Africans will behave during it, he must be able to understand people pretty well.

Sacrificed?

Bear in mind everyone in the world knows all about Redeker and his plan by now. There are questions about the sacrifice decisions that could lead into the response, but holy shit this is horrible writing. It’s like the narrator just dropped in from our universe and is trying to find out what happened with interviews and this is the first time anyone’s mentioned this.

Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government’s resources to the breaking point, thus dooming the entire population. He compared it to survivors from a sinking ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have room for them all. Redeker had even gone so far as to calculate who should be “brought aboard.” He included income, IQ

So what you’re saying is he’s racist.

an entire checklist of “desirable qualities,”

The story seems to be really trying to sell the idea that this is just coolheaded decisionmaking here, but holy shit no that is racist. The quality’s Mr. Rational is going for are the same ones generally listed for why white people should be in charge in the first place and that doesn’t seem weird at all?

including the subject’s location to a potential crisis zone.

See, if you were actually picking this for a good reason, it wouldn’t be “including” this as a final afterthought. It’d be the first and probably last quality anyone cared about.

And it would absolutely not involve “fertility” because there are other white people in the world, you don’t need to worry about keeping a breeding population of the pure race going just because the scary black men are sick of you owning everything.

Of course he was invited to appear before the “Truth and Reconciliation” hearings, and, of course, he refused. “I won’t pretend to have a heart simply to save my skin,” he stated publicly, adding, “No matter what I do, I’m sure they will come for me anyway.”

He sounds like he knows full well what he did was wrong. If he’s going to claim that he’s emotionless and emotions are the problem, he should be fine calmly explaining how his plan was so “logical” and totally not motivated by hate and nobody should be mad, rather than going NO YOU’RE ALL A BUNCH OF MURDEROUS THUGS WHO’LL KILL ME ANYWAY WAAAH!!!!!

It was during our Great Panic, which began several weeks before yours.

And that was why?

Because we’ve spent a great deal of time on why America wanted to keep their head in the sand, and how precisely America accomplished that, and exactly who leaked the information that caused the eventual panic.

Not that it makes sense for everyone else in the world to wait for America to panic before realizing that right, zombie death, but it doesn’t make any more sense for everyone else in the world to assume things are fine for unrelated reasons and then figure out they’re not at almost the same time. And furthermore, one of the author’s attempts to rationalize the America idiot ball is that it was cold so the zombies were less active and people assumed that meant it was over, which not only is not a thing for South Africa but also they’re on the other side of the equator so it’d have been high summer during the same period.

Anyway, he’s in his cabin expecting to die when some people come for him but shockingly they’re not here to kill him. For all our interviewee keeps saying he’s super hated, it really doesn’t seem like it or he’d have died well before now.

They were of all colors: black, Asian, colored, and even a white man

But really, this guy is totally a racist.

Anyway, the white guy naturally is the one who starts asking about if he’s got a plan for the zombies. And he does. He was working on it just for fun. In a better book, that explanation would’ve been the forefront of the defense of his previous plan instead of just BUT HE’S NOT RACIST on a loop.

Once again, Redeker had taken everything into account, not only the strategic situation of the country, but also the physiology, behavior, and “combat doctrine” of the living dead.

Anyway I’m going to now guess that the original plan was extremely detailed but actually shit because he couldn’t predict human behavior, but luckily the zombies are less intelligent than bugs so they’re a perfect fit for his strategic abilities. Large portions of the plan sound like they’d only work against an enemy that doesn’t adapt to anything you do, so this is really plausible.

While you can research the details of the “Redeker Plan” in any public library around the world, here are some of the fundamental keys:

“As you know, Bob…”

Our forces had to be consolidated, withdrawn to a special “safe zone,” which, hopefully, would be aided by some natural obstacle such as mountains, rivers, or even an offshore island.

You may recall zombies cheerfully wander over the seabed and there’s multiple mentions of them coming out of the surf.

The idea islands are somehow defensible will keep coming up because rationally, they are. It’s just the author forgot he also made his zombies impossible mary sue zombies designed to handle all the rational ways of dealing with them. An island just means you don’t see them coming until they’re right outside.

The second part of the plan dealt with the evacuation of civilians, and this could not have been envisioned by anyone else but Redeker. In his mind, only a small fraction of the civilian population could be evacuated to the safe zone. These people would be saved not only to provide a labor pool for the eventual wartime economic restoration, but also to preserve the legitimacy and stability of the government, to prove to those already within the zone that their leaders were “looking out for them.”

Of course, if you just let everyone die you’re still just as legitimate a government because there’s no one else to argue.

