Chapter 123: The Resilient Biosphere and the Fragile Civilization (Part II)

Judging from the performance of the Earth that is still alive and well after five mass extinctions, the resilience of the Earth's biosphere is certainly beyond doubt. However, judging from www.biquge.info the relics of ancient human civilizations such as the ancient Maya and ancient India, there is no doubt about the fragility of human civilization.

To sum up, humans may not be able to destroy the earth, but they can definitely destroy themselves.

The impact of the eruption on the Earth's biosphere as a whole will be negligible, not even to the extent of a small-scale extinction. But for the fragile human civilization, it is already a catastrophe of landslides and earth cracks.

-- Especially when the human civilization on the European continent has been tossed by war and is on the verge of disintegration, and only the final blow is reached: up to now, the countries of Europe, which were once the center of world civilization and are now ravaged by war, are still basically in a desolate state of ruins. Even without taking into account the fact that Britain is currently in a state of anarchy, there are about 50 million to 80 million people left homeless in continental European countries such as Germany, France, Italy, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain alone. These people live in cellars, ruins, and caves, as long as they have a place to live. Tens of millions of people do not even have such a place to live, so they can only sleep in the wilderness.

Obviously, such terrible living conditions are absolutely unable to withstand the extremely cold weather of minus 40 degrees Celsius, and freezing to death is just a small matter.

Even those city dwellers who are lucky enough to keep their houses have a miserable life. Because the city's infrastructure was destroyed by the war, they were completely deprived of the most basic public services, such as drinking water, gas, electricity, and people living everywhere in Europe.

For example, in the port of Marseille in France, where there was a bloody tug-of-war for more than half a year, only two street lamps remained in the city after the ceasefire, and 80% of the houses were reduced to rubble. In Vienna, the capital of music, the new Austrian government has not been able to restore running water and electricity due to the incompetence of the new Austrian government, frequent infighting, and the lack of interest in restoring the economy, and the citizens have to get drinking water from the muddy Danube, and in the winter they have to dig ice to melt water, and even the high-ranking officials who visit the area have only one bottle of water a day for washing. People are sitting in the middle of the tattered machines of the twentieth century and living a medieval life.

Even in the Soviet Union, which had already completed the initial post-war reconstruction, due to the nuclear explosion, there were still a large number of homeless war refugees, who could only live in temporary shelters urgently arranged by the Soviet government, with 40 people in one room, crammed like canned sardines.

Europe's cities are ruined, but the countryside is just as bad. As a result of the war, the arable land of the European continent was either over-cultivated, burned, flooded, or discarded. Mussolini had gone to great lengths to drain the swamps of southern Italy, but in the ensuing scuffle, the Allies deliberately flooded the area, causing a severe malaria epidemic. During the battle between the Soviets and the British for the Netherlands, the British also deliberately opened the Dutch dam, causing more than 300,000 hectares of pasture and arable land to be flooded by the sea.

When the flames of war were extinguished, the victorious Stalin looked down on the continent and found that the scorched earth policies adopted by all sides during the war had led to the burning of orchards and vineyards in the countryside, the slaughter of poultry and livestock, and even the malicious destruction of water conservancy facilities, such as the blowing up of reservoirs and dams - in the course of Nazi Germany's retreat, Himmler explicitly ordered the SS commanders at the front to completely destroy everything in the occupied territories and even the lost territories: "After we are gone, no prisoners, no livestock, no food, no railroad tracks... … The enemy will only find a country that has been utterly burned and destroyed. ”

Of course, compared with villages and pastures, industrial and mining enterprises are the first targets to be destroyed. In Hungary, for example, more than 90% of factories were deliberately burned down by the Germans, and almost all coal mines were flooded or blown up. And Yugoslavia, which was even worse by the war, has simply been reinstated as an agricultural country.

Under these circumstances, the state of agriculture in Europe was bleak, and the surviving peasants, who had escaped direct slaughter from the war, found themselves in a desperate situation when they returned home: no fertilizers, no pesticides, no seeds, no agricultural machinery - and even if they did, they could not find the fuel they needed to start them. Even if they found the old wooden plough that their ancestors had used, they could not find the animal that pulled the plough, so they had to plow the ground with their own hands with hoes. Even the irrigation reservoir has been blown up, and agriculture has to count on God to rain.

