A Bystander watching the World Go Dark.

A V for Vendetta short -

By TimeTraveller-1900.

"England Prevails!"

The chorus of cheers echoed throughout the whole of London. I pretended to cheer with them. I didn't want to be arrested by simply being seen as not cheering with everybody else; Susan worshipped Fate, the closed-circuit computer surveillance network which had been spun around the country like a giant computerised spider's web which was designed to hunt down everyone from traitors to any of the religious undesirables who'd survived the initial purges.

Under the control and command of both the Eye and the Ear, the visual and audio divisions that maintained surveillance over the country, if anyone tried speaking out, their likenesses and the sounds of their voices would be known within minutes, unless they were betrayed by friends or strangers alike.

For people like me, Fate was something to fear.

And the best way to avoid it was to merge with the crowd.

But as I watch the parade, people shouting the anthems of the party, I was harshly reminded of my grandfather's home country; I come from a family of German immigrants from a Jewish background, although my family had ceased practicing Jewish customs and traditions following the original Nazi party's rise to power, and several of my family were sentenced to concentration camps and many of them died during and after Kristallnacht.

My family migrated to Britain and to America in the hopes of starting afresh, but the memory of what happened in Germany forced us to throw away our Jewish roots, but we didn't throw our history out of the door.

The parade of dark-clad soldiers with their black uniforms and red insignias and red shirts marching with their banners of that red double-cross with the black background was similar but different to the Nazi swastika, but they were just as alike. Fascists like Mosley, Mussolini, Hitler, and now Susan, were like deadly plagues which emerged from the pain and grief of those who suffered.

After the nuclear war and the bioweapons used in the last few decades after the Labour Party made the stupid decision to disarm the stock of nuclear weapons in the country, and the resultant war and the outbreak of the plague which wiped out a million people and the clouds of radioactive fallout devastated Britain's capacity for farming, the mass riots of angry, starving people had planted the seeds of Norsefire and fertilised them until Susan's party had taken control. They had control over the Church of England which had begun with more and more of the clergy being sacked and replaced with their own people. They had control of the television and radio companies, using them as the mouthpiece of the party, and putting them under the control of the Mouth.

But as I cheered, sickened with myself for not only betraying my ancestors by cheering for a fascist regime that'd likely been responsible for the plague unleashed in that primary school (the fact Susan, or any of the other sick members of his government, would even think of doing that just to make the country accept and elect them at all was terrifying), and in the Tube network and in the waterworks, I wondered to myself how we were going to get out of this…

This regime was not going to last forever.

As Princess Leia in Star Wars A New Hope stated, "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

I didn't see why that reality couldn't occur. There were hundreds of people like me, I was sure of it; many who had managed to escape their fate, political prisoners who'd somehow gotten lucky and escaped the camps and others who knew what Norsefire was doing was just wrong and should be stopped. It was a start. But later as the years passed, Norsefire was bound to piss off hundreds of people and they would find ways of resisting the party and begin to work with other like-minded people and groups. It would take time, but it would happen.

The whole world was darker now, but it would soon be time for some light to seep in.

X

Author's Note - I decided to mix the two origins of Norsefire into one major body. Instead of merely having just a nuclear war, I decided to show the plague and the effects of Norsefire in a world where someone who comes from stock who'd suffered under Hitler and the Nazis watches on in horror.