Introduction
Max Brooks, a creator of horror fiction, is appropriately divisive.
Epidemics and Human Fate
These are contentious times because we are seeing massive power being unleashed by technologies for the first time in almost every area. Recent epidemics like the HIV\/AIDS, nanotechnology, large automated mega-companies, and stem cell research have all had a significant impact on how cultures and societies operate as interconnected organic systems.
The Zombie Apocalypse
Because of the institutional infrastructures that have developed over time and the expansion of human imagination, it is possible to imagine how things might turn out in terms of human fate. For this reason, the zombie apocalypse proposed by Brooks can be of considerable interest to those crafting the interventions that shall mitigate the event of devastating epidemics of the future. While the political power vested in institutions like the United Nations have transformed the manner in which individual countries deal with their internal affairs, the aspects of security and potentially destructive tendencies in communities will pose challenges not only to individual nations but to the survival of humanity.
Parallels with World War Z
This critique of World War Z thus highlights parallels exhibited in recent history and in the metaphor of the book with a dint of horror as the only viable means of capturing the futuristic realism in human fate.
Humanistic Encounters and Global Governance
As humanistic encounters get mediated with diverse technologies, new advancements in global government and the mechanisms of international relations take new dynamics, we are poised to enter the era of a World War Z. Brooks talks of the onset of new epidemics that could rapidly change the medical profession and alter diverse systematic approaches of the administration of justice, particularly as a consequent of an eminent danger for the extermination of the human race.
International Movement and Perils
World War Z analyzes established systems of education and training and the consequences that could lead to their alteration when debilitating exigencies are encountered by our generation. In the world view of the author, we witness aspersions about great adversity that could come to us as a result of human advancement and the possible ways that governments might respond. The author insinuates a borderless universe where immigration and movement of large masses of people will be the norm and at the same time the peril of human civilization.
Decisions and Consequences
The central anchor, which is the U.S. Army, has to deal with diverse decisions and each available option has dire consequences for some people or nations.
Diverse Interviews and Critical Concerns
The storyline takes from diverse interviews conducted by the author on diverse issues surrounding international governance and international humanism. Although war takes a center stage in the plot, the themes and issues raised in the novel concern critical political and social concerns broader than the politics of a single nation.
Outbreak and International Relations
It starts with a Chinese young boy identified with a plague, and since the nature of the case is poised to create international tensions, the Chinese government avoids every culpability and instead starts a diplomatic row with Taiwan to divert public opinion and criticism. The plague soon spreads to many nations as a result of international travel, human trafficking, and movement of refugees.
Governments and Crisis
As a consequence, Israel abandons many of the territories of Palestine, closes its borders, and institutes quarantine on the populations. The United States is reluctant to institute responses, trusting its advanced infrastructure of medical institutions. The issuance of a widely publicized placebo vaccine makes the citizens have a false sense of security until a crisis results. At the height of the Great Panic, the governments of Iran and Pakistan lock horns in a terrible debilitating nuclear war after the Iranian president makes an attempt to block Pakistani refugee swarming into Iran with the plague. Brooks depicts the character of governments and predicts what their leaders would do at a time of crisis in the magnitude of an apocalypse, and the predictions are a cold reminder to all of us who feel the warmth of globalization at present.
Delicate International Relations and Memory of the Past
Brooks reminds us that the nature of current international relations is fragile, and we should not be too ambitious about the gains of globalization. Although the predictions are positive and at the same negative about diverse nations, they weave a delicate mosaic of international relations that parody history and the limits of diplomacy.
Historical Links and Humanistic Interaction
The author implores a hyper-internationalist view of the global arrangement in terms of diverse players and interconnected institutions and polities. Within each nation are histories of diversity that are pasted into their futures when adversity strikes. In the case of South Africa, the government recruits the apartheid-era intelligence operative Paul Redeker to be in charge of a secured sanctuary to allow a segment of the victims to recuperate. Although the events of the apartheid regime were equally harrowing, the pastiche of its memory serves to create a historical link between diverse trends of humanistic interaction that still take diverse influences in the formation of the international architecture of humanity.
The Medication Situation and Consequences
The author explains the medication situation of the Zombies in great detail as if it were a real medical case already witnessed. He asserts that Zombies freeze in severe cold conditions. The fleeing of North America into Canada and the Arctic and the consequent death of eleven million people as a result of hypothermia is a critical turning point. The consequence of cannibalism among the inhabitants of North America and diverse places as a result of food shortages is discussed as a social innovation and as a matter of survival scheme. At the International Space Station, the three astronauts who survived the ordeal of war strive to salvage resources and supplies from an abandoned Chinese Space Station. Human civilization has gradually transformed into a condition in which the people who live have survived great odds, and this become a type of a super race because of their advanced technology and the experiences that overtook their plight. The scientists discuss the experiences of witnessing giant worms of zombies on the Great Plains of America and central Asia. They also analyze the extent to which the devastations have affected the earth dynamic and the atmosphere.