Well, in addition, there are so many reservoirs, canals, and fields that you run the risk of being blown up at any time if you want to farm.

Obviously, in this situation, the grain production of much of Europe immediately fell back to medieval levels...... What's worse is that with the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, Europe ushered in a "summerless year", and the European countryside did not even produce food at medieval levels.

Moreover, according to the assessment of experts, this situation of basically no agricultural harvest may continue for as little as two years or as long as five years......

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Under these circumstances, the countries of Europe, especially those in Western and Southern Europe, which had just subsided in the flames of war, could only kneel down and beg for help from the big brother of the Soviet Union. But then I found out even more desperately that the transportation in Europe is now paralyzed, and even aid cannot be delivered!

-- Roads throughout Europe are covered with landmines, telephone lines have been cut off, large and small bridges have been blown up, and traffic throughout Europe has been paralyzed, with the exception of a few main lines that carry out military tasks. In France and Italy, 80% of the rail and 60% of the road network are unusable. In Greece, three-quarters of the ships were destroyed before the war, and even the port facilities were largely in ruins. The only mode of transportation that is universally valid for Europeans is walking.

To add insult to injury, as the Third World War continues, millions of anti-government guerrillas are active in various European countries, following the radio remote instructions of the White House and the Pentagon, bombing bridges, cutting railways, digging dikes, and burning warehouses all the time...... In many areas, infrastructure is often not repaired as quickly as they can be destroyed, and it is naturally more miserable in the face of super cold waves, abnormal weather and famine.

In this situation, the capitals and large cities of the countries were at best able to maintain a minimum standard of wartime rationing, and in most of the more remote or devastated areas, the local government, if there was such a thing as a government, could not even maintain the rationing system, and left the people to fend for themselves: as is the case in Spain, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

The Soviet side was also helpless in this regard, and had no choice but to shrink its forces and leave it alone; except for retaining a small number of port bases that could be supplied by sea, the main forces of the Red Army originally stationed in Western Europe had basically withdrawn from the area west of the "Berlin-Geneva" line and retreated to Eastern Europe, where the situation was relatively good, and France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain were allowed to "rely on themselves" and solve the problems of people's livelihood at home on their own.

As a result, no Western European country was able to solve its own livelihood problems, and only continued to ask the Soviet Union for aid - but even if they did, they could not distribute it because of the paralysis of transportation, so they could only hoard it in the ports and slowly consume it. It also sparked an unprecedented wave of refugees, with more than 20 million French, Italians, Spaniards, Belgians, Dutch, Germans, and people of Eastern Europe struggling to flee to the legendary milk and bread Soviet Union, where more than half of them died on the way, and less than 10 million made it to the Soviet Union alive.

After the refugees entered the country, according to the highest instructions of the Kremlin, all refugees, except for some technical personnel and their families, were not allowed to stay in the European territory of the Soviet Union, and they were all sent to Siberia to open up wasteland and cut wood and mine pits. Naturally, the refugees reacted greatly, and none of them wanted to go to a place like Siberia. But the problem is that if they don't go to Siberia, then Stalin will let them go to hell.

-- The Red Army of the Stalin era was not the soft-hearted Red Army of the later era, and the power of the political commissar and the prestige of the Cheka were still more terrible than the Satan of Hell...... The Cheka fighters in charge of the execution originally thought that at least two or three hundred thousand people would have to be shot to have a deterrent effect. Unexpectedly, more than 100,000 people were shot before and after, and the remaining refugees were basically honest, which shows that these Europeans are really cowardly.

On the other hand, for the Siberian region, which has always had a shortage of labor, the bad news for Europe is the gospel for Siberia -- with the rapid influx of nearly 10 million European refugees, Siberia's human resources are now so abundant that they are about to overflow, and they are not the illiterate people in Central Asia who are only willing to recite the scriptures and are unwilling to go to school, but high-quality talents from Europe, all engineers, senior workers, university professors, and agricultural experts are grasping a large handful, as long as they survive the temporarily chaotic and difficult initial stage. The prospect of victory in the development of Siberia must be just around the corner!

