Nuremberg II

Nᴜʀᴇᴍʙᴇʀɢ: ᴀᴜɢᴜꜱᴛ 14, 2036

The sleepy town of Nuremberg, Pennsylvania makes an unlikely setting for an international criminal trial, especially one in which prominent USAC figures and their sympathisers will be held responsible for tens of millions of deaths in the past decade. But it has the advantages of being accessible and easily defended against roaming militias. And then, of course, there’s the name.

Let’s imagine you have a time machine that takes you back ten years, to August 14, 2026. You randomly approach one of the 434 people living in this tiny census-designated place (CDP) at the time, and ask them what the future holds?

This predominantly white, staunchly conservative CDP straddles the borders of the counties of the Schuylkill and Luzerne, rooted in coal mining and manufacturing. I think we can safely say that most citizens there, at that time, would have joined the 90 million still supporting Donald Trump, still clinging to the belief that he would somehow end the Hormuz blockade and end the futile Iran war now still grinding on with intermittent explosions as Iran pummels the Israeli remnant. That he would ‘fix things’.

Few would foresee Trump’s grim removal. Few would predict the massive, worldwide depression in full swing just two years later—despite the one fifth of them already below the poverty line. Even fewer would have predicted the millions of deaths from the heat, cold, floods, tornado swarms, famine and pestilence we now know all too well, let alone the hundreds of millions who have died around the world—in Africa, and in a vast swathe across the Middle East and India and South-East Asia. Let’s not even mention large parts of South America and Russia, where things have broken down so badly, we simply don’t know the death toll.

How a decade can change things! Everyone predicted the bursting of the AI bubble, of course, but who could have known how well China would embrace asymmetric warfare, or how complete their victory would be in Taiwan, or how shameful the capitulation of the US would be? The virtual collapse of the semiconductor industry? Massive starvation in the heartland of the United States Apart from California? Those damned mutant screwworms? The concatenation of heat wave after heat wave, crop failures, and the implosion of both cryptocurrencies and software giants like Oracle? The failure to maintain a joined-up energy grid? The collapse of US science, education, and NOAA, USDA, FEMA and the FDA? The long, long lines of the unemployed, and the paradoxical rescue of USAC through the combined help of Canada and the EU,1 despite their own huge problems, and despite interference from California?

All of this of course came at a price. But even the most conservative American now feels an intense sense of betrayal, and that justice must be served. The spectre of the ostentatiously rich trying to flee, the Vance/Thiel incident—few have doubts that those who sold out USAC for massive personal gain must be held fully responsible. Most will acknowledge the harm done here and worldwide. Justice must be served, and given the state of the USAC legal system and the abolition of the Supreme Court, this must necessarily be international justice. Especially because so many people died as a direct consequence of the decisions and actions of people in power in USAC. And previously, in the US.

Some see it as unfortunate that the death penalty is still legally on the books in Pennsylvania, but many Americans disagree with their European colleagues that this is excessive. After all, in 1947, at what is now called “Nuremberg I”, the death toll from the depredations of Nazi Germany was put at between 35 and 50 million, with between 12 and 17 million deaths from ideological murders that included the Holocaust. And yes, people were found guilty and executed by hanging. An international precedent was set.

It’s abundantly evident that the ideological crimes and related deaths allegedly caused by the accused exceed the German toll by several fold, at a conservative estimate, even excluding the tens of millions who died in the Limited Nuclear Exchange.

The British, of course, complained about their predictable, paltry 300,000 deaths, but the international consequences of actions by leaders of USAC are claimed to be orders of magnitude larger. Everyone knows that Musk is first in line, and everyone knows why. The catastrophic failure of SPCX caused more than massive class action lawsuits, and more than stock market meltdowns. The tens of millions of deaths worldwide from his savage evisceration of USAID were merely a prelude to what followed.

There are many other candidates for first place, but Vance is now, of course, forever beyond our reach, and who really knows where Thiel is? The reports of him living in a penthouse above a gay bar in Auckland turned out to be false, and he seems to have vanished without trace.2 Many of the architects of the catastrophic Project 2025 that caused so much death and misery are either in hiding or dead, and let’s face it, many of these were minor functionaries. Musk it must be.

But the line after him is long, and justice must be seen to be served.

In our next post, we will look at the courthouse and the massive security detail that protects those housed in the adjacent on-site prison from random attacks by heavily armed USAC citizens, and ask “Were those lax gun laws a mistake?”

Your reporter at the front line—in Nuremberg, Pennsylvania.

I hope that everyone will by this point have worked out that this post is satire.

Note that satire is now once again legal in the territories governed by USAC, following the quashing of Executive Regal Order 45,470.

^{This post has, of course, nothing to do with the University Studies Abroad Consortium, the United States Auto Club, the Universal Service Administrative Company, Universidad de San Carlos, the US Airways Center, the United States Army Corps, or Utrechtsche Studenten Alpenclub.}