There was another reason for this partial evacuation, an eminently logical and insidiously dark reason that, many believe, will forever ensure Redeker the tallest pedestal in the pantheon of hell. Those who were left behind were to be herded into special isolated zones. They were to be “human bait,” distracting the undead from following the retreating army to their safe zone. Redeker argued that these isolated, uninfected refugees must be kept alive, well defended and even resupplied, if possible, so as to keep the undead hordes firmly rooted to the spot. You see the genius, the sickness? Keeping people as prisoners because “every zombie besieging those survivors will be one less zombie throwing itself against our defenses.”

Right. This is supposed to be the dark crime of WWZ.

The distinction between “safe zone” and “special isolated zone” is poor. One is supposed to be better than the other, but in practice the “isolated” zones seem to be more secure than the “safe” ones, which rely on constant military patrols to make sure the zombies don’t get in and are untested at the moment, while the “isolated” ones tend to actually be secure.

In practice, as soon as the author’s done with the zombie apocalypse half people start slaughtering their way outwards, so a safe zone means you’re in the center of that expanding circle of peace so obviously it’s great and extremely safe. But going by what actually happens in the book up to this point, which is zombies steamrollering over all opposition, holing up behind concrete walls somewhere with that’s infection-free already seems like it’s a lot more likely to work. There is no reason to think at this point the safe zones are a better option. They’re a different option, one that may fail horribly.

No, now, you want shitty? You murder the people yourselves because there are no “special isolation zones” ready (how would you have time to set them up? They’d have to have been thrown together by people on the spot, in which case you’d never need to herd people into them.) and murdered people don’t get back up. Also acceptable would be deliberately opening up somewhere with refugees to distract the zombies with a delicious baby buffet and give yourself a chance to run for it.

Meanwhile, if your goal was actually to simply distract the zombies, you don’t need piles of people. The zombies just go toward any people at all. They don’t look at a situation and say there’s not enough people so some of them should move on. Put a couple guys on roofs. Once a week, fly out a new guy and a week’s worth of food, since you have to fly out the food anyway and replacing them weekly means no one commits suicide. If you have a perimeter of guys on roofs, the zombies will encircle the buildings and never move on.

(You could also just use a damn speaker hooked to a solar panel but no one will ever figure this out.)

That was the moment when the Afrikaner agent looked up at Redeker, crossed himself, and said, “God help you, man.” Another one said, “God help us all.” That was the black one who appeared to be in charge of the operation.

By “appeared to be in charge” he naturally means “this is his first line of dialogue and it was the white guy who asked about the plan, but because I am racist I perceive a black guy saying anything as talking constantly”.

So they take him back to tell the government.

You should have heard the uproar, with no voice louder than the defense minister’s. He was a Zulu, a ferocious man who’d rather be fighting in the streets than cowering in a bunker.

Presented without comment.

Anyway, it turns out it was this black guy who called for Redeker, in a shockingly predictable reversal of expectations, and he says Redeker’s great and hugs him, and Redeker’s mind snaps.

To anyone else this was simply his signature bear hug, but to Paul Redeker…I know that the majority of psychobiographers continue to paint this man without a soul. That is the generally accepted notion. Paul Redeker: no feelings, no compassion, no heart. However, one of our most revered authors, Biko’s old friend and biographer, postulates that Redeker was actually a deeply sensitive man, too sensitive, in fact, for life in apartheid South Africa. He insists that Redeker’s lifelong jihad against emotion was the only way to protect his sanity from the hatred and brutality he witnessed on a daily basis.

Man, if only we knew if his original plan was designed to minimize casualties or just let the white people survive while mustard-gassing the majority of the population and maybe some nukes! That might resolve this burning question. But hey, who cares about facts?

Not much is known about Redeker’s childhood, whether he even had parents, or was raised by the state

Apparently no one in South Africa can manage basic recordkeeping, even for people they were raising. Wasn’t apartheid Africa pretty big on keeping track of people? How do they even know this guy is white and not just some really light skinned black guy? Records, people!

So anyway, our interviewee says Redeker vanishes and nobody knows what happened, so it fell to him to enact the plan because he knew the guy really well.

After a parting embrace from my guest, I am driven back to my ferry for the mainland. Security is tight as I sign out my entrance badge. The tall Afrikaner guard photographs me again. “Can’t be too careful, man,” he says, handing me the pen. “Lot of people out there want to send him to hell.” I sign next to my name, under the heading of Robben Island Psychiatric Institution. NAME OF PATIENT YOU ARE VISITING: PAUL REDEKER.

WHAT A TWIST.

Not that he’s really the guy he knows all about, the part where an outside source confirms Redeker’s statements about being psychotically hated which means that the rest of his statements are also presumably true about how not a racist he is and how the plan to deal with an uprising by a guy who couldn’t handle people was totally brilliant. The only possible way you can make this chapter not terrible is if we assume Redeker’s unreliable about far more than what his name is, but the way it’s presented makes it clear he’s supposed to be otherwise giving you an accurate rundown.