-- Just as the formation of fertile deltas at the mouth of great rivers inevitably comes at the cost of soil erosion on both sides of the upper reaches of the rivers. The dawn of civilization, which has now suddenly appeared in the Siberian wilderness, naturally needs to be used as a stepping stone to the darkness of the whole of Europe......

“…… The French newspapers of these days have been lamenting one after another that Europe as a whole is entering the Dark Ages following the collapse of yet another Roman Empire. And Comrade Stalin's assessment of this is, you literati who can only shake the pen, take advantage of the fact that there is still a newspaper to publish more fallacies! The real Dark Ages are yet to come! When the time comes, I'm afraid that even the paper, ink, and newspaper will disappear together! ”

Sophie, the ship's mother, told a topic that could make ordinary people creepy so plainly, as if she was just telling an ordinary cold joke.

“…… That's a cold statement...... But it's true. ”

Wang Qiu shook his head, "...... So, what do Stalin and the Kremlin think about the current nightmare life of Europeans? For the European continent, which is going dark, even if the big brother of the Soviet Union cannot be the savior, he has to shoulder some responsibilities, right? ”

“…… To this question, Stalin's reply was: in the present situation, I cannot make the Europeans live a better life than the Africans, but can only try to increase the happiness of the European peoples by lowering the standard of living of the peoples of the enemy country, so that they cannot even live the life of the Africans......"

- Well, that's a really tough answer...... Full of the brutal and violent aesthetics of Uncle Iron and Slavic peoples.

“…… Huh? The whole world is already in this worse situation, and in the next two years, those Europeans who remain in their homeland will still have the standard of living of Africans? I thought it would fall straight to the standard of living of the cannibals of Papua New Guinea! ”

In this regard, Ma Tong blinked curiously, said with an "innocent" face, and tilted his head very cutely.

However, what she described in her words was so ...... Gross, it's disgusting!

Fortunately, all of you here are extraordinary people who are used to seeing the big world, and they can naturally handle this small scene calmly.

But in the same way, they have no sense of empathy or compassion for the various tragedies that have occurred in Europe.

What's more, not to mention the time-travelers who stayed out of the matter, even the leaders of the Soviet Union, in this period of all-out war to the death, threw all the compassion and benevolence out of the clouds, leaving only a cold and iron-hearted heart.

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In fact, for the Soviets, sitting back and watching European civilization go to ruin may be the real plan for foresight and long-term stability.

Since the birth of Russian civilization, it has been in a serious geopolitical dilemma - geographically, Russia is a difficult country to defend, and the core areas of most countries have certain geographical barriers to build defensive lines. The core area of Russia continues from the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow to the present, and there are no mountains, rivers, seas, etc. to protect it, and its defense strategy is mainly not by terrain obstacles, but by the harsh climate to exhaust the enemy's strength.

Historically, the invasion of Russia mainly came from two directions: the Eurasian steppes and the Bodian Plain, the former such as the Mongols and earlier the Huns, the latter such as the Teutonic Knights, Napoleon, the First German Reich, the Nazi Empire - the invasion and expulsion of the Mongols, so that the Russian civilization gradually took shape in the exercise of blood and fire, and the defense of the European enemy countries relied on repeated retreats and scorched earth policies, and finally ended in a crushing victory.

In order to compensate for the weakness of its own defenses, expansion was the best defense for Russia -- to the foot of the mountains and to the coast. At any time in history, the Russian state can hardly count on a natural barrier to protect itself, although the north is protected by the Arctic ice sea, and the south is defended by the Black Sea-Caucasus, but the east and west sides of the country are open doors, a smooth road, and there is no danger to defend.

In the face of military pressure from the east and the west, Russia needs to constantly expand the buffer zone, relying on attrition and time to win, but occupying a large number of buffer zones requires garrisons, internal police, and intelligence services to maintain its rule, forcing Russia to continue to expand outward, and on the other hand, it needs to centralize power internally and even implement a policy of terror...... At great cost, the Russians finally expanded eastward to the Pacific coast, securing the eastern front of their core hinterland. But on the Western Front, it was only pushed to Poland, and it could no longer be pushed - according to the standards of absolute security, it was necessary to conquer all the way to France!