Securing Survivors and Governance
The possibility of crafting mega plans to secure survivors begins to be a useful political consideration in the United States. Safe zones are constructed in the western frontier near the Rocky Mountains. The American citizens are all in agreement with the efforts to establish a war against the new pandemic. However, much of the preparations seem like the scheme of a total war. The public promotes the rationing of energy resources and food. Soon the federal government troops make patrols in the civilian neighborhoods, and the congress-like institution in charge begins to think of new schemes of governance. For instance, the Re-Education Act is passed to indoctrinate the citizens with new ideals. The citizens begin to panic against many products, and a good number begin to experiment with own cultivated gardens for the supply of fresh vegetables in the households.
Change and Adjustments
The dynamics of change and adjustment among the citizens as among the governments are a very marked progress throughout the novel. Seven years after the outbreak of the epidemic, delegates converge aboard the USS Saratoga off the coast of Honolulu. Delegates from across the world seek to find ways out of the plague menace to no avail. The issues of safe zones became apparently the only way to overcome the situation. The United States nonetheless represents a new perspective that the zombies can be fought and won rather than a safety consideration which sounds like an appeasement. In the U.S plan, the use of semi-automatic guns, high power rifles and the reinvention of shooting zombies in the head becomes apparent. However, this plan was a reinvention by the Indian army during the 'Great Panic.' The invention of the lobotomizer, a set of multipurpose hand tools for close quarter combat also became prominent among the U.S. Army. The United States rapidly adjusted its army to the exigencies of the present challenge, and the legislators crafted the laws useful for encounter. The law of necessity alone guides all the operations of government because the worst-case scenario would very easily result from inaction, particularly in the case of the United States.
United States and International Supra-State
Over the recent years, the United States army has been a useful standby force in all global affairs. During the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War eras, the United States performed a very critical and decisive role that turned the course of history. At the end of the Second World War, in particular, the United States dropped the lethal bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus forcing the Japanese emperor into a unilateral surrender. In the events of the World War Z, the annihilation of the whole world by the plague has caused yet again the danger that surpasses the capacity of the ultra-civilized world to contain, and then America emerges. This novel is egoistic and extremely patriotic to America's quest for becoming the overall international supra-state enshrined into a position through scientific superiority. The crisis of the Zombie war takes diverse twists, and ten years after the end of the war, many zombies are not exterminated like the American military had wanted. The surviving zombies, however, take to the ocean floors and the snow line islands. The whole encounter has greatly bankrupted the developed nations, and a new Democratic Cuba is the newly thriving economy. Massive changes have taken place across the globe, and China has become a democracy with a new name as the 'Chinese Federation.' Tibet becomes free from Chinese rule and hosts the most populated city called Lhasa. Russia becomes the new expansionist theocracy and is known as the Holy Russian Empire.
Predictions and Collaborations
The developments proposed by the author seem to follow a staggered history of the evolutionary nationalism across the world with already visible indicators. As can be appreciated from contemporary world history, the wars in the Middle East have been vital developments in some internationally acknowledged trends. The recent emerging economies have emerged under a highly sophisticated international architecture through diplomacy, substitution of aid for trade, and diverse collaborations among nations. The author predicts such type of collaborations between nations and other institutions in the fording of global history. According to Prof. Huntington's famous paper "The Clash Civilizations," history is controllable through the control that governments exercise in the economy and through politics. The author seems to have a wild imagination about the possible manner of collaboration between nations that should occur when the world faces an apocalyptic catastrophe or tragedy among nations. Whether one apocalyptic zombie plague is in the offing or not, that one only time will tell, but the prophetic tone of the novel is something not to be assumed in any way because it is situated in America.
Heuristic Realism and Imagining the Future
In conclusion, a lot of contemporary novelists tend to create heuristic realism about the things of the past and how they might influence futures. A knowledge economy existing in a highly sophisticated industrial and socially advanced populace will no longer be innocent about its fate and destiny. As writers implore the future and citizens make broad suggestions about the future, it becomes something of the present and even of the past. Time travel has become a part of human experience because the fear of the unknown, much a phrase of the ignorant, makes little sense to our fast-paced world of virtual reality. Brooks, although should be censured by occasionally scaring us about the prediction of an ill fate, we in the western hemisphere believe in possibility, we are made in possibility, and doomed to possibility. There is no fear and no regrets about imagining the future, even if the author so much wants us to shrink.
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