While the Russians have been pushing their borders as far west as they can, compressing the space of their opponents. But this is too difficult, because the west is the hinterland of the European powers, and it is not possible to win by breaking the head. Moreover, even if the Russians really managed to conquer all of Europe, all the way to France, and wash their boots in the Strait of Dover, Russia would not have enough population to absorb such a huge territory, and even in the existing territory, the proportion of the Russian nation barely exceeds half of the total population, religious and ethnic problems are in chaos, and the pressure to maintain internal stability is far stronger than that of other countries.

It can be seen that Russia's political center of gravity is separated from the economic center of gravity, and the economic center of gravity is occupied by other nationalities, so that Russia can only be ruled by a centralized and high-pressure system, and the economic center of gravity is close to the front line of the war, and there is no natural danger to defend, resulting in the economic collapse and national disintegration in the event of defeat.

-- The core problem of Russia's geostrategy is that because the hinterland is open and there is no danger to defend, it must rely on a large expansion offensive to maintain the security of the empire, but excessive expansion leads to indigestion, which in turn creates internal security problems and the risk of disintegration, so that a tough political system is needed to maintain the existence of the empire, and when the system collapses or a strong enemy invades, internal regional disintegration and national security problems will erupt at the same time.

However, in the context of the outbreak of World War III and the global nuclear explosion, the Kremlin found that there was a solution to this geostrategic dilemma: what if the European continent west of the national border was as ignorant and backward as Black Africa and as sparsely populated as Siberia?

- In this way, the Soviet Union would be able to build a super-empire from a small hinterland in the same way that the Romans conquered the Mediterranean world!

At the time of the establishment of the ancient Roman Empire, Rome did not have a large population and was not as civilized as the Carthaginians and Greeks, but it relied on the small Italian peninsula to attack from all sides. While learning civilization and technology from the Greeks, he used barbarian peoples as targets to practice his skills, and at the same time, with a relatively high level of civilization, he integrated with various surrounding peoples, and finally ruled the West for 500 years.

The situation in the Soviet Union today is somewhat similar to that of the Roman Empire at its inception - the Soviet Union itself has stood on top of the world, and it no longer needs to draw nutrients from the civilizations of the advanced countries of Europe to develop itself, but only needs to successfully integrate them to reach the sky in one step: for this reason, it is necessary to make the other European countries become poorer, more backward and more ignorant than the Soviet Union, and can only lie on the ground and look up at the prosperity and wealth of the great Soviet Union and drool (the life of the Soviet people is naturally not rich, but the rich and the poor have always been relative, As long as the other countries are made poorer, it will be fine), in order to compete for a place to become a citizen of the Soviet Union, and then provide a steady stream of high-quality human resources to supplement the Soviet Union, which is short of labor......

In short, the Soviet version of the American dream...... However, since the hardware conditions of the Soviet Union were not as good as those of the United States, in order for the lives of Soviet citizens to be widely attractive, it was necessary to appropriately lower the living standards of the people of other countries and make them even more miserable......

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On the other hand, even as they scrambled to deal with the catastrophe in Europe, the Soviets did not stop for a moment from launching nuclear strikes on the Saharan and sub-Arabian deserts. For most of the past six months, the Soviet Union's strategic nuclear strike long-range bomber force has been effectively and rapidly lowering the living standards of civilians in enemy countries, mainly Arabs, on the other side of the battle line at a rate of two atomic bombs a day, sometimes three atomic bombs a day.

-- At the beginning of the retreat from Jerusalem along the eastern shore of the Red Sea with 300,000 American and British allied troops, Admiral Eisenhower originally planned to set up his headquarters in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, so that he could liaise and coordinate with the Royal Government in the vicinity and collect as many supplies as possible from this barren land.

Unexpectedly, while the headquarters was still in the middle of the relocation, Riyadh had already been dropped by the crazy Soviets with an atomic bomb, and Saudi Arabia was destroyed...... Looking at the mushroom cloud rising at the end of the horizon ahead, Admiral Eisenhower in the desert reluctantly ordered the convoy to turn around and turn back to the port of Jeddah, who knew that only a few hours later, the port of Jeddah, where a large number of American and British allied troops had gathered, was also hit by a Soviet atomic bomb, killing 30,000 American troops and 10,000 citizens.

Seeing that the port of Jeddah was also finished, Eisenhower had no choice but to move his headquarters into the holy city of Medina in the face of local protests and riots, thinking that with the religious status of this place, the Soviets should not dare to drop atomic bombs casually, right? Comrade Stalin, who did not think of evil spirits, had already gone crazy after the nuclear bombing of Leningrad, and how could he care about the holy cities of infidels, and the two cities of Mecca and Medina continued to be served by atomic bombs, just as the God of the Bible sent down heavenly fire to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and easily destroyed these two religious holy cities.

-- As the saying goes, "under the nuclear bomb, all living beings are equal," no city is more noble in the face of deadly heat, radiation, and shock waves.

Nevertheless, Admiral Eisenhower was fortunate to escape the catastrophe once again. But the Soviets' nuclear bombs continued to fall one after another like hailstones...... After a few days, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia could not find a single city that had not been bombed, nor could it find a few unpolluted water sources, so Eisenhower had to move the long distance again, following the troops that continued to retreat south, and moved the headquarters to the port of Aden in Yemen...... As a result, only three days after settling down, another atomic bomb hit the top, sending more than 10,000 American troops and more citizens to the port of Aden.

Thus, over the next few months, Eisenhower moved around the Arabian Peninsula, playing hide-and-seek with Soviet nuclear bombs while watching cities turn into radioactive wasteland...... Finally, in the summer, Eisenhower had to move his headquarters out of Asia altogether, and retreat south to the port of Mombasa in Kenya, East Africa, where he could be considered stable, because it was too far from the Soviet Union's southernmost forward air base to exceed the combat radius of the Soviet strategic nuclear strike bomber formations.

The Americans who came from afar could have walked away, but the bombed Arabs, looking at the cities and oases swallowed by the mushroom cloud, could only lament in despair: "Wherever Eisenhower went, the atomic bomb followed!" But in the face of the Soviet atomic bombs that were blooming everywhere and the American-British allies who were not leaving, the indigenous Arabs really had no choice but to sit and wait for death.

In fact, it was not only the Soviets who dropped nuclear bombs all over the Arab world, but also the Americans, who threw the last two atomic bombs at their disposal. The first was the nuclear explosion of Port Said at the northern end of the Suez Canal, which destroyed the Suez Canal even more completely and blocked the possibility of the Soviet Red Navy rushing out of the Mediterranean Sea and into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean from here. Another atomic bomb was used to nuke Cairo, which succeeded in creating millions of refugees, turning Egypt into an anarchic mess and making it difficult for the Soviet Red Army to travel up the Nile and attack Allied-controlled black Africa south from the Eastern Front.

And as time went on, more Soviet atomic bombs continued to fall on the edge of the Sahara and Arabian deserts, turning cities and ports into radioactive dust. According to this situation, the next stage of the three wars is likely to become a mushroom cultivation competition between the two camps across the desert. How many Arabs and Black Africans will die on the front lines of a nuclear explosion is a secondary question that no one cares about.

-- Even if you die, you can only consider yourself unlucky...... In an age when power is truth and cannonballs are justice, this is the sorrow of being weak.

Far from caring about their lives or deaths, the two camps even plan to increase their looting efforts to deal with the food crisis and war attrition.

In addition to Africa and West Asia, the Soviets also dropped dozens of atomic bombs on the Azores, Madeira, and Canary Islands, which were isolated in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, before the large-scale withdrawal of troops from Western Europe, thus completely eliminating the possibility of a US counterattack in Europe from the Atlantic direction.

At the same time, on the other side of the world, the Combined Fleet of the Japanese Navy, which had been dormant for a long time since it victoriously ended the South Pacific Island seizure operation and planted its military flag on Easter Island, once again raised its battle flag in the spring of '47, pulled out its anchor and went to sea, launching a new major operation...... (To be continued